The Neighborhood is returning to its roots and embracing change in Season 5, with new showrunners (and seasoned sitcom vets) Mike Schiff and Bill Martin at the helm of Cedric the Entertainer’s CBS comedy.
“With the season opener, what we immediately glommed onto was that the show is called The Neighborhood,” Schiff tells TVLine. “There are a lot of comedies that have living rooms, but this show has the houses, the front yards,” and most importantly, a sense of community, “so let’s re-embrace that element of the show.”
Schiff and Martin — whose extensive resumes include 3rd Rock From the Sun, The Unicorn and Cedric the Entertainer’s previous sitcom, TV Land’s The Soul Man — take over for Meg DeLoatch, who succeeded series creator Jim Reynolds ahead of Season 4. But a year later, DeLoatch departed the sitcom for reasons unknown, at which point Schiff and Martin were afforded the opportunity to reunite with their former star.
“The thought of joining somebody else’s show in the middle [was challenging],” Schiff admits. “If it hadn’t come with Cedric attached, it would not have been the immediate yes that it was. We just loved working with the guy back at TV Land. There, too, we came in following several other showrunners.
“We’re playing with other people’s characters and a premise that existed before we showed up,” Schiff points out. “We can’t write Jim Reynolds’ version of The Neighborhood, and we can’t write Meg DeLoatch’s version of The Neighborhood. All we can write is what we think will be funny, [but] I think people turning on the show will see the same show they’ve loved until now.”
Viewers will get their first taste of Schiff and Martin’s writing with the Monday, Sept. 19 premiere, in which Dave decides to disconnect the Johnson home from the grid and inadvertently causes a community-wide power outage — which, naturally, incenses Calvin. Watch an exclusive sneak peek above.
“The thing about Dave is that he doesn’t just like his solar power, he likes to talk about his solar power, and how we’re all prisoners to the grid,” Schiff says with a laugh. “In terms of Calvin, those panels on Dave’s roof are one more reminder that the world is changing in ways he doesn’t like. But once the power is out and everyone comes together, it’s about Calvin rediscovering the spirit of the neighborhood that he loved.”
Below, Schiff and Martin preview what else they have in store for Calvin & Co in Season 5.
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Calvin vs. the New World Order
Image Credit: Courtesy of CBS There’s trouble on the horizon at Calvin’s Pit Stop. “Calvin is the best at working with cars. But cars have changed, and are no longer the analog devices that he knows how to work with anymore,” Schiff previews. And as Martin points out, “we’re on the cusp of not having carburetors anymore,” and that changes the game for Pasadena’s top mechanic.
“That’s an arc [in Season 5],” Schiff confirms. “How is Calvin, who is this old-school guy who is too young to be done, going to adjust when the world is changing around him?”
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Dave Heads to Work! At a Real Office!
Image Credit: Courtesy of CBS “We’re taking Dave’s job a little more seriously this season,” Martin tells TVLine. “We’ve got him working in Veterans Affairs, and we want to go [to the VA] and make it feel real. He’s going to be a counselor, and we’re going to have a lot of fun with the fact that he’s channeling that do-gooder thing into something that is actually going to be real.”
Acknowledging Dave’s previous job as a conflict mediator — a job we only saw him work once, towards the end of Season 4 — Schiff points out that it was “a hard job to show on a TV show,” and his new gig at the VA will make the writers’ lives easier. “We’ve just approved the plans to build an office for him, and it’ll be a place we can go and understand his job a bit more.”
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Marty in the Middle
Image Credit: Courtesy of CBS The newly engaged Marty will find himself in a difficult position as he tries to start his new life with Necie.
“Necie, this poor woman, is in the Butler family hotspot, and it’ll be problematic,” Martin previews. “It’s very difficult to start out life as a young couple with your [fiancé’s] brother in the bathroom and your future mother-in-law [in the house next door], who smells what you’re cooking and doesn’t think it’s being cooked right.
“It would be easy if she didn’t like Necie,” Martin posits. “But Necie is delightful, which puts Tina in an impossible position… She has dominated Malcom and Marty’s lives for a long time — she still feeds them, she still dresses them — and it’s not going to be easy [to let go].”As for Marty’s big brother Malcolm, his new gig as a USC batting coach comes with some sweet, sweet perks. “Through his new connections, he gets good tickets to the Dodgers game [and takes] Calvin and the Johnsons,” Schiff reveals. “Two-thirds of the episode takes place at this Dodgers game. Dave is excited to bring Grover to his first game, but it’s not working out the way he wanted.”
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Tina Heads to School, Gemma Faces the Music
Image Credit: Courtesy of CBS Not unlike Dave’s former career, “Gemma’s job [as school principal] also felt a bit imaginary to us,” Martin says. “They’d been there a couple times, but we didn’t feel like we really got in there. Now we’re going to because Tina is going to work there,” as the new after-school music teacher. “What’s fun about her is that she doesn’t hold back — and Gemma is terrified,” Schiff says. “But it turns out the kids love her. They need someone [in there] who is not coddling them.”
As for Tinalicious Cakes, well, “that may be a casualty [of this new storyline],” Martin tells us. “In a very dark, sad episode, the cupcakes sail off into the sunset.” Adds Schiff: “We’re moving away from cupcakes to get Tina and Gemma together in a place where we enjoy watching them — and there are politics [involved]. If you’re working in a school, you have to please a lot of people, and that gives us a lot of opportunities.”
The Neighborhood Season 5 kicks off Monday, Sept. 19 at 8/7c on CBS.
