Christopher Guest, the king of improv comedy and best known for hit movies such as Spinal Tap and Best In Show, returns to our screens with Family Tree, a show that he has created along with Jim Piddock and which stars Chris O’Dowd, Tom Bennett and Nina Conti. O’Dowd plays the central character Tom Chadwick, who loses his job and his girlfriend and starts to look into his family tree after he receives a surprise box from a great aunt that he has never met. As he delves deeper into his family history, he gains a greater understanding of who his family really is.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly back in January, Guest explained that each episode of the new HBO series was crafted with just eight pages of script, or plot guidelines and the rest was improvised. “Each of these episodes is an eight-page outline,” he explained. “But we've written a huge back history for every character, which took us six or eight months to come up with. We've done an entire family tree going back to the 1700s. So when I talk to the actors prior to shooting, everyone knows who they are. It's not just ‘Hey, let's start yapping here.'”

A trailer for the show has been released online and it shows O’Dowd’s character arriving in California to uncover some of his relatives. 

 

Chris O'Dowd
Chris O'Dowd stars in Christopher Guest's new comedy Family Tree