Vogue: How does it feel to see the show out in the world and to be connecting with viewers?

Abdullah Saeed: This is the first time I’m being heavily reviewed, and I’m super relieved to see that the critical response is good. We were certified fresh. As the first-time creator of a scripted show, I did not know what that timeline looked like, because I’ve never watched it that closely on any of the shows I’ve watched. You know, you just think, How’s it doing on Rotten Tomatoes? But when it’s your thing, you’re like, Oh, my God. A really good friend of mine, Shal Ngo, just released his horror film Control Freak on Hulu, and it’s kind of fortuitous and fun that we had something come out at the same time. He posted about this earlier; he was like, “I’m obsessively watching this Rotten Tomatoes score,” and I was like, “I’m doing it too,” because whether we like it or not, or want to admit it or not, it’s such a big part of the validation for a show or movie in our time and place. It’s been a funny experience to watch that, but the audience thing is totally separate, right? Because it’s not so quantitative—it’s purely qualitative. In the streaming age, we don’t necessarily know what kind of ratings or viewership we’re getting, so what we know is that people come up to us or you have people hitting you up. My friend is a comedy writer from Long Island, and he went home and was like, “Yo, all of my Long Island friends from home are watching your show.” I was like, okay, it cracked something there, right? I love the idea that there’s a bunch of six-foot-three white dudes in Long Island watching Deli Boys.

I love the territory that the show explores about the ways in which we see our parents, even—or especially—when they don’t live up to our ideals. Did you always know you wanted to tell a family story?

You know, it really started out as the best prism for jokes; it was a sample script, so I was kind of trying to demonstrate my joke-writing and wasn’t putting too much pressure on the emotional story. I think as a writer, I have the most to learn about the emotional aspects of a story. I’m constantly learning more about this medium of writing, which I’ve only been doing for about eight years. I look to my fellow EPs, to Jenni [Konner] and Michelle [Nader] in particular, when it comes to story and character and sort of learning that stuff.