Joel McHale on ‘The Great Indoors,’ ‘Community’ and career perspective

TORONTO – Joel McHale isn’t big on “bae,” a fan of “fam,” or onboard with “on fleek.”

As the lead in the new sitcom “The Great Indoors,” premiering Thursday on Global and CBS, the Emmy-nominated comedy star plays the supervisor of a team of millennial magazine journalists. As such, he says he doesn’t have to be up on the latest slang of that generation.

“I’m the guy who’s not supposed to know any of it and not understand any of it,” says the 44-year-old.

“So that dynamic of my character being shoved into this world that he is unfamiliar with, and then you have Stephen Fry who is of another generation, I think that all together will make for hopefully a huge plate of carbonara pasta where you combine all these ingredients and hopefully it will work.”

The 59-year-old Fry plays the founder of the adventure-geared Outdoor Limits magazine. McHale’s character moves from the position of field reporter to supervisor when the publication becomes web-only.

Co-stars include Judd Apatow-favourite Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who plays the resident “tech nerd,” Christine Ko as the social media expert and Shaun Brown as a “hipster-lumberjack.”

“The Great Indoors” comes after McHale soared to fame on the satirical weekly pop-culture series “The Soup” and the sitcom “Community,” which both ended last year.

Rumours have swirled of a possible “Community” movie, and McHale says he’s onboard — if the money comes together.

“We just need like $200 million — and if you have that, we need it,” he says. “I think at one point Yahoo wanted to. I know there were rumblings about it. But then that all went away very quickly. The Yahoo streaming service disappeared. So who knows.”

McHale says he was attracted to “The Great Indoors” because he’d been longing to do a four-camera sitcom and a workplace comedy.

“When they work, they become the American and the British ‘Office’ or they become ‘The Larry Sanders Show,’ or something like Mary Tyler Moore or ‘Cheers,'” he says.

It also had the potential for an “endless” storyline — “a sandbox that we could play in for a long time” — unlike the other TV scripts he’s read lately that seemed more like a movie with an end-point.

“You can have shows like ‘The Nick’ that Steven Soderbergh directed. He was like, “I’m directing a nine-hour movie,'” says McHale.

“(TV) also is the place where, it’s basically where you do independent films now, because they have the money and the flexibility to do it.

“But movie companies, it’s becoming gigantic budget films and very small-budget films and not much in between. Although, I just did a Netflix movie and they had a $20 million budget, which is unheard of,” adds McHale, referring to “A Futile and Stupid Gesture.”

“So that’s the future, I think, probably right there for movies.”

McHale says he feels “blessed” that he’s on something that got on the air. While it’s hard to make a successful series, he also looks to his family and world issues for perspective.

“I always say my older brother is an electrician and he spends the day trying not to electrocute himself while wiring buildings,” says McHale. “And my little brother is an Episcopal priest who sits in hospitals and helps old people onto the next life.

“So we talk about, ‘Oh, this was a difficult thing to shoot and this was a hard thing to do.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I guess. I’m not in a dinghy in the Mediterranean trying to start a new life for my family because I’m leaving my war-torn home.’ So it’s all relative.

“I’m being paid well to try to make people laugh, and so it’s all gravy.”