Speaking with Comic Book earlier this month, Matt Shakman shared that working with the cast of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” (most of whom are also crew members themselves, including Rob McElhenney and Glenn Howerton, who created the series in 2005) imparted to him the importance of creative collaboration, flexibility, and compromise — qualities that are vital to a show that relies heavily on improvisation. “[T]he rule of improv … is you say ‘yes and.’ If you’re in an improv skit with somebody, you say, ‘Well, I’m a doctor,’ and they go, ‘No, you’re not.’ It’s over,” he told the outlet. “What do you do? And that rule of improv is such a good thing for the creative process … ‘Yes, I like what you’re bringing. Now let’s also do that plus this.'”
Shakman, whose resume also includes episodes of “Game of Thrones,” “The Boys,” “Succession,” and all nine installments of the Disney+ Marvel series “WandaVision,” further explained that this approach has allowed him to produce work he’s proud of regardless of a project’s scale. “[‘Yes and’ is] the essence of collaboration and it’s how I think anything good, whether it’s a giant awesome show like [Monarch: Legacy of Monsters] that’s made across continents, or whether it’s something [like “It’s Always Sunny”], made for two nickels with four or five people,” he said. “So that spirit infects, I think, or informs, I should say, everything that I do.”
