Jeff and Liz Astrof, the sibling duo behind ‘Stumble’, talk about creating NBC’s new mockumentary series set in the high-stakes, absurdly competitive world of junior college cheerleading.
In this conversation, Jeff and Liz Astrof discuss how ‘Stumble’ came together, drawing inspiration from ‘Cheer’ and their shared sense of humor. They talk about how the idea started as “a cheer mockumentary about the worst team in the United States,” why it was always going to be a mockumentary, and how their different writing backgrounds complement each other. They also share stories about the cast, the show’s Rat Pack references, and their gratitude to NBC for giving the series a home.
“I said, you know what we should do?” said Jeff. “We should do a cheer mockumentary about the worst team in the United States, and we’ll call it ‘Stumble.’ That was kind of it.”
“What if they were really shitty, but with all the heart, even more so, of ‘Cheer’?” added Liz. “We thought it would be really funny to do a redemption story and this ragtag team.”
Created by Jeff and Liz Astrof, the single-camera ‘Stumble’ stars Jenn Lyon, Taran Killam, Ryan Pinkston, Jarrett Austin Brown, Anissa Borrego, Arianna Davis, Taylor Dunbar, and Georgie Murphy, with Kristin Chenoweth in a recurring role.
‘Stumble’ airs Friday nights on NBC beginning November 7 at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT, streaming the next day on Peacock.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to finally have this chat face to face and it’s nice to meet you too, Liz.
Jeff Astrof: Okay, first of all, Danielle, how crazy is this that you’re like a big, a big shot now? Like I knew you when, and now you’re this big shot interviewing us. Like the power of cheer, you can crush our souls. This is incredible. I am so happy for you. That’s amazing.
Liz Astrof: Hi. So nice to meet you. Jeff, where do you know each other from?
Jeff Astrof: I don’t know. Did we connect on Facebook or something? I don’t know if it was a Jewish thing or something, but you reached out.
AF: The writer’s strike. I had reached out after I saw your article on what was it, Aish?
Jeff Astrof: Probably. Yeah. So the first writer’s strike. Yes. So we reached out about being Jewish in Hollywood and then we had a we had a long conversation, and you were just starting out at this, and you really like this. I just saw your name. I’m so happy.
AF: Yeah. How come it took this long to team up with each other to create a series?
Jeff Astrof: It didn’t. It took this long for us to sell a series together.
Liz Astrof: We’ve done one other thing together.
Jeff Astrof: We did one other thing.
Liz Astrof: Yeah.
Jeff Astrof: The truth is we were both—thankfully, we were doing different things. I think that’s good. We were both doing different shows, and then we talked about this. I think we both thought at the time, Okay, this will be our second show. We have two of us.
Liz Astrof: Here we are.
Jeff Astrof: Like boom, the Lord had different plans. We each brought something to this, and we just fell in love with the idea of it and we each brought different elements to it. We’re both excited about it. We’re like, why not? I don’t think any of either of us thought, Oh my G-d, this is gonna be the thing that—because it’s such a crapshoot when you come out with anything anyway. But I was telling my wife just this morning—even though I call Liz, Shawni, my wife’s name, and vice versa—I was just telling her, doing this with Liz is, I don’t know that the show even would have got picked up without her because it’s just one of the other things that makes the show just such a great package.
Liz Astrof: We really compliment each other in a great way. We make each other laugh when we’re not working together twenty times a day. We are each other’s pillar of—I’ll call it—strength. We’ve helped each other so much on each other’s projects.
Jeff Astrof: I also think that—Liz is writing about different things. Liz is still at the point, and I told Liz, I gave up writing about my family years ago, and that’s when I started getting shows on the air. Liz was still writing about our family, and she was getting shows on the air with it because she’s like, “‘Pivoting’ is my story.” I was like, “Okay, you’re right.” Because I was like, “You have to stop writing about yourself.” And Liz was like, “I just got ‘Pivoting’ on the air.” Like, okay, never mind. I was doing the genre-bendy stuff, and Liz, she got her show on the air about her friend group.
Liz Astrof: My friend passed away, and it was about the rest of us kind of dealing with that after in a funny way.
AF: How did ‘Stumble’ first come together and at what point did it become a mockumentary series?
Jeff Astrof: It was the same way that ‘Trial and Error’ came together—because Liz shared ‘The Staircase’ with me. I watched that and I was like, Oh my G-d, this would be a really funny comedy and then I didn’t do anything with it for years. It was like, You got to pitch ‘The Staircase’ comedy, you got to pitch ‘The Staircase’ comedy. That was ‘Trial and Error’.
Liz and I were both watching the documentary ‘Cheer’ together. And I said, You know what we should do? We should do a cheer mockumentary about the worst team in in the United States, and we’ll call it ‘Stumble’. That was kind of it. Liz is like, We gotta do ‘Stumble’, we gotta do ‘Stumble’, we gotta do ‘Stumble’. It was always a mockumentary because it was always based—first of all, my love of that style from ‘Trial and Error’ and knowing our director, Jeff Blitz, also liked it was just the roots of it are this inspiration is clearly ‘Cheer’. We’re not trying to do another just another mockumentary. It’s just like it’s a sports documentary, and it’s in the DNA. I mean, wouldn’t you say Liz?
Liz Astrof: Yes, a thousand percent. It’s in the DNA of it. It couldn’t be otherwise. It couldn’t be anything else.
AF: How did you end up deciding on a junior college?
Liz Astrof: Well, it was based on very loosely and not in a litigable way. Litigable? Anyway. I’m the one without the good vocabulary. But it was, we watched ‘Cheer’ and we were obsessed ‘Cheer’ fans. It was always that kind of—Jeff had the idea of doing a really, really, really shitty team. What if they were really shitty, but with all the heart, even more so, of ‘Cheer’ and the same stakes. We thought it would be really funny to do a kind of a redemption story and this ragtag team.
Jeff Astrof: Also, the thing about junior college that we love is that it’s in a weird town in a weird part of the country—an overlooked part of the country—but it’s not even college. It’s another step down and from a very bad junior college. And also, the thing we love about junior college, like Liz pointed this out in ‘Cheer’, is that some of the cheerleaders are 30. There’s no age limit at junior college. Some of these kids are fifth-year seniors and we just love that. And for me, what I really loved is that this is really the time of their lives where these kids can fly and that’s it in this short little window. It puts so much pressure for them, not for the rest of the world, but for them, being under the microscope in that tiny world. It ups the stakes.
Liz Astrof: Yep. So high for them, especially being these underdog characters.
AF: I have to say, after watching the pilot, I loved the Rat Pack easter eggs.
Liz Astrof: Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College Red Foxes.
Jeff Astrof: And Dean Martin. We couldn’t call him—
Liz Astrof: Dean Dean Martin.
Jeff Astrof: Yeah. His name was Dean Dean Martin, and we changed it to Dean David Martin. But yes, it’s Dean Martin.
Liz Astrof: I think because there was a Dean Martin in the area or something like that.
Jeff Astrof: I guess there’s also litigious. But yes, we you will if you there this this show is filled with name jokes. Any place we could fill a spot with a joke, it’s there.
Liz Astrof: It’s there. Yes. But always with so much heart and um everything behind it has so much heart.
AF: Yeah. What’s it been like working with this cast and is there an actor who has surprised you the most?
Liz Astrof: G-d, they’re all so surprising. I mean, one of them had barely graduated from Julliard
Jeff Astrof: She missed her graduation.
Liz Astrof: She missed her graduation, yeah. She didn’t tell any of her friends that she got the job, which I understand why. But then it must have been like, “My show got picked up.” Really? What show?
Jeff Astrof: I know. Some of them are getting commercial agents, but the cast is magical.
Liz Astrof: They’re all magical.
Jeff Astrof: In real life, there’s no—we joke around about them, who’s going to become the biggest monster? And we were like, Georgie, the girl who plays Sally. She’s like, “Why would you say that?” I said, “I don’t know, we just think so.” She had to put on her microphone. I don’t know if I told you this, they had to put on her microphone. She’s like, “Let me go to the restroom.” I was like, “Whoa, Her Majesty.” She’s like, “What?” They’re all so sweet.
They keep surprising us, all of them. There’s no bad place to go. In the cast, there’s no—Jenn, for us, is a revelation. Jenn is the center of the show. The fact that I think the surprising thing was is that I had never heard of her before this.
Liz Astrof: Everyone who sees her knows her, but always from something that wasn’t her show and everyone says—
Jeff Astrof: People love her.
Liz Astrof: She should be such a huge star. People love her. She’s so accessible, warm, and hilarious. I mean, her audition, she added such funny things and just all of the people in this cast became their characters. Their personalities and their characters just sort of melded and they made them their own in such a great way. Also, they’re all so funny and they’re all very rich.
Jeff Astrof: Yeah. Not physically rich. They’re poor—most of them. Not poor, but they’re starting their careers but they—on the pilot, our DP said, “I feel like I’m filming like the 7th or 8th episode of a show.” It seems like they had already bonded and they’re all going out together as the cast of ‘Shrek’ for Halloween. Arianna, the one who plays Madonna, drove 30 miles upstate to New York to watch the rest of her team perform.
The only bummer about this show is that in order to kind of hit our budget in the beginning, and we didn’t know what we were gonna get, they’re all in nine out of 12 episodes. Some episodes don’t have all the cheerleaders in it. Whenever we see it, we’re just like, Oh, next year, G-d willing, hey have to be in all the episodes because they’re so good.
Liz Astrof: Luckily and thankfully, we came up with such defined characters for each one of them so they’re all so much fun to write for. You could never give a line to someone else.
Jeff Astrof: That’s a good sign.
AF: NBC is devoting more time to sports this year. How grateful are you that they found a spot for the series, even if it means a number of us are gonna have no choice but to watch it the next day?
Liz Astrof: Great, great, great.
Jeff Astrof: We are very grateful. It was very funny because this was a very old school-like situation. We had a bidding war. CBS, NBC, and Fox all wanted it. Monica Aldama thinks that this is just the way things go. NBC really made a very strong offer for it. They said, “You want to be a Peacock or at network?” We like the idea of a network show. Of course, as it would be—
Liz Astrof: They did? They asked us?
Jeff Astrof: Yeah, in the beginning, Lisa said, “But we think this would be for the network.”
Liz Astrof: Yes, yes, yes.
Jeff Astrof: It’s gonna be on Peacock anyway. I haven’t quite understood that relationship yet. I mean, I think it’s you know the same thing, but I said, “Of course it’s gonna be on Friday night when I can’t watch it, but I will watch it the next day on on Peacock.” I don’t know what the expectation is. I know that the show has hit every demographic they could want. The testing was crazy about the show.
Liz Astrof: There’s entry points for every single demographic.
Jeff Astrof: Right. So if you’re asking how grateful we are, we are extremely grateful.
Liz Astrof: For all of it.
Jeff Astrof: Yes, for all of it. I asked, because we’re coming on right away, it had to hit every single button for us to get a show on the air now. It’s so difficult and never take that for granted.
Liz Astrof: It’s funny that Monica has had the experience of selling something on the Zoom and just like, “All right, y’all,” and then we’re ecstatic, jumping up and down and—
Jeff Astrof: We can’t believe it.
Liz Astrof: Everything. We can’t believe it. I mean, she’s been incredible luck. Her choreographer, Dahlston Delgado—did we mention him yet—is so incredible and they just they make the show.
Jeff Astrof: It is a nice thing. But yes, it has to hit everything. I didn’t know—Liz and I didn’t know until recently that there was not still Must-See TV on Thursday night just because we’ve been out of the loop. It’s either Tuesday night or Friday night. They said that Friday night has a good live audience and from coming in from Reba, so we’re excited about that. I guess with Kristin and Reba, there’s a big crossover audience there and the South thing. I don’t know. I’m just happy to be on TV.
Liz Astrof: I’m so happy to be on TV, to have a job, and to not have to be driving my kids around as much and so accessible to them. But I’m kidding. But it’s so nice to have someone go with—
Jeff Astrof: And to see billboards.
Liz Astrof: It’s so nice to be in person. It’s so nice to have a writer’s room. It’s so great to be back there.
Jeff Astrof: It is very, very stressful because the schedule is a little bit brutal, but every single day, you stop and say, I’m really—as my wife said, “It’s gonna be over and you’re gonna miss it.” I was like, “You are right, you are right.”
Liz Astrof: Yes, we are racing to make sure we got it all and to be wrapped, and then we will both cry.
Jeff Astrof: Yes.
Liz Astrof: So
Jeff Astrof: Till next season.
Liz Astrof: When we’re—yes, till next season, I hope. I pray.