The Neighborhood Bosses Reflect On The Emotional Series Finale — And The Uncertain Future Of Multi-Camera Sitcoms

After eight seasons, CBS has officially moved out of "The Neighborhood."

Monday's heartfelt series finale kicked off with a double wedding, as Marty (Marcel Spears) married Courtney (Skye Townsend), and Malcolm (Sheaun McKinney) married Mercedes (Amber Stevens West), with both couples also preparing to welcome babies — the second for Marty and Courtney, and the first for Malcolm and Mercedes. And with both their sons starting families of their own, Calvin (Cedric The Entertainer) and Tina (Tichina Arnold) had plenty of quality time to look forward to — especially with best friends Dave (Max Greenfield), Gemma (Beth Behrs), and their son Grover (Hank Greenspan) packed up for a move back to Michigan, forcing Calvin to finally confront that the Johnsons were more than just the Butlers' neighbors. They were family.

Below, co-showrunners Mike Schiff and Bill Martin — who first joined the show in Season 5 — break down the emotional decision to split up TV's favorite neighbors, explain why the finale skipped over the actual wedding ceremony, reveal alternate endings and Easter eggs that didn't make the final cut, and reflect on whether "The Neighborhood" could wind up being one of the last long-running multi-camera sitcoms of its kind.

TVLINE | Some shows go for slice-of-life finales, where you know life will go on exactly as we've seen it, episode after episode. Instead, Dave, Gemma, and Grover move back to Michigan, breaking up the Butlers and Johnsons. Why the big move?
SCHIFF | We just felt like we needed a big story with Calvin and Dave. Something big needed to happen in one of their lives. The Butlers had two new daughters-in-law and two new grandchildren [on the way], so to balance the scale, it couldn't just be that the Johnsons were putting up new wallpaper. They needed something big in their lives.
MARTIN | We were taking a wide look at the show — from the very first frame of the very first episode — and the whole show was about Dave and Calvin, and Dave trying to make Calvin his best friend. He loved Calvin, and was so effusive and obvious about it, and we felt like the real bookend would be to drag Calvin kicking and screaming into Dave's emotional turf, and to make him say, in one way or another, "I love you, too." It took eight years to get Calvin there, but that was the bookend the show deserved.

TVLINE | The penultimate episode, which set up the double wedding and revealed that both Marty and Courtney, and Malcolm and Mercedes were expecting, very much felt like Part 1 of your series finale. Technically, you only have the one episode, but were you thinking of this as a two-parter?
SCHIFF | You know, it was never on the schedule as a two-parter. Even the last three were really sort of a three-act [story] of how the Johnsons go. We'd obviously been planting seeds along the way, including in the very first episode [of Season 8] when Dave lost his job. And then we began to understand why Gemma would move. She had a great career, but [had grown] disenchanted with that. 

Pretty early on, we said Marilu [Henner, who plays Dave's mom Paula] should come back and lure Dave back to Michigan, and we checked in months before. We thought we'd have her either in the fourth to-last, or third-to-last episode, and she was very happy to clear her schedule for us, which was great. And it all seemed to fall into place.

TVLINE | You've been building toward this big double wedding... but then we don't actually see the wedding. Was that a matter of logistics? Limited runtime? Or was there never really a plan to show the ceremony itself, knowing audiences have seen their fair share of TV weddings before?
MARTIN | That's the thing: We've seen TV weddings a million times before. We didn't have anything [to set this one apart]. We didn't want someone to come in and say, "Stop the wedding!" We wanted to make sure we got the obligatory stuff out of the way so we could just have fun and have our characters sit in that living room, be on that couch, and say their final peace to each other.

SCHIFF | We realized we had to isolate them. We had to get them in the living room without all the [wedding guests] and all the music. We needed to strike that balance between being big and fun, which we also have — and Calvin has his speech at the end [of the reception] — but also have enough time to get [our characters] alone in different pairings.

We lost a couple of things along the way. I mean, I'll tell you that we had a [storyline] that I liked that would have been good. We thought that Marty was worried about telling his dad that Courtney was going to be taking time off now that they have two kids. But actually, it turned out that Marty was going to [step away from The Fuse Box] because he didn't want to be in cars his whole life. He was a rocket scientist. He loved [running] this company with his dad, but he had to go back to his first love, and Courtney was basically going to take his spot at The Fuse Box — which is a thing that I know happened, but is not in the show because we just didn't have enough time.

TVLINE | You already answered part of my next question, which was whether you had a checklist of which characters you wanted to see share one last scene together — but I feel like you hit every possible pairing I would have thought to include: Calvin and Dave, Calvin and Tina, Tina and Gemma... Calvin, Tina, Marty, and Malcolm... Dave, Gemma, and Grover....
SCHIFF | A week before, we realized we'd never done a scene with just Courtney and Mercedes, so we gave them a moment together just because it's nice when you pair people in ways you don't usually pair them. It's fun to see what happens.

TVLINE | I also appreciated that in the finale — because so few sitcoms acknowledge when two characters are essentially strangers — that when Gemma asked Marty, Malcolm, and their brides if they would visit them in Kalamazoo, Mercedes whispered something along the lines of, "I don't really know you." And she's right! She doesn't know Gemma all that well.
SCHIFF | [Laughs] I'm glad you liked that. Amber was so funny with that.

TVLINE | She's great. I was happy when I saw she'd been cast this year. I loved her on NBC's "The Carmichael Show," which was one of those great, throwback multi-cams that came and went, and never got its proper due.
SCHIFF | In the Season 7 finale, we had mentioned that there was a Housewife named Mercedes Selznick, which was not a name that we had really given much thought to or anything. Then when we cast Amber, it was such a godsend because they just had such chemistry — and we knew if we wanted Malcolm to do something pretty quickly, but still be on his side, it would only work if they had chemistry — and thank the Lord, they did. Because as soon as you saw them together, you thought, "I want to see them together." That was just lightning in a bottle.

TVLINE | The final scene doesn't include Marty, Courtney and Daphne, or Malcolm and Mercedes. It's just our two central couples — Calvin and Tina, and Dave and Gemma — and, of course, Grover. Why not include the entire cast?
MARTIN | I think it was mostly driven by Beth feeling like that foursome was such her world [on this show], and it was going to be hard for her not to have that goodbye moment for them. And once she put it in those terms, we realized, "Oh, she's right." It's where the show started, it's where the show should end. There was a point where we were going to end on the toast at the wedding, but it killed us that we weren't giving people that moment. And then, of course, once we decided to have [Dave give Calvin] the kombucha in the jar, the whole thing came together.
SCHIFF | It was hard, because Sheaun and Marcel, and Skye and Amber are so great. But it just felt like if we brought every character back for that last tag, we were going to get bogged down with it.

TVLINE | It would have felt like a roll call.
SCHIFF | Exactly. I mean, obviously, Grover's in it because it would be weird if he wasn't getting in the car.

TVLINE | You could have had Grover chase after the car because they forgot him.
MARTIN | [Laughs] We did have a version that I was fighting for a couple of months ago — which was that Grover says, "I'm going to stay here and finish the school year..." But, you know, I lost [that one].

TVLINE | Tina mentions the eventual arrival of the Butlers' new neighbors. Did you ever consider ending with Calvin and Tina greeting them, as they greeted Dave and Gemma in the pilot?
MARTIN | We did. We also thought about not even seeing them, which would be a very "Sopranos" way to do it.

TVLINE | Just a knock at the door, then cut to black?
MARTIN | Yeah. And it would have been funny to have someone that we all knew and loved come in. But it kept feeling like it was going to rob from the sweetness, so we ended up abandoning it.

TVLINE | You could have gone super meta and cast the original Dave and Gemma — Josh Lawson ("St. Denis Medical") and Dreama Walker ("Don't Trust the B—- in Apartment 23") — who appeared in the unaired pilot.
SCHIFF | Believe me, people talked about that! That came up! I'm not sure how those actors would have felt about it, but it was brought up. And it's so funny because that original trailer for the show is still on YouTube.

TVLINE | That dovetails perfectly into Easter eggs. The wedding reception was obviously modeled after one of Calvin's yardeques. We end with the Johnsons driving off in the same configuration we first saw them in the pilot. Any others you think audiences might've missed?
MARTIN | There are the ones that we cut in editing. Because we had some brief appearances by other characters from the show like Lil' Hatchett [played by Staci Lynn Fletcher]. There had been a scene about Malcolm's book coming out, then she breezes through to say that she heard the reviews are bad. But the first cut of the finale was six minutes over.
SCHIFF | Then there's another character, Kayla [played by Karla Sonnier], who was Malcolm's very angry ex-girlfriend that he'd ghosted. She had a little bit...
MARTIN | She had found the missing dentures at the reception.
SCHIFF | And here's something that almost happened. We almost had Marcel's real daughter Nola as Daphne in a flower girl dress in the very first scene because the twins that played Daphne didn't want to walk through. Originally, Courtney came through chasing her, and that's how we got to, "You can't see the bride!" That was an Easter egg that was almost happened. By the way, I didn't know this until our set decorator told us, but the "For Sale" sign [in the Johnsons' yard] is the same one from the pilot.

TVLINE | We've talked before about the Marty and Malcolm spin-off not moving forward. How different do you think their trajectories would have been this year had you spun them off? Would you have been as quick to have them settle down?
SCHIFF | No, I'm sure we wouldn't have. Obviously, I wish we'd done the spin-off, and I think we were going to make a good show out of it, but I think this was a more satisfying way to go, ultimately. And I think that, unfortunately, the spin-off coming at the end of the season, it was a bit of a rush — a patchwork of different things — which is why we aren't seeing "Marty & Malcolm."
MARTIN | It's hard to make a convincing pilot and cram it into a freestanding episode of an existing show. It's doing it the hard way. And we would like to go back in time and do it the easy way, where they have a real pilot. So maybe next time... [Laughs]

TVLINE | Any guest stars you came close to booking for this final run where, ultimately, the timing or logistics just didn't work out?
MARTIN | We actually thought we had a trick where we were going to get Anthony Anderson back on because he was working literally next door [hosting Netflix's "Star Search."] We knew if we went through agents and legal affairs that we would never be able to make it happen. But we thought, "What if Ced just goes over when they wrap? 'Just come here and film a two-second thing,'" which probably would have gotten us in trouble with SAG.

TVLINE | Yeah, the only possible returnee that sprang to mind was Kevin Pollak as Dave's dad Lamar.
SCHIFF | We would have loved to have Kevin on, but it was just hard with everything we had to do. He finished in jail. [Laughs] It seemed like it was the end for his character. I mean, we also had so many old friends of ours on: Megyn Price [from "Grounded for Life"], French Stewart [from "Third Rock From the Sun"], and Nate Burleson, who we'd written a pilot for a few years ago that didn't go forward.

TVLINE | I was thinking about the state of the multi-camera comedy. Heading into next season, ABC has one ("Shifting Gears"), CBS has one ("Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage"), and NBC has two ("Happy's Place" and "Newlyweds"). That's it! Even a couple years ago, we still had "Bob Hearts Abishola" and "The Conners." Then I think about the run you guys have had — eight seasons, 156 episodes. Do you think there's a chance "The Neighborhood" winds up being one of the last, if not the last multi-cam to have a run like this?
SCHIFF | It's certainly possible. Needless to say, neurotic comedy writers talk about this a lot. Will it make a comeback? Sometimes these things do. Or is it going the way of the variety show, which is, "People don't need that anymore. They get variety elsewhere." Do audiences find them inauthentic? Maybe they don't believe in [the genre].

TVLINE | And yet, "Georgie & Mandy" is the most-viewed comedy on broadcast, and you guys were number one on Monday nights...
SCHIFF | It's interesting, because every year we hear, "They really want multi-cams," and then multi cams don't get on television, so I'm beginning to question whether they might think they want multi cams. Because when push comes to shove, they're more interested in single-cams, which we also do! I take great pains to let TVLine readers know that Martin and Schiff are very happy to do single-cam. We did "The Unicorn" [for CBS]. i just don't want this article to be "Martin and Schiff Say Goodbye to Television."
MARTIN | You can write "Schiff Says Goodbye to Television," but Martin is still very much interested!
SCHIFF | I do think, not to get too into the weeds, that the new model of shorter orders doesn't play to the strength of multi-cams, which is hanging with people that you enjoying hanging out with, and enjoy laughing with them. [Shorter orders] are not really good for comedy in general. Comedy is scratching a different itch than a drama. If you turn on "The Pitt," you're going to see people's stomachs cut open. If you turn on "House of the Dragon," it's only eight episodes, and you're going to have to wait two years for the next batch, but there are going to be dragons fighting each other and castles falling. That's not where the comedy sweet spot is.

TVLINE | The streamers keep trying to do multi-cams, and the only two success stories are "Fuller House" and "The Ranch." which ran 75-80 episodes. All the others get such short orders that you don't have a chance to get to familiar with these characters.
SCHIFF | Yes. You can't do eight episodes of older Frasier, and then wait two years. It's just not what people will tune in for. And the comedies that are working in streaming are the ones where there are already 200 episodes. It's "The Office," it's "Friends." Because you can sit and enjoy those people for a long time instead of this eight-episode deal. I understand the economics of it that they think are going to work for them, but it doesn't work for comedy. It just doesn't, and I hope that they realize it. Because I think people would be more than happy to watch a comedy in the way that they still watch "The Office" if we could give them enough that they feel they've had a meal instead of just an appetizer.

TVLINE | Give it a couple of years. "The Neighborhood" will land on Netflix with its 156 episodes, and it'll land in the Top 10. Subscribers will see the four main actors they know and love from other sitcoms, and press play.
SCHIFF | I hope so.
MARTIN | I hope so, too. And then we reboot!