‘The Mick’ Star Kaitlin Olson On Creating Bold Comedy

“The Mick” stars a family, but it’s not exactly family-friendly. The Season 2 premiere featured a teenager helping hire a prostitute and a little kid performing an adorable exorcism on his alcoholic housekeeper. Star and co-executive producer Kaitlin Olson revealed to International Business Times that she loves the Fox comedy because of the unexpected laughs.

“Well, I had a long conversation with [Fox] before I signed on because — I don’t know that raunchy is my sense of humor, but definitely things that are unexpected, comedy you haven’t seen a million times before on network TV is my sense of humor,” Olson told IBT. “So that’s really what I bring to the table and I wanted to make sure that they were on board with that also. And they really are.”

“The Mick,” which returned Tuesday for Season 2, follows Mickey (Olson) as she goes to her rich sister’s house to ask for money, but when her sister and brother-in-law have to flee the country, Mickey is stuck taking care of her privileged niece and nephews. The hustler isn’t exactly a good influence on the brood.

Olson said that Fox is onboard with their concept, but the comedy has run into some issues with Standards and Practices. “But that’s to be expected and we’re developing good relationships with them,” Olson reasoned. “We’re able to find something that we think is funny. If it’s too far for them in terms of language, we can massage it and sort of make it work.”

A storyline in which young Ben (Jack Stanton) killed his pet bunnies during Season 1 was one of the biggest problems for the writers, but “The Mick” found a way to get the story to screen eventually.

“Killing the bunnies was a real problem for them,” the actress recalled. “They didn’t like that Ben was killing all those bunnies. But in the initial script, I think he killed like 30 bunnies. Then when it aired I think it was eight or nine. We come to a happy medium, and of course, my answer is it’s very clear that those are not real bunnies.”

“The Mick” has found an audience that seems to be growing. Over 1.8 million viewers tuned in for last season’s finale, but the early numbers for Tuesday’s premiere show 2.8 million tuning in, according to TVSeriesFinale. However, Olson knows that “The Mick” isn’t for every TV fan.

“You’re not going to please [everyone]. We have to make a show that makes us laugh,” the “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star said. “I also am not interested in raunchy humor. It’s not funny to me, not because it’s inappropriate. It’s just not funny to me. So we have to find that common sensibility between all of our sensibilities.”

The Portland native is a co-executive producer, but she also credits showrunners John and Dave Chernin as amazing collaborators. “They always take the scripts, if they’re farmed out to other writers, and do another pass on it, and then I’ll look at it and I’ll kind of go through it. We just work together. You get to a place where it just feels right.”

When asked when she knows that a joke is right, Olson said it’s a difficult process that doesn’t end until the episode is finished. “It’s never going to be there because we’ve gotta start shooting on Monday morning so you get it as funny as you can and then you start shooting. When I see it on its feet, I kind of massage things a little bit or I’ll go in and [make suggestions]. It’s ever evolving all the way through the editing process.”

“Comedy is really hard. It’s really hard. I don’t know that it gets the amount of respect that I think it deserves because I’m a real snob about it. It’s very hard to do,” Olson added.

“The Mick” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. EDT on Fox.