Paul Scheer On Iconic Movies, Podcasting, And The New Season Of ‘Black Monday’

Paul Scheer seems to be at a high point in his career. His credits touch on some of the best comedy of the last decade. A small highlight reel includes Human Giant, NTSF:SD:SUV, Childrens Hospital, The League, VEEP, Fresh Off The Boat, and Big Mouth on TV alone. Then there’s his presence behind the scenes as a writer, producer, and director, as well as an Indy movie mainstay. And all of that is before you even get into his two hit movie podcasts How Did This Get Made and Unspooled — and his second season turn as wild man Keith Shankar in the upcoming return of Showtime’s Black Monday.

It’s always a bit of a crapshoot when you’re talking to someone working as much as Scheer does. There’s often a hard out after 15 minutes or so. Scheer immediately dispelled that when we jumped on a call, while he was legit on a break from recording voice-over for a new project. As soon as we started chatting, he made it clear we had all the time we needed to talk about his podcasts, our mutual love of movies good and bad, and his very meme-able Black Monday character Keith Shankar.

Let’s start with Unspooled. The podcast feels like an outgrowth of How Did This Get Made But it’s such a different beast. How did that show come about

You know, Unspooled is really this weird passion project that I’ve had. I was out one night and I saw a list of the AFI’s Top 100 movies. I realized I’m a big movie buff, but I had never really seen at least 40 or 50 percent of these films, and I wanted to watch them. I thought, maybe a lot of people out there were experiencing the same feeling and hadn’t seen these films either. I thought it would be a fun podcast to do. It would be like almost a book club podcast where you learn about things. It’d be a little bit like a simple film school.

I was wracking my brain for who to do the show with. The first person that came to my mind was Amy Nicholson because I’d done some really fun things with her in the past. She hosted a show called The Canon. I’m a fan of her on NPR. I love her reviews. I was just like, maybe she would be great because she’s somebody who’s uniquely interesting. She’s funny. She’s incredibly opinionated, but not in a way that’s off-putting. You may not agree with her opinions, but she’s not snobbish about her opinions. I felt like that was a great fit.

I approached her and asked, “What do you think about doing this” She was really excited about it. It turned out, she hadn’t seen a handful, probably five or six, of the films on the list. It was just a fun project to start with her.

It feels like this started from a place of pure love of film overall.

It really just started with me wanting to learn a little bit more about film. I obviously watch a lot of bad movies, but I feel like there’s so much to be learned. I think there’s a world in which the past is getting so disposable that we rarely look backward anymore. That, to me, was part of the appeal of the show. It was finding these things that you wouldn’t normally go to. Look, if it’s Ready or Not or Nashville, I’m probably going to watch Ready or Not. I want to watch that hide-and-seek horror movie. I feel like we often tune out the past. But, I wanted to do Unspooled in a fun way that didn’t make it stuffy, or feel like you needed to have a film degree to enjoy it.

I think that plays into one of my favorite episodes, The Best Years of Our Lives. It’s such an obscure film, and it’s so hard to find. But I’m hoping with what you’re doing it makes it a little more accessible. Have you found that Unspooled is making some almost forgotten gems a little more current

It’s funny to see what people gravitate towards, especially in the downloads of the show. Obviously, we have a really high, strong listenership, and it spikes on certain films. Sad to say, it spikes the most whenever we do something that is a little bit more popular, so your E.T.s, and your Raiders, and your Godfathers — we just did a Parasite episode — or anytime we talk about the year’s movies.

But then, there are these movies that really invigorate our audience. It’s something like, “I’d never even heard this title!” That movie, The Best Year’s of Our Lives, was intriguing on that level. It was like, “Wait, what could be on the list that I don’t even know, that’s not even in popular culture” That was a really interesting one that I think got people very excited. It felt like we all found it at the same time.

I guess the elephant in the room is that the AFI 100 list is, of course, finite. I’m wondering what do you and Amy see on the horizon once you get to number 100

Well, that’s something that Amy and I have been talking about since day one. We knew that the list was going to run out. We are definitely going to continue past 100. In what form the show continues, I’m not exactly sure. I think it might become a little bit more open-ended at points because I think what we’ve found is a fun balance where we can pull in a bunch of different things. So, I like the show when we can be talking about Sound of Music one week, Repo Man the next week, and Parasite the week after that. I think we want to continue to play in that world. I don’t know what that will be, yet.

Luckily, our title is good in a way that we didn’t tie ourselves down with an “AFI” name, or anything like that. We’re unspooling a film reel. So, that’ll allow us to look at anything we want for a couple of episodes; look at Kurosawa, and then maybe look at John Hughes, and then maybe look at something like Birds of Prey, if needed.

I would like something that feels like it has a little bit of a round-robin nature to it. I think that the fans have enjoyed this experience and a lot of our conversations branch out to other things. People have responded a lot to our roundup shows about the year’s movies or the decade’s movies. I think we can approach things the same way. Whatever it will be, it will definitely be Amy and me talking about movies. It just may not be as rigid as the AFI list.