The Untold Truth Of The Kominksy Method

"The Kominsky Method" is a study in contradictions. It's a TV series about old people set in an industry known for worshiping its young and beautiful. The series is a streaming single-camera comedy created and written by a legendary network multi-cam sitcom guy. Even more, this story about aging is made possible by the new technology that's revolutionized the business.

The premise to the Golden-Globe-winning, Emmy-nominated "Kominsky Method" is simple enough: a 70-something-year-old actor who never had a big break, Sandy Kominsky, runs an acting studio where he teaches a much younger generation. His best friend is even older, a recently-widowed 80-something-year-old partner at a successful talent agency. There are jokes about prostates and urine streams, about funerals and sex, and about legacies. There's also a lot of heartfelt meditations on friendship and love, on the ravages of aging as well as the beauty of being old enough to have some idea of what really matters. Plus there are some comic gems that have never been explored, such as when Sandy realizes his lack of testosterone has made him a better man, all pulled together by one of the leading sitcom creators, Chuck Lorre.

So how do a sitcom guy, a streaming service, and two old Oscar-winning film actors come together to make an award-winning streaming series about aging while keeping a sense of humor? They use "The Kominsky Method."

"The Kominsky Method" is a huge departure for Lorre, whose whole career was built on multi-camera sitcoms. Before "Kominsky," his first single-cam show without a studio audience was "Young Sheldon." Lorre (per Deadline) admitted he was "a nervous wreck" about doing his first single-camera show. "It's an entirely different animal, and the working process is very different. It's much slower."

"Kominsky" is closer to home for Lorre than his other series. "I don't have to make this stuff up. On 'The Big Bang Theory' we would be regularly talking to our astrophysicist consultant David Saltzberg," Lorre tells the New York Times. "I didn't need to have a consultant on this one."

He also explained this is a departure from his bread and butter, the sitcom: "It comes from 'Situation Comedy.' There's no situation here other than the fact we get older. ... So I think you're hard-pressed to call those situations. The situation is just life."

Leaving the networks for "The Kominsky Method" on Netflix was also another huge career first.

"The Kominsky Method" also presented Lorre with an opportunity to try out another "new trick," writing a lot of episodes by himself. In part due to COVID-19 and in part due to Netflix's looser release schedule, Lorre spent a lot of time writing and without the writing room most showrunners depend on. In a Deadline interview of him and Michael Douglas, Lorre says that "the normal television shows that I've been doing for many, many years ... the urgency to deliver a new episode every week ... you have to approach the scripts or writing room, a group of writers that can plow through exhaustion and frustration and keep it moving."

He adds, "This gave me the luxury to sit there and write, for the most part, by myself and find out if I still had a voice if no one else was in the room."

After Lorre claims he felt helped out by the years of experience Douglas and Arkin bring to the show, Douglas states it might just be false modesty. The actor rebuts with, "I would... be terrified after going from a whole writing group to basically writing alone, but I got improvement just out of watching Chuck's enthusiasm for treating this, after all his successes after all these years, as a new experience, and him actually enjoying the fact of having the additional pressure of not having other writers to work with or passing it over, but basically completing everything himself."

Chuck Lorre started as a musician. As he says in an NPR interview, "about 17-18 years, I played saloons in Alaska and cruise ships in the Caribbean and all points in between." He adds more about the role music played in his life. "Playing music impacted on the way I listen to words. There's rhythm in dialogue; there's pauses like there's rests in music."

However, the music is more than just inspiration for his writing; it's an inspiration for the "failed" actor Sandy Kominsky. He gets really deep in a Hollywood Reporter interview: "I didn't set out to be a TV writer. My journey into TV came after 15 years of banging my head against the wall trying to make it in the music business. There's a moment in the last episode where he's talking to Roz, played by Kathleen Turner, and he's staring up at that billboard talking about dreams deferred and that this wasn't supposed to happen. He says, 'I've lived my life with a broken heart,' and without going too deep into this personally, my music career didn't happen — I had a bit of luck along the way, but there was a broken heart associated with that and there still is because it was my first love."

So Chuck Lorre still feels like a failure on one front. Celebrities, they really are just like us.

In 1984, Michael Douglas had a big star turn in the movie "Romancing the Stone," about an adventurer who, over the course of an epic adventure, falls in love with his female companion played by Kathleen Turner. Danny DeVito is also a major character in the film and its sequel, "The Jewel of the Nile." DeVito, who plays Sandy Kominsky's urologist in "The Kominsky Method," would go on to direct "The War of the Roses" in which Douglas and Turner play a rich married couple going through a bitter divorce. It's amazing how well this plays into "The Kominsky Method" since Turner plays Douglas' ex-wife, mother of his daughter. Even more, their bitter divorce has now turned into a sweet truce between two people staring down the barrel of old age.

It works kind of perfectly, especially since they stayed friend all those years, according to several interviews. "I think [the chemistry] was pretty immediate, even though we [filmed] this whole thing with COVID protocols, so that added to the difficulty," Turner tells Fox News.

"It was so much fun," Douglas recounts to People Magazine regarding his reunion with Turner. "It just is a comfort factor." He later says that "You protect and cherish when you've got a good relationship." Their reconciliation and eventual admiration for and connection to each other, a major point of the third season, is no doubt helped out by their genuine affection for each other offscreen.

There are many award-winning, A-list guest stars in "The Kominsky Method." Allison Janney appears as herself, telling Sandy's class that his devotion to the art of acting is naïve and unrealistic. Danny DeVito makes several appearances, and Haley Joel Osment is a recurring character. Barry Levinson has a very pivotal role and Elliott Gould has a cameo too. But one of the highest-profile guest stars is Morgan Freeman, playing himself and as himself playing a gender-fluid surgeon in a in-series procedural that casts one of Sandy's students as a co-star. In turn, he makes an appearance at Sandy's school. While the appearance of Freeman, one of the greatest actors of the last several decades, may seem a bit high-profile for a streaming series, there is a good reason: Freeman is a fan.

Freeman told Variety that was attracted to the writing. "I always get off on writing. I guess all actors do. And the one thing that this show mostly stands out with me is that the writing is so good." Apparently the writing likes Freeman too — He's earned an Emmy nod for best guest comedy actor for his work in "The Kominsky Method."