The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 546 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking at the genre/form of limited series based on actual events with two of the writer/creators behind recent critically acclaimed shows.
Elizabeth Meriwether is the creator and showrunner of the limited series The Dropout. She began her career as a playwright in New York before transitioning to television where she created seven seasons of the amazing hit comedy New Girl. Her other credits include No Strings Attached, Bless This Mess, and Single Parents. Elizabeth Meriwether, Liz Meriwether, it is a damn pleasure to finally have you on the show after 546 episodes. I can’t believe it took this long. Hi.
Elizabeth Meriwether: Hi. That was a great interaction. Hello.
John: Thank you. You’re a little bit sick as we’re talking to you. Thank you very much for being with us. I’m sorry. It sucks being sick.
Meriwether: Much like Elizabeth Holmes, my voice is a little deeper, which is exciting.
John: Absolutely, but not a deliberate choice. You didn’t stand in front of the mirror practicing to get your voice to this pitch.
Meriwether: No, she says in quotation marks. Just kidding.
John: Our next guest is no stranger to this show. Liz Hannah is the executive producer and co-creator of Hulu’s limited series The Girl from Plainville. She also executive produced and wrote for The Dropout. Her other credits include The Post, Long Shot, All the Right Places, and Mindhunter. Liz Hannah, welcome back to Scriptnotes.
Liz Hannah: Thanks for having me. Hey, everybody.
John: It’s so good to have the two of you here. We have two guests named Liz, which will not get at all confusing.
Hannah: You could just go by last names. It’s the easiest.
John: I was going to say.
Meriwether: We were in a writers room together, and we had a third Liz, Liz Heldens, who’s incredible. We would just all call each other by our last names, so I’m probably going to be Meriwether and she’s probably going to be Hannah for today’s podcast.
John: Hannah versus Meriwether does feel like some sort of big title fight.
Hannah: We were also talking about Elizabeth Holmes. It was a very odd eight months of our lives.
John: For the rest of the show it’s Hannah and Meriwether.
Hannah: There you go.
John: You can call me August or John.
Hannah: Great.
John: Whatever you want to do. One of our recurring segments on this show, which I love and listeners like a lot too is How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories that are in the news and figure out how they could become movies or really basically limited series. You guys just both did. You both took things that were in the news and turned them into high-quality film and entertainment.
I want to obviously focus on your two shows, but also at the end I want to go through some other topics of things that are in the news right now and spitball ideas in terms of how you would adapt these into limited series down the road, if they were appealing to be adapted. I’ll bring up that one of the topics we proposed as a potential one, one of our guests said, “Could we not do that one? I’m actually looking at getting the rights right now.” That is how close to the source we’re getting to on these. We’ll get into that.
In our bonus topic for Premium members, let’s talk about showrunning and producing while pregnant, because that’s something you both had experience with, because Hannah very recently had a baby.
Hannah: He’s here. He’s very fresh.
John: I love it.
Hannah: He also has some fresh attitude that will maybe be chiming in. We’ll see.
John: That’s great. Rachel Bloom, when she was on this show, she was breastfeeding. We’re normalizing maternal things happening while-
Hannah: Look, we all have feelings. He has a lot of them right now and has to talk about them.
John: He’s got to express himself.
Hannah: Doesn’t know what hands are, so the only thing he can do is scream.
John: I love it. Let’s talk about this moment we’re in right now with limited series that are based on actual events, because there’s so many on TV right now. We have your two shows. We have The Dropout, The Girl from Plainville, but we also have We Crashed, The Thing About Pam, Super Pumped, Inventing Anna, Pam and Tommy, The Tinder Swindler. This is a moment where a lot of these things are happening. I want to start with your two shows. Maybe we’ll start with The Dropout. Miss Meriwether, how did The Dropout come to be? What was the first thing? Was this something you pursued? Did they come to you? What was the origin story The Dropout, the story of Elizabeth Holmes?
Meriwether: I was finishing New Girl, and Searchlight contacted me, because they had optioned the podcast The Dropout, which is incredible and anyone who’s interested in the story should listen to it. They had Kate McKinnon already attached, and it was already set up at Hulu. They were just like, “We have everything in place. We just need a writer.” Just a little thing.
John: A small thing.
Meriwether: I do feel like Searchlight, this was their first television show. I think they are coming at it with more of like the movie thing, of like, we just need to write. It’s like, no, welcome to television. I read Nick Bilton’s Vanity Fair article. There was a really big article. Vanity Fair with Theranos was falling apart. I’d read it, I think a couple of years before Searchlight contacted me, and I loved the story. I just hadn’t done anything with it. I was familiar with the story. By the time they contacted me, I just had that feeling like, there’s been a documentary, there’s been a book, there’s been a lot of reporting about it. I think at that point there were some companies in Silicon Valley that had Elizabeth Holmes Fridays or whatever. Didn’t we find that out, Hannah, that they had been dressing up like [inaudible 00:05:20]?
Hannah: When we were in the room, I was in Austin for something, and it was Halloween. I saw three Elizabeth Holmeses walk in. This was before the show. I think I texted you guys. I was like, “What goes next? Everybody already dresses like her.”
Meriwether: This story was definitely in the news. I had that question that I’m sure you had too, Hannah, which was just like why does this need to be dramatized, why does this need to be a limited series. I think the answer I came up with was that I felt like it hadn’t been told from her point of view. Her interior world hadn’t been explored. I thought it would add to the story. The only people who can do that are writers. It’s not the job of journalists to picture themselves in somebody’s shoes. I felt like that would really add to the story. I went in for the meeting. As I was talking about it in the meeting, I just got more and more animated. I just found myself getting really emotionally involved in the actual meeting. I had that out-of-body experience where I was like, “I really want this [inaudible 00:06:32] care about this story,” which is never good in the meeting.
Hannah: To realize it?
Meriwether: Yeah.
John: You’re talking yourself into it.
Meriwether: Then you’re like, “I’m not going to be able to walk away from this.” Then Liz Hannah hired Liz Heldens, incredible drama writers, because I had no drama experience, and really knew that I needed help in that way. Then we wrote it. We were supposed to start shooting March 2020. Then COVID happened, and we lost our director and Kate McKinnon, and then spent a year trying to put it all back together again.
John: I definitely want to focus on the writing of this, because I’m so curious what your process was going into it, because you’d run shows before where you’re cranking out 20 episodes, 24 episodes in a year. This is such a different beast. Before we get to the writing of it, I’m curious what the origin story was for The Girl from Plainville. This is again based on a real story of a young woman is accused of leading a man, another teenager, into suicide. What was the start of this? Was there a book? Was there an article? Who came to who with the idea of doing this?
Hannah: There was an article called The Girl from Plainville by Jesse Barron in Esquire. I had not read it. I’d heard about it. I’d obviously heard of the case, but really in a peripheral way, I think in maybe how we all knew it, which was I knew it happened. I knew less about that than I knew about Elizabeth Holmes upon being approached to do The Dropout. I hadn’t listened to the Dropout podcast but knew it existed and knew more about her, at least in the zeitgeist, than I did about Michelle Carter. The article existed, and then there was the documentary, I Love You, Now Die by Erin Lee Carr, that was on HBO. Universal had optioned the article.
Patrick McManus, my co-creator and co-showrunner, was attached to do it, but really wanted a partner on it, and didn’t feel that he could or wanted to tell the story all by himself. Elle Fanning was considering doing it. I had worked with Elle previously. We’d been looking for things to do again together. They brought it to me. I was like, “Hard pass.” We were still in the room on The Dropout I think when they approached. I was like, “What kind of… “ The similar approach was just like why do this, what is there to add to the story, but also I was like, “I just spent a long time unpacking the interior life of a quite complicated woman who everyone hates. I don’t know if I want to dive into that again.”
I didn’t read the article until Elle wouldn’t take no for an answer, and neither would Brittany Kahan Ward, who’s my manager and our producing partner. I read the article, and the thing that really struck me was, similar to Elizabeth Holmes, which there’s so much more to this girl to unpack, and also that I really felt like she had been depicted in a very salacious way in the media that maybe undercut some of the larger conversations to be had about the case itself and about the relationship itself, and I think very dismissively talked about suicide, rather than having a larger conversation about mental health and the toxicity of this relationship and the toxicity of technology and all of these things. It felt very of now to tell that story. This was in December 2019. Patrick and I sat down and tried the pilot. We were going to take it out, and then the pandemic happened.
The thing that I couldn’t relate to in the show was how you could be so consumed by your phone. I’m consumed by social media, but I don’t have a relationship with my phone, because I didn’t grow up with it. It’s a different experience to just not have been 12 and have an iPhone or a Twitter account, and to not necessarily understand the connection that you can have with somebody that’s so distanced between that. Black Mirror and then the pandemic happened, and every relationship I had was with everybody over a phone. It became very timely in a weird way.
That was really where it started, and very similar to why I was interested in doing The Dropout, which frankly was because Meriwether was doing it. I was like, there’s a why now aspect which I think is interesting, but there’s also a voice aspect, which I think Meriwether is one of the best writers I know. I wanted to work with her and hear that. That was really exciting. I think when you decide to do one of these things, it’s what we’ve been talking about, unless it’s going to be additive, then it just feels like we’re putting another thing on television. There’s enough.
John: From the start, did you guys know how many episodes this series was going to be. Meriwether, did you know that this was going to be x number of shows?
Meriwether: Isn’t this funny, because Hannah knows all the answers to these questions?
John: If your voice fails, Hannah can fill in.
Hannah: This one’s a really funny one.
Meriwether: First of all, I was terrified of drama, and I was terrified of drama-linked stories and drama-linked scripts. I was like, “Six, six, it’s definitely six,” which felt like the shortest amount that you could do. I was also like, “I don’t know how much the audience is going to want to engage with this story.” Then we started researching it and working on it and interviewing people, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It just became clear that six wasn’t going to be enough. For a long time it was seven or eight. It was either going to be seven or eight.
Hannah: Unless you’d asked Dan LeFranc, who still wants 10 episodes.
Meriwether: He’s still working on two more. Even after the writers room ended, Hulu was still like, “By the way… ” They were incredibly patient with me, but it was up to a point where they were like, “We need to know. We’re making a budget. We need to know if this is seven or eight episodes.” I finally was just like, “Eight,” because I needed them to budget in case it needed to be eight. I think what I was so afraid of was that the eighth episode was going to feel like it was just wrapping up. I think what was tricky about The Dropout story was that in my mind at least, and I think people who are familiar with the story, and anybody who’s seen All the President’s Men, that first article comes out and you’re like, “That’s the end of the story.” The more I was reading about what happened afterwards, I realized the article didn’t actually stop Theranos, that it was a mix of the article and just this federal agency.
Hannah: Bureaucracy.
Meriwether: Yeah, it’s bureaucracy. Then in the room, in the writers room, they talked a lot about wanting to end at Burning Man, which was always the dream, that we were going to end it with her and Billy at Burning Man.
Hannah: There was an acid trip in there at one point. There was a lot.
Meriwether: Hannah, we’ve never talked about this, but I credit [inaudible 00:13:35] for stopping the Burning Man dream, because what had been Burning Man turned into one woman getting into an Uber.
Hannah: It is actually amazing, the whole process that takes place in a short amount of time. There was an acid trip and there was a burning down of something. It’s the burning down of the building thing.
Meriwether: Who knows? What about you? Did you know what the amount of episodes was, Hannah? How did that work?
Hannah: I think we always knew it was eight. I don’t know, it felt like not 10 and not 6. That felt like a nice, round number.
John: Was that a creative decision or was that like, this is economically viable to do 8 episodes, whereas 6 is too few for us to pay out, and 10 is-
Hannah: It’s a bit of both. Six is really hard to convince a studio to do. They just don’t make money back when it’s six, for a sundry of reasons. I think you could maybe get away with seven if you were like, “Creatively it doesn’t make sense for us to have an eighth,” and you made a real case for it. In all frankness, I think there’s a bit of extension that happens in Plainville for the eighth episode, but at the same time we also knew that we wanted to give Conrad a full day, his last day as an entire episode, and give him his moment. Knowing that then backed us into the eight. We definitely never were like, “There’s more to the story after that.” Dan also wasn’t in the Plainville room. I’m sure had he been, we would still be talking about parts 9 and 10 of Plainville.
Meriwether: It was so foreign to me just as somebody who had spent eight years being told everything I had to do, and to the point where I think it was the first season when we were really a hit. After you plan a whole season, getting a call towards the end that’s like, “You need to put two more episodes on the air,” it’s… I almost felt like I had too much freedom, where I was just like, “How many episodes do you want this to be?” I’m like, “What? What is this alternate universe where I get to decide things?” I put off the decision for as long as I could.
Hannah: Length was also a weird thing for me. I know we did this in the room for Dropout 2 is… The page length, they were like, “If it has a five in front of it, that’s maybe a problem.” They wouldn’t push back on it. I don’t know if you had a similar experience, but in post it was like, we have the amount of minutes it had to be for international sales, and that was it. It was like, as long as it hits this, which I think for us was 42 minutes. Our episode length could really be anywhere from 42 to 60 minutes and could even go over if it needed to. We don’t, but we could’ve. We had that conversation. That was really weird and interesting to have this… There’s no handcuffs. If this is a 40-minute episode, then it’s a 40-minute episode. Do whatever is creatively right for it.
Meriwether: I strong-armed them. I am not good without limits. I was like, “Just tell me what is the best time for episodes to be.” They finally gave in and were like, “51, 52.” Then I went into post with that. This was so foreign to me. I was used to hitting 21:35 no matter what, and to the point where you’re like… We called it ball shaving. I don’t know if we should put-
John: That’s awesome.
Meriwether: To the point where I was in with the editor taking frames out of… It was so bizarre to me to have that kind of freedom.
John: Before you get to the ball shaving and the final post of it all, you have to write these episodes. Let’s talk about the writing of the two shows, because from what you’re describing it doesn’t sound like what I expected, because Hannah, I assumed you came in after there was a pilot and after there was an order, but it sounds like you were earlier than that. Hannah, let’s start with Girl From Plainville which I think might be a little bit more normal. You’re at Universal. They said, “We want you to do the show.” Then they’re going to take it to Hulu. Did you guys write a pilot episode first before you wrote everything else? Talk to me about that pilot? What other documents did you write at the same time?
Hannah: We wrote a pilot and a pitch document, and that was it. We also made the article. Erin Lee Carr was on as consulting producer on the show. We had Erin and Jesse there for anything. The pilot that we wrote, and then that was how we sold the show, aside from removing some scenes, is pretty close to what’s on the air. There’s not a lot that changed.
Meriwether: It’s so good, by the way.
Hannah: Thank you. There’s a writing motif, I was just telling somebody about this earlier, that we had in the show. I don’t know that we need past, present, fantasy, text fantasy, and then this other thing on top of it. That’s no longer in there. Other than that, it was that. We sold it to Hulu. It was the same partner as I’d worked with on The Dropout. Then we opened the room and it was pretty straightforward. We had a 20-week room. We wrote six out of eight in the room. Then I wrote seven, and then Patrick and I wrote eight. We had outlines I think for… We knew what eight was always going to be. We had that done and then we just had to write it, which we did about four days before we went into production.
John: Universal’s hiring you guys to write this pilot. You guys are writing this document and this pitch document before you’re going out to pitching it to the Hulus and the other potential distributors for it. What is the pitch document like for this? What’s in that? How long is it? Is it a keynote? Is it a pdf? What is a pitch document?
Hannah: The greatest thing that ever happened was that I didn’t have to drive to Santa Monica four times randomly over the course of two weeks, because it was all on Zoom. I don’t know that I’ll ever go back to pitching in person. It was glorious, because also, guess what. Little pages, document right up on my screen, you can’t see it and I can’t see you. I can just read, and it’s great. I can ad lib and do my little shtick. It was great. That was it.
The document was why we had come to the show. It was a synopsis of the pilot, because generally no one reads the pilot until they hear the pitch. Then they’re like, “Oh, maybe.” Then they read it. You remember when you read in the pilot, that you didn’t read, that these things happened. Then it was like a here’s what the show will be. We went into it with what are the ways that people will pass on this show. We knew putting the texting out there was a way to pass, because it’s the thing we’ve all been trying to figure out how to do for the last 20 years is put texting on screen and not make it just subtitles or just I’m reading my phone and seeing texting. Patrick in our very first meeting had pitched me the idea of their last conversation being in person. Then we took that and ran with it through the whole show of having these texting reenactments of them being in the same place together. That was in the pitch. Then we had the fantasies, the Glee fantasies in the pitch. They were not musical numbers yet, but they did have those.
John: This document, you’re saying it’s a pdf. Is it just text or do you have images to show-
Hannah: Just text. It’s interesting. I don’t do a visual component to pitching. I’ll either become too obsessive about it or I [inaudible 00:21:03] myself and then I don’t write the actual document. I’m like, “Look at all the pretty pictures.” I know people that do it. My husband is a writer/producer and he uses a visual component in his pitches, and it’s really effective. As the audience for his practice pitches, I find it very effective.
I do it with directing sometimes, because I think that’s a much more… You’re trying to be specific about your vision for this. We did a visual component when we did our final pitch-out of the season before we went into production and our production plan. That was when Lisa Cholodenko and Fred Elmes had come on, and so they had said how we were going to aesthetically deal with some of these things. It’s just words. Then at the end we were like, “Elle Fanning will star on it, so you should buy it.” That was about it.
John: You should buy it. Absolutely. Star of one of your other big series. Meriwether, for you, it was already set up at Hulu. You had a star. You had Kate McKinnon attached. It sounds like you actually brought in writers to help you from the start. Is that correct?
Meriwether: Yeah, it was really bizarre, also having now sold my next project as a limited series. I did it in a more traditional way. I’m realizing how strange The Dropout was. I came in and they were just anxious to get going. I had a conversation with Hulu. It was the classic Hollywood thing where they don’t tell you it’s a pitch. They don’t tell you it’s-
Hannah: It’s a meeting. It’s just a meeting. There’s no pressure.
Meriwether: No pressure. It’s a meeting. You would think I would know at this point. I had notes on my computer. I’d actually had an idea for what the structure was going to be, so I pitched them the loose structure of what the episodes were. Then we just got a room together and we started working on it. I think before the room began, I wrote out some document. I don’t remember what it was, but I think it was an overview of what the series was going to be and what each episode roughly was going to be. At that point I thought it was six episodes. It wasn’t the most accurate thing.
Hannah: The pilot was pretty… It was there.
Meriwether: I’d outlined it, right?
Hannah: Yeah, you had outlined the pilot. Then there was a few pages of what each episode then was going to be. A lot of how we would break that show in particular was by years, because so much time had passed. It was like this episode is between X and X years or X and X month, and then here’s everything that happens in that, and that’s what we’ll address. Then going into the room, it was like the weaning of that and finding where each story was.
Meriwether: We had that overview. I was used to getting into the breaking. Then we realized that we had to do so much research. We had to become engineers and chemists and talk to a bunch of people. The crazy thing was what I was simultaneously… Because they were in a hurry to get it out, joke was on them, ultimately. I was simultaneously running an ABC sitcom called Bless This Mess that was about a young couple on a farm. I had the two rooms going at the same time.
Hannah: We were on different sides of an office. It was one side of windows, and then the other side of windows.
John: Who gets Meriwether’s attention at this moment, and you’re trying pitch [inaudible 00:24:40]
Meriwether: I was running back and… It was the most strange reality of walking into one room and having conversations about chickens and-
Hannah: Microfluidity.
Meriwether: Chicken comedy. The call sheet for Bless This Mess would sometimes be four goats. It’s having those conversations, and then going into The Dropout room,we’re having very serious conversations about sexual assault and microfluidics and a lot of things.
John: These were actual rooms. This is also a difference, because this was pre-pandemic. You were literally together with bodies around a table figuring out this stuff and looking at the same whiteboard experience, which is not norm anymore. That’s all changed.
Meriwether: I think we had an awkward mixer, where it was the Bless This Mess writers mixer.
Hannah: Yeah, we had a lunch. It was kind of like step-kids meeting for the first time. It was very strange. Isn’t Cheaper By the Dozen about that? I think that was based on that lunch. We didn’t have that for Plainville.
John: Let’s talk about the difference between the Plainville room and this room.
Hannah: Do we have to?
John: The Plainville room, you had a pilot already, so you were hiring writers to come in to help you out on that. Everyone could look at the same master plan, like, “This is the pilot. This is the show we’re trying to make.” Then what was the process of figuring out from there how to break out this information across these episodes? Had you done this before?
Hannah: I hadn’t showrun before, no.
John: What was your approach?
Hannah: Fear, terror, a sense of humor about myself. “Yes, but” is what I would say about the pilot, because we had the pilot written, but the pilot is extremely different than the rest of the show, because it doesn’t… Conrad is not introduced, his timeline is not introduced until Episode 2, and the prosecution doesn’t begin until Episode 3, or the real investigation doesn’t begin until Episode 3. The pilot we had, and we had that for a total touchstone and pacing, but we were looking for writers. Patrick was about to go do Dr. Death. He had just wrapped the writers room for that around the time we had done The Dropout. There were a few writers on that that I met with and really loved and wanted to bring on. There was a continuity to it, particularly because Patrick was going into production on Death five or six weeks into the room.
The big thing for me about all the writers that came in was I wanted writers that didn’t want to write a true crime story. I wanted writers who didn’t have an interest in just being a straightforward true crime story. I wanted them to come in and do different things, which was similar to The Dropout, if not the same. I don’t think any of us had any interest. I don’t think anybody had really done true crime except sort of me with Mindhunter, but that doesn’t really count. There were a lot of playwrights in the room. Heldens, who’s the best, she’s the best of the Lizzes, had done network dramas for a long time.
Meriwether: Friday Night Lights.
Hannah: Friday Night Lights. We had talked about that, because we were obsessed with Friday Night Lights. I think I played it cool for two days and then was like, “Can we just talk about Friday Night Lights?” We all approached it from a very different way. Then Heldens would be like, “This is how a show is written.” We were like, “Copy.”
That was the approach that I took to Plainville was just having a bunch of interesting brains, not necessarily brains that were experienced in writing this material. We knew similarly with the structure, like what we were talking about before, we knew that the final episode was going to be… I actually think we thought the penultimate episode was going to be Coco’s last day, and then ultimately as we got into the breaking realized it was going to be the last episode. Then we had the spine of the investigation and the trial and things like that.
I would say the biggest obstacle we had is that nobody was interested in the trial, because we were like, “We’ve seen it.” It was similar with Elizabeth, where at a certain point we’re like, “We’ve reached this place where everybody knows her. How do you make it interesting? Everybody’s seen this part from documentaries.” I would say the trial and the breaking of that was by far the most difficult part of the process because we were hamstrung into making it. You have to tell the facts and you have to tell the story that I think is fascinating, of how did this girl convicted off of something she said, that we don’t know if she said, based off a text message to another friend. It’s a very flimsy thing to be convicted on. That was fascinating to me. We’ve also seen trials before, so how do you make it interesting?
John: Now Meriwether, for something like New Girl, you are breaking story, you’re writing an episode, you’re shooting an episode, you are posting an episode all at the same time. How different was it going from that to this where you went into production with these scripts written? It felt like you were doing one thing at a time.
Meriwether: Is that what you think happened?
John: Were there things that you would do differently based on what you learned through this?
Meriwether: Yeah. I learned an important thing, which is that I can’t run two shows at the same time. I certainly can’t-
John: I don’t understand how someone could.
Meriwether: A show on network that’s airing at the same time that I’m running another show, because the way you described my job on New Girl was my job on Bless This Mess 2. We were shooting, editing, and writing, and then I was also running this other thing. At a certain point I think I just couldn’t. I couldn’t anymore. It was too hard. I really am in awe of those showrunners that can do that. It was an important step for me to realize that I can’t. I’ll never put myself in that situation again.
John: I couldn’t do what you did on New Girl, where you’re running a show that’s filming right now.
Meriwether: I couldn’t do it either.
John: You did it for seven seasons, by the way. You did it for seven seasons, so I think-
Meriwether: I had a lot of help. It’s very hard. It’s not conducive to great television.
John: Or good life or happiness.
Hannah: It’s not conducive to life.
Meriwether: I didn’t have kids when I was on New Girl. I spent nights at the office. It was my entire life. It consumed my whole life. It’s just not a good way to work. I was so happy with all of the IATSE stories. I do feel like a lot of the way that television gets made needs to adjust a little bit.
John: Was this experience on The Dropout better in that way in terms of doing one thing at a time? What were the pros and what were the cons? I’ve definitely heard a lot of the cons, which was that sometimes the writing process was so divorced, by months or by a year, from the production process, that people end up being dragged across… A producer, in your case, could be still producing a show that they wrote a year ago, and they’re not getting paid any more money and they’re actually being pushed down towards scale levels of pay, because they’re still producing this thing, or the original writers can’t be involved with the actual production, because they’re now on three shows after this. Those are the cons.
Meriwether: The writers room on Dropout, I was doing a bunch of things at the same time, but we weren’t shooting it. That was different. I think the system hurts the younger writers the most, because I feel like working on New Girl was this amazing crash course for a lot of people, including myself, on television production. I think it’s so important and so great to see an episode from start to finish, and even if it gets rewritten a million times, but to be able to go to the table or hear what the notes are, hear how the genre handles the notes, go to set, all those things are invaluable. It’s honestly in a job that doesn’t have really a school that you can go to to figure out. It made me sad that the writers on The Dropout weren’t involved in the production at all. I was texting Hannah screenshots of the monitor. I was like, “This is your episode.” I really didn’t like that way of working. I felt like that was strange.
Hannah: COVID on top of it. At least for us, we couldn’t bring our writers to set. Even if you can, because now it’s just so rare to have the writer who wrote the episode cover the episode or even be a part of it. Even pre-COVID, I agree, it’s just not a typical thing anymore.
Meriwether: I felt guilty, because I was like, “You’re not being paid anymore. I can’t ask you to be on set.” It’s just crazy.
Hannah: When it’s disconnected like that, you’re still not in the writers room. It’s like [inaudible 00:33:32] what’s the incentive to do it, other than the learning experience? I think it’s really important for everyone to, if they can, just go visit for a couple days and be on set and observe and be a part of it. Because of COVID, we couldn’t do that for any of our writers. We couldn’t do it for any of our support staff, because we were on lockdown for… I think Dropout wrapped before us, because we started prep in June, and we wrapped in the middle of December. We were really fortunate to bridge both Delta and Omicron.
Meriwether: Oh my gosh.
Hannah: We were PCR testing every single day until two weeks after Thanksgiving. Then we were PCR testing three days a week. Then we got hit by Omicron two days before we wrapped. I turned to Dan Minahan, the director, and I was like, “Dan, I have to leave. I have to leave here, so you have to finish this episode of television before 2022. We have to finish it.” He was like, “There’s no one left to do the show.” I was like, “I don’t care. It’ll be you and me.” I agree. It’s a real bummer that writers… Being a writer in television is 30% of the job. Being a writer as a showrunner is 15% of the job. There’s so much more to it. If you’re not exposed to it, you have no idea.
Meriwether: I will say the pro for me was after the room was finished, and because we had COVID, and I had a year to sit with the scripts. It was the first time in my life. I guess when I was writing for theater I had the same time. That part of it was incredible. I just could sit with the scripts and think. I had nothing else to do. I just got to write. What a gift. That’s great. I think once we started production…
When you’re making network television, you’re getting constant feedback, and sometimes it’s great to incorporate that into the show, and sometimes it can be destructive, because you’re chasing numbers, or you read a tweet and then you change a whole storyline. I think when you’re making network television, you have to protect yourself a little bit of that. I was scared because I was like, “We’re not seeing anything. I’m not seeing anything. I don’t have any feedback. I don’t have any audience. I just have to keep going down this road.” That part of it was a little unnerving too. This is a very long answer to your question. I think for me it was a lot of pros and cons, in interesting ways. I feel like I learned a lot from doing it.
John: Let’s wrap up this pros and cons with our fantasy world, because you’re both people who have successfully run these limited series now. If you could set it up in your dream way, what would you do differently or how would it work? Is there a way to get those writers on the set? Is there a way to make sure that we can actually have that sort of apprenticeship that you learned, the good thing about New Girl? Is there any stuff that you can bring through to this process? Hannah, from features, is there stuff that we could be doing to make these even better?
Hannah: I’m laughing just because I’m like, I really just wanted more time and money and not having to-
John: A unique thing, yes.
Hannah: The COVID situation was really detrimental I think to everybody, and obviously everybody in the world, but I think to filmmaking and to television it was really detrimental. There was just so much that was impacted creatively in the show that that was really a bummer, and that bums me out. More time and money, please.
John: More time and money.
Hannah: I take it.
John: No COVID.
Hannah: I take it here. Thank you.
John: Structurally, is there a way to make the experience of doing these shows better for writers and ultimately [inaudible 00:37:11] creative project at the end? I’m just thinking ahead. If people who are setting up these shows now, what kinds of things could they ask for that would make it a better process for them as showrunners but also for their staff?
Hannah: I would just say I do think it has to do with money, which is making it part of your budget that you’re bringing the writer to set. I also think it’s a part of talking about how we make these shows, which is… Meriwether, you do this, and I know some other showrunners that do this, but not a lot of people do this. You talk about the showrunner, you don’t talk about the room, and normalizing the fact that television is not made by one singular person, that it’s a group of people that make it.
It’s similar to talking about being rewritten in features. When you’re rewritten in features, the first time it happens to you, you’re like, “What? This never happened. How is this happening?” Then you talk to a feature writer and you’re like, “Oh no, this happens in every single script. It will happen to you for the rest of your career. It does not matter how big you are, how little you are. It will happen forever. You have to just have conversations about it. There’s a good way to do it and a bad way to do it. We’ve talked about that before, if you’re the rewriter reaching out to the person you’re rewriting, however it is. I think that having a larger conversation of, this episode was written by this person, and this is the person who came up with this… There’s enough credit to go around. The only way that I think networks and studios will find it important to bring those people to set and empower them is if we empower them. We’re like, “We can’t do this without them. They know this.”
I was really fortunate to bring my number two in the room, Ashley Michael Hoban, to set because I was like, “I’ve never run a show before.” Patrick’s, it was in post on Death, I think, and then it was airing. I’m not doing this by myself. That’s a really quick way for me to lose my mind and for this to be a terrible show. Hoban was there the entire run of the show and covered set. It was amazing. I literally would not have survived without her, and the show would’ve not been good without her. I just think that took just convincing. I just think there’s enough credit to go around that we should just be like, “These are the people who need to be here to make it better.” You hire 9,000 PAs, because we can’t do these things ourselves. It’s not dissimilar to, we need writers around to make this better.
John: Let’s talk about the writer’s responsibility on the set, because I’m sure it varies from project to project. Liz, you were covering set sometimes, but you also had someone else helping you there, Liz Hannah. Meriwether, were you on set for the whole thing? What were your responsibilities on a day of shooting?
Meriwether: For your listeners who are going to hear the bonus content, I’ve just recently given birth. I know that I gave birth on April 10th, which is my son’s birthday, and we started shooting in June. I had an infant and also COVID. I was on a feed, which was… For me, it’s so hard.
Hannah: It’s horrible.
Meriwether: It’s so hard.
Hannah: It’s awful.
Meriwether: I really felt for the director, and trying to text notes that are complicated, that are like, “Can she move her… ” Putting that over a text message is crazy. I didn’t have a room anymore. Everything that Hannah just said was brilliant and exactly right. I loved the script coordinator who had been with me for the year, that after we had the room, Zach Panozzo, who I asked to be on set, so I just promoted him to associate producer, and he was on set every day. He had a really tough job of me texting him and him having to go and give notes to the director, who was occasionally not psyched that there was this dude here shoving a phone in his face.
Hannah: To be fair, they’re not always psyched when it’s you approaching them without the phone.
Meriwether: That was really hard. That being said, I think I also am glad I wasn’t there at every moment. I feel like on New Girl, sometimes when we got behind, I was always trying to fix things on set or fix story issues or character stuff on set. I liked having a little distance I think in the end, because I don’t know how to direct a drama. I think it was kind of good that I was on this couch in a weird little bubble, looking at a feed, pumping milk out of my breasts. It was a very weird existence.
John: Hannah, what were you doing?
Hannah: I was on location the whole time. We all moved to Savannah from June to December.
Meriwether: Oh my god.
Hannah: My husband and I drove across the country with our dog. Similarly, the day after we arrived in Savannah, I found out I was pregnant, which was not a plan that we had. That was a bit of a twist. I was pregnant the entire time we were shooting. By the time we wrapped I was seven and a half months pregnant. I was on set in Savannah in the summer. We’ll talk about it for the bonus. It’s great.
John: Obviously, as the writer covering set, you’re there to make sure that this scene is actually doing what you need it to do. You’re there as a second set of eyes and whispering to the director and getting stuff moved. Were you also rewriting or changing things?
Hannah: Yeah.
John: How much change on the day?
Hannah: Quite a lot. Not on the day necessarily, but there was a lot that changed before we went into production and prep. Patrick was there for prep. Ashley Michael was there for prep. I was there. Then our producing partner Brittany Kahan Ward was there. Brittany basically would body-block people from coming into our offices so we could write. We had seven of eight written. Patrick and I wrote eight. I think during prep, we turned in the first draft. Then I think our shortest script was 57 pages when we flew to Savannah or when we got to Savannah. That was exceptionally long. They all had to be cut. I think every script got cut between 7 and 11 pages. That was just a massive overhaul that we had to do to begin with.
Something that I really like to do, that we’ve done in the room, but haven’t been able to do with all the episodes, because obviously seven and eight weren’t written, we’ve done on this Mindhunter, was we pulled characters, storylines, put them in a final draft document, and treated them almost like they were features. We would have 400 pages of Wendy and would be like, how does she flow through the season? Then you put them back in and see how they speak to each other.
Meriwether: That’s so cool. That’s such a good idea.
Hannah: It was Courtenay Miles on Mindhunter, and Fincher, were like, “Can you take this character and do this?” I was like, “Yes.” Again, it was one of those things where I’m like, “That actually sounds like something that’s common sense to do,” and I’d never done it. I’d never done it for a feature either, just taking a character and being like, here are their scenes. We did that in Plainville with Michelle, in particular because her arc is so circular, and that if you watch the past timeline in the finale and then you watch the present timeline in the pilot, you’re fully caught up. There’s one hour that’s been skipped basically. We were able to do that and spend time on that. Then once a director and a cinematographer come on, this process was not super dissimilar from features in terms of Lisa and Fred were there for prep for a good amount of time and were very involved in how we were going to tell a lot of these stories.
We did I think four tone meetings for one and three and were really drilling down on it. That’s what we were doing for all the prep. Then I covered for one and three. Then Ashley Michael and Patrick did two. She covered me when I was directing. She also covered four and five. I would prep while they were covering. We basically just did that until we lost time, and now we’re here.
Meriwether: I always think a writer on set though… What I always found was so amazing about it was that they had this breadth of knowledge. They knew what every joke was supposed to be and why it was there. To me it was like this person who could speak to the choices that we had made in the writer’s room. I did feel that the lack of that and not having the right answer-
Hannah: It’s like an encyclopedia.
Meriwether: It’s an encyclopedia of what happened in the writers room, which I think is really important. Similarly, because of the situation, I had I think marathon tone meetings that Showalter I think is still scarred from. I think we were averaging about four hours an episode, which is pretty embarrassing.
Hannah: Yeah, but detailed. Very detailed.
Meriwether: I felt like I was just going to have to say everything. It actually did help I think in the end. A lot of rewrites came from the tone meeting, of just talking stuff through. I wasn’t actually doing that much rewriting on set, which was really helpful. I went into production not having written… I had a first draft of Seven, and I had not written Eight at all. I don’t recommend that.
Hannah: Having to write Eight while we were in production was brutal. This was the first time I was a director and I was covered on set, which was a fascinating experience. I was like, “I’ll be fine. I don’t need a writer to cover me. Of the two, I wrote one of them. It’ll be fine.” Then I got three days into production and I turned to Brittany and I was like, “I think I need Ashley Michael to come back.” She was like, “She’s coming back on Friday.”
Meriwether: You need it.
Hannah: It sounds silly, because it’s like, you wrote the episode, you’re a showrunner, why do you need a writer there. It’s because as the director, you’re not thinking about it.
Meriwether: Story.
Hannah: I don’t want to rewrite while I’m also trying to convey to an actor what the interpretation of the material is. I don’t want to have to figure out why the scene is not working in real life when it worked on the page while we have 10 hours to shoot, and then also having a producer on set. That’s the other thing. I was the producer on set when I wasn’t just the writer on set. There were things that would happen that I was like, I as the writer and director now cannot be the producer. You can’t wear all of the hats at once, as much as you want to. I was extraordinarily pregnant at that point and barely mobile. If anything, it doubled down the need for writers to be on set, for features, for TV, for everything. It’s just having another set of eyes is the best gift you could have. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want it.
John: A couple of terms that have come up here that I wanted to make sure we’re talking through. A tone meeting for the two of you is really walking through the script with director or other important department heads in terms of this is what’s happening in the scene, this is what it needs to be, make sure you’re not getting the wrong version of the scene at the end of the day. What else is important to cover in a tone meeting?
Hannah: Any questions they have for anything they don’t understand. The first tone meeting is usually when you get a lot of the notes from them. We did multiple tone meetings for every episode, just because it was just a bananas show and there was a lot that was confusing about it. We would do that. Then it’s really like you go through every line of dialog, every choice a character makes, every moment of the show.
Meriwether: It’s supposed to be your chance to talk to the director. In an ideal world, it’s like this is your version of communicating to the director how you would want it directed, I guess. On New Girl, once we were in production, the tone meeting unfortunately became my first real actually engaging with the director on an episode. A lot of the times our amazing line producer, Erin O’Malley, got the rhythm of that and would try to… While she was prepping with the director, she would know that things would pop up, and she’d text me like, “He’s doing this,” or, “She’s doing,” whatever, because there were certainly times when we’d get to tone meeting and I’d be like, “Wait, that’s completely [inaudible 00:49:24].”
Usually, the tone meetings are set for the Friday before we start shooting on Monday when you’re doing network. That’s too late to make big, big changes. I was trying to get ahead of that. We started calling them pre-tone meetings. They were taking so long that they just became the tone meeting, because nobody was going to do a pre-tone meeting and a tone meeting. All of the designers started listening in, just because so much comes up. For us in The Dropout, it became a concept meeting and a tone meeting, where it was talking through what everything was going to be. Television is supposed to be pretty organized with meetings and production and stuff. I think doing limited series, people are making different rules and what works for them a little bit more.
John: You’re halfway between how a feature would do things and how a normal series would do things, because in both of your shows, you had some sets you could come back to. Were either of your shows block shot or did you shoot episode by episode?
Hannah: Yeah.
Meriwether: Yeah.
John: You were block shooting. Defining terms, in block shooting you can group together all of an actor’s scenes or all of a set that you’re going to use that appears in multiple episodes, so you can efficiently shoot that out and then move on to the next thing. It’s always a question of how to best manage that time.
Meriwether: I’ve never done that before, because for network you don’t really block shoot, because the stuff is just not ready with enough time to block shoot. We block shot The Dropout Episodes 1-4.
John: Wow.
Meriwether: Repping for four drama episodes at the same time, it was like… I couldn’t-
Hannah: When you told me that, because you sent me a photo of old white guys in August, and I was like, “You guys are already on Episode 4?” You were like, “We’re block shooting four episodes.” I was like, “That’s terrible.” What a nightmare. I can’t believe you guys did that.
Meriwether: Keeping it all in your head where you’re like, “Wait, that’s a scene in Episode 4,” it’s just… Then after that we did two. It’s two at a time.
Hannah: We did two at a time, and then we had two solos. Two and Eight were single episodes.
John: Generally, in block shooting you have the same director and cinematographer who’d be working on those things so they could collaborate on that.
Hannah: We had an AV team swap it, going back and forth. Just going back to the tone meeting really quick, because I also toned Six and Seven with Patrick, which was a funny experience to… When you have a co-showrunner, there’s also a funny experience. It’s like who’s going to blink first on what they want to say the scene is about, to see if they’re wrong, because he and I would split scenes and then we’d do passes on each other’s scenes. I think with Seven, we were talking about something, and we were just like, “What do you think this should be about? How should we do this?” It’s fun. It’s a fun experience I encourage everybody to do.
John: That’s nice. Let’s wrap up this conversation and talk about stories based on true events, where these people are still alive. These are people who could come after the studio producers and stuff. At what point were there conversations with legal departments about these are things we can do and things that we can say or can’t say?
Hannah: Constant. All the time.
Meriwether: All the time.
John: You’re going to have to make choices about how you’re portraying these events. There’s certain things which are going to be easily, factually documentable. These text messages happened or didn’t happen. There’s going to be things that you are inventing because you’re inventing a show. At what stage did legal get involved? How early did it happen? How much was it a factor in the story you ended up being able to tell? Let’s start with Girl From Plainville. Obviously, the trial happened. There’s documentation about a lot of stuff. As I watch the show, there is an opening credit thing saying this is based on real events but they’re fictional things. What was the conversation?
Hannah: The short conversation is that we talked to legal I think before we even sold the show. We talked to legal when we were writing the pilot. There were a number of things, not the least of which was Glee, that we knew had to be in the show. We didn’t get the okay to use Glee until three weeks before the show premiered, four weeks before the show premiered.
John: Wow.
Hannah: There was a lot that there were plan B’s on. That was a constant conversation.
Meriwether: That’s crazy. Sorry.
Hannah: We had the okay to do Make You Feel My Love when we shot it. We reshot that in December. That was originally shot with the way that you could cut basically seeing Glee out or only use fair use, which was about three to five seconds, and then you really get into it and it’s two and a half seconds, which meant nothing. We had that version. It just did not work. The whole point was to see it. Patrick spoke to our partners at Hulu. Then we all got on the phone with everybody and were like, “We want to re-shoot it, but we don’t want to re-shoot it unless we can use Glee.” We got that. We were in our last week of shooting. It was early December probably. Then we didn’t get the rights to do the rest of Glee until right before it premiered. We were constantly talking to legal.
Then because we had the text messages, the one thing I really learned from The Dropout that I brought onto this show was having a dedicated researcher, hiring somebody specifically to be a researcher, because there was so much more than even we thought we would need to know in The Dropout and then very quickly realized… I have no idea what microfluidics still is. I think once, I could write a sentence about it and it maybe was accurate, but it’s gone now.
Meriwether: Tiny fluids.
Hannah: I know that, but how they work.
John: Teeny, tiny fluids.
Hannah: We had somebody draw a diagram of the box for us on a whiteboard, because we did not understand it. By the way, it didn’t work, so there’s a reason we didn’t understand it. It was very confusing to us. I hired a dedicated researcher named Patrick Murphy, who’s incredible. He came on very soon at the beginning and made all the text messages searchable for us and made them consumable so that it wasn’t just like literally scrolling through text. Then that was given to our lawyers at the studio so that they could vet every script. Every text message conversation in the show is either exactly the conversation they had or paraphrased for time or they were like, “Heart you,” things like that. It was constant. Then we changed the names of anybody who was underage during the show, except for Conrad in the show.
Meriwether: I obviously never worked with a lawyer on anything that I’d ever written.
John: New Girl wasn’t going to liable anybody. New Girl was happy reality-esque.
Meriwether: It was interesting, because I think at first I was really thrown by it. I think that we started having conversations with legal as soon as we started turning material in. Hannah was there for a lot of it. It was just so exhaustive and just every tiny thing and our amazing writers assistants and script coordinators having to answer a lot of these legal emails and things with our research and being able to-
Hannah: Annotations.
Meriwether: Back it up and annotations, yeah. I think at a certain point, I started really appreciating the conversation. I started thinking about it like it’s keeping you honest in many ways. As a writer you can get really caught up in the story and just trying to tell it in the best way that you think. Often, the real story has nuances and gray areas and just contradictions that are interesting. I think it definitely was frustrating at times. Then other times I feel like it veered us in better directions than it would’ve otherwise. The other thing about legal notes is sometimes they sound really big. They sound really global. There’s really scary legal language where it’s like defamation and all this. Then when you get down to it, it’s like, can you change this glass to a plastic cup?
Hannah: I was going to say.
Meriwether: That was one particular example of that.
Hannah: It’s still one of my favorite legal conversations to use as an example in the room, where I’m like, “When you get this note, this is how you can do it,” which is there’s a scene in the show where… It’s in the trailer, but I don’t think it’s in the show, which is funny. Sunny was going to throw a glass at Elizabeth, and it was the green juice, and it shattered down the hall. It was a 20, 30-minute conversation about this glass and what it could mean.
John: A glass that shattered could be dangerous, whereas a plastic cup is not.
Hannah: Yes. Meriwether was like, “What if it’s plastic?” They were like, “Yeah, totally, that would work.” We were like, “That’s 20 minutes of our lives that we’ll never get back.” Again, it makes sense, and you know why they’re doing it. They’re doing their job. That’s why they have their job, and I don’t. When you break it down to that minimal of a thing and you’re very stressed out about being sued, it’s…
Meriwether: Beyond being stressed out about being sued, I felt, and I’m sure Hannah felt this too, just an enormous responsibility. I thought about it constantly. It was something that I was constantly worried about.
John: Meriwether, there’s legal and there’s ethical. You were telling a story, and some of these people will not have their own chance to tell the story, so you’re going to be the public representation of what they were thinking, what they were doing. I think your show, Hannah, about the ethical and moral responsibilities of portraying teen suicide… While there’s a warning card and there’s all this stuff and there’s resources available, it must have been a constant discussion about how are we going to responsibly portray this real thing that happened in a way that’s interesting but that’s not going to be glamorizing. What were some of the conversations you had about that? Who else did you involve in those conversations?
Hannah: There was a lot of conversation about that before we even agreed to do the show, because it was like, “Is this the right thing to do? Does this need to exist?” Ultimately, I do think it does, again, for what we were talking about. I think it can hopefully be additive to a conversation about the three-dimensionality of mental health, that mental health is health and we should talk about it, and that I think with Coco in particular, and to some extent Michelle, that his suicide was so abrupt and shocking to his family, and who he was with Michelle was not the person that he was with everyone else, and that also he had a really good day the day before he died, or he had a really good morning the day of his death, and that suicidal ideation and depression is not a contiguous line. It’s not a straight line. It’s a roller coaster. You get flipped upside down. You go backwards and forwards. I think that not just expecting somebody who’s depressed to present as depressed I think was a conversation that we’ve been having for a long time and was something that I thought… I thought that this show could help be additive in that conversation, in that depiction.
Also, I’m not a mental health worker. I don’t have any experience in that. We brought on the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which was the foundation we’d worked with on Bright Places as well. Their team read every outline and read every script. They watched the cuts. They were extremely additive in avoiding triggers or being aware of triggers. There were certain things. Conrad dies by suicide in the show. That was something that obviously is going to have to happen in the show. Being able to tell that in a way that doesn’t feel grotesque or gratuitous or horrific or any of those things was extremely important to us, that we were telling responsibly.
Meriwether: I thought you did that so well in the pilot with them-
Hannah: Thank you.
Meriwether: …discovering his body. I love that the camera stayed on the police officer and that you just were getting the information that you needed from… I think there’s obviously a lot that is done in the writing, but it should be such a conversation with the director and how things are being shot and the way that they’re being represented.
Hannah: I think all of our directors met with AFSP to have those conversations as well. That in particular was something that we talked to them about was how to show… We never show his body on the show in that way. Obviously, we have images of it or glimpses of it. That was quite gratuitous to me in particular, and to Patrick. We didn’t want to do that.
Something that I learned on the show that I never knew before, and I’d made a movie that dealt with similar issues, was that the terminology or the phrasing of it is died by suicide, because committed puts the blame and onus on the person who’s suffering. That depression that leads to suicide is like cancer. That is like taking the blame off of that person, which for me was a revelation and was really honestly that very small, which was in our very first conversation with AFSP, that very small… They corrected me. They were like, “Hey, just so you know, this is how we talk about it.” That really actually opened up the whole conversation of Conrad’s journey and trying to be respectful.
I absolutely live in fear that the thing I don’t want to do is ever make somebody feel not seen because of the show or because of something that we were trying to say and feel ignored or that we did something salacious or anything like that. We really actively tried to avoid that at all times.
John: Even thinking about that moment where the body is discovered, we stay with Norbert Leo Butz’s character, who calls to say there’s yellow tape everywhere, doesn’t even say that it’s death. It’s just that it’s about the moment or the situation and not the evaluation of what’s happened there.
Hannah: Going to what Meriwether said, that’s actually what Co said to Lynn. In that truth is stranger than fiction or more emotional than fiction, everything that happens in the pilot is something that was sourced. A lot of the conversation were things that we got from court transcripts or interviews. Jesse Barron had done a lot of interviews and had a lot of material that couldn’t make it into the Esquire article that we had. Lynn in particular for me is somebody that I felt an enormous amount of responsibility for, in telling her story. She was actually the reason I leaned into the show in a lot of ways. I love her. I think she’s such a fascinating woman. The way she speaks is so eloquent. What she’s gone through is horrific. I feel a real responsibility, of course.
John: Great. Now, we’ve had a long conversation about some of the shows you’ve made. I don’t think we have time to do a big deep dive on how these other things could be a movie. I want to hit the headlines here. We’ll put links in the show notes for what we were going to talk about more fully. Maybe we can vote on which of these three things is most interesting for you guys to pitch as a future limited series.
The first one we want to talk through was Birds Aren’t Real, which is early 2017, Peter McIndoe was studying psychology at the University of Alabama, and he went to a protest, and he wanted to be a counter-protester, and he held up a sign called Birds Aren’t Real, which was just a joke. Then he became an improvver who was going on this whole big fake conspiracy about birds not being real. My teenage daughter loves it. I think it’s a great meme. Is there a story to be told about Birds Aren’t Real?
Hannah: Yes.
John: Either of our Lizzes, do you think there’s something to be made there?
Hannah: I’m trying to pull up the… Maybe I won’t, because it’s actually my One Cool Thing is this article, so I won’t say it. I would say that there’s something to be made about the society that does that, that we’re the society that two years ago one of the most famous NBA stars in the League is like, “The Earth is flat.” That’s where we’re at in our space.
Meriwether: I feel like it’s such an amazing story about young people too. That part of it really jumps out at me as just what it feels like to be a young person right now where you’re living in this absurd time and it coming out in that absurd way. That feels really funny to me. Or you lean in and you just do a documentary about how birds are real, as if you’re explaining birds to somebody.
Hannah: It’s the Pelican Brief. We actually watch the documentary.
John: We love it.
Meriwether: That’s such a dad joke.
Hannah: I know. You’re welcome. It happens though.
John: I do also love that he’s homeschooled and that he says that that’s a big part of how he has this feeling about… Being raised in the bubble of homeschooling and in a very Christian upbringing is interesting.
You’ve both made great series about young blonde women who are the center of a story in which mental health becomes a big thing. Let’s talk about the Britney Spears conservatorship and the end of the Britney Spears conservatorship. What is the series we might make about Britney Spears? One of the things we always are wrestling with when Craig’s on the show with us is where do you start and where do you end the story. Is there a story to be made about the conservatorship and her being trapped in this and breaking free of it? Do you start the story earlier? What kind of Britney Spears limited series would be interesting to make?
Hannah: I’m just laughing because I feel like I’m going to end up making this show, because Elle and I recently discovered I’ve only worked with blonde actresses in my career. I’m just going to make another blonde story.
Meriwether: The gaslighting part of it is really interesting to me. I think that the experience of realizing that you’re trapped in this thing… The story that really jumped out at me about all of it was the putting a bug in her room, that her dad put a bug in her room. Just the feeling of safety with the family and then slowly realizing that that family is against you I think is fascinating. I feel like that would be what I would focus on, as long as you could have a lot of big musical numbers, I guess.
Hannah: Obviously. The thing that makes me the saddest of that story is that Britney did need help. She needed help. She needed somebody to help her get out of a very dark place. They took advantage of her in that way. She still didn’t get help. That’s the part that ultimately is so tragic to me is that she didn’t get what was the only thing she needed. The way we talk about mental health, and particularly women, and maybe just because I had a baby, but postpartum…
The thing that sticks with me that she talked about was her sitting in that restaurant with her two kids because the paparazzi were outside, and nobody would help her. Everyone was making fun of her in that restaurant. That’s horrific. I’m not Britney Spears, and I could not imagine my child having a meltdown and everyone being horrible to me in a crowded place. I find that so tragic.
Meriwether: That’s interesting. Would you start the story there? It’s a rock and a hard place. She’s either going to be out in public on her own and totally under attack, or she’s going to be in her family where she thinks is safe, is actually-
Hannah: The complete opposite.
Meriwether: …against her. I think that’s fascinating. My agent who’s no longer my agent, early on when I started writing, I was talking to him about wanting to go to therapy. He was like, “No, don’t go to therapy. I need you to keep writing, keep making scripts.” He was joking, but I think that mindset of just keep producing, just keep producing, and nothing else-
Hannah: Don’t take care of yourself.
Meriwether: Yeah. That part of it’s interesting. I also love that in the Britney Spears story, that Instagram becomes this outlet for her is fascinating.
Hannah: I’m really into this. Should we do it?
John: By the time this episode comes out, you guys could start this up. I feel like the two of you together [inaudible 01:10:04].
Meriwether: I do think that question of would we need that-
John: Do we need it?
Meriwether: Her story has been taken from her so many times. It would be very interesting. At this point she needs to tell her own story, I feel.
John: Finally, MacKenzie Scott, so MacKenzie Bezos Scott. I only knew her as Jess Bezos’s ex-wife, who has been giving away all her money. I wasn’t clear on her backstory. She actually has a really interesting backstory. In some ways it reminds me of The Dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, in that she grew up with a lot of money, all the money went away. She struggled to get through her writing degree.
Meriwether: She had to leave high school because they couldn’t pay for her school, right?
John: Yeah, but then ends up becoming quite a good writer and then being with Jeff Bezos and helping him start Amazon. She was a much more interesting character. Now I have to say, she has dark hair, so that may just rule her out from Liz Hannah’s-
Meriwether: Oh, Jesus.
Hannah: Didn’t read the article because of that. I was like, “Ah.”
Meriwether: By the way, I did make a show with an actress with dark hair for a very long time.
John: Famously dark hair and bangs.
Hannah: Also, I just want to be clear that I’m a brunette, so let’s not make this a situation. I just think it’s funny. That’s all.
John: Is there a MacKenzie Bezos story to be told that is not set around Jeff Bezos? What are you thinking about her as a character at the center of a series? Is there a series to be made there? I’m not sure there is, but tell me what your instinct is.
Meriwether: I love that she’s given away $12 billion. I think about that all the time, just happening into so much money. I think I would start it in the middle of her marriage or the beginning of the end of the marriage and then just track the experience of getting divorced from the world’s richest man. Then she falls in love with a high school teacher, which I think is amazing, and then starts giving away… She’s given away more money than anybody else in the world, I think, if I remember.
Hannah: I think in that amount of time.
John: Meriwether, what you’re describing though is… I wonder whether you need to tell the actual real person’s story or if it’s just an interesting jumping-off place, because you could imagine a woman who gets divorced and ends up with a crazy amount of money. It doesn’t have to be billions, but just a crazy amount of money, and then falls in love with the chemistry teacher. That’s an interesting premise in and of itself, somebody who is so-
Hannah: I smell a rom-com.
John: I’m just wondering if it’s a Marry Me. I think there’s something more classically comedic about it.
Meriwether: That’s interesting. I don’t know. It’s such a marriage and a couple that I feel like people want to know about. That’s another interesting one, because she’s really, really private. I think it would have to be a question if you’d want to invade that privacy.
John: There’s also the possibility of where… Succession isn’t technically about the Murdochs.
Meriwether: That’s true.
John: It’s sort of about the Murdochs. Maybe you could do a show that’s not exactly them, but that high-profile divorce is at the center of it.
Meriwether: That’s a great idea.
John: I’ll sell that one. Divide the three [inaudible 01:13:20].
Meriwether: Ours is about Sydney Beers.
Hannah: I also can’t believe we’ve been talking for 90 minutes and Succession just got brought up, and neither of us were the ones that brought it up.
John: Hey. [Crosstalk 01:13:33].
Hannah: An interesting twist. Didn’t expect it. I love the idea that while Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are both trying to buy Twitter and flying into outer space, she’s just writing checks for billions of dollars.
John: To the YMCA, yeah.
Hannah: It’s like the best way to get back on your asshole ex-husband is be a really good person and make him look even shittier. It’s kind of amazing.
Meriwether: I also think it’s amazing all she wanted to do was publish a book, and then she ends up in a relationship with the man who’s killing bookstores, and then she can’t sell her…
John: That irony is amazing.
Meriwether: Maybe you can do an insane First Wives Club with Melinda Gates. By the way, I do love true stories. I know there’s probably now too many of them and we’re going to go in a different direction. My dad is a journalist. I feel like there’s something interesting to me. I do get excited about them.
John: You were describing at the start of the conversation that you want people to tell you what the rules are, what the boundaries are. What’s nice about reality is there’s some boundaries there, and that does help [inaudible 01:14:42].
Meriwether: Having you repeat that back to me was like therapy. I’m like, oh yeah, I do like when people tell me what the rules are.
Hannah: I also think what you said about the interior life and that… Giving purpose to true story is I think the important thing. For me, it serves a purpose if you’re telling the interior story, and that can’t be told by journalists, or shouldn’t, or that’s not their job, as you said. I thought that was really smart. I’m also somebody who’s literally made a career doing true stories, and so I apologize. So sorry.
John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things on the show. I have two very related things. These are two AI-powered art generation tools. This is where you give them a prompt and they come back at you with just amazing artwork that has been generated by your prompt. One’s called Midjourney. The other one’s Dall-E. Let me see if I can share this in the Zoom so you guys can see. I’ll share a link here so you guys can see this. The thing I loved most about Dall-E was there’s an example of The Matrix if directed by Wes Anderson. That was the prompt.
Meriwether: Do I want that?
Hannah: That’s amazing.
Meriwether: I think I do. I think I do want that.
John: [Crosstalk 01:15:57].
Hannah: Is that Fantastic Mr. Fox?
John: Sort of, yeah.
Hannah: I was trying to think of, with some of these things, who’s the filmmaker or the storyteller to do the jumping-off point for that. There’s something interesting about a David Lynchian Birds Are Real story.
Meriwether: The whole thing is just a man in a room with a curtain behind him talking about birds.
Hannah: Or he controls all the birds in the world.
Meriwether: You could also do, Hannah… I’m sorry I’m still stuck on this.
Hannah: This is great.
Meriwether: You could do a bird as the main character talking about how it’s not real.
Hannah: He’s having a crisis.
John: A dissociative disorder.
Meriwether: This is amazing.
Hannah: What’s that movie where Amy Schumer thought she was like Emily Ratjkowski, that movie I Feel Pretty, but you do that with a bird, where a bird thinks he’s a human. Is that where we go? I feel like, guys, we’re set on this one. We’ve got a few shows and movies.
John: 100%. The concept art will all be generated by-
Hannah: I love this.
John: …these two great AI things, which are remarkable. Bart Simpson by Pablo Picasso is also fantastic. Literally, if a real person painted this, I would buy these paintings. I just think they’re terrific.
Hannah: These Spider-Man ones are dope.
Meriwether: This is awesome.
Hannah: I love this.
John: The same stuff’s coming for writing, which is scary, but also interesting. We’ll see where we’re at. Ten years from now I’ll be talking to the AI people who created the next-
Hannah: I know. People already think writers are expendable, so let’s just make a computer app to do it.
John: Hannah, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
Hannah: I do. There’s this article in The Atlantic that I read yesterday that I saw people going around. If you haven’t read it, I really recommend it. Also, if I listened to it as a podcast, because now these… I love that you don’t have to read them, you can hear them. Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt. Strong recommend. It’s fascinating. The long and short of it is that social media’s the devil and none of us should be on it.
John: That feels right.
Hannah: I shared it on Instagram. It felt very weird.
John: Perfect.
Meriwether: Perfect spot for it.
John: Hypocrisy.
Hannah: I thought it was great. I thought it was exactly where it should live.
John: Meriwether, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
Meriwether: I just recently re-watched, for the millionth time, Notorious, the Alfred Hitchcock movie. I just love it so much. That’s not super cutting edge. It’s definitely not AI-generated art. There’s this scene between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. When I go back and rewatch things, I often just find myself on Wikipedia reading about it. I didn’t realize there’s a scene in the beginning where they’re kissing for so long. Apparently, they had to break up the kiss after two minutes, and then they would go back to kissing, because of the code. They weren’t allowed to kiss for longer than two minutes. If you watch it, they’re kissing and then they break apart and then they start kissing again, and then they break apart and then they start kissing again.
John: I feel like I’ve seen the movie, but a long time ago. I can’t even imagine two minutes of kissing. That just feels like that’s a long kiss.
Meriwether: Wait, it must’ve been shorter than that. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m misquoting it. It was definitely because of the code they had to keep breaking up the kissing.
John: That’s great.
Meriwether: It’s so hot. It always blows my mind.
John: Love it.
Meriwether: They’re not even allowed to open their mouth when they kiss each other. Most of it is them just smelling each other’s faces. You’re like, why is that the hottest thing?
John: I find characters who are about to touch, that’s the most tantalizing moment. When they actually touch, great.
Meriwether: The To Catch A Thief scene where… I obviously love Hitchcock. They’re watching fireworks. They’re not even touching. It’s Grace Kelly and Cary Grant watching fireworks. Maybe they were just all really beautiful. I don’t know. Anyway, I love that movie.
Hannah: I was going to say, it’s also Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. I would watch them-
Meriwether: That’s true.
John: Beautiful people.
Hannah: I think that’s a Hitchcock thing though, convincing you you’ve seen something that you haven’t and finding the tension in that.
John: Hitchcock would’ve been a great director for you guys’ show because he loved pretty blondes. He would’ve made a hell of a Dropout. Elizabeth Holmes and Hitchcock together, come on. She’s an icy blonde.
Meriwether: Can you imagine Hitchcock directing television? Can you imagine him sitting through a tone meeting?
John: No, I don’t think that would work especially well.
Meriwether: That was another thing in the Wikipedia page. There was a moment when Ingrid Bergman had one idea on set, and he loved her so much that he took the idea. It actually made it onto the Wikipedia page because actors were so-
John: It’s so remarkable.
Meriwether: …afraid to not speak in his presence. I don’t know.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. Are the two of you on Twitter?
Hannah: I am.
John: Talk about social media and the evils of social media.
Meriwether: I was hacked, and I never got back on.
John: Smart choice there, Meriwether. Hannah, where are you on Twitter?
Hannah: @itslizhannah, same on Instagram. I don’t have Twitter on my phone anymore, which feels like a real-
John: That’s smart.
Hannah: I became obsessive, and it needs to go away. I also sit around with a child now. I’m just scrolling. It’s doom scrolling constantly.
John: Not good.
Meriwether: Instead of following me on social media, watch that scene in Notorious.
John: That’s how you get the real, full Liz Meriwether experience.
Hannah: Read the article about how social media’s destroying our lives.
John: You can find the show notes for these episodes and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on babies and having babies and being pregnant while making television programs. Liz Hannah and Liz Meriwether, absolute delight having you on the show. You are always welcome back any time, even without a new series.
Hannah: This was great.
Meriwether: What a dream.
Hannah: Thank you.
Meriwether: What a dream. Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Let’s talk about babies, because I think people who’ve listened to the show for a long time know that I absolutely adore babies. I’m obsessed with babies. If I could just be a part-time baby nurse, I would be delighted. Give me a baby. You guys have babies. Hannah, you were describing that during production you showed up to set and you found out you were pregnant and went through all of your pregnancy while there.
Hannah: I had an OB in Savannah. It was a bizarre experience.
Meriwether: Oh my goodness.
Hannah: Was it a thing? Did production know that you were pregnant? What were your choices there? What were the decisions?
Meriwether: I told my manager, our producing partner, who’s the EP that was on the ground with me. I told her four seconds after I told my husband. I told my assistant, because I was like, “I can’t tell… “ You’re not supposed to tell anybody until you’re 12 weeks. I think we started production, or we were close, it was a week out when I hit 12 weeks. Then I through it told a few people. I told Elle and I told our costume designer, Mirren, who I’ve worked with a number of times and love. I didn’t really tell anyone. I didn’t look pregnant, quote unquote, until the last week of production. I just looked like I was gaining production weight the whole time, which I also did, so that was fun.
Meriwether: That’s what we called the Peggy on Mad Men.
Hannah: I did the Peggy. I basically just pretended I was eating for two but only one.
Meriwether: By the way, it must be nice that you didn’t look pregnant. I wouldn’t know how that feels.
Hannah: I did, and now I still look like I’m pregnant, eight weeks after giving birth. That was actually fine. I really loved being pregnant. I was really happy that I had something that had to distract me from doom scrolling about pregnancy and what could happen and all of the horrific things that went through my mind of what could happen to my child, and then also had a distraction from the show.
I wasn’t necessarily able to, although I’m sure my partners just completely disagree, take it too seriously. I took it seriously enough in that it was my job and I wanted it to be as good as it could, but I was also like, “I have a baby, and that feels really important.” It didn’t become all-consuming until we were… We were in post while we were doing the show, but we were in post for the last four episodes, five episodes when we got back. Then I was eight, nine and a half months pregnant doing post, and that was really brutal. I had amazing partners. I only did one conference call from the hospital after giving birth.
John: Now, Meriwether, you were in the same boat. You were pregnant during production.
Meriwether: Yeah. It was my second baby. For my first baby, I was also pregnant and… It’s a very common experience. I don’t believe in the don’t tell people until 12 weeks, as somebody who’s had a miscarriage, because I feel like if you want to tell people right away and then you have a miscarriage, people also need to know that.
Hannah: Absolutely.
Meriwether: It’s really important, unless you just don’t want to share. Then that’s also fine. I guess I just feel like the rule about don’t tell people until after 12 weeks is just to preserve other people, not to help you.
Hannah: I think for me it was my superstition of being very jinxy. It was like, “If I tell people, then something will go wrong,” which that’s not true. My husband also wore the same clothes during the March Madness, because we kept winning, which I’m sure affected the game. I agree. I think it’s normalizing all of that.
Meriwether: In a strange way, Zoom helped a lot, because it wasn’t immediately apparent that I was pregnant. I think it’s obviously totally unspoken at this point because people have been drained, but there is that feeling of, oh no, is this going to mean that we can’t… I got pregnant when we were in this real transition moment with the project. There was definitely a feeling of, is this going to mean the end of this, because we’re not going to have her focus?
I did a lot of overcompensating of just like, “I’m going to hire a million nannies.” I wish that wasn’t the go-to thing. I obviously completely believe in family leave, and it’s so important. It’s just really hard with production, because when it… The Dropout, we’d been sitting waiting for a year. Then when they tell you it’s time, there’s really nothing you can do. You just have to take each day at a time and listen to yourself and think the thing that you’re doing is really important, but also taking care of yourself is really important and just having to check in with yourself a lot.
I think for me I don’t like being pregnant. I am not overly fond of infants, because I feel it’s sort of just terror. Then it started being fun later on when it wasn’t just pure terror. I think having something else to do, having something else to think about I think was really helpful for me. I will say for certain I think male executives, if you’re in a fight with them and then you just start rubbing your pregnant belly, sometimes you win arguments that you shouldn’t win, because there’s a Mother Earth goddess over here. I definitely think sometimes it works in your favor.
Hannah: I definitely also didn’t, I think, give enough credit to… I thought people would think I was a burden, or similarly, I couldn’t do my job, just because I think that’s what’s ingrained in all of us, whereas my assistant knew from the beginning and was amazing, and then our crafty women found out, because I just kept eating constantly, and they were like, “Is she okay?” They literally took care of me the entire time in production. They kept it a secret until I was ready to tell people or until I started to show. Then they would check on me all day every day. They were like my mothers on set. These were two women who I’d never met until we went to Savannah. The community of women and parents, I wouldn’t say it was even gender-specific, I would just say of parents on the show that took care of me, was really remarkable. I didn’t necessarily expect that. Yes, there were times that I was hysterically crying. I was like, “Guys, I’m fine. This is just a thing that’s going to happen, and move on. I’m not as sad as I could feel right now.” I think that was really something that I had never anticipated was the open arms of people taking care of me on that. Even in arguments on set, it was I think a little more subdued.
The first three months I was so stressed out and so freaked out about the show and so freaked out about being pregnant, I really did think I was going to lose the baby, because I was not in a good place. I held that in for a really long time. Talking about it, going to what you were saying, Meriwether, freed me up to start preemptively dealing with all of the emotions I was dealing with.
Meriwether: It’s tough, because in an ideal world, aka Europe, there’s help. There’s help built in to being a citizen of that country and just getting childcare. I just said in my answer, I’m going to hire a bunch of nannies, which was sort of a joke, but I can afford that. It was absolutely crucial to me being able to do this show. I wonder if there’s some way to build that in. I don’t want to say studios should have to pay for… It’s absolutely a necessary thing that you need, and I would not be able to do it without… I had a baby nurse and a nanny, because I have two kids. I don’t know. I think that’s really important and sometimes gets left out of the conversation. It’s just like, oh she was pregnant and she did the show. It’s like, no, I had an enormous amount of help that I was paying.
Hannah: I love that Melanie Lynskey thanked her nanny when she won a Craig’s Choice Award. I got so emotional seeing that, because I have a night nurse for my son. I literally could not function as a human, nor do my job. I released the show two weeks after I gave birth. I could not do that without help. My husband couldn’t do it on his own. My husband is super involved, but I don’t know how we could do all of that. There’s an enormous amount of privilege in me being able to say that sentence, the fact that I was able to do anything because I could afford a night nurse, or I can get sleep because of that. I can make choices about my life because of it. I can continue to work. There’s an enormous amount of privilege that is very unfair in I think how we deal with children.
Meriwether: The other thing I would say is also postpartum. I think that’s also hugely important. When we shot the Bless This Mess pilot, I was pumping, and I had to pump in an actual barn where we were shooting, near cows, real cows. That was a low point. A low point for my assistant was carrying that milk, I’m sure, back to the freezer. I think just the difficulty in the logistics of pumping and breastfeeding as it relates to production I think is something that isn’t talked about a lot. How do you make sure that there’s a place to pump on set for people who need it?
John: We had Jack Thorne on the podcast recently. He was talking about disability access for members of crew. I don’t want to medicalize or fragilize pregnancy, which is such an incredibly common thing, but it feels like those accommodations and accessibility for people who need to pump breast milk or just have a place to sit down because they need to be able to sit down, it feels like it’s part of the same conversations, like how do you make sure that-
Meriwether: Yes, humans.
John: …sets are designed for everybody who needs to be there and who can be there, because otherwise people are going to get excluded. You guys were running the shows. They had to figure out ways to accommodate you. If you weren’t, it would’ve been tougher. There wouldn’t have been the same-
Meriwether: Absolutely. It’s infuriating. It’s totally infuriating. You’re right, it’s not just pregnancy. It’s just accepting that people working on shows, on sets, are human beings, and writers rooms too.
Hannah: I’m going to shout out my dad. My dad’s a designer, and he wrote a book called Access By Design 30 years ago, which is about not having disability access, but having just access for humanity. You don’t have stairs and a ramp. You just have a ramp, because people who are able to walk on two legs can walk up a ramp. We don’t need stairs to differentiate. Having door handles that everyone can use rather than specifically calling out somebody who can’t use it. That to me is something of just like we don’t have to have the pod where I go in and do this thing. We just should have it all be accessible at all times to whatever any individual’s need is, because nobody’s the same. Sorry I cut you off, Meriwether, but what you were talking about with writers room I agree with.
Meriwether: The short seasons of these streaming shows are also not conducive to women taking leave. That’s another thing that’s complicated, because on New Girl people were able to go away for a month or two and come back. When I first started New Girl, a male writer came to me and was like, “My wife’s having a baby.” My showrunners, who are great men, but they were just telling me how things work, and they were like, “He gets a week off.” I was like, “Okay.” I to my dying day regret it, but I was like, “Okay, you get a week off.”
I think that mentality, like this is how it’s always been done, if you take any more than that you’re being overly precious about it, is totally wrong. I also understand the difficulty of shorter seasons where you’re like, if I take a month off, I’m missing half of the room or something. It’s all a bit complicated. If you want to put it in purely cynical terms, that’s how people do their best work. If you want good shows, if you want good content, make the experience pleasant and livable. It took me a while to learn that, by the way. I really had to figure that out.
Hannah: I also think shorter order and limited series, because at least with ongoing series you have a hiatus of some kind and there’s some consistency. If you get more seasons you know [inaudible 01:35:51]. Limiteds you can just stack on top of each other. They can be happening any time. Patrick, like I said, was doing Death and Plainville at the same time. He had done another show before that. He has a family and was basically gone from his family for three years. Though there’s a benefit, I creatively really enjoy doing limiteds, because I feel like I’m able to express everything in a short span. I get to take risks and do some things that I wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to do and something ongoing. I also think there’s benefits of things that are ongoing that you don’t have on limiteds. I think for me it was baby steps. It was like I’ll do a 2-hour and then an 8-hour and then I’ll be okay maybe doing 13.
That I think is really an expectation now in this industry, particularly with showrunners that are experienced in doing limiteds, is that you just have the next one lined up and you’re ready to go. It’s really, really, really hard. It’s the hardest thing I have ever professionally done was make this show, and regardless of having a child, need a break, but then I also was pregnant and had a child and my maternity leave was my quote unquote vacation, which FYI it’s not. Also, there’s not really a maternity leave.
Meriwether: You didn’t think it was a… I had the time of my life.
Hannah: I’ve been sipping Mai Tais and just waving at my child from afar because he’s perfect. My husband just texted me and he’s like, “How’s it going?” because he’s losing his shit.
Meriwether: I know, I have to go put my kids to bed.
John: We can wrap this up. Thank you so much for this conversation on babies. We’ll circle back in 10 years and see whether the industry’s improved how we handle pregnancy and babies.
Hannah: I don’t think so.
John: There’s no way to say anymore.
Hannah: We may have the David Lynchian Birds Aren’t Real show.
Meriwether: I would like to see that.
John: We’ll follow up.
Meriwether: Thank you so much.
John: Thanks.
Hannah: Bye.
John: Bye.
Links:
- The Dropout on Hulu and The Dropout Podcast
- The Girl from Plainville Show and the Esquire article by Jesse Barron
- Liz Meriwether
- Liz Hannah on Twitter
- Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt for the Atlantic
- Notorious Alfred Hitchcock Film
- AI art – MidJourney and Dall-E
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.