Coach and Mrs. Coach!

Connie and I, the whole on-screen marriage happened the first day we met downtown. We were going out to lunch — “

“Dinner,” Britton interjected. “He always gets this wrong.”

Seemingly with practice, Chandler continued undeterred, “And it was, I think, within the first five minutes that … sometimes you meet someone and it’s like, ‘Oh, OK! We’re in good shape now,’ and within the first five minutes we realized … we were gonna have a good time, and in the next 10 minutes we realized the acting styles were gonna work, and within the next half hour, we were excited to begin. And the greatest thing between Connie and I, I think we’d both agree, is that when we’re working together, we’re both fools, we like to play the fool, but no matter what, we would always let the other person … fall as far as you wanted to, but you knew the other person would grab you. And in the acting, that’s perfect because that’s the timing and everything. So you always felt safe making the biggest fool you could of yourself, so we could always turn back around to the sentimentality or the humor of it.”

Britton agreed, adding, “Right from the beginning, it felt like we could trust each other, which was crazy, but we did. I think the other thing that felt really important from the beginning was, we shared the same values about what we wanted that marriage to be, which we shared with the writers. We really wanted that marriage to be about two people who were committed to being married to each other, through thick and through thin, as opposed to having affairs and all of those dramatic things that happen on other TV shows …”

Hudgins noted, “It was certainly a challenge in that marriage because there was the idea that no matter what happened and how much we tested Coach and Tami that they would never get apart, which is a challenge from a writing standpoint — but it sounds like you felt like it worked.”

“Oh yeah, I think, not only did it work — and I remember you writers saying in the course of the seasons, ‘This is challenging from a writing standpoint’ — but I think that the audiences appreciated it so much because, oddly, that was a rare thing to see on television,” Britton said. “And I think that’s what most people are trying to do out in the world, is live a life where they’re doing the best they can with a partner and making it work. We were really true to that.”