After seven bizarre, hilarious seasons, The League will come to some sort of conclusion soon. The comedy series created by Jeff and Jackie Schaffer, whose seventh and final season starts tonight on FXX, has committed to topping itself every year, but like a good player, it knows when to get out of the game. Or, as Jackie puts it: "We would rather be Barry Sanders than Brett Favre."
We talked to the stars and creators of The League about how they look back on the show—it turns out they all see it a little differently—and what they'd like for its end. "To wrap things up really completely everyone has to die, so I don't think their lives will be over," Jeff says. "But you will see the ends of certain chapters and the beginnings of new chapters of their lives. We're using this season also as an opportunity to touch base with lots of the great guest cast members that have come through our doors. The one footnote we'd say to all this is: We still love writing for these characters and I'm not quite sure you've seen the last of them." More on that in a moment.
In honor of the show's final season, here are seven ways the cast and creators remember The League.
1. It was all about the casting—which almost didn't happen.
The League was born in 2009, when the Schaffers gathered a group of six actors under the premise of creating a show about fantasy football that was largely improvised in the style of Curb Your Enthusiasm (on which Jeff previously worked). The cast—Nick Kroll (Ruxin), Paul Scheer (Andre), Mark Duplass (Pete), Katie Aselton (Jenny), Jon Lajoie (Taco) and Steve Rannazzisi (Kevin)—came from various comedy and acting backgrounds and most had never worked together prior to the show.
"When I heard the concept for the show, I was like, 'Oh, I don't want to do that show. I know absolutely nothing about fantasy football,'" Scheer says. "And I turned down the audition. It happened that I was friends with Nick Kroll and Nick was like, 'You know, they want you to come in for this show. You should really come in.' The day before they had figured out their cast, I was like, 'All right, I'll go in.' And I went in and I auditioned for the show kind of begrudgingly. So it was a fluke I even got in the show. And then once I was in the show, I was like, 'Holy shit, fantasy football is giant!' Fantasy football was my Narnia and The League was the closet I walked into to get there."
Kroll was more receptive to domestic situation comedy from the start. "I was in on the premise of guys in their late 20s and early 30s who were starting families, and that alone was interesting," he says. "When it became clear a little further into the process that it was about fantasy football, it felt totally relevant. When you're trying to figure out a show, you just want to create a world that feels believable. It's really about a group of people and fantasy football is a very effective organizational tool to base their lives around."
2. The actors had chemistry from day one.
The show's pilot, which premiered in 2009 on FX, had a group of friends with low morals and quick insults who compete for what they call the Shiva Bowl. Fantasy football was the center point around which their awfulness revolved. The episode was largely improvised, with only an outline and some plot points to guide things along. The six actors immediately clicked.
"We had a bit in the pilot where Andre is trying to give a toast and we just start interrupting his toast," Kroll remembers. "It was one of the first days of shooting, and we all just jumped on that same game and started playing it. It felt really natural, really easy. It was like, 'God if this gets picked up, I think it will work for a while.'"
"I always remember that as being a moment that sums up the entire show," Scheer adds. "I'm laughing, I'm having fun, it sets up all of our characters, and it was the beginning of knowing we would have six years of these amazing people. You think the seventh year of a show is people like 'Fuck it. Where's my money? Let me get in my Tesla and audition for my drama movie.' I think we're still having fun."
3. The show created its own lasting vocabulary, from "Eskimo brothers" to "fear boner."
The first season featured only six episodes, and fan momentum picked up once that season was available on Netflix. Suddenly, everyone realized The League was a comedy show, not a football show. Terms that came out of the scripts and actors' improvisation like "Eskimo brothers" and "fear boner" became cornerstones of the show, but also part of larger pop-culture slang. "I know the show works because we have changed the vernacular," Aselton says. "You watch The Bachelor this season and they're talking about being Eskimo brothers. That comes from our show! That's crazy to me. That's when you're like 'Oh, people do watch this show.'"
"I know at least two or three babies that are named Ruxin," Nick Kroll says."I know at least two or three babies that are named Ruxin and well over a dozen pets named Ruxin," Kroll says. "There are children named Ruxin. For real. People named their children Ruxin!"
"We name a character Shiva or Raffi or Ruxin and suddenly animal shelters are tweeting that they're able to have more animals adopted by naming them after League characters," Jackie adds. "I think, if that's our legacy, we've done well."
4. The show was willing to go anywhere and everywhere.
For Aselton and Rannazzisi, who play husband and wife, there is one moment that will always stand out above the rest. In season four, in an episode called "Our Dinner with Andre," Jenny and Kevin's daughter Ellie is playing hide-and-seek with a friend, played by child actor Colin Kalopsis. As he hides, he encounters the couple having sex in their bedroom.
"I remember having to stimulate sex with Katie while the kid, who was probably 10 years old, stared at me," Rannazzisi says. "I was like 'Okay, this is too much.' It felt wrong. But it was really funny and it was really good in the episode."
"Some of my favorite times are when it's just me and Steve," Aselton says. "Shooting that scene was one of the funniest things I've ever been involved in. The kid was like seven years old and was allowed on set. That was funny on its own and then so uncomfortable. And then recently Steve and I were at the Fox party at [the Television Critics Association tour] this year and this kid is looking at us. He's like 'Hey, you remember me?' It was the freaking kid! He's on The Grinder now! I think we severely traumatized him. That is something I will take with me for a while."
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Rafi, the show's most insane character, played by Jason Mantzoukas, is a good example of how far The League is willing to push its humor, even if some of it gets axed. "Everything that comes out of Rafi's mouth is the most inappropriate," Rannazzisi says. "When you have a character like Rafi who has no boundaries and no limitations and then you give that to an improviser who's as brilliant as Jason, it's very difficult to keep a straight face on set. He's said some horrible, horrible things on set. I remember one time we asked him what he was listening to in his van, and he said the audio recordings of the 9/11 hijack. We were like 'What in the world?' If any other character on the show said that it wouldn't make sense, but Rafi is Rafi."
"Every year we get the outtakes right before the season starts to approve for the DVD and you watch 15 minutes of us just cracking each other up," Kroll says.
5. It can call up guest stars like Seth Rogen.
Everyone from J.J. Watt to Marshawn Lynch to Jay Cutler has appeared on the show. The League is an ever-expanding universe. If a character references something off-hand in one episode, it might emerge as a full-fledged plot or character in another episode. At one point, Rafi mentions a friend named Dirty Randy. The next season, Dirty Randy was manifested by Seth Rogen.
"All these things build on each other," Scheer says. "That's the beautiful thing on this show. Like I said Andre had a blog about Don Henley and magic—and then two episodes later we put that in the script and we shot a video blog post of me talking about Don Henley and magic. So that's what I love. It's a Choose Your Own Adventure for actors."
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Season seven opens with its usual draft episode, this time located at the actual NFL draft. It sets the stage for a series of storylines that will guide the characters into new states. Guest stars reappear, including Leslie Bibb as Pete's ex-wife, Rob Huebel as sex addict Russell, and Rogen as Dirty Randy. "It's always nice when you have a guest star because it's just a new energy to play with," says Kroll, who counts Jeff Goldblum among his favorite guests. On one ridiculous Thanksgiving episode, Goldblum appeared as Ruxin's father—and forever ruined sorbet (if you've seen it, you know)."He and I knew each other and had been working on a movie idea for us to play father and son. That kind of fell apart and Jeff and Jackie were like, 'What do you think about Jeff playing your dad?' It seemed like such a fun no-brainer."
6. It is the very definition of a "cult show."
The actors don't fully know where The League, which moved to FXX several years ago, will live in TV history (although Scheer claims Andre's hats will be going into the Smithsonian "next to Archie Bunker's chair"). And it hasn't necessarily been a critical darling or a show with huge ratings.
"It could have been douche central. But somehow we avoided that," Katie Aselton says.Aselton remembers one extremely embarrassing interaction with a journalist. "We were all doing a red carpet one time, early on, and they were like, 'Access Hollywood really wants to talk to you guys!' So we go and the reporter says, 'What's it like to play people in high school? Did you guys sing before the show started?' They thought we were the cast of Glee. They misheard because it was loud on the carpet. It was so mortifying for everyone involved, and we had to walk away because they had no idea who we were. So seven years later, we're in a better place than that, but it does still feel like a new show. It's a very cult show. People get very excited to discover it.
"Think about how terribly douchey this show could have gone. Like, 'Let's get a group of improv comedy guys in on a show about fantasy football!' It could have been douche central. But somehow we avoided that, to Jackie and Jeff's credit. They somehow struck gold with these guys."
7. Season seven may not be the end of The League after all.
The show will be over after this season, but the Schaffers are cagey about a possible announcement coming down the line. What do they mean when they say we haven't seen the last of the characters on The League?
"What do you think that means?" Jackie says. "It means maybe you should talk to us again in a couple months and we'll have a different conversation." Jeff adds: "It means we can't tell you everything yet. But there are plenty more stories for these deranged people."
"If you've been watching for the past six years, [this season is] going to pay off in a really cool way," Scheer says. "We're bringing back characters you maybe haven't seen for a few years, we're tying up some loose ends. We're sending these characters off without making their endings finite. These characters can live on and will live on."
PLUS: The Stories Behind The League's Inside Jokes
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