Over the course of several decades, director Ken Kwapis has established a career working in both film and television, with plenty of feature work including Follow That Bird and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but also notably directing the pilots for two truly game-changing series: The Larry Sanders Show and the American adaptation of The Office.
It was the latter assignment which led to his most recent project: the second season of Space Force, created by The Office‘s Greg Daniels and Steve Carell. While the first season had plenty of charms, including a truly stacked comedy ensemble including Carell, John Malkovich, Ben Schwartz, Diana Silvers, Tawny Newsome, Jimmy O. Yang, and Don Lake, those involved have been open about knowing that the second season could improve on the first.
As Kwapis explained to Consequence in a one-on-one Zoom interview, Daniels and Carell enlisted Kwapis to take a different, more character-focused approach to the series. While he’s straddled the line between two seemingly different worlds for a while (his new book But What I Really Want to Do Is Direct explores that journey in depth), Kwapis took the opportunity to direct the full season as a film and television hybrid, while making sure to amplify the show’s comedic potential.
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“I just love how many wonderful craft choices you make as a director that an audience feels, even if they’re not aware of the choices that you make,” he says.
In the interview below, transcribed and edited for clarity, Kwapis explains what kind of changes he implemented for Season 2, what the collaboration process was like, and his hopes for the show’s future. He also reflects on what it meant to direct The Larry Sanders Show at a time when TV and film were seen as very different worlds, and how an episode of the short-lived NBC series Eerie, Indiana led to him getting that life-changing job.
Let’s talk about joining Space Force. How did that come about for you?
Well, this was a first for me. The first time I’ve ever directed an entire season of a television show. Granted, it’s only seven episodes, but that’s the equivalent of directing a three-and-a-half-hour feature. So I treated it like a feature.
But just to back up a bit, I’d worked with Steve Carell and Greg Daniels on The Office, and they invited me to come aboard and do Season 2 of Space Force, in part because they wanted to kind of shift the tone of the show a little bit. They wanted to focus more on characters and character comedy, and they really saw the season as an underdog story.
Steve in particular wanted me to come up with a shooting style that allowed for as much performance time as possible, specifically time for the actors to improvise and discover things, and I was thrilled to come aboard.
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Had you watched Season 1 when it originally aired?
I definitely watched Season 1, and I enjoyed it. I had some questions about the style of the show, and I think when Greg Daniels and I discussed it, I think that I probably kind of gave him the thought that maybe I should help out with the second season.
When Greg and Steve conceived Space Force, they wanted a show that looked cinematic that did not resemble The Office. They wanted to depart from the look of The Office as much as possible. So the directors on Season 1 were encouraged to put on their Stanley Kubrick hats and think in terms of a bold visual style, and that’s what they did.
But my question was, was the style getting in the way of the characters? And I think Steve and Greg had come to a similar conclusion, so when we started talking about Season 2, part of my job was to come up with a look for the show that is cinematic, and yet still supports the emotional content of the story, and specifically reinforces the characters and their respective emotional journeys.
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So in terms of that, when you’re getting really granularly into that, is it favoring medium shots over extreme close-ups? That sort of thing?
Absolutely, yeah. My pitch to Greg and Steve was to stage things in such a way that you see the characters together in the frame more. Quite literally, if you look at the first episode of the show, which Steve Carell wrote, there are wonderful scenes in which you see four, five, six, or all the characters kind of crammed in the frame together. I felt, right from the get-go, that that would reinforce this idea that Season 2 is going to be about the core ensemble.
I also personally loved setting up two-shots as opposed to singles. Now, a lot of people feel like, well, you need reaction shots for comedy. That is true. But I also feel like if you want to really tell a story about relationships, you should put your characters together in the frame so that the shot is not about one or the other, but about the energy between two characters. That’s something that’s very important to me. That’s something I’ve tried to do a lot in this season.
In terms of the collaboration, were you brought on after the scripts for Season 2 had already been written?
No, in fact, Greg is famously inclusive. He will have the actors sit in the writer’s room and help shape their own characters. So when I came aboard, the scripts had not been written, and I was, per Greg’s invitation, in the writer’s room. Not every day, but a lot of the time. And I would just be quiet and listen.
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It gave me a great opportunity to understand what Greg and Steve and Norm [Hiscock], our co-showrunner, had in mind, what their intentions were, and it really made my work with Steve on this set a lot more creative — the fact that I understood his intentions as a writer on the show.
An interesting difference between the two seasons is that Season 1 felt, in a lot of ways, very satire-driven as a reaction to the real Space Force initiative and all of the absurdity surrounding that. And then in Season 2, the stakes are different because we’re not necessarily satirizing a corrupt administration.
Absolutely. Jumping off of that, what we wanted to do was create stakes for Space Force< as a whole. So the new Secretary of Defense has put Steve Carell’s character on probation, and he has three months to prove himself or he’ll be replaced, and the budget has been slashed. So Space Force as a group is undergoing an existential crisis. We’re no longer satirizing their mission, but we’re rooting for them to survive.
Now, the other difference — and this is something I spoke about with all the writers — is that each character has an individual story arc that is very distinct. So you have John Malkovich’s character who’s fighting the main’s integrity as a scientist, whose budget is being slashed. Or you have Jimmy O. Yang’s character who’s pining after Tawny Newsome. You have Tawny Newsome’s character dealing with the PTSD from the near-calamity on the moon. And you have Diana Silvers dealing with the challenges of finding a college to go to. Things that are very relatable.
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By the way, one of the obvious things that Greg and Steve and Norm did was give Diana’s character a reason to be a part of the Space Force group, a part of the workplace family. So for me, going back to the question of what those conversations were like with Steve and Greg, it really had to do with how a family dynamic works. For me, this is similar to my work and other workplace series, like Outsourced or obviously The Office, or going back even further to The Larry Sanders Show.
Ultimately, it’s about a family dynamic, and how a sometimes unruly group of people have to get along and accomplish a goal. And for me, that was the focus of a lot of our discussions.
Space Force (Netflix)
My parents are fans of the show, so I was talking with them about Season 2, and the thing they observed was: “So they kind of really just wanted to push past the Season 1 cliffhanger, didn’t they?”
Let’s put it this way. The Season 1 cliffhanger created the stakes for Season 2. So I think that, on the one hand, you don’t want to dwell on the storyline. It does reverberate for several episodes, obviously — the budget has been slashed, and in Episode 3, Tawny’s character has a reunion with her Chinese counterpart, which does not go well.
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So there are echoes of the Season 1 cliffhanger that reverberate for a while, but I think the main thing was to not so much move past it in a dismissive way, or like, “Oh, that didn’t work, we don’t wanna deal with that,” but more to use it as a springboard for the new season.
And maybe slightly lower the stakes in terms of life or death?
Yes, but I guess the question is, these astronauts didn’t return alive, so now the stakes aren’t life and death, but they’re intense. They’re high stakes. You’ve been given the opportunity to oversee a new branch of the military, and now you have three months to prove yourself or you, and/or it will go away.