Everything Old

You know, I’m not going to lie

And say I mind the money

Because obviously

I don’t mind the money

But, uh—

From the way they were talking

I got the sense

That this was something

People really wanted

And I’m not on, uh, social media

I don’t look at any of that stuff

I’ve been out of the game

A long time

You have to remember—

The last time I was on television was—

We’re talking almost twenty years here

That’s a long time

And I knew that when we were on—

Well, for the first couple of years anyway

We were pretty hot stuff

We won a lot of awards

A lot of accolades

Lots of positive, uh, attention

So when they asked us all to come back

I was all for it

Because, you know, my mind immediately went to

The beginning

When everything was really great

I didn’t even think about

Those last few years

When we were sort of, uh

Well—

I guess I’ll just use the word ‘uncool’

I’m not, you know, a writer

I’m not great with coming up

Ways of talking about things

But yeah, I’d say we were just ‘uncool’

And, uh, that happens

You know

You get hot

Then you cool off

There’s no way around it

And we all enjoyed doing the show

Right until the end

I would have been fine

Doing it for another

Four or five years

Maybe even more

And, uh, the money was great

You know, even towards the end

The money was really, really great

But it was clear that, uh

By the time we ended

We had sort of—

Overstayed our welcome

I guess you could say

And that didn’t occur to me

Until we filmed the pilot

For the reboot

And, uh, I turned it on

To watch it

And what immediately struck me

Was that we all seem kind of—

Lame

I mean, we’re all older, obviously

We’re not spring chickens

And, uh, comedy is—

I mean, you can be old and funny

But it’s not easy

Being old and cool

Especially when you’re telling the same kind of jokes

You were telling twenty years ago

It just seemed really sad to me

That we were there

On television

Playing these roles that—

I mean, it didn’t really hit me

Until I saw it

Because when I read the script

I thought—

Yeah, that works

That’s about how good it used to be

Because, I don’t know

Maybe it didn’t used to be that good at all

Maybe it was fine

And back then, you know

For a tv sitcom

Fine was fine

But now…

When we went off the air

It was sad

But also

It was a relief

Because…

It’s hard to do what we do

And not be, uh

You know, cool, but also—

Relevant

And, uh, we just weren’t relevant

At that point

So it was good to kind of—

Call it quits

But I thought maybe

Enough time had gone by

And we could revisit what we’d done

And it would be like, well—

Everything old is new again, right?

But, uh…

That’s not the case

I mean, maybe it’s the case for some old shit

But it wasn’t the case for us

At least not in my opinion

Of course, I wouldn’t say that

And, uh, they’ve already renewed us

For two more seasons of the, uh, reboot

And, you know, I’ll do them

Because it’s work

And work is work

And, you know, my dad was a carpenter

He didn’t turn down work

Just because the work wasn’t cool

He didn’t care about that

So why should I?

And the money is—

It’s good

I mean, it’s really

Really good

So with that in mind, it’s like—

Well, why not?
You know?

Why the hell not?