Trivia / The Crazy Ones

• Awesome, Dear Boy: When Sarah Michelle Gellar learned that Robin Williams was making a television comedy, she contacted her friend Sarah de Sa Rego, the wife of Williams's best friend, Bobcat Goldthwait, to lobby for a co-starring role.
• Creator Backlash: Creator David E. Kelley spoke poorly of the show in a 2016 interview, criticizing the writing heavily, though he praised Williams's performances. Kelley claimed to have been disillusioned by working for network television as a result of the show's failure, though he did eventually sell another pilot to a network in 2020 with Big Sky.
• Friendship on the Set: Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar formed an immediate and intense bond while working together. Gellar says that Williams became the paternal figure she'd been missing^note her father was absent from her life and the two spoke about how they could be vulnerable and cry in each other's presence. After Williams' death, Gellar was devastated and kept sharing stories about how much he meant to her long after tributes to him stopped.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Simon, which is no surprise given who plays him.
  • The show's outtakes show that James Wolk and Hamish Linklater riff fairly often as well, doing an admirable job of keeping up with Robin Williams.
• Money, Dear Boy: Robin Williams was quite open about the fact that he had bills to pay and that appearing in a weekly series was a preferable alternative to doing a comedy tour or working on smaller films for union scale wages.
• Reality Subtext: Simon rarely gestures with his left hand, often keeping it in a pocket or holding the arm close against him. After Robin Williams' death, it was revealed that he'd developed a tremor in his left arm related to the Lewy Body Dementia and he'd been attempting to mask it.

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