MacGruber Writers Talk Returning to the Ridiculous World of the Hero

For the past decade, the team behind MacGruber has been hoping to revive the hilarious concept for more adventures of the hero, which they finally get to realize with the new Peacock series. Complicating the potential of a revival was that the debut film was both critically and financially underwhelming, only for it to earn a passionate following over the years, with enough viewers showing their support to make this continuation possible. Writers on the series John Solomon and Jorma Taccone recently detailed how this new series taps into a pitch for a planned sequel film for a jumping-off point when it came to this project. The new MacGruber debuts on Peacock on December 16th.

“The first episode is basically a version of a script that Jorma wrote,” Solomon confirmed to ComicBook.com. “Jorma wrote a full sequel to the movie while Will (Forte) and I were working on Last Man on Earth, Jorma was working on this script, among other things. So, he had a full script that he gave us … Basically, a lot of that is what you’re seeing in the first episode. And then everything after that is a combination of stuff we had talked about and what our writers worked out in the writer’s room.”

The new series didn’t only bring back beloved figures from the original film, but also brought with it some impressive new additions.

“I think when me, Will, and John were talking about casting stuff, it’s … We’re very hive-mindish about all this,” Taccone detailed. “We really know what the tone that we’re going for is. We’re obviously looking for very real actors to flesh out this world and have it be … You need to make this a real world to then destroy it. There’s not that many people who are allowed to be ‘funny’ unless it’s coming through the seriousness of their acting.”

He continued, “We’ve gotten insanely lucky. We were saying on set several times, we would literally, over the God-mic, be like, ‘Laurence [Fishburne], why are you doing this? Why are you here?’ We were just so insanely lucky to get the cast we … And they really got it, too. They really understood that this tone needs to be ultra-serious. But in terms of picking people, we’re all completely on the same page of who’d be great, and then we were just incredibly lucky to get the people we did.”

In the new series, after rotting in prison for over a decade, America’s ultimate hero and uber patriot MacGruber (Forte) is finally released. His mission: to take down a mysterious villain from his past-Brigadier Commander Enos Queeth (Billy Zane). With the entire world in the crosshairs, MacGruber must reassemble his old team, Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) and Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe), in order to defeat the forces of evil.  

Check out the new MacGruber series when it premieres on Peacock on December 16th.

Are you looking forward to the new series? Let us know in the comments below!