Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider explain how writing sketches made them yearn to tell longer stories, but that they never want to leave behind the funny.
On the surface, Comedy Central’s newest original series “The Other Two” – a show about the flailing older siblings of a pre-teen pop sensation – wouldn’t seem to have that much in common with “Saturday Night Live.” But its creators, Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, began coming up with the idea for the show during their second-to-last year as head writers of the iconic sketch comedy show, and in talking to them about it, the connections become quite clear.
“I think as you start to leave ‘SNL,’ you have to figure out what you’re gonna do next. ‘We should try to come up with some TV show,’” Kelly said. Kelly had been branching out already, making his film directorial debut with the Sundance favorite “Other People,” but to him returning to TV made sense: “I didn’t really think about it that way other than it seemed fun to try to write a TV show and to try to see if we could have a TV show. That felt like a very tough mountain to climb, but we wanted to see if we could do it.”
“The Other Two.”
Comedy Central
Kelly and Schneider wrote for “Saturday Night Live” for six years, which was a factor in what inspired them to pursue bigger series. “I think when you’re writing in the sketch format, you kind of do have this itch to write a longer, more narrative story, which is why Chris wrote ‘Other People’ while he was at ‘SNL,’” Schneider said. “You just kinda want to exercise a different part of your brain and try something that’s a little more long form.”