My Seven Shows: Ed Solomon

An episode of Barry here, a stand-up comedy special there. Otherwise, veteran screenwriter Ed Solomon stays away from the television screen these days. It's not because he's emotionally detached from all that content — if anything, the opposite is true.

"I've been working so much with a full-on enterprise in the past year, and then I would return home at the end of the day and write more and be so fried — so the idea of processing words and narrative has just felt really, really tough," he explains. "I would actually say I don't watch much TV because I'm just trying to recuperate from having made a bunch of it."

That beast of a project? Only a sprawling crime thriller that encompasses multiple plotlines and points of view. In the limited series Full Circle, premiering July 13 on Max, a New York City couple (Claire Danes, Timothy Olyphant) cope with a botched kidnapping attempt on their child. The investigation unspools long-held secrets connecting multiple characters (played by Zazie Beetz, Jim Gaffigan, Jharrel Jerome, Dennis Quaid and CCH Pounder) and cultures. Solomon created the show and wrote all six episodes; Steven Soderbergh, his collaborator on the 2017 interactive HBO series Mosaic, directs.

That cryptic plot description aside, "I was trying to tell a story that from whatever angle you chose, you have a different set of protagonists and antagonists," Solomon says. "From one side, there's this innocent family who are victims of this kidnapping. Then there's a story about kids coming to America and this kidnapping weirdly becomes their way out. It's ultimately about what goes around comes around."

Solomon — who started his career in the Laverne & Shirley writers' room before transitioning into film with hits such as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Men in Black and Now You See Me — spent six years developing Full Circle. "I always loved watching this genre, but I just never believed I had the chops to write up to the standards that I would approve of," he says. "So it took a little while."

But he expertly and efficiently picked his seven shows for Emmys.com, acknowledging in advance that he omitted classics like The Sopranos and The Wire because "I want to go with the ones that have personal resonance." Here's his list.

• Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (NBC, 1968–73)
The problem was it came on just after my bedtime. So I used to hear my parents laughing downstairs through the floor, and there was a spot on the stairs where if I snuck in quietly and then lay down in the right position, I could see it through the slats. At one point, I actually wrote a letter and asked them if they would consider moving up the show an hour earlier so I could watch it. But I didn't know how to mail it, so I had to tell my parents that I had been watching it. They allowed me to watch it with them. I had that incredible childhood experience of laughing with my parents.

• Columbo (NBC, 1971–78; ABC, 1989–2003)
I remember watching it with my dad. I revisited it recently — and so often when you revisit a show from your childhood, it doesn't hold up. But Columbo does. I don't know why shows don't do this more often, but I loved that you could see who did the crime at the beginning of the show and then watch Columbo slowly figure it out. It's a superhero quality because you know Peter Falk is going to solve it, right? You're never worried. That creates this constant delicious joy. Plus, the person who does the crime is usually a giant asshole. So it's kind of an emotionally safe schadenfreude watching that person get discovered and destroyed.

• Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC1, 1969–73; BBC2, 1974)
This was the first time I saw grown adults, clearly intelligent people, not just being open to being silly but finding joy in the silliness. And you truly got the sense while watching it that they knew all the rules and yet were willingly choosing to break them. I was like, "What's going on here? They're not trying to make us laugh — they're trying to make each other laugh." That was mind-blowing to me. When Chris Matheson and I were writing Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, we wanted the movie to have that same quality.

• It's Garry Shandling's Show (Showtime, 1986–90; Fox, 1988–90)
This is a show I worked on. I'm not including it because I think it's a show that stands the test of time, because I actually think we only got a little of it correct. But it changed the way I thought about comedy. Until I was on that show, I believed that if I kept at it hard enough, I might be able to have a profound influence on comedy. Then I worked with people who were truly comedic geniuses — Tom Gammill and Max Pross and Al Jean and Mike Reiss and Garry Shandling and Alan Zweibel. They could pull jokes out of the ether like a magician. I realized I could never get to those places. I needed to have a wider range. It wasn't a depressing thing; it's just a reality.

• Los Angeles Dodgers broadcasts (Various networks, 1958–2016)
I hope this qualifies. When I was living in L.A., I listened to Vin Scully from the early 1980s until he retired. Sometimes I used to put the games on in the background when I was writing just to hear his voice. And the Dodgers aren't even my team! There was just a magnanimous benevolence of spirit in the way he spoke. He knew the sport inside and out. And there was this combination of a ballet of words coming out of his mouth along with an underlying humanity. No matter what kind of mood I was in, I would listen to him and come out of it feeling better.

• The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–)
When I was going through my divorce, [writer and executive producer] Al Jean, whom I met when I worked on It's Garry Shandling's Show, called me out of the blue and invited me to dinner. He and I hadn't socialized before, so it was an unusual call to get — and incredibly kind. He'd just recently been divorced and was offering friendship and support. And he brought along two DVD box sets of The Simpsons. Seasons thirteen and fourteen, I believe. That began a routine with my two kids and me that lasted for a couple years: every night, the three of us would watch an episode of The Simpsons and curl up on the couch together and laugh. The show had jokes that worked for all of us, and it gave us a safe way to find a small island of joy in what seemed like a swirling ocean of disorientation and sadness.

• I Hate Suzie (Sky Atlantic, 2020–22)
It's both brilliantly funny and utterly tragic. And it creates a sense of anxiety and panic throughout while you watch Suzie [Billie Piper] make a series of surprising yet true choices that continually make her life worse and worse until the cathartic end. That's the first season. In the second season, which centers around a dance competition, they take it even further. And you're basically watching the performance of the decade by Billie Piper. It's so vulnerable, raw, truthful, funny, sad, tragic and real. I know the show didn't have a lot of financial support, but its level of art and skill, to me, is really staggering.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.