Parenting & Family Quote by Donal Logue

The cleanest trick here is how “family show” gets framed as a creative constraint and a permission slip at the same time. Donal Logue isn’t pitching some bland, three-generations-on-a-couch product. He’s pointing to an origin story: two creators, Bill Martin and Mike Schiff, understanding that the only way a show can plausibly speak to parents and kids is if the writers stop trying to “write for families” and start writing from memory.

The key phrase is “they knew we had to.” It carries the pressure of television economics (broad audience, advertiser-friendly, network expectations) while also implying a kind of craft ethic: if you want something that lasts, you can’t build it on cynicism. You build it on recognizable stages of life. That’s why the next sentence lands: “Everybody came at it…having been a kid and a teenager.” It’s a subtle declaration of method acting for a writers room. Instead of treating adolescence as a punchline or a problem to be managed by the adults, it becomes the shared reference point that equalizes the room.

There’s subtextual humility, too: Logue defers credit to the creators and to “everybody,” signaling that the show’s tone isn’t the result of one star’s voice but an ensemble agreement about emotional truth. It also hints at why “family” can feel sharp rather than saccharine: teenagers aren’t tidy. Writing from that vantage makes warmth possible without pretending the messy parts don’t exist.