I'm Here at Sony Studios with Brent Forrester One of the Executive Producers on Love, a New TV Series

BRENT FORRESTER PODCAST SONY STUDIOS CULVER CITY MARCH 22, 2016

Tom: I'm here at Sony Studios with Brent Forrester one of the executive producers on Love, a new TV series. Who are the principles on the show? Well let me just ... we met at the University of Michigan, you came out, you did this incredible clinic with our students, talking to the whole comedy formation. Gave us a great grounding in how to write television comedy. How you work and what your process is. We had a great time out there with that, two falls ago. You've worked on the Office, you worked on the Simpsons for a long time. You worked on King of the Hill, in two separate runs and a bunch of other things. You've written feature films and it's a thrill to be here. Right now you're working on Love.

It's a Netflix show, it's in it's second season. You're writing it now right now here. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Brent: Sure, we're in the second season of production, so the first season has aired and the second season is being shot. We're in that process of getting feedback from the fans and the viewers, which is fantastic. Everybody seems to love the show.

Tom: I love the show. Gus and Mickey, they're just, they're incredible characters. There's so much texture and there's so much great character development. Things going on and who they are in their lives. There's such great grounding and they're lovable and they're flawed. They're meant for each other, but they're also... the idea of calling it love is so amazing. It's on Netflix, the first season is completely there and now the second season is just ... when is it going to be on the air?

Brent: Good question, season 2? I don't know. We released season 1 pretty close to Valentine's Day. They probably don't even know when

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they're going to release season 2. Netflix is, in a good way for us, protective of their data. They don't release ratings data, outside of their own executive world. Which means we don't have to worry about ratings because it's not part of the narrative. It's just a matter of perceived critical success. This is just another one of the great things about working for Netflix, I think. Is you don't have that pressure that attends the normal launching of a network TV show. The normal launching of a network TV show, there's an obsession with the ratings on the first 4 episodes.

That's when conventional wisdom says the ratings sell out. When you're doing a show like that, you have this crazy pressure that affects the creative process. We don't have that. This show is characterized, in great part, by the absence of a lot of the things that people have really complained about in network television for a long time. The notes process is absent on the show. There is no notes process from the executives to the creators. We are the vindication of what happens when you work in that environment.

Tom: Right now you're on season 2 and you've written 3 episodes. The third episode is shooting now and you've written up to number 4 and you have a writer's room where you're working on the next 4 episodes. There are 6 episodes.

Brent: Yeah. It's an ongoing multi-script process. We have drafts of 8 scripts, but those scripts will evolve radically, my experience. The closer you get to deadline and the more you push the decision-makers to make decisions, you'll notice the story will just keep re-breaking, very frequently, all the way up until the end. I try to get that process started as early as possible. It is possible to get all of the important people to go, "Yes, this is the story. These are the specific beats." When you get that, then the writers can relax and write it, and keep making it better.

Tom: You'll break an episode with the group in the writer's room?

Brent: Yes.

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Tom: Then they'll be an outline for the 30-minute show. How long will that outline be? What will it look like?

Brent: It depends on the show and it depends also ... you know, sometimes where you are on the show. I would say, in my experience historically, when you ask for an outline you're asking a writer to turn in something that's 5 to 15 pages of prose. Personally I think, the Simpsons we would get these 15-page prose documents that would be the outline before going to script. They would be well beyond what an outline is. They would have just tons of specific attempts at jokes within it. That was more than an outline is. I do like the writers to try to write a prose version of the script before they go off and do it. Honestly, more important to me than that is the oral telling of the story. That's the one that I think is really the key to the process.

If you can look somebody in the eye and tell them the story, that's the version that you end up translating into a half-hour script I find.

Tom: Where will they tell ... they'll come in with what they've figured out and they'll tell the room or tell you the story?

Brent: Yes.

Tom: Then they'll go to the, in this case, the creative executive producer? Where will they go with that verbal version of the story that they've talked through?

Brent: It depends, what you can see here is that the schedule of the top person, in this case, Judd Apatow. Judd's schedule becomes an intricate part of this whole process because there's no way for me to really fully know his schedule. A lot of times you'll notice the top person won't even share all the details of their schedule. They don't want to be pinned down, right? Sometimes I think they're sending some conscious messages about, I want you to just run this as if I were dead, I don't want to have to do any work. All of that negotiation becomes part of it. It's a long way of saying there is no

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formal process that we have here. What I try to do is, make sure that all of the stages of writing a good script happen.

I have distinct stages for that. An oral story-telling, an outline, a one- week draft process, and then return to the room to get it re-written. Have a table read, do a post-table, and that's it. Those are like 5 stages.

Tom: You sort of administer the room? You're like the chief room guy?

Brent: I have a title – executive producer - showrunner. The thing I really run is the room. I find that, especially with ... we have an executive producer who's a director EP. The production side runs very well under that EP.

Tom: Who is that?

Brent: That's Dean Holland. He's a director who directed the first 2 and the last 2 of season 1.

Tom: Who were the other people who directed the other ... you had Joe Swanberg?

Brent: Yes, he's awesome.

Tom: So who else directed, did Buscemi?

Brent: Buscemi directed one.

Tom: And who else?

Brent: John Slattery from Mad Men and Maggie Carey, who's a great director.

Tom: The guy who did the first 2 is Dean?

Brent: Dean Holland, he's a director, he's an editor, great editor at The

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Office, when I was there. Just so manifestly talented as an editor, so brimming with energy and ideas. I remember feeling like an editing room was too small for him as a human being. Sure enough, he busted out and became a director. Directed at The Office, a lot of Parks and Rec, and then has been our in-house director, executive producer here.

Tom: Okay. In the second season, he's ... was he in all the way through or he was just directing and being executive producer in that first season?

Brent: Yes, he was all the way through as the director and in-house executive producer. In addition to directing, he supervised the other directors and sort of supervised production.

Tom: Okay, now there's Paul Rust and there's Dean and Judd Apatow. For a script to get ... before shooting starts how does a script run through that. Are you like going to Judd at some point and just doing a bunch of stuff at the same time? He sort of comes down from the mountain and gives his opinions about things, or brainstorms a bit or ... How does that work? I don't want to put words in your mouth about that.

Brent: No, that's exactly the way it works. Judd is flowing through 3 television shows and a movie right now. He's kind of intuitively going where people most need him. He typically does exactly what you're saying. He'll step in for sometimes just an hour of brilliance. Sometimes 20 minutes of brilliance, I got him yesterday on the set. I just said, "Judd, we need to solve this story problem." Almost every time you do that, he does solve it instantly with some kind of easy, perfect, hilarious, set piece. He truly is just one of a kind, Judd. That is part of the process. Early on we had a long pre-production and Judd would come and sit with us in the writer's room more. For any story to get approved, it does have to get pitched to Judd.

As I recall, this season we had him come in and at one point we just blasted him with the first 6 episodes. We had spent weeks and weeks figuring out what those would be, in the abstract, before we came in

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and did that.

Tom: Did the show start with a script that could have gone anywhere and just ended up on Netflix? Or was it always for Netflix?

Brent: No, it started out before I joined the show, as I understand it, Paul Rust, the actor, was working also as a writer for Judd. He was working principally as a writer for Judd. Paul's a great comedy writer and he was writing the PeeWee Herman script for Judd. They developed this creative relationship. Paul has this tremendous reputation as a stage performer in the world of comedy, though his rep until recently has not been broad publicly, internally, everybody knew how great Paul was as a performer.

Tom: Is he stand up or he was a character, or actor, in comedy shows? What was he doing?

Brent: He's a guy from UCB, Upright Citizens Brigade, improv performer, has his own improv group. A comic stage performer. He was getting cast in little parts, I cast him on a show on ABC in a secondary role. He was really starting to blow up, but he was hired as a writer by Judd at the time. Judd said to him, "Do you have any screenplay ideas?" Paul said, "My girlfriend and I have written this thing largely about our own relationship as a movie. It's very honest, warts and all. Honest." That really always gets Judd, if you say, "I'm going to honestly reveal my flaws, you just have Judd's attention. They presented the screenplay which Judd then said, "This will work great as a TV show. We could really play it out longer. What if we played out a movie that lasted like 5 hours?"

That was sort of Judd's original vision, which works perfectly on a video on demand site like Netflix, where people are watching it serially. They essentially are watching it like a very long movie.

Tom: It was a 2-hour, it was regular length script and he just saw and thought we can just explore these characters more?

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Brent: Yeah.

Tom: We can develop more situations around what's going on in their lives. Just made it so it's 10 hours, or you said 5 hours at first?

Brent: Yeah, in the first season. It's 10 episodes.

Tom: The second season is another 10 episodes?

Brent: It's 12 episodes. It continues to have that very serial feel. The thing that becomes so addictive to the writers in this process is, the slowing down of the pace. The feeling that you don't have to neatly wrap up an episode that is it's own unit, disconnected from the others. It's a real sense that we're telling a long story and telling it at a pace that I've never experienced as a writer in television.

Tom: In the beginning of the first season, just for people haven't seen it yet, there's a feeling of inevitability that they're going to get together eventually. You want them to get together. You get to know them and you think, they should be together, but they're completely not together. Then all kinds of different things happen. Then finally at the end of the first season, they do get together. The second season would be they're together and... ?

Brent: Listen, I don't want to spoil it, but I will tantalize you by saying, imagine season 2 comes up immediately at the end of season 1. Literally, season 1 ends with them kissing and then breaking apart, season 2 picks up right from that moment.

Tom: That's kind of what you want. You want to keep watching. We wanted to keep watching, that's ... have it just be what it still is. Say, how is this all going to work if he is so this and she is so that? There are just always things on the table. There's a lot of information withheld about her and what's really going on with her. There's other things that just really ... it's very compelling. What was their relationship to draw from -- just conflict, story, real world stuff and comedy in the original script?

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Brent: Yeah.

Tom: How do you approach that in the writer's room? That balance? Especially in this flavor of comedy, flavor of stories for the show you're creating now, where it's ... there aren't really jokes. There are jokes, but there aren't jokes. It's a big question. Sorry.

Brent: No, that's a huge and vital one. You're really at the core of the way the art form is evolving. The question of how do you find the tone? What is the process? We really struggled with that. Certainly I did. I come from network television. That's been my entire career. I've worked on very high-quality shows. Most recently worked on a show that was famous for it's naturalism, which is The Office.

Tom: King of the Hill wasn't a punchline show and the Simpsons really was ... it was more...

Brent: Simpsons had a lot of punchline in it and a lot of surrealism. King of the Hill distinguishes itself by being a much more naturalistic version of comedy. It was a huge move that Greg Daniels and Mike Judge did together. That really was their vision. There is, for sure, the strong tradition of naturalism in television comedy. Larry Sanders show is always cited as one of the brave examples of naturalistic comedy. Nothing surreal happens there, it's funny wall-to-wall, generally. There are jokes, but those jokes only come out of the mouths of people who make jokes, typically. Like Gary Shandling, Larry Sanders, he's a talk-show host, so he's a funny, witty, comedy guy. You can put jokes in his mouth.

We have the same on Love. Gus is capable of funny lines, but it's really important not to overwrite those, the guy's actually a little less good at comedy than Paul Rust, the human being is. We have to keep it a little to that side, to be realistic.

Tom: When you think of lines, you have to kind of dial them down,… that's too clever for this guy?

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Brent: I've watched him do that. I've watched him start a little improv thing and then kind of dumb it down, or find himself unable to continue riffing. In other words, the character of Gus stops riffing, whereas Paul Rust could have continued. I think he is making a choice with the character, yeah.

Tom: The base of an episode is going to be the dramatics, the bones of the story and not going someplace that's going to end up being funny? Or it's going to end up being ... you know that it's going to have to be an irony to whatever the result is or where it ends up going? The surprise is kind of the comedy or the surprise of where it veers off to?

Brent: That sounds smart, you may be right about that. I know it's not the way ...

Tom: I don't know, I don't write comedy, so I'm trying to figure it out.

Brent: Well, the secret to writing comedy is trial and error, ultimately. It's a trial and error process. That's the real core of it, just showing up and trying.

Tom: At the apex of Simpsons, trial and error?

Brent: I think so. I was very analytical.

Tom: It wouldn't be people come in and say this is brilliant. No, let's just try a couple of different things.

Brent: Of course.

Tom: Actually figure out what is brilliant?

Brent: Yes. I can prove this to you mathematically. When I was on the Simpsons, it was a very intimidating room. It had all of these gigantic legendary comedy writers there, Mike Reese, George Meyer, etc.

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When I was at the Simpsons, the head writer David Merkin, great writer, he would say, "Everybody turn to page 3. I need a new joke for Homer, here." We would turn to page 3 and the room would go into silence. For minutes at a time, 5 minutes, no one would say anything. Everyone raced frantically in their minds, trying to think of a perfectly written joke. That's just how that room went. I think that's not the way to ...

Tom: Then eventually someone would write one in their mind that they felt was good enough to speak out?

Brent: Yes.

Tom: The true geniuses in the room, I'll put quotation marks round that, that would either play or it wouldn't play for them? Sometimes they would be pleased and say, "Okay." That's ... ?

Brent: That's exactly what happened, you would ...

Tom: Somebody else was writing all this down?

Brent: I think we did have a writer's assistant in the room writing it down, yeah. Writing down the pitches. Basically, it was just a certain number of pitches would happen, and then finally the head writer would decide that we had a good enough one and we could move on. He was taking his cues, in great part, from the other legendary writers who had preceded him. It just was a tough room, and for me that's not the right kind of room. Because I think that what you really want is to just have all these brilliant people throw out 100 lines. If you did that, I'm sure there's a great one in there. If we're only throwing out 1, 2 every 5 minutes, it's just not the way it goes. That just seems obvious to me, the real question in running a room is how can you get that creative flow going.

I have an answer to that. Basically that is creative leadership in the comedy world is you come in leading with a vibe. Your vibe is energize confidence, for me, extremely positive feedback guy. I'm

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constantly calling people out for good work that they've done. Never falsely. People just happen to do great stuff all day long because they're talented and their job requires it. I just remind them, "Goddamn that was some good stuff yesterday." That kind of ...

Tom: It keeps them on the bubble of creativity and keeps the flow going. It energizes, it's like a positive workplace.

Brent: Exactly, yes. I find, right now, motivating the writers, getting them energized is not difficult. Possibly it's because we're in production and energy flows from production.

Tom: Because they're in the writer's room and down the street, at the studio, they're on the set shooting and everything's going on. It's more heightened atmosphere in here, in this work suite, than it would be when you came in January and started pounding out ideas. When do you start pounding out scripts?

Brent: It started so early, we had 16 weeks of pre-production, which is unusually long.

Tom: You started in October? When you first came in October you had to pick 4 writers, or there were 4 writers who were already on board from last season?

Brent: Yes, we added a writer this season because we discovered that when we had Paul on set and Judd was off filming a movie, we just didn't have enough writers. We added this wonderful writer named Rebecca Adelman.

Tom: How many staff writers were there last year?

Brent: There was ... Paul's on set, but in the room we had Dave King, Lesley Arfin, Ali Rushfield, Ali Waller and me.

Tom: That's 5.

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Brent: Yes, but Dave King became on-set producer and was completely absent from the writer's room, largely Lesley was, too, so it became 3 of us. Myself and 2 other writers, which was too small for us. We added a writer and it now feels like a pretty full room. Also our writer's assistant ...

Tom: You're with 3 women?

Brent: Yeah.

Tom: That's great, how did that balance of 3, it was just they were the best persons for the job. Or there was some feeling like that women understand these characters? How did that ... it was just work that they'd done?

Brent: That's a great question, I'm really aware of the gender dynamic right now. I think, especially when you're writing for female characters, male characters, and you're trying to be honest about the perspective. I do notice that the gender dynamics change in a room when it's 3 women and when we have more guys it becomes different. They weren't chosen for any real ... with any kind of plan in mind. Everyone was chosen individually when they came in. Judd was very aware of choosing people who have life experience that seemed relevant to our material. He didn't want people who seem like they were too perfect, in a way.

Tom: People who could say, my relationship, I've been in these rough-and- tumble relationships. Sort of Mickey and Gus's view of the world, somehow. They've had that kind of mileage in their lives.

Brent: I guess that's probably true, yeah.

Tom: How did you relate, your own person?

Brent: That's a good question, I have so much complexity to bring to the table. Being in psychotherapy is really valuable if you want to be a Judd Apatow writer. That's really a lot of the tone of what you're

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doing. If you've ever been in...

Tom: Yeah, you know I…

Brent: That's the common denominator of all of our writers. It's the first staff I've been on in which every writer is actively in some kind of psychoanalytic program. It's so valuable to the writers because what are you trying to do in writing this sort of material? You're trying to be sophisticated about character and about human beings and how we act. Our flaws, so to speak, those quirks about us that don't correlate with the standard of human perfection. That's where Apatow lives as an artist. That's what he wants to see, that's what he responded to, in the original material. Probably that's, by no accident, a common denominator in all of us. I find myself all the time talking about the characters and then relating some insight I have in therapy about myself. Is that specific enough?

Tom: Yeah, that's good. The writer you added this season, what was her background before she came? How did she happen to get here?

Brent: Well, Rebecca Adelman, great writer, she was a writer for the New Girl. They had already discovered her as a hotshot and she'd kind of proven her reputation there. She came in to meet, I guess she met Judd, Paul, Lesley, and got hired. I wasn't even part of the process, but when I met her I immediately recognized in her, that similar trait. She has a tremendous interest in the way human beings behave. That is kind of what this show is about as an exercise, is that.

Tom: It's like a chemistry experiment.

Brent: Yes, it is.

Tom: This person has this, this, this, and this, and that one has that, that, that and that. How are these things going to interact and how are they going to bounce of each other and change each other. Will they, can they change each other or should they, as time goes on. Getting

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back to the question about the original pilot. They shot tons of stuff and like the Australian roommate was not in ... I don't remember if she was in the pilot or not. She came in 1 episode later, but there was ...

Brent: She's in the pilot, but not the pilot script.

Tom: Okay, she's not in the pilot script and there's a landlady, and there are 2 friends from out of town who disappear.

Brent: Right, I forgot about that.

Tom: There's also the people who live at the Oakwood. Which I think I did understand from the show, they said they were leaving the next day? Then they never left. Is that true? They're like college students who live at the Oakwood, right?

Brent: Yes, there's a pair there, Frank and Allen, are the character's names. There are a couple of Larry's improv actors who Judd's been aware of and cast, and Gruber. These guys are great. I forgot what's on the page originally, but, yes, things just kept evolving. You mentioned Claudia O'Doherty who plays the Australian, Bertie. She was added.

Tom: She was scripted and then you found her? Or she just sort of stumbled in and you said this is great.

Brent: Other way around. This was a great Judd Apatow move. Judd is so good at identifying great talent and in the course of shooting the movie, Trainwreck, he discovered this incredibly talented, largely to the public unknown, performer named Claudia O'Doherty. Cast her in Trainwreck, was blown away by her talent and just said, "Put her into Love." That's just how it happened, just, "Find a role for her."

Tom: She is Australian?

Brent: She is Australian, yes.

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Tom: She just has her own specific way of doing things, which is sort of ... there's a contradiction in the character, which is, for me, highly entertaining. She's sort of wholesome but she does things in a wild way, actually. How she rolls in life. You knew that she was going to hook up with that other guy, or that just sort of happened?

Brent: No, that was another one where we started shooting scenes with Mike Mitchell, who plays Randy on the show. Here's a guy who… Mike is so funny, he's a friend of Paul's and another star of the improv community. Once we had him on camera it just became irresistible to put them together.

Tom: In the second season there will be more of an arc with them? Or are they just going to be sort of a continuing presence of sorts?

Brent: You'll have to watch and see, I'm not going to say there isn't an arc.

Tom: Asking those questions like a fan, I should go back to this different stream, Netflix and network in that instead of getting feedback from the network after the first 4 episodes, or getting weekly episode feedback in the form of whatever it is, emails and tweets, whatever it is you might get. If you drop the whole season then you end up with this result from the whole thing? Or you get episode to episode commenting? What feedback do you want and what do you have to look at? How's everybody looking at it?

Brent: Great question. We don't have what you do normally have in network TV, which is air an episode, get some feedback. That feedback distinctly affects the process, as it did at The Office. We don't have that here, at least we didn't have it until we released the first 10 episodes. Then we got a barrage of feedback. We were already shooting episode 1 of season 2. We had had to do all of our pre-production on season 2, all of our really arcing out the whole season. We sort of figured out, in large part, what we we're going to do for season 2 before we knew what the audience felt about season 1. We were concerned about it, but it ended up being kind of a non- issue. The audience seems to be in line with what we're doing.

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What the audience likes about it is what we thought they would like about it. The feedback, so far, has kind of confirmed our feeling that we should stay the course of what we're doing in season 2.

Tom: It's more like a movie, but there's no ... do you preview episodes? Is there any of that process of the way they preview movies and get audience cards? There's none of that?

Brent: Thank God, there's none of that.

Tom: You could see that people could end up doing ... you could see that could be done?

Brent: Absolutely.

Tom: It would be micromanagement of a sort that ... ?

Brent: I guess, it depends how much Netflix is using ratings even as a metric. I wonder quite how a video on demand business works. Basically, they make money by increasing their subscription base. What they really are looking for is a kind of periodic advertisement for themselves in the form of a splashy release. I have to imagine that's part of the calculus of what they're doing.

Tom: Do they just want people to say, "This is coming up, I'm going to keep this because I want to see the next episode. I know they're going to drop something good, so I want to see that." If you're working with a great group of people, great talents, and you believe in the show, why not just let them do what they're going to do. It's like making a film that they want to make. Let them just do that. Hopefully they won't do this network parsing process to these kinds of shows. That sounds good to me. What's a day in the life in this process? What would a typical day like? What's going on today?

Brent: Now that we're in production, things are different than they were in pre-production. In pre-production we had a very normal writer's

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room process. Everybody shows up in the room, 10 AM, that's when we start. The room starts with a conversation about what we're doing. I generally lead that conversation until it takes off of it's own accord and other people start to take it over. I might say, "Okay, good morning. Great work yesterday." Call people out on the good stuff they did. Remind them of what we're trying to do and say, "We need to talk about this episode 5. I feel like we have the broad strokes, but what is this about?" I'm trying to inspire people to talk about the story.

Generally it will take off, you have a lot of minds in there, if you can keep them focused. If you think about it, what are you trying to do in a writer's room? One writer, if you had one very good writer, I'm not saying Shakespeare level, I'm just saying you've been on a lot of writing staffs. I've met a lot of good writers, one as good as Alison Silverman, all right? If I could have an Alison Silverman, if Alison began working at 10 AM and worked with total focus until 6. At her highest level of brilliance, in other words, not coming up with a good idea every 10 seconds, but 3 times that fast. This is Alison just at her most inspired and it goes from 10 till 6.

That's all you would need. In fact, it's never been done in the history of TV. That would be a brilliant show. You can replicate that with a writer's room by simply starting a focused conversation and having several people involved in it. If it stays focused it keeps popping up ideas. It's basically creating one mind out of many. In that way, I can always create a brilliant writer. I can create the greatest writer that ever lived and ever worked, by giving me 3 very good writers and keeping them focused on the proper task. Essentially that's what I try to do in the writer's room. What I have more than most in the industry, is that ability to stay on task. The writers joke to me about it all the time, I've been accused of having tension surplus disorder.

Tom: Which means if you're working on an episode you're thinking about, what's this really about? What do you mean by ... I'm going to address that question. When you say, "What an episode is really about" what do you mean?

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Brent: What it's emotionally about, in particular. The word emotion comes up all the time on a Judd Apatow show as it should. That's what characterizes the great work of Judd. He's doing comedy, but with tremendous attention to the emotional through-line and the emotional impact. Eventually you really want to be asking that question about your story, for sure. It's not the only question. You have to have a structure, too. Sometimes you can start asking those questions. I feel that you address these issues in dialogue and conversation and then you make them concrete with tools like the cork board. As we're talking and as ideas are being pitched out, even though, when I say it's focused, it can also be very digressive within the topic.

If I'm saying, "What is this about emotionally?", and somebody says, "You know it's like when I went to my brother's wedding. I was supposed to make a toast and I thought it was good and I ..." This feels like a digression in a way, it's very specific, but no, it is on topic. After a moment somebody will say, "What we should do is, somebody should be looking online and see a YouTube video of Gus's wedding toast." Now I write that down, Gus's wedding toast, on a card and put it up on the board. We've gone from more abstract to more concrete. If you just do that kind of thing ...

Tom: You'll put a thread with a note card? A digression will become, "Okay we got something out of that." Then when you put it on the board, you can ask another question?

Brent: Right, you begin to see that the board is pretty full in the beginning section, but there at the end, we don't have any cards. You literally, graphically begin to see where your needs are. You can start saying, "How should this end?" Or, "Do we have enough of a twist in the middle?" You're focusing the group mind on that and I find if you put a certain amount of focused time on any of these tasks, with a small group of bright people, you just solve the tasks. That's basically the show.

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Tom: You keep in your mind ... you know, that you have these buckets that need to be filled with cards. They'll be like a twist in the middle and the third act, how does it end? What will be those buckets?

Brent: That's a great question. Plot-wise, we have really not pushed any kind of contrivance. A really interesting element of this show, and part of the tone that people are responding to, is that we have prioritized authenticity of behavior over plot.

Tom: You don't really know in the beginning of the episode if there was a story specific to that episode or if things just moved forward in a amorphous but realistic way?

Brent: Yes, exactly. Honestly, even within that quest, I'm finding that it's possible to overdo the plotlessness. I actually think it's true, I think we're finding that on a script now, where we really committed to quote, nothing happening. In fact, one of the episodes in season 1 that we were most proud of was the second episode, in which less happens in that episode than has ever happened in an episode of network TV. Right? What happens is, it's literally episode 2. Episode 1 has this brilliant structure of the romantic leads never meet until the last scene, which I love. Then episode 2, the whole episode is basically them walking from the convenience store back to her apartment to get some money, "Oh, I don't have it." "Well, let's drive over there." "Okay, I got the money, you want something to eat?"

"Sure." "Okay, oh you're too high, I better drive you home." "Oops, it's not that house, let me drive you to your actually home." It's very little. It has just enough to keep forward motion and it actually contains, sneakily, a really powerful drive. Which is, you put a guy with Gillian Jacobs and he's going to desire her and that's drive enough. That would work out beautifully I thought. We're trying to do a similar structure in season 2, an episode that we've been calling, "Happy Day." It's just that thing that happens early on in a relationship, where you spend the whole day together. It's a small, but significant step, and we're trying to capture it in an episode. I feel we're struggling at this stage, 5 weeks out from shooting, plenty of

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time to revise.

I feel we are struggling with the sense of momentum in the first half of the script. It doesn't feel like there's any story and inevitably when you're reading something, or imagining watching a TV episode, you are sifting for some story. It's just inevitable, you can't truly believe that there's no formal progression in time. Your mind is constantly trying to find it. That's part of the process that we're dealing with. It's a very original struggle to have, for me, because normally we never get to that place in network television. We are always trying to keep the pace very high in comedy. Certainly when I entered TV in the Witt/Thomas/Harris era, the twilight of the sitcom explosion.

Tom: Which show were you on?

Brent: I was first hired on a show called Nurses on NBC. It was a multi- camera show that, I think they did 3 or 4 seasons of it. It was not a hit, by any means, but it was part of a hit factory called Witt/Thomas/Harris. Paul Witt gave one note so many times to the writers on various shows they finally had it macramed and put on his wall, a framed phrase. It was just, "Pace and energy." That was the conventional wisdom of comedy when I entered it. It's always been part of what people talk about when they talk about comedy. It's what we're fighting against with this show, in favor of authenticity for sure. I think there can still be energy, but pace for sure we have just turned the wheel completely in the opposite direction on purpose.

Tom: In that second episode, the tension, it was contrast and situation drama in a way. Will they have sex? Will he make a move on her?

Brent: Sure.

Tom: It was really that they were just kind of hanging?

Brent: Sure.

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Tom: This is authentic, this is like seeing these people hang out, and how they bounce around for the day. There was something inherently entertaining about that for a long while.

Brent: Basically, you realize that so much of what is entertaining us is the performance of the actors. That's another great lesson of working on this show. Historically there's been a kind of Balkanization of the writers and the performers in television, so that the shows are really run in the writer's room -- by the head writer, who generates the scripts. The actors see it Friday, before a Monday table-read maybe. They're not part of the process, fundamentally, the actors. This show is really different that way.

Tom: How does that work? They improvise on the scripts and they rehearse it for a long time? Or they play with it on set? How does that work?

Brent: There is some of that. Principally what I mean is that the star and co- creator of the show, Paul, is an actor. He's bringing an actor's sensibility to the writing process, powerfully. Actors will always prioritize authenticity of performance, over cleverness of line, for sure. They're correct about that. It's a danger of the writer's room, is that it becomes a cleverness competition and that affects the authenticity of the lines because the writers are going to put a clever line in place of a real line every time. You get a pat on the back for saying a clever thing in the room. It goes in the script. It creates an artificiality in background. Actor, once the actor becomes the de facto last word on the script, he scrubs that out. Paul certainly does. We've learned to discipline ourselves and police that kind of artificial writing.

In addition, I notice it in terms of the story telling, because another thing writers pride themselves on are their story-telling abilities. Their story-telling tricks, plot twists and this sort of thing. Ultimately that can fight authenticity as well. Because a plot twist is more likely to be a contrivance, than the lack of a plot twist. I notice that really affecting the process of creating stories, as well. Very memorably,

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when talking about this very episode, "Happy Day." I came in one morning very concerned about the drive in the story. I'm like, "I can tell you I've worked in television for 20 years and that's the thing that kills us. If we have a story that doesn't have drive, that one always dies." Paul came back just as passionately and said, "The drive is life."

I thought it was just one of the great moments of our collaboration. It really stuck with me, because what it means to me is "the priority, Brent, is authenticity of performance over even these things you think are so important in story." It's performance over story, is another lesson here.

Tom: Pace and energy isn't ... you throw away that macrame.

Brent: It's a different style.

Tom: You put it in the attic. I'll put it in somewhere, in the office closet for another show.

Brent: For a different style of show. Certainly if I were doing a Saturday Night Live sketch, I would bust out pace and energy for sure. Animation, yeah, for sure. Certain kinds of comedy you want that. A Marx Brother's movie, that's what you're there for. This is a much more dramatic show, and we really are going after emotion. Emotion in performance is aided by slowing things down.

Tom: The idea of conflict. You talked about -- scenes have to have conflict. You can break a script down, a story down in terms of what's the main conflict and all that. I think you're putting aside those parameters of story-telling in this kind of show. There are people now who talk, "It's not conflict, it's contrast." If you just have 2 characters you want to explore those contrasts. Instead of conflict, it's a situation. I forgot, this is the most I'll say today, I was framing something and trying to ... "Let's just explore the situation here." I realized that the situation driving character, driving plot gives you a lot of leeway to just be character driven. Just think about how people are interacting. Then I realized that sitcoms used to be called,

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situation comedies.

I haven't heard anybody use that expression, situation comedy. It's become sitcom and there's no emphasis on the idea of situation. You have a family of characters, all you want to see is that situation. How are they going to behave naturally? You're talking about the roommate and her boyfriend, their relationship is a situation. It's a micro-situation in the whole show, but you kind of want to see what's going to happen in that situation. Any number of things. I was thinking, why don't they call things situation dramas?

Brent: Interesting.

Tom: I don't know.

Brent: I like it. I think it's really interesting to revive the word situation. It is interesting how a word can become so loaded with negative connotations that it becomes an insult in itself. Like “sitcommy” -- that word I noticed is the Kryptonite of the creative process for comedy writers. Any time you present a script and the writer's feedback comes back, "It's sitcommy." Everybody just quits, they say, "Okay, we can't do this." It's an incredibly powerful word to lob at people, and yet, as you pointed out, it contains within it probably one of the great wisdoms about writing comedy. Which is create a situation for some characters and play it out. Trust the comedy. I know that Carl Reiner used to say apparently, to his writers in the ... I'm spacing the name of the show ... what's the show?

Tom: Dick Van Dyke?

Brent: The Dick Van Dyke show, yeah. Carl Reiner, when he was the head of the Dick Van Dyke show, apparently he would say to the writers, "If you come in here and try to think of ideas out of your head, we're going to be selling shoes in 3 weeks. I want you to tell me the situations you got into over the weekend. Where did you make a jackass out of yourself? That's going to be our show." That remains the greatest wisdom ever, that is the way do a show, for sure.

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Tom: In the writer's room, you will be there from 10 to 5? How does the schedule work in the writer's room?

Brent: Yes, I always like to start at 10 sharp, and we ... look the hours, the writer's room, what should they be and what are they is a very good question. Judd likes us to work from 10 AM to 6 PM. I personally can get the job done faster than that by staying focused.

Tom: You break for lunch for an hour and a half? Or an hour? Do you eat in?

Brent: What I like to do, honestly, I like to start sharp at 10, another words, please have hung up your coat at 9:45 and be in the writer's room at 10. Let's start the conversation, nobody be coming in late. Then stay focused, on task, no break at all. Lunch arrives, I keep talking, I don't take a break at all. Leave, go to the bathroom, whatever, but to me it's like a cocktail party, basically, except we're talking about stories and characters and stuff. Stay focused, keep doing it, keep doing it. The writers do begin to call for breaks after a while, and I'll indulge them for a 15 minute spell or whatever.

Tom: They'll say like, "I have got to take a walk."

Brent: Whatever, "Can we take a break?" I'm like a professor in a university I'm noticing. It's a lot of that kind of vibe now. There's a feeling almost of, that kind of leadership. Anyway, they'll call for break, we'll take some breaks. To me an ideal workday would not go past 4. I think honestly, writers if you look at them, the energy that they have for the task is really only more like 3, 4 hours of super focus. You can extend that but I've never found there's any reason to keep writers too late.

Tom: That's to say writing by myself, I think 3 or 4 hours of writing is as much as a person can do in a day and be so focused.

Brent: Yeah, I think a lot of our workday now is caught up in, for me

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certainly, I find what I'm having to do is start plate spinning. Get a couple of writers working on a thing. I got a few writers carding episodes 10 and 11 right now. Meanwhile, I'm going to set to try to argue for a story that we've broke in the writer's room, but will Judd approve it? There's a lot of that going on in my day now, of sort of presenting, literally, pitching to the decision makers.

Tom: An individual will go off and write, they'll do that 15-page, or 10-page prose outline of that episode that everybody's talking about. Then, they'll eventually, one person will eventually go off and write the first draft? You'll work it through in the room together, how will that work?

Brent: Yes, we have a more fluid process than I'm used to. Normally there would be a lot of room work on a TV show. We have quite a bit less of sort of room punch-up on this show. We really don't do room punch-up. We've done sort of get together as a group and make notes. Get together as a group and generate some material, but this show seems to be written much more the way drama's are. Where a single writer is empowered to write the script, or in this case, Judd will have us pair up a lot. Almost every episode in this season is written in pairs of writers.

Tom: He'll say, I want so and so, and so and so.

Brent: He'll just chose these pairs and just pair us all off. What typically happens is, you know, we talked a lot about the stories in pre- production. Now, we assign the writer, the writer goes off and does an outline comes back with an outline. I'm trying to get a lot of feedback loop, so you pitch and you get feedback. You run outline, you get feedback. All the writers are giving feedback individually to the empowered writer. Write a draft, get feedback. We've done more drafts than most shows. Typically, you get one draft, then it goes to the room. This one, we've been getting 2, 3 drafts, with feedback at each point, so it's a different process. I would say this process is much more characterized by writers writing drafts, getting feedback, writing more drafts. As opposed to, writer writing a draft,

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it goes to the room and we gang-write it.

I think we're getting effectively the same results. Because we're getting more re-writes, but those re-writes are being done with less people.

Tom: Okay. All right, well you have to go… you're going to go to the set now?

Brent: Yep.

Tom: All right, Brent, thank you so much for sitting down with me. This is a thrill and I learned so much. This was a pleasure, it was just great. The series is fantastic and we're going to look forward to seeing the second season on Netflix as soon as possible.

Brent: Thank you so much.

Tom: All right, thank you.

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