Happy’s Place Creator Kevin Abbott Says New Series Will ‘Recapture Some of That Old Feeling’ from the OG Reba Show

Kevin Abbott is revealing whether Happy’s Place is really a reboot of the iconic show Reba.

As the creator of both Happy’s Place and Reba, Abbott talked about what makes the two similar after the original Reba revival was never made. Noting that he and star Reba McEntire work well together, Abbott said he knew he wanted to do another show with her, and that’s where the idea for NBC’s new sitcom Happy’s Place came to be.

“Just in general, Reba and I gelled and clicked on the old Reba show I think because we both like to tell the same kind of stories, and we have a very similar sense of humor, and thematically, we like positivity,” he said. “When people get done watching our shows, we want them to feel good. We want them to walk away having really enjoyed themselves and maybe gotten half an hour out of the tension of life.”

“In this one, we wanted to recapture some of that feeling that we had on the old Reba show, on the reboot,” he added. “I guess we were looking for that.”

The themes of “family and forgiveness and responsibility to other people” follow both Abbott and McEntire, they said, so naturally, any show they create will embody the essence of one another. Still, they made sure to add some new elements to Happy’s Place to set it apart from their past work — and they were not actually the originators of the sitcom’s plot.

“That’s where I think, from an emotional place, that we’d like the shows to come from,” he explained. “Otherwise, the reboot, when that went away, it became, well, let’s do a totally different show. Let’s not do a family show in a family setting. We told a lot of those stories. Let’s find different stories to tell in a different venue.”

He continued: “That’s when Julie, my wife, came up with the concept of having Happy’s Place and bringing in family in a different way so that we get to tell more adult stories, not necessarily from an R-rated perspective, but from an adult perspective that we found really interesting.”

While McEntire and Abbott have a history with other cast members like Melissa Peterman, who played Barbra Jean in Reba, and Rex Linn, who is McEntire’s longtime boyfriend, the two wanted to bring in new actors who could deepen and diversify the show.

“Just the times we’re in, and when you’re seeing different viewpoints on life, to be able to capture some of those and see how they kind of bounce off each other, and see where we can find commonalities that you wouldn’t necessarily think are there,” he said. “I mean, we tend to want to bring people together and find the things that people share rather than the things that people apart. And that’s why we brought in Belissa [Escobedo] and Pablo [Castelblanco] and Tokala [Black Elk].”

“We wanted to get some different perspectives on life so that we could honor those and show how, yeah, we might be different, but we’re also more similar than you think,” he concluded.

Still, Abbott said Reba’s Steve Howey made a guest appearance and he hopes to bring on more of the iconic show’s old cast to incorporate that sense of nostalgia into Happy’s Place in the future. McEntire agreed.

“I absolutely love it,” she said of filming for Happy’s Place. “Our group, our cast with the Reba show was magnificent, but with this cast and [writers] Mindy [Schultheis] and Michael [Hanel], Kevin said it at the very beginning, it [felt] like a second season on the first episode instead of a pilot. I don’t know why, but this show was meant to be at this time.”

Happy’s Place premieres Friday, Oct. 18 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC.