INTERVIEW: Don Roos and Dan Bucatinsky

Don Roos Credits

Best known for:

Web Therapy (Executive Producer/Creator/Writer/Director) 2008–2012

Who Do You Think You Are? (Executive Producer) 2010

The Other Woman (film) (Writer/Director) 2009

Marley & Me (film) (Writer) 2008

Happy Endings (film) (Writer/Director) 2005

The Opposite of Sex (film) (Writer/Director) 1998

WGA Award Nominated 1999

(Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen)

Boys on the Side (film) (Executive Producer/Writer) 1995

The Colbys (Writer) 1986–1987

Hart to Hart (Writer) 1981–1984

Dan Bucatinsky Credits

Best known for:

Grey’s Anatomy (Consulting Producer) 2012

Web Therapy (Executive Producer/Creator/Writer/Director) 2008–2012

Emmy Award Winner (Outstanding Special Class –

Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs) 2012

Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Special Class – Short-Format

Live-Action Entertainment Programs – Series) 2012

Who Do You Think You Are? (Executive Producer) 2010–2012

Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Reality Program) 2012

The Other Woman (Executive Producer) 2009

Lipstick Jungle (Co-Executive Producer/Consulting Producer/Writer) 2008–2009

The Comeback (Executive Producer) 2005

NL: How did Web Therapy come about?

DB: Lisa [Kudrow] and I had been producing television together with this production company.

It was after The Comeback that we would start to get questions from our agent about whether we were interested in doing a web series. It was really the beginning of stuff on the web with Funny or Die and YouTube with one-off sketch or kittens-that-go-poop videos. There was really nothing that made sense to us about creating a web series that was designed specifically for the web. But Lisa could not let it go. She thought it would be so much more interesting to come up with something that was literally designed for the web, that lived in the presence of the web instead of a sitcom that gets cut up into pieces. And just one year prior, we had shot a presentation for a comedy ourselves and we were thinking about cutting that into three little bites for the internet. Lisa woke up one day and thought wouldn’t it be funny… what kind of person would, on their coffee break at work, get three minutes of therapy? What kind of therapist would do that? It became this game of “What if?” And luckily, we got a call around that time from somebody who was building a new broadband site for Lexus and they had focused on Lisa as someone who represented their audience.

DR: Lexus went to Intelligent Life Productions and said, “We want to build a website. Will you recruit talent and look for content?”

DB: They wanted it to be like HBO on the web without commercials. They said, “We don’t want to sell any cars on it. We just wanted it to be a cool destination which had a very, very subtle integration with Lexus.” Which was music to our ears because we weren’t really looking for commercial-branded entertainment. And Lisa, in like one minute, said I want to play this online therapist who does three-minute sessions who is completely unqualified and narcissistic. They bought the idea and they gave us complete and total creative freedom, which to Don and me and

Lisa was music to our ears. We were literally given the opportunity to create 15 webisodes.

DR: They gave us money. I guess Lexus gave Intelligent Life money and Intelligent Life gave us money. DB: Yeah, and we had to give them an outline so that they understood what the breakdown of the 15 would be. It was really the three of us sitting in this exact office, spitballing, and Lisa developing this notion of this character, Fiona Wallace. Just based on who would be this person and who would be the people in her life.

DR: We shot it a few of the webisodes in here. We shot the first two seasons – the first 30 episodes here in our offices. So production was always like, “Oh my god, we have to move out all the offices.” It was a nightmare, so in season three and four we went to a studio.

DB: The notion of the whole show being a series of web chats was fun and seemed so simple and so obvious and made for the web. What became interesting was the months of strategizing over how to shoot it. You can either shoot it at low quality by actually using the webcam and in the back of our minds we thought we should shoot it so that it was television-ready. Not that we were intending to be on TV, but why not make it something that can move into other formats?

We wound up coming up with a system of being able to improvise the show on two sets simultaneously with two cameras and teleprompters and ear wigs and actors being able to improvise live. We’ve been doing it sort of the same way from the beginning.

DR: We have a great cameraman, Michael Goi, who is actually the head of the cinematographer’s guild now. We just tried to do as best we could. We didn’t know what would happen to it, but we owned it, we owned the content which was another thing that was attractive to us.

DB: And fairly groundbreaking. Most of the studios were trying to develop web content, but for artists themselves to be the owners and creators of their content was a very exciting proposition for us. We were the actors, the creators, and the directors in it. We could make it what we wanted. With the exception of our license deal with Lexus, we owned it, so we wanted to make it

as good as possible. We also wanted to make this whole show union. Even though at that time it

was just after the writer’s strike and the contract for new media was not clear what those

minimums were and what those parameters were.

NL: When I first saw it, it was literally just three- or four-minute segments.

DR: It was supposed to be something that you could watch at your desk when you were supposed to be working.

NL: Then you keep watching more of them because they’re so addictive. So how did it expand from just doing that to episodes on Showtime?

DR: It was sold to Showtime and we weren’t even in the room. And they weren’t even sure what they had bought.

DB: It was a happy mistake in a way. Our agents thought, “Oh, you guys have done 30 webisodes and if you do three of them, that’s 30 minutes times ten episodes, you’ve got 30 episodes.”

DR: Not realizing that three times three is nine minutes. We originally thought, or maybe

Showtime thought, that they were just going to use them as interstitials or something.

DB: They always loved the notion of 30 minutes of content that was ready-made. The thing was though that when we shot them there was great talent attached and they were very funny and they could license them. And that’s what was sold to them, these half-hours already shot. Of course, it was very attractive. The only thing was, no one did the math. At the most, there was only 18 minutes of content. We got on the phone with Bob Greenblatt, who was the head of Showtime at the time, and we said, “Were thrilled to have this opportunity, but we just have to

explain something to you which is in order to make 30 minutes times ten, we need 300 minutes of content. We have 111 minutes of content. We’re going to need to shoot more in order to fill these up. We also watched three of them in a row – and god bless Don who said, “We can’t just make these individual clients who have a problem and then they’re done in three minutes. We need to build the history and the life of this woman and relationships among them.” It’s the very reason we even have a narrative to tell season to season.

DR: Yes, I thought it was important. In the very beginning, we just thought she’d have funny clients and say funny things. But we realized early that every client had to have something that

Fiona wanted. She had to have an actual goal in all of the clients because otherwise it’s just clever or funny, but there’s no way to engage the audience—there’s no rooting interest in Fiona.

So her wants and desires were center stage, always. Which is why we ended up having to people her world because she has more invested. For example, Dan played a client who was working at

Visa, so she used him to at first promote her business and then she used him to get Visa information against her husband. And then, thank god, we decided to make him a regular so now

Jerome [Dan Bucatinsky] works for her. So there’s a little bit of a family. We realized why television shows are the way they are. You need a stable of regulars. You need a main character who wants something.

DB: But once we got going and once we had done one season and then we were lucky enough to do a second season and a third season for Lexus. With two seasons under our belt and then shooting specifically for television, it all still had to play—because of the unions—on the

internet. Every frame of our show had to appear on the internet before it could appear on

Showtime. And that was a rule we had to explain to Showtime. We couldn’t shoot anything directly for them because it made it a show for television. This was a web show licensed for television. They understood. We were able to find a platform in the first season called Flo TV which was on the mobile phone—very, very limited subscription base. But it was one of the first times that an original half-hour comedy was on a digital platform on a mobile phone. In the window of airing them for about one month, the company went bankrupt after that – not because of Web Therapy. They had filed right before we delivered. And it was a happy accident because by the time we aired them on Showtime, virtually no one had seen those half-hours before. That has always remained an interesting loophole in how we’ve done the show. It always has to be new media content licensed for television until the point when we can just make it directly for

TV.

NL: What are your budgets like then with these loopholes? Is it very low budget then?

DR: It’s very low budget. Would it be a percentage of a half-hour for Showtime?

DB: The budget for a half-hour on Showtime would be $1.3 million.

DR: Yeah, so we’re a percentage of that.

DB: And, by the way, the license fee they pay us is a fraction of that. It’s one of the lowest license fees ever.

NL: And probably your guest stars are working for scale.

DB: We’re able to make this show for exactly what they’ve given us, but because we own it, we then have the opportunity to try to distribute it internationally and then we own that. But

Showtime gives us valuable promotion and visibility. And creatively in terms of tone, I think that it always felt like more of a sophisticated cable television program. A lot of webisodes television right now is very young and very fast. Our audience is actually more geared for television anyway and so are we in terms of the stories we are telling.

DR: It’s interesting when you’re doing this. You’re sort of inventing the whole television system all over again. You realize that you invent deficit financing. Okay, it will cost us to make them, but eventually we’ll own it. We’ve encountered all the elements of television in developing this show. We realized that we needed a franchise. We need characters that they can identify with and tune in for. We need a family that they tune into. We need a broader continuing story.

NL: Those are all my chapters.

DR: All of that—and we thought we were doing something completely different. But as soon as you do want to appeal to a large audience and have them come back, you understand suddenly why all of these things are in place and why a lot of the business things are in place. The sponsorship stuff we have is very much like the early days of television where it started as sponsored broadcasting. Where if we had a car or mentioned a car, it would be a Lexus.

DB: And now because it takes place on the web, the entire landscape of our show is the desktop of a character’s computer. It has allowed us to explore integration possibilities that normally we wouldn’t be able to do. So without being so aggressively integrated, without having to hold up a

Pepsi bottle, we’re able to have a very organic sponsor like Skype integrated with us. We needed some type of software because it was the basis of the whole series. So that became very easy for us, as did any other software company or website, if someone wanted to place some kind of icon on the desktop, it’s a very easy and organic way of integrating for us. We’re in that game of looking for ways to finance the series, especially for the web, through a series of integrations which allows us to control how we’re going to tell the story in a way that doesn’t feel aggressive in terms of the integrations. When we had to work with Lexus, it became sort of fun, funny way to integrate those cars into our series by mentioning them or having someone do a web chat in one of their cars. As long as we can control it, we can find the humor in it.

DR: And Lexus was a great partner because they were very cool. They didn’t expect us to do hard sells.

NL: Do you think you would ever change the rule of only doing stories with the screen?

DR: We had talked about it when we were trying to see where this show could end up, but it was something that we didn’t want to do. We had one objective camera shot in the first season, I think it was the Jane Lynch [as Claire Dudek] episode, when she says something scary and Fiona jumps up away from her computer. So we thought let’s catch her jumping up, but we hated it. So we’ve never seriously been tempted to jump off her desktop.

DB: And now it’s that this is what the show is. And the challenge is now fun. The challenge is how to use the growing technology for web chat and FaceTime. And people who can actually talk into their iPhones and have an iChat with somebody. Like now we’re starting to play around a little with ways to open the show up.

DR: We have David Schwimmer [as Newell L. Miller] on a Skype call on his iPhone, so he’s outside.

DB: We have Minnie Driver [as Allegra Favreau] outside. We have her car pulling up to the valet in the background, which is a Lexus, as she’s in an outdoor café, iChatting or Skyping with

Fiona. We definitely think creatively about how we’re going to do this and how we’re going to be outside. I think that’s going to be a lot of the fun of the future of the show and I still want to see what would happen if we had one group therapy session with two people from two different

locations talking with Fiona.

NL: When you figured out that you wanted to do the campaign as the drive of the season, or with

Fiona’s mother, Putsy Hodge (Lily Tomlin), are you going to do multiple episodes with different

wardrobe, so that while you have somebody, you can shoot them all?

DR: You have to have a beginning, middle, and end for each character. They come in and they

have to do those three webisodes in the morning and it takes about four hours. And then someone

comes in and shoots three webisodes at night. So that ensures that the character has an arc.

That’s another thing.

“We have three acts. The first act introduces the problem/question and the second act develops/expands it and then there’s a third act complication and resolution. We’ve discovered that everything we were always taught—there’s a reason for it. They aren’t just rules. That’s how it has to be.”

DB: Well, we came at it from a very sideways way. To be clear, the first two seasons of the show, even in its longer format, were not scripted as a half-hour. So when we went to shoot

Meryl [Streep, as Camilla Bowner], we knew we were going to shoot a three-episode arc for the web series – not for a half-hour. We did that with all of the episodes. When we had to build a season for Showtime, we placed the existing webisodes we had on index cards and we laid them across a big huge board—the way you would break story. So it became a puzzle. What do we now need? Who do we put in which half-hour to create a story? It was that backwards outlining, so we could create additional footage which caused us to back into all the rules for narrative half- hour storytelling. DR: Like to end each episode, we either had to place Fiona in the most jeopardy or have the most significant victory. So not every act three webisode would really be big enough for an act three ending for a 30-minute show.

DB: Oftentimes in the first season, we would do the first and second of a character’s arc in one half-hour and then finish the story in the next one. But we didn’t only do three with some people, some did five webisodes. Lily Tomlin came in and did a bunch. And then it became fun to see how many half-hours we can keep some of these stories and their characters alive.

NL: Now that you’re able to start from scratch, is your approach different now? Is it more of a traditional show where you would sit down with a staff and figure out where you want the characters to go?

DR: Well, first of all, it’s about the actors. Who do we have? Who can we continue? So we want returnees, so the audience can identify with them. We were lucky in season one for Showtime because our overarching thing is we had to introduce all of the characters when she was launching Web Therapy. And that’s when we decided that Kip [Victor Garber], her husband, should be running for Congress. So when we did season three for the web, it happened to be an arc. Then when we did season four, we realized looking back at season three that the end of the campaign was a highlight.

DB: We built the timeline for season four within the context of the campaign, knowing that it would work when we had to lay these out in a longer format.

DR: It still had to work on its own for someone who hadn’t seen season three. It was very, very complicated. How were we going to go forward? We didn’t want to change too much because it had worked. So we decided to do it three beats at a time per character, but keeping in mind that

we’ll have to decide what the arc is to the whole season.

DB: We may still be laying out seasons of webisodes online, but with the knowledge that we’re

going to be creating these longer formats for TV. We’ll probably talk about a season-long arc the

way we would do in the writers’ room of any television show and then we’ll talk about the talent

that has expressed interest in doing the show and who they could play in the context of that

larger story. And then how we’ll use our regulars, her husband, Jerome, and her mother, to fill in

those pieces. It’s going to be interesting. This next time is going to feel really new to us in that

way. We shoot every actor in a half day, so they can do a series of scenes in a half day. So we get

to use a lot of talent that normally would never be available to us.

DR: The problem is that when you try to then put those people into a half-hour on television, they have previous commitments, so you have to bundle them all into one half-hour.

DB: It’s about relationships also. Alan Cumming plays a recurring character [Austen Clarke] for us, and because Showtime is a CBS-owned company and he’s on The Good Wife as a regular, they gave him a dispensation that he can recur on our series without it getting in the way of his

show. And luckily, Bob Greenblatt who brought Web Therapy to Showtime is now the head of

NBC, and he’s also said to us, if you need Rashida [Jones, as Hayley Feldman-Tate] and she’s on

Parks & Recreation, you can still work with her. If anybody’s at ABC, we’d probably have to

bundle them all in one which is okay.

NL: Will Fiona ever change fundamentally?

DR: No. I don’t think Lucille Ball’s Lucy ever changed. Fiona is so deliciously evil or

narcissistic that I would hate to see her weaken or change. Now there’s a moment in this series where she has a bit of a breakdown, but she quickly recovers on camera and we see the true her

come back.

DB: That’s what I like to see happen. The little colors of Fiona that we’ve never seen before

happen. In the first season, she blew up at Jerome and his fiancée at one point in a way that

you’ve never seen her do before and it was hilarious because she was so angry and so out of

control. In season two, she shows a very flirtatious side. So seeing these other colors, but then

seeing her recover quickly. I think not having her change fundamentally is key.

DR: Another rule of television is that you have to re-meet them each week basically where you left them. They have to always be re-starting. It’s not like a film where a character begins on page one someway and is completely transformed by the end.

DB: But, comedically, comedy in television for years is completely dependent on the written joke and the actors performing and timing those jokes perfectly like music. This show has the room to completely allow the actors to find comedic moments through improvisation. It’s not based on hitting a particular joke.

DR: Saying all that, it’s true that at the end we sort of need a comedy rhythm and callbacks are important. You discover a lot of things that do work and you have to use them. This is a show really about conversations and there hasn’t been a comedy show like it. This is a show entirely based on people saying something and then people listening and reacting. It’s very new for comedy.

DB: It’s not traditional network television. Because of the pace, it’s not boom-boom-boom, joke every 30 seconds. This is tailor-made for cable where people go to see things that you would never see on network television and where sometimes you have to let things breathe. How we

find the comedic moment naturally.

DR: It’s very, very different in terms of pace of a typical show. We have a great editor who

basically created the half-hour form for us. I remember he put them all together and then Lisa

was the one who said that we should use title cards in between just to set each episode off. They

are little conversations. We are building a world. So let’s highlight each conversation rather than

try to distract the fact that these are elements of the show.

NL: I love them because you’re waiting to see the context of when that line is going to appear.

DR: We stole it from Hannah and her Sisters.

DB: It also allows you to do a traditional A, B, or C story in a half-hour and separate them in a way where you can leave a storyline, introduce another storyline, go back to the first one and not necessarily have to do it in the way you would normally do it in TV.

DR: It’s very limited in that our only landscape is faces and whatever else she brings up on her screen. We’re very lucky to have such a great company of actors.