‘The Jim Gaffigan Show’ Season 2 Finale Preview: It’s a (Whole) Family Affair

Warning: This interview contains storyline and character spoilers for The Jim Gaffigan Show.

We’ll share our hopes that there’s a third season of The Jim Gaffigan Show on TV Land, because Season 2, which concludes with back-to-back new episodes on Aug. 21, has been one of the summer’s most fun TV pleasures. The comedy was more surreal, and grounded at the same time, and the fact that the titular comedian’s wife Jeannie took over as series showrunner — as well as co-writer of all the episodes — made the show a very obvious personal labor of love.

The Gaffigans, while on a brief break from Jim’s summer stand up tour (which consists of the couple and their five children traveling across the country on a tour bus), talked to Yahoo TV about their unique approach to Season 2 and why it’s their new philosophy going forward, why a certain former child star came out of retirement to making multiple guest appearances on their show, and how the series is a family affair in every way possible.

The Season 2 finale, “The Mike Gaffigan Show,” is a great example of what the show has done so well all season, mixing humor and heart, in very creative, unexpected ways. You co-wrote it together, Jeannie directed, Jim plays his dad in flashback, two of your kids play Jim and one of his sisters, and your whole family appears at the end as several generations of Gaffigans. This may be the most family-centric episode of a family comedy ever.
Jeannie Gaffigan: This flashback episode to Jim’s childhood was really a passion project for me, from researching what things were like in the ‘70s to the comedy to the emotion of the scene. Probably the most exciting thing for me was to be able to work with Jim for every episode of the season, and to be able to work with Jim and my son Jack playing young Jim Gaffigan, which was a major decision for us to even let him read for the role, because we are really into having our kids have a normal life and go to school and everything like that. But after we started seeing the auditions, it was pretty apparent that these kids who were auditioning were all… we were looking for an 8-year-old, and the kids who were auditioning weren’t eight, they were 10. We have a 10-year-old son who looks like Jim and understands Jim’s comedy. Eventually we were just like, “Let’s have Jack read for this.” He understood the comedy so well. It was a really amazing experience to work with Jim and Jack at the same time.
Our daughter, Marre, also played Jim’s sister, Pam, in the episode, and she is really wonderful, too.

Were you surprised by the kids’ performances?
Jeannie: Where we were surprised was how quickly they understood the characters, understood the story, understood the scenes, and they spoke and listened to each other. They related to each other as siblings, and we just said, “This is a pretty natural thing. We need to cast them in this role.” Actually, on the set, I was not worried about them. I was very peaceful with what Jack could do. He plays such vulnerability, and yet he understood the comedy. I was really amazed at where he went with the scenes, and a lot of it was really a magical experience to watch it.

Were you concerned at all that they would catch the acting bug?
Jeannie: Oh, definitely. Definitely, because even afterwards, Jack said, “When’s my next movie?” I said, “There is no next movie. You’re not auditioning now.” I just don’t want to go down that road. It was a special time, but if he does something else, it will be something that we’re not dragging him around to auditions for. That’s not happening.

Jim, was this a difficult or particularly emotional episode for you, playing your dad? You portray him as being gruff, or as one of your TV kids says, “mean.” But there’s also some acknowledgement there that this story is your point of view as a kid, and that as an adult, and father yourself, you might look at his behavior a bit differently.
Jim Gaffigan: I had this initial bare-bones script. I went and did a [stand up] show and I came back, and Jeannie had re-written it and transformed it into what it became. The story at the center of the episode, about a tornado, was something that I had told Jeannie 10 years ago, but we couldn’t sit there and make it… we had to embellish it for storytelling [purposes], but yeah, there is something kind of unforgiving about it, and there is a [lighter] feeling, too. We were hoping to capture a human understanding. I think as you get older, when you have kids, you have an understanding of your parents that you simply don’t have when you don’t have children, or when you’re younger. This fuzzy memory that we employed for this episode, we wanted it to be humorous, but there’s tons of details in it that are very factual, including my mother yelling, “Eat the cole slaw!”

A lot of the details were just fun, but that’s something that I’ve learned in stand up: The more personal you make it, the more universal it will likely be. If it’s really humorous and kind of awkward to your personal experience, it will translate well to the universal experience even if it didn’t happen to somebody else.

It was also fun to do it because I got to portray this whole other character. When we were editing the episode, our editor at one point turned to me and Jeannie, and said, “It must have been nice for you to have the episode off.” I said, “I played Mike Gaffigan.” He forgot that I was even in the episode. It was fun to hide in, be another character.

Was it a little surreal to be playing your dad with your children playing you and your sibling, and interacting with them as your dad?
Jim: Yeah, it was very weird and fun. It was fun to play my dad. He lacked patience, which I normally have. That was kind of fun to try that on for a little bit, because I think dads in that era, at least my dad, didn’t have to be patient. Then, it was an adjustment going back. It was fun to play the curmudgeonly guy, and I’m not saying I’m not a curmudgeon…

This season felt like it was much more personal in the stories that you were telling, and the development of the characters. Was that a result of Jeannie taking over as showrunner for Season 2? Obviously, who can the two of you trust and feel comfortable with more than each other?
Jeannie: Oh, definitely. We wanted to go deeper with all the characters. We wanted to go bigger with all the stories, and we wanted to break out of the four walls and just being in the apartment. We really wanted to explore a lot of memories and flashbacks and fantasies, and take it to a higher level. Like you said, Jim can really trust me to understand where he’s coming from as an artist.

From the “court of public opinion” trial episode to the penultimate episode with Daniel (Michael Ian Black) and Jim sort of bonding, and then the flashback finale, this season was also full of creative, sometimes surreal approaches to storytelling that often made the episodes feel surprisingly more grounded, the messages of them certainly more grounded. Did you set out to sort of flip the idea of a traditional family comedy with Season 2?
Jeannie: Yes. Jim’s point of view and his comedy starts in a very grounded place, and allows him to go to a very fantastical, silly, humorous place while staying grounded in reality and keeping a deeper meaning going. This season of the show was really a hands-on approach to what we’ve been trying to do in our comedy for years, and I pretty much think that all of our future projects are going to go down this path.

That finale episode is really an exploration of a father-son relationship and it’s a little dark, but we hoped to approach it in a really relatable way. It’s the sort of thing like, look, Jim might not be the model father, but his father was even less of a model father, and his father’s father was even less of a model father. What we perceive as what is a good father seems like a simple idea, but it’s a really complicated idea about relationships. We really want to say something with these episodes and entertain and leave viewers with a good feeling, and leave with an understanding of what people can relate to.

Season 2, like Season 1, was filled with great guest stars. Jerry Seinfeld, Macaulay Culkin was back, Will Ferrell, Tig Notaro. How do you get, how do you even approach, Cardinal Timothy Dolan to play a bartender?
Jeannie: Every single amazing guest star that we’ve had on the show has a story behind it. None of it was easy. Macaulay, who came out of retirement to do our show, started this whole thing [making recurring cameos] because he just really had a great time on the set. We have an amazing crew, and we have a lot of fun with the cast and the actors, and we give a lot of leeway for improv. I think Macaulay really responded to our set, and at the end of the first shoot said, “Look guys, if you want me to do this again, give me a call and I’m down.” That’s what gave us the idea to have him as a recurring, surprise “Where’s Waldo” sort of character.

Jim: We had run into Cardinal Dolan at a couple of events, and I had said, “I want you to do my show.” He politely had said, “Yeah, sure. OK.” The best time to ask someone for a favor is usually when they’re asking you for a favor, and so it’s all well-intended stuff. It’s similar to asking Mario Batali for a favor. He has things that he wants to do, and I want to help him out, and he wants to help me out. But Cardinal Dolan doing it… we ran into a friend who’s a priest, we ran into him later on, and he was like, “I recommended that the Cardinal not do [your show].” But I think Cardinal Dolan knew it wasn’t going to be disrespectful or out of line, and also, his dad was a bartender, so he responded to the idea of playing a bartender. It was at McSorley’s and he’s an Irish-American guy… if you’re an Irish-American guy, McSorley’s kind of holds a special place for you. Kind of for all New Yorkers. But I think when I explained what we were looking to do, and as long as you set it up where we’re very protective of their time… but it was a big ask. And it’s a small miracle that the timing worked out.

The Macaulay pop-ins continue to be fun to anticipate. There’s a little nod to Home Alone in the flashback finale. Was that especially for Macaulay?
Jeannie: Absolutely. Yeah. There’s a lot of little nods, Easter eggs in that episode. That’s a big nod to Macaulay and how much we love him and appreciate having him on the show.

Another Easter egg from the flashback finale: There is a photograph that we based the look of young Jim Gaffigan on, which is a school picture of Jim from like 1975. It’s his profile picture on Twitter right now and Facebook. Our son, with his glasses, his wardrobe, the hair style, everything, was a copy of this school picture, and it’s pretty uncanny the resemblance, because it’s like the same face.

All over the set of that episode there are details like our real family pictures on the wall, authentic items that belong in that house, around the house, like in the girls’ bedroom there is a desk, an antique desk, that belonged to Jim’s mother when she was a child

But as far as the school picture is concerned, I really felt like Jim’s mother, who loves photographs, would have taken all her children’s photographs and lined them up along the stairway. So I had a photo session with the actor kids in which they wore ’70s wardrobe and posed for a school picture as their characters in the story. Except that rather than a photo of my son Jack as Jim, it’s Jim’s actual school picture.

The Jim Gaffigan Show Season 2 finale airs Sunday, Aug. 21 at 10 p.m. on TV Land.