The role also allowed Macdonald to play the straight man among a cast of eccentric characters, a departure from his traditional comedy style.
Hooper, a famous newspaper columnist turned television commentator, moves his family from their New York home to a small Wisconsin town, Waterford Falls, where he hopes to better get in touch with Middle America in an attempt to make his weekly minute-long television commentaries more appealing to a larger audience.
Macdonald has said his goal was for the show to lull its audience into complacency, and become more subversive as time went on.
It included a plan for Stan's wife Molly to be murdered by a drifter at the end of the first season.
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