Ground Floor: Skylar Astin & John C. McGinley Preview Tonight’s New TBS Comedy

A sitcom legend and a Pitch Perfect favorite both star in the new TBS sitcom Ground Floor, which premieres tonight at 10PM (ET) on TBS. The series shows what happens when a guy from the “top floor” of a wealth management firm (Skylar Astin) falls in love with a woman who works on the dreaded “ground floor” of the building (Briga Heelan). The owner of the firm, Remington Mansfield, is played by John C. McGinley, who sitcom fans know and love for his role as Dr. Cox in the long-running series Scrubs. Ground Floor, like Scrubs, comes from the mind of Bill Lawrence, who managed to convince McGinley to come back to television for this new role.

“In this particular case, I went in a little backwards, because I was seduced into doing this by Bill Lawrence, because I didn’t want to work. I was just doing a film every once in a while, like 42, and I was just going to bounce around like that. I’ve done enough TV for a lifetime,” McGinley explained to us at the Burbank studio where Ground Floor is shot. “But Billy kind of talked me into it, and then it seemed like one of the main objectives was to create as much distance between myself and Dr. Cox which in some circles is a pretty iconic TV character. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of living in his shadow in any way,” he said.

In order to further differentiate Mansfield from Dr. Cox, McGinley did a lot of thinking about the character’s voice. “Having just come off playing Red Barber in 42, I’ve indulged myself a great deal in voice work,” he said, “and so here, I made a cocktail out of George Scott, and Lee J. Cobb, and Jason Robards, and I kind of mixed those together, and I found Mansfield’s voice somewhere in there. It’s funny, during the pilot, some people from Turner came to me and asked me if I had a cold. Of course, I didn’t have a cold – I was playing at this voice, and trying to own it, and calibrating it to where I wanted it. Now it’s where I want it.”

Doing a multi-camera sitcom does have a different feeling from experiences in other media. “It seems like the take-away so far, eight episodes into this, is that unlike doing a Broadway play, or a film, or a single-cam, the more agile you can stay between your ears, the better you are served. And what I mean is that if you’re doing a David Mamet play, you really want to commit to David’s words. If you’re doing an Oliver Stone film, you want to commit to what Oliver put on the page. Here, if you make the mistake of committing to the words too early, it’s going to be an exercise in frustration, because you will be given draft after draft after draft of rewrites. That can’t be a problem; it has to be a privilege. So, unless you’re willing to embrace being that nimble, cerebrally, you’re dead,” he says.

Mansfield’s relationship with Astin’s character Brody is also quite different from what we’d see from Dr. Cox and J.D.. “What’s very attractive to me is that he wants Skylar’s character to be his son,” McGinley says. “Again, as opposed to being an unwilling mentor to Zach’s character in Scrubs, this is quite antithetical to that. This is a guy who has a missing piece, and that kind of damage, and has that kind of loss or yearning.”

Skylar Astin also had words to say about Brody’s relationship with Mr. Mansfield. “I think if anyone was developing a real personal relationship with their boss, they would feel really great about it, but also they would know that it’s their boss,” he explains. “Not to say Brody has an ulterior motive; I just think that the writers do a great job of Mansfield drop the hammer on Brody, like ‘this is done now. Now I’m your boss again’.” Even with that seeming on and off switch, the relationship between Mansfield and Brody does seem genuine.

“Brody’s father passed away,” Astin reveals about his character’s past. “We find that out in the first episode, and it’s really great that it’s given him this father figure. I think he really, really trusts and believes Mansfield, despite his tendencies to hit golf balls off of a rooftop. I think he knows he’s kind of his wacky boss, but I think down to the core, he’s got a big heart, and I think Brody knows that,” he says.

Ground Floor premieres tonight at 10PM (ET) on TBS and from there you can see more between Brody and Mr. Mansfield, as well as a unique group of characters both up above and down below. Don’t miss it!