Exclusive: How AMERICAN CLASSIC Brought OUR TOWN to the Screen

This Sunday, the curtain will close (for now) on MGM+’s American Classic, Michael Hoffman and Bob Martin's series about one family and their small-town theater. There have been a lot of standout moments across the show's first seven episodes, and in the season finale, the show must go on when the Bean family debuts their production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

With a star-studded cast and the weaving together of two stories—the one on the stage and the one on the screen—American Classic is an ambitious series. But the genesis for the show was simple: After a public display of bad behavior, a Broadway actor returns to his hometown, awaited by his brother and their family theater.

After several years of sitting with the idea (which is credited to producer Leslie Urdang), writer/director Michael Hoffman found Broadway’s Bob Martin to be the right collaborator for the job. Martin, of course, was no stranger to the subject material, having already penned tales of theater antics on projects like Slings & Arrows and Broadway's Smash. Together, the duo pieced together the show, drawing on their knowledge and experience in theater to tell the story of actor Richard Bean and his family.

Richard would ultimately be played by three-time Tony winner Kevin Kline. This inaugural season follows Richard in his attempt to bring together his hometown with a local production of Our Town. Along the way, Richard might just find himself as well. Onscreen, Kline is surrounded by many other real-life stage and screen stars, including Laura Linney, who plays his ex-partner Kristen and Jon Tenney as his brother, who is now married to Kristen. 

As a family comedy, the show alternates between humor and earned seriousness, sometimes within the same scene. But regardless, it’s always earnest, which can be difficult to capture without becoming twee. 

“For a long time, it was Bob and I… trying to figure out what the tone was. Kevin [Kline] was involved from very early on, and Kevin has an absolute terror of embarrassing himself. So I think that Kevin became a kind of guard against sentimentality to some extent,” says Hoffman. Martin agrees: “Sentimentality is really the enemy of comedy to a degree."

In an early episode, Richard's father, Linus, played by Tony-winner Len Cariou, comes out to him in a tender moment soon after Richard arrives back home. Plagued by dementia, Linus asks that Richard not tell his mother. But what Linus doesn't know is that Richard's mother, his wife, has recently passed away.

"I love that kind of oscillation, that juxtaposition between something absurd and comic and something really heartbreaking. And I think the series is most effective when it lives there," says Martin.

Writer and executive producer Ellen Fairey came to the production later, after Martin became busy with the 2024/25 Broadway season. “When I came in, I had the first two scripts and they were so funny," she remembers. "[The humor] felt like from another time, almost, in the best way... I think if you stay truthful to how people behave, it won't be sentimental because people aren't sentimental in their real lives. It's just situations happening.”

To tell the narrative at the center of the season, the writers needed a play that would match its themes. After considering a few other American classics (including Death of a Salesman and All My Sons), they landed on Our Town.

“The play is so profound and so much about what choices matter as a human being,” explains Hoffman. “And the whole series is about that… What makes any choice relevant? What's worth doing? What's worth letting go? I think we just happened to find a play that really mirrored the themes of the series we wanted to develop.”

“The other thing we wanted to do is be as true as possible to Our Town itself,” adds Martin. “We wanted to present Our Town in a way that, in no way, parodied it… but allowed it to really live and breathe in the way it was intended.”

Richard directs the community theater production, also playing the role of Stage Manager. The rest of the company is filled out with other characters, including Kristen and his brother Jon. As the season progresses and rehearsals are underway, it becomes apparent that elements of both American Classic and Our Town intertwine. After all, those themes of memory, family, and connection remain at the forefront of both stories. 

“The interesting thing, creatively, was [figuring out] how much of the story of our protagonists, our family, and how much of the story of Our Town would we tell,” says Martin. Fairey admits that the climax took a lot of planning, with Hoffman choosing how to structure the presentation of Our Town before some of the other episodes had been written. “[He] very deliberately picked out the scenes that [he] knew [he] wanted to film. It was really a painstaking kind of thing.”

But despite its ambition and meticulous planning, there is still a simplicity in the storytelling of this series, much like any run-of-the-mill production of Our Town. "In a way, it's the argument of the show [that] you don't need a lot of bells and whistles necessarily to find a way to be relevant,” Hoffman says.

Moving forward, the writers hope for future seasons where they can continue certain storylines introduced in the first season and bring more small-town theater to the screen. But, in the meantime, viewers can trace Richard’s season one journey from an egotistical performer to a whole and authentic person. 

“There's something so just profound about getting to who we are as human beings and who we are as storytellers and what it is about a story that matters. And I think that's very central to the story we were telling.”

Watch an exclusive clip of Kevin Kline and the cast perform from Our Town in the Season Finale of American Classic. The episode debuts Sunday, April 12 at 9:00 PM ET/PT on MGM+.

Photo Credit: David Giesbrecht/MGM+