Main Characters
Hannah Korman
Played by Rachel Bloom
An indie screenwriter who successfully pitches a darker, more complex revival of the old sitcom Step Right Up, hoping to inject it with some of her own experiences.
- Elite School Means Elite Brain: Promising indie screenwriter Hannah graduated from Northwestern with honors.
- Hates Their Parent: Hannah begins the series deeply resenting her father Gordon for abandoning her and loathing the fact that he's come to set to lord his authority and experience over her. They begin to mend their relationship over the course of the show.
- Nerd Glasses: Unlike the posh actress Bree and the poised studio exec Elaine, writer Hannah dresses rather frumpily and has large, plastic-rimmed glasses to match.
- Promoted Fangirl: She claims to have been a huge Step Right Up fan. Though that's true, her main motivation for rebooting the show is to tell her version of the story.
- Showrunner: She successfully pitched the show and was supposed to be the sole showrunner before her dad showed up and revealed he still owned the rights. The two act as co-showrunners, wrangling the writer's room and actors.
- Transparent Closet: She's a lesbian who stresses about coming out to her Disappeared Dad. He then tells her he'd always known — not because she'd described herself as LGBT in interviews, but it had been obvious since she was a little girl.
Gordon Gelman
Played by Paul Reiser
Hannah's estranged father and the original showrunner of Step Right Up, who based it on his experience as a stepfather.
- Disappeared Dad: He left his daughter Hannah and her mother for a new family when she was seven, which she has always resented him for. They reconnect in Hannah's adulthood.
- Mentor Archetype: He grows into a mentor role for his daughter and co-showrunner Hannah, giving her advice on wrangling writers and actors and how to bring the show together.
- Open-Minded Parent: Unsurprisingly for a Hollywood dad, he rolls with diverse celebrities and studio folk and doesn't care that his daughter's a lesbian and even tries to set her up. Benny, one of the writers who is also LGBT, comments that Hannah is lucky.Benny: Okay. It's hardly the same thing. Your dad's friend got a blow job from Paul Lynde. Back in our town, my dad tried to ban dancing.
- Showrunner: He ran the original Step Right Up and returns to it after the revival is greenlit.
- Yiddish as a Second Language: The Jewish Gordon sprinkles Yiddish words in his sentences and sometimes lets it bleed into the scripts for the show.
Reed Sterling
Played by Keegan-Michael Key
The actor who played Lawrence, Cody's stepfather on Step Right Up. He left the show to do serious acting, but hasn't been able to find success.
- Classically-Trained Extra: As he's proud of saying, he went to the Yale School of Drama, but hasn't been able to rise past bit parts after his time on the show.
- Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Everyone notices that Reed has lost all of his hair since the 2000s, and Gordon seizes the opportunity to add some bald jokes to the reboot's script.
- The One That Got Away: To Bree, who admits that she never got over him despite being married for 15 years.
- Tom Hanks Syndrome: In-Universe, Reed quit his sitcom career to take serious roles in dramatic films and plays, and only returns to the show when he believes it's going to be more high-brow. When Gordon wants it to be shallow comedy again, he nearly quits again. Later, Gordon admits that he thinks Reed has brilliant comedic timing that would be wasted on dramatic media.
- White-Dwarf Starlet: To his dismay, he hasn't been able to rise past his 20-year-old sitcom role, and only has a string of obscure theater roles, minor onscreen parts, and unsuccessful auditions to show for his efforts.
- The Whitest Black Guy: He's biracial, but whenever he affects elements of black culture, it causes people around him to cringe. Clay even tells him he needs to hang out with more black people.
Bree Marie Jensen
Played by Judy Greer
The actress who played Josie, Cody's mother on Step Right Up. After the show ended she became duchess of a small Nordic country, but has recently divorced her husband and wants to return to show business.
- 0% Approval Rating: She appears to have been hated by the small country she ruled over. In the first episode she tells her husband someone threw a pinecone at her head and called her a "clown whore", and it was evidently not the first time.
- Hollywood Old: A frequent concern of hers. She protests the idea of her onscreen son having a child, because she's only in her 40s and playing a grandma on a TV show will be the death knell for her career. She then worries that the network is trying to upstage her by hiring a beautiful reality TV star to be her costar.
- Minnesota Nice: Invoked, she's from a small town in the Midwest and tries very hard to project the image of a down-to-earth Midwestern woman, even though neither 'actress' or 'duchess' are professions that lend themselves well to that.
- Nice to the Waiter: She's quite spoiled and often turns to characters demanding something or other, even if she claims to be nice. She doesn't even recognize Zack, mistaking him for one of the assistants and demanding sparkling water. Clay says she has a tendency to act condescendingly fake nice to waiters.
- Riches to Rags: Bree shows up acting like she's still living it up as a duchess. Turns out, she's divorced after discovering her husband cheating on her and, thanks to his country's quirky laws, is flat broke.
- White-Dwarf Starlet: After her sitcom Step Right Up ended she did some low-budget scifi before taking a 15-year acting hiatus to become duchess of a small country, so she has even fewer credentials than Reed does. She wants to catch up on the craft and rebuild her star, which includes not only stepping back into the groove of acting, but also dipping her toes in the writer's room.
Clayton "Clay" Barber
Played by Johnny Knoxville
The actor who played Jake, Cody's biological father on Step Right Up. He became a comedian known for offensive humor, but has been battling addiction on and off.
- Girl on Girl Is Hot: Clay gets very interested when he learns that Bree and Timberly slept together, reading sexual undertones into all their interactions and dropping not-so-subtle hints that he wants the juicy details.
- Hidden Depths: Clay, despite being a foul-mouthed comic who's had numerous troubles with the law, is shown to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and is genuinely trying to better himself and make amends with the people he's wronged, even if he doesn't quite get it half the time.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's abrasive, foul-mouthed, and has had plenty of legal troubles, but he genuinely cares about his co-stars and does his best to look out for them, such as going out of his way to pick up Bree and making sure she gets home safely when she gets high on mushrooms after attending a retreat.
- Power Dynamics Kink: He gets really turned on by Zack's mother Susan acting motherly towards him, even though she's about his age, and sleeps with her a couple of times as a result. Reed diagnoses him as having mother issues.
- Recovered Addict: Clay is attempting to shake the alcoholism. His redemption is played surprisingly straight, as he's seen taking group therapy seriously, struggling with being sober, and apologizing to people he's wronged.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Clay has such a foul mouth, he had to use a Swear Jar on the set of the original show because he kept cursing in front of the child actor.
Zack Johnson
Played by Calum Worthy
The actor who played Cody, the son on Step Right Up. He did a string of direct-to-video teen movies after the show ended.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: At least some of his out-there-ness is due to having an ADHD diagnosis. He's immediately distracted by a picture after telling his former castmates about it.
- Former Child Star: Zack has been an actor since he was four and played the child character in Step Right Up, but since the show's cancellation all he's done are direct-to-video kids' movies and no one, not even his old costars, recognizes him at first. However, unlike many examples of this trope, he seems to be decently well-adjusted (if immature) and harbors no bitterness towards the entertainment industry, still being proud of his career.
- Hidden Depths: He may be a doofy and out-of-touch Former Child Star, but he reveals to Clay that he's got an aptitude for real estate and has multiple properties he rents out.
- Manchild: He's now in his twenties and acting since he was four has left him immature and emotionally stunted. He still brings his mom to set, makes lame sex jokes, and plays basketball with teenagers who are about as mature as he is. Nevertheless, he's a nice guy.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Zack Jackson pretends he never lost his cute "child star" appeal and assumes he's quite famous, but even his old costars don't recognize him immediately.
- Teen Idol: "Baskets" shows a couple of teenage girls who swoon over him for his DTV teen movies.
Elaine Kim
Played by Krista Marie Yu
The junior network executive in charge of the Step Right Up revival.
- Asian and Nerdy: The show's only Asian main cast member, she's a Child Prodigy with a background in software engineering even though she works in entertainment. She mentions that her dad is a Microsoft bigwig and telling her family that she'd been fired from Hulu would be humiliating.
- Child Prodigy: Elaine invented a glucose monitor for pets that was immediately purchased by a pharmaceutical company at the age of six.
- Clueless Boss: Elaine is well-intentioned, but doesn't really "get" humor despite being the head of the humor department at the network. She actually tells Reed and Bree that her background is in software development and that she only ended up working in entertainment for Hulu because of a series of corporate acquisitions and reshuffles.
- Promoted Fangirl: An In-Universe example. Elaine Kim, Hulu's director of comedy in the series, tells Hannah that she loved family sitcoms growing up and especially loved the original Step Right Up, so she's pleased to be working on the revival.
Recurring Characters
Timberly Fox
Played by Alyah Chanelle Scott
The reality television star hired to play Whitney, Lawrence's daughter on the Step Right Up revival.
- Bad "Bad Acting": Since she isn't a trained actress, Timberly is initially terrible on camera (exaggerated gestures, weird voices). She gets better after some acting tips from Reed.
- The Charmer: Unsurprisingly for someone who got famous on reality TV, Timberly is exceedingly charming and (after she gets some acting lessons) a natural on-camera. Bree is jealous that she appears to be so popular with set visitors and fans on social media.
- Head-Turning Beauty: The cast's immediate reaction to her is that she's too pretty to be playing Whitney.
- Kayfabe: After Bree sleeps with Timberly, Clay and Reed become convinced that Timberly is actually manipulating her based on some things she did on the reality TV show she starred in. When Bree confronts Timberly on this, she has to tell her that everything on that show was actually fake and that the producers just told the contestants what to do. Bree promptly calls out Reed and Clay for making her look like an idiot in front of Timberly.
Nora
Played by Eliza Coupe
Reed's girlfriend, a New York-based theater director.
- Foil: Nora is Reed's serious director girlfriend; Bree is Reed's bubbly actress ex-girlfriend. When they meet it's obvious they couldn't be more different, and Nora frequently expresses jealousy or suspicion towards Bree.
- Properly Paranoid: She frequently nags her boyfriend about the possibility of sparks rekindling between him and his ex Bree, which frustrates him. But she's totally right that Bree is still in love with Reed.
Susan
Played by Kerri Kenney-Silver
Zack's mother.
- My Beloved Smother: She still comes with her son to set even now that he's in his 20s; he attributes this to him being all she has left since his parents divorced.
- Textile Work Is Feminine: An overprotective mother who is frequently seen knitting.
- Woman Scorned: Subverted. After hearing that she hooked up with Clay, Zack warns the latter that Susan once smashed a guy's windshield after a relationship ended badly. This makes Clay fear ending things with her. However, she is very graceful about it and even clarifies that the windshield story was a coverup — she had actually smashed the windshield while having an intense orgasm in the car.
