Sam Richardson Wants to Show Viewers the Real Detroit

It's not hard to see Sam Richardson's mannerisms in his characters—and vice versa. On Veep, Richardson plays Richard Splett, an eternally optimistic White House staffer who doesn't seem to mind—or even know—that he's an idiot about most things. At one point, he introduces himself as "Richard T. Splett," and then cheerfully corrects himself: "I don't know why I said 'T'—my middle name is John." Richardson is more worldly than his fictional counterpart, but with a penchant for mid-sentence giggles, he's just as upbeat.

Richardson's latest character, Sam Duvet, is basically a less professionally successful and politically ambitious Splett: bug-eyed, socially confident, sometimes grating, and blissfully and/or willfully ignorant of the frustrations he causes others to experience. He's one of two leads on the new Comedy Central sitcom Detroiters, a show about a pair of bumbling commercial writers who see the world through rose-colored glasses and rarely, if ever, get work done.

The threads connecting these characters aren't an accident. Richardson, 33, created Detroiters along with his friends Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin, and Joe Kelly. The bubbly rising star says his sense of humor has been pretty consistent since his childhood, when he could be found quoting Jim Carrey movies like The Mask and obsessing over Saturday Night Live stars like Phil Hartman. "My cousin Dwayne was really the first person who was like, 'You're funny, man!'" Richardson told me over the phone. "I was like, OK, sure.'"

At 16, Richardson started taking classes at the Second City Detroit, an improv comedy talent factory that counts Keegan-Michael Key and sitcom veteran Suzy Nakamura among its alumni. Richardson began working there four years later, in 2004. After a few years, he moved on to a memorable stint performing comedy with Second City on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Working on the cruise ship strained his bank account when he got a little too comfortable with relaxing in Barbados and Saint Lucia. But his takeaway was more positive: Performing for an audience of vacationers trained him to be "efficiently funny. It happened right when it needed to in my life," Richardson said.

Richardson briefly returned to Detroit before moving to Chicago and eventually clawing onto the TV-guest-star circuit. His breakout turn in Veep raised his profile enough to land him some small parts in blockbuster movies (Neighbors 2, Ghostbusters, Office Christmas Party) and a chance to co-create and star in his own series.

Richardson met Tim Robinson, a former Saturday Night Live cast member and staff writer, in passing a few times and eventually bonded with him as his Second City underling in Detroit. The two soon imagined creating a show together, set in their beloved hometown and capitalizing on their strong bond. The original concept was for the two to play parking-lot-booth attendants going on adventures and getting into mischief. But the prospect of paying homage to the iconic local commercials they grew up watching dovetailed nicely with their own experience as comedy writers. Detroiters was born.

"I think everybody from whatever town they're from knows their hometown commercials," Richardson said. "What if the guys who came up with these things were so impassioned about it that they thought they were making high art?"

Sam Duvet and his friend Tim (played by Robinson) have inherited Tim's father's local advertising business, despite no formal training. They're prone to distractions, like smashing a glass window in their unnecessarily spacious office or renting a motorcycle for use during workdays. Sometimes, they fight—in an early episode, Sam thinks Tim holds him back from finding love, while Tim thinks the women Sam likes don't deserve him—but mostly, they frolic.

"That friendship on the show is pretty much how we are in real life. We say we love each other all the time," Richardson said. "Of course, the characters are extreme. We always say that Tim and Sam Duvet are Tim and Sam Richardson if we were half as lucky and twice as dumb."

Richardson recalls warning Robinson just before filming began that they would probably "have a blow-up fight" before wrapping production. Richardson told his friend to remember, "I love ya, and we're just coming from two different creative places." On the last day of filming, though, Richardson realized his prediction hadn't come to pass. "Incredible," he recalls wistfully. The admiration and adoration are mutual, Robinson confirms. "We have gone through many stages of our careers together, and even when we went through stages without each other, we always checked in regularly and helped each other through ups and downs," he wrote in an email. "So to have my best friend by my side every day is [a] dream come true."

Their playful rapport caught the attention of Comedy Central president Kent Alterman instantly, he said. "They are not only funny, but have a genuine sweetness that is irresistible," Alterman wrote me in an email.

Detroiters is a monument to their friendship, but also to the city where it began. The jubilant theme song, a brief but catchy blast of tuneful crooning about hometown pride, sets the tone; Richardson and his team took pains to subvert persistent pop-culture depictions of Michigan's largest city as "full of parolees and cons walking the streets looking to steal stuff." In his eyes, Detroit is full of "sweet, kind, Midwestern people" bursting with hometown pride.

The creators also sought to honestly reflect the demographics of Detroit's population—more than 80 percent of which is black, according to US Census data. For heightened verisimilitude, the show was shot on location, breaking from Comedy Central's typical New York and LA locales. Richardson, who spent parts of his childhood living with his mom in Ghana, saw to it that the casting department stayed accurate, right down to the bit players.

"I wasn't going to let the show get whitewashed," Richardson said. "Ninety percent white people walking down the street, and the black people are there parking cars and shit. That's just not Detroit."

The characters in Detroiters don't talk about race much, and Richardson says that's by design, to keep the focus on their misadventures, instead. Still, he hopes someday to translate the experience of being surrounded by black people in two different cultures into a story of its own. For now, he wants viewers to appreciate the Detroit he knows, not the one they think they know.

With Detroiters, Richardson is kept busy running his own show. Having to answer every question down to specific choices about what's in the frame or how an episode should end has been taxing, he admits. Yet, on the other hand, Richardson and his collaborators relish their freedoms. "You're accountable for so much but that's also a positive because if you're detail-oriented, you have it reflect the details you want so much," Richardson said. "Being on Veep, it's so much fun, and I get to put so much creative input in there, but at the end of the day, what they say, I do." On Detroiters, however, he and his friends call the shots. He credits his success in that transition to Detroit's discerning comedy fans, who kept him humble during his Second City days.

"Those audiences, once you get 'em on board, they would fiercely love those shows," Richardson said. "It's what made me want to keep doing what I do."

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