This is Later with Lee Matthews, The Lee Matthews Podcast More of what You
Here weekday Afternoons on the Drive. Created by Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning
Kurt Smeaton. You know from Ship's Creek Children. Ruin Everything is his new
half hour comedy that follows him and his his wife and their new adventures of
having kids when they're not necessarily used to it. Is that a fair assessment?
Totally fair assessment. You know you have kids, you know you have
a relationship and with just two adults, and then when you add start adding
kids, it changes everything. A lot of stuff gets changed in for the
worst. But there's also a lot of beautiful moments they get added too,
and that's what it shows about. I don't know if you ever saw the
comedian Gallagher's routine where he talks about having a child for the first time,
and he talks about how you know your friends that you to party with call
up and say, hey, you want to go out. We'll go to
dinner, we'll go dancing, we'll drive, we'll pay, and you say
no, And then he threw out an anchor with a diaper on it thunk
on the stage. We have a baby. Yeah exactly, Yeah, that's
that's you know, those relationships, you know, it's funny. I had
one of those, a pair of friends like that, and I was just
hit with them last night because they just had a baby, they had their
first baby, and they're in their forties now, and I'm like, oh,
you you've really, you've really, you've gotten used to your lifestyle with
the drinking wine and having nice furniture, and that's all that's all going to
get wreck someone's And I incidentally a Kurtch meetings with us, you know him
from Ship's Creek, and his newest children ruined everything. It's on the c
W. I don't have children, so I can kind of laugh at this
too. But friends of mine will get into my car and my car almost
has three hundred thousand miles on it, but you'd never know, and they
say, oh, my goodness, how do you keep such a good care
of your car? And I just look at them, saying, I don't
have kids. It's it's sometimes I look back down and it's like a landfill.
Yeah, like driving, Look what has happened? What? How is
there an apocalypse in just the back seat and the front seats fine. Uh
yeah, it's it's wild. It's uh yeah. They definitely age cards very
very quickly. And you know what, I do love going on road trips
with kids. I do love We're we're I'm up here in Canada. We're
driving out to the East Coast in a couple of weeks, and you know
it's you know, they have their eye uh, their their phones and stuff
like that they can tune into, but we generally put that stuff away and
just try to chat and listen to music and hang out in the car.
And I love it. Actually, well good because the show is is somewhat
semi autobiographical, isn't it It is it is you know that. I'll tell
you when I first pitched the show and we got into development with it,
I had two kids, and the show, the first season is about should
we have a third kid? And by the time we got the green light,
I had a third kid, Lee I had I had. That was
a discussion that was going into my house the entire time, And that was
an argument and a discussion and the result a third child. I was gonna
say it was an inspiration. Hey, I better get more kids before absolutely
show. Kids are so expensive, I might as well. Mark with them
now might get some money out of this, but it can also be touching
when you when you have kids. Absolutely. I mean there's so many beautiful,
beautiful moments, and I think the show does a good job of trying
to show that as well. And we wanted a show, you know.
I first was inspired to the show. I read an article about, you
know, how happiness is greater in people who don't have kids than people who
do have kids, and it was like, you know, you have more
time, more money to yourself, you're more sleep and I was like,
oh, that's true. And I had just become a father. I was
like, what have I done? But there was something in that stuff that
they didn't include, which is all these beautiful moments you have your kids first
steps. You know that my youngest daughter still has it, like her a
funny voice, she still mispronounces words and it's so cute. And like I
said, these road trips where we're all together, there's these beautiful, wonderful
moments that you can't get anywhere else, and it almost makes up for it
all the stuff that they write. Golden Globe and an Emmy Award winning Kurt's
Meeting is with us. His newest creation is Children Ruin Everything on the CW.
It's also from the same media company that brought you Modern Family, Arrested
Development, and How I Met Your Mother. So the production qualities is pretty
high. Yeah, we've got a beautiful looking show, We've got a great
cast, and we have a lot of fun making it. You know that
the cast has really become close over the years, and they sort of act
like a little family. You know, they really care, love love each
other and care about each other. And I think the fun that they have
on set really translates to the screen ly well. In that production company,
it's a new metric media. They're very good. Everybody seems to know what
they're doing, from the cameras guys, to the editors to the writers.
They all seem to really know what they're doing. Yeah, these are season
season veterans, and you know a lot of parents, a lot of parents
in that crew and in that company, and so they you know, this
is a special show for them too. Although it's funny, you know it's
every year you give out a crew gift, right, you get like something
for the whole crew, like maybe a jacket or a hat or something like
that, and it's tough because people don't necessarily want to walk around with a
sweater that says children ruin everything. The context of a TV show, isn't
there. I'm just like, who's that jerk? So we have to get
creative with the crew gifts sometimes, but yeah, we have a good time.
This may be a sensitive issue. But how are you working around the
actor's strike at this point or was a lot of this produced prior to the
strike. It was all produced prior to the strike. Now we're up here
and I ended up making the show, and so the we're we're with a
different union in a different Okay, okay, but there we go. Yeah,
but I do want to say absolutely support the the SAG and the w
GA, and they're fighting the good fight, and we're all watching up here
very closely and paying attention to that. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't
want to go to to I didn't want to. I was treading lightly,
as you could tell. But I was just curious. One of those curiosities
of mine, Kurt Smeaton is with us, how much do you get how
much say do you get in the writing itself? Oh I'm the final say
Okay, So it's it's great. I'm in the I hired the writers who
we're in the room together. We we we sort of talk about what are
the things that we find funny about, you know, raising kids, what
are the things that kids ruined? And you know, like we'll say,
like the confidence, so you know, I'm not as confident as I was
because you know I And so we'll try to com up with a story about,
you know, how children have ruined your confidence and how maybe sometimes they
can make you feel more confident. Or weekends, you know, when one
episode it's just about you know, I used to have you know, I'd
be done work on Friday, I'd have all that time to myself. And
now it's just like I finished work on Friday, and I've got another busier,
harder job to do on the weekends, and I'm looking forward to Monday
to get some time off from that. So we just sort of, you
know, we talk about all those things that are different now that we have
kids, and we try to come up with some some fun stories. And
then I ultimately, you know, I'm the big bossman. I get final
say, I get to crush people's spirits and destroy their ideas and make them
mind. Kurt's meeting is with us. The name of the show is children
Ruin Everything and in your personal life. Are you at the point now where
sports and piano and dance and other extra curricular activities are starting to take over?
Oh, it's taken over. My kids are now thirteen, ten and
six, so they're you know, it's it's almost getting to the point though.
My oldest, like he's at overnight camp right now, he's away for
the week. He you know, he can get himself to his own activities
in some instances, like he's kind of has more autonomy. And the ten
year olds getting there as well. But yeah, we've got you know,
you go through phases when they're really little. You have all these giant apparatuses
in your house, you know, the you have the circle of neglect,
and you've got like the you know, all these big plastic a big plastic
easel and all these big plastic things. And I to get older, those
things go to the curb. Yeah, you give them to some other parents.
You know, the stroller goes away. All these big sort of like
items that take up space get moved. And your kids, you know,
they're drawing and coloring and playing on the iPad or playing video games or whatever,
and so that that stuff takes up much less space. So I feel
like in the last four or five years, I've just gotten so much of
my house back. Well, in your house, you can watch Kurt Smeaton's
new c W comedy series Children Ruin Everything. We thank you for bringing the
story to us and for joining us today, Kurt. They thank you so
much. Early, appreciate your time. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee
Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live
weekday afternoons from five to seven. And iHeartMedia presentation.