Mike Royce was a stand-up comedian and audience warm-up guy for The Maury Povich Show and Spin City before he broke through as a writer for the Sklar Brothers and their MTV series, Apartment 2F. He later helped his friend Ray Romano on a book and eventually his hit CBS sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond. Since then, Royce has gone on to run the shows for Louis CK’s Lucky Louie, TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, and FOX’s Enlisted. All of those are more heralded now than their ratings ever were, and Royce won the Peabody Award for co-creating Men of a Certain Age. Now he’s co-written and co-showrunning the new version of Norman Lear’s One Day at a Time, which is available exclusively on Netflix. I spoke with Royce in his offices on the Sony lot the day One Day at a Time debuted on Netflix earlier this month.

So let’s get to it!

This episode of Last Things First is sponsored by The UCB Show on Seeso.