Arts

Virginia Living: What makes Richmond funny enough to be the setting for a sitcom?

MIKE HENRY: You’ve got to recognize what’s all around here. … There’s an African-American family living across the street from, I would say, a redneck family who are living next door to a kind of a hipster wannabe and also next door to a family of bears. I’m not sure where the bears fit into Richmond, but basically I grew up in Richmond and I love Richmond. We’ve actually modeled all of our show—landscapes, all of the architecture—on it. There’s a river running through the town in our show—it’s all lifted directly from Richmond.

When we bought our Richmond house a couple of years ago, one of the cable installers was a former high school superstar athlete. And he told a lot of stories about his specific games and stuff, and I was very intrigued, and a week or two later we made Cleveland a cable installer who was a former high school athlete, which we would have done anyway. There are little bits and pieces, nothing entirely literal. My brother took a picture of a house we lived in for a while on Libbie Avenue. That actually became one of the houses of the neighbors.

Will there be any jokes that people from Richmond or Virginia will get that someone from, say, Ohio, won’t?

Nothing is too specific. Again, it’s largely location-driven. We have old, colonial-era buildings that have been turned into restaurants and contemporary businesses. It’s more of a backdrop than going after the people in Virginia. At some point soon, we want to go at the society. One of our characters is kind of a good ole’ boy who’s got some money, and our funny twist on it is that he’s a closeted homosexual. We’re kind of taking Richmond and turning it on its head a bit.