Julie Klausner at 'It Happened in Hollywood presented by THR' during TV Academy's 2026 Televerse Festival on Aug. 14, in Los Angeles. Robin L Marshall/Getty Images Julie Klausner would like comedy liberated from the phone and returned to the sitcom.
“If I want to canvass for one cause, it is for the return of the hard comedy sitcom,” the Difficult People creator told a sold-out audience at Televerse in downtown Los Angeles, where The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood staged its first live episode. “I think that the idea that comedy is for your phone is not great. I think that it’s a little isolating. I think it’s reductive.”
Klausner joined me for an hour devoted to Difficult People, the cult Hulu comedy she created and starred in opposite Billy Eichner. Four clips from the series guided a conversation about its making, its reputation for being ahead of its time and the television landscape that has changed dramatically since its 2015 premiere.
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The phone-comedy discussion followed a scene in which Julie Kessler and Billy Epstein, the proudly embittered struggling comedians played by Klausner and Eichner, confront an up-and-coming digital creator.
The face-off was pointed in 2015. Eleven years later, its target has largely won. Front-facing-camera videos and scrolling feeds have claimed an enormous share of comedy consumption, while traditional television has moved away from tightly constructed joke machines and toward dramedies and funny hourlong shows. Klausner cited Succession as an example of how much great comedy writing now resides in dramas.
What she misses is not simply the multicamera format or a laugh track, but the communal and emotional function of a show built around jokes. “Sitcoms with hard jokes and heart are beyond comforting,” Klausner said. “They are a really, really important part of being connected.”
She pointed to the enduring popularity of earlier ensemble comedies as evidence that younger viewers still respond to the form. “There’s a reason why even young people who were born way later than 1996 are watching Friends and Seinfeld and Golden Girls reruns every night,” she said. “We love and appreciate these rhythms. Shows especially about friendships are really great. They help us connect not just to different worlds, but to each other. And I really, really miss that form.”
Friendship was also the protection built into Difficult People. For all the show’s cruelty, one of Klausner’s rules was that Julie and Billy would never seriously turn on each other. Their unconditional loyalty counterbalanced the acid surrounding them, grounding the series in what Klausner described as the special relationship between queer people and their “hags.” The rule was broken only in the series finale, when Klausner suspected the show might not return.
Difficult People began during the Obama era, a context Klausner believes matters when people call the series prophetic. Its protagonists’ cynicism was then “more like salt on chocolate than salt on an open wound,” she said. The show mocked sex creeps before the #MeToo movement made those conversations public and treated online snark as something fun before, in Klausner’s formulation, “nuclear fertilizer” turned Twitter into something much uglier.
Ironically, the series itself grew out of an earlier internet-comedy ecosystem. Klausner was Eichner’s first writer when Billy on the Street expanded from online videos into a television series. Their rapport led Amy Poehler to attach herself as a producer. USA funded a presentation before eliminating its scripted comedy department, and Hulu, then a relatively new buyer of original programming, picked up the show. Klausner remembered having to ask: “What’s Hulu?”
At Televerse, the clips demonstrated the series’ density and range. In addition to the battle with the young digital creator, one transformed Julie’s discovery of her Italian American roots into a Goodfellas parody. Another found Julie and Billy serving as court-mandated clowns and tormenting a child. The final selection revisited Julie’s role in a catastrophically bad Woody Allen-created television series.
Klausner modeled the show’s intricate plotting on Curb Your Enthusiasm, constructing separate stories that would dovetail at the end of an episode. “It’s like sitcom ecstasy,” she said of achieving that convergence. She also assembled a cast from New York comedy and theater, including Cole Escola, who joined the writers room and played Matthew, Billy’s workplace nemesis.
Difficult People ran for three seasons before Hulu canceled it in 2017, but Klausner has not abandoned the characters. She also revealed new details about an existing route back. Universal commissioned a Difficult People feature screenplay from Klausner and Alex Scordelis, a writer on all three seasons. The pair completed Difficult People: Ahead of Their Time in 2022 and will stage a reading at New York’s Town Hall on election night, Nov. 3.
Christopher Meloni will play himself in the reading, Klausner said, while Cecily Strong and Michael Urie will portray what she called “a bizarro version of Billy and Julie.” She described the movie as a caper in the tradition of the 90-minute comedies she grew up watching, citing Foul Play, What’s Up, Doc? and Bette Midler’s Touchstone movies.
“I hope it leads to something great happening,” Klausner said. “I hope that there’s some opportunity to revisit this world and these characters, in whatever form that takes.”
A revived Difficult People would have no shortage of material. Klausner imagined Matthew falling into the “Clavicular manosphere.” Julie might land a “street-casted” role in a Benny Safdie movie, take a dubious weight-loss drug and become “the first person to die from a panic attack.”
The ideas suggest that Julie and Billy remain ideally equipped to take on an increasingly surreal era of looksmaxxing, brand integration, nepo babies, prestige dramedies and vertical video.
In other words, we’ve never needed Difficult People more.
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