The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 720 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you sell and produce an original series in this age of streamers and IP? To help us answer that question, we welcome back the co-creators of the new spy series Ponies, Persons of No Interest, Susanna Fogel and David Iserson. Great to have you back on Scriptnotes.
David Iserson: Great to be back. I listened to this show enough that it is still freaky to see you do the thing that I hear you do.
[laughter]
John: Last time you were here, it was Episode 361. This is Episode 720. It was halfway through. Every 360 episodes, it’s like a year cycle. You come back on the show.
David: This is how hard it is to get a thing made. It goes from script to production over the half-life of Scriptnotes’ journey as a podcast.
John: That was for The Spy Who Dumped Me. Now you’re back with another spy show, so spies are in your pocket.
David: We’re back with something that has some shared DNA in that we wrote it, and that it is about spies, but it’s a very different tone, very different feel. I think we learned a lot of things for making that movie that we didn’t bring into this show. It’s a different beast, but it is still things that we gravitate to. We shot them both in Budapest.
Susanna Fogel: Budapest. French stories–
David: About two women.
John: That’s true. It’s hilarious, but the tone is specific and strange. I really want to get into it because I was struck by sort of Ponies is a tone I’ve not seen on a show in a while, which is fun to say. I want to talk about that.
Susanna: Aw, thanks.
John: I want to talk about the series, but I also want to answer listener questions on trusting your judgment, how to tell if you’re talented, and differentiating character voices. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about taste. We did a little bit of this before we got on mic, but what is taste? How do you cultivate it, and should you even worry about taste? We’ll get into taste. Let’s remind listeners who weren’t here for episode 361–
David: What were you guys doing?
[laughter]
John: What were you doing? It’s okay. Answer and remind us who you are because Susanna Fogel, and the time since we saw you last, you went off and directed a whole bunch of things. Pilots for the Flight Attendant, The Wild, A Small Light. You directed the features Winter and Cat Person all in the time since we’ve seen you. You’re so busy and prolific. Congrats.
Susanna: Thank you. I go for long stretches of time where I’m not working, and I’m in my pajamas, so when things come out all at once, and it looks like that’s my regular density of work, I feel excited that that’s how it looks.
John: David, when we talked before, we talked about you working on SNL way back in the day.
David: Yes, that was my very first writing job.
John: Yes. Since then, United States of Terror, Up All Night, New Girl, Mad Men, Mr. Robot, Mozart in the Jungle, Run. Since the last time you were here, you also had young kids.
David: Yes, I had identical twin girls who, by the time this episode airs, will be two years old.
John: That’s incredible. As Craig and I often describe on the podcast, kids are the death of a career.
David: Sure, yes.
Susanna: When we started working on the show, they were negative six years old. This is how long we’ve been working on the show.
David: Working on this, I wasn’t married, I didn’t have kids, and I’m married with two kids. I brought my kids and my wife overseas to make this show. I couldn’t get them on camera, but they are a part of the show in that they were there.
John: They grew up in it. My daughter grew up in and around the Big Fish musical, the long journey of that.
David: Sure.
John: Every incarnation she was a part of and saw, so her DNA is somehow in that show as well.
David: Did she run screaming from this industry as a result of seeing us?
John: No, she loves it. She loves tech rehearsal, which is where they’re painstakingly rearranging lights, and actors will move two feet, and they’ll reset the lights. It’s the most tedious process. She was maybe six, eight years old during it. She would sit there at the table for hours watching it. I couldn’t believe it. Now she loves all production stuff.
David: That’s amazing.
Susanna: That’s so cool.
David: I remember when I started off in this industry, and you’d hear people being like, “The last thing I would ever want is for my kid to be in this industry.” I was talking to Vic Michaelis, who’s an actor on our show yesterday, about how all of our toddlers love musicals and how we would be just distraught if they just wanted to be in tech or accountants or just something. We just essentially just need them to be in showbiz because it’s the only thing we understand.
John: At Sundance Labs, I was there with this married couple. She was a writer, and he was a writer-director. For years, we’d see them up there, and they had young kids and like, “Oh, we want our kids to do other things.” Other kids are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal. Somehow, it does just rub off. Let’s talk about the genesis of this series. Where did this come from? It feels like it should be based on a book or something else, but it’s not. It’s just a thing.
David: It’s not based on a book. You can, as I did, take a deep dive into many, many books about spies in the ’70s, abouty the American Embassy and the British Embassy during the Cold War. There’s a lot of sources that give a window into what this world is. There was an idea that kept coming up when I became interested in, and just to predate even that, my interest in just the aesthetics of the ’70s and the Cold War. It came out of a trip I took in my 20s to Prague and Budapest and Berlin.
You just can see there’s a communism museum in Prague and the DDR museum in Berlin. The aesthetic of this time is such a weird version of what American pop culture looked like through this weird prism. I just was really captivated. If you come to my house, you will see I have a large mural on my wall about the second and third dogs in space from the USSR. I have weird old watches. I love this look and this feel. For me, I would read these books.
The idea that kept coming up again and again is that although maybe film and television, Cold War-era film and television made it seem like spy operations were happening with some success, the Americans and the British really couldn’t run a spy operation in Moscow. They just couldn’t. They tried to. They would be followed everywhere. I think that idea of it was a desperate time where they’d be willing to try anything was something that Susanna and I started talking about.
From there, the most ethereal way I sometimes think of writing is that sometimes it is just there. It is almost behind a wall. As you start naming a character and just finding details of it, it really took form. For us, we just started talking through these characters, and then everything became very clear very fast.
John: The logline of the show is set in 1977. It’s following two secretaries who are working at the American embassy in Moscow. They become spies after their husbands die in mysterious circumstances. The engine of the show, at least at the start, is them trying to figure out what actually happened to their husbands. That’s the logline. What was the actual pitch? What did you actually pitch to people? Did you write this first? Did you go in and pitch to Universal? How did this all come together?
Susanna: This was a really interesting and very singular experience of having a bunch of general meetings after Spy Who Dumped Me, where people were looking for us to do the TV version of Spy Who Dumped Me. We didn’t want to do exactly that. We didn’t want to do something quite as comedic. We didn’t want to do something broad. I had a general meeting at a network that is not Peacock.
David: That doesn’t exist anymore.
Susanna: No longer exists. That shall not be named.
David: It was Quibi.
Susanna: Exactly. The executive said, “Do you have anything that’s similar to Spy Who Dumped Me?” I said, “Not exactly, but David and I had been just batting around the idea of what if there were these two women in this era and they became spies, but it’s a friendship story, but it’s a little bit more grounded in terms of the tone, but also more action.” She said, “We’ll buy that.” She said, “We know we’re not the coolest place to sell a show.”
David: We know Quibi is not the coolest.
[laughter]
Susanna: She said, “I know on the downside, we’re not the coolest place to sell a show. On the upside, you don’t have to pitch it to anyone else. If we don’t do it, we’ll give it back to you, and we won’t be assholes about it.” After having pitch fatigue about trying to sell everything else and just the amount of time you waste or spend with maybe limited rewards, the idea of just getting a yes and being able to actually just go write the thing and not have to spend six months, it was such an appealing thing that we just said yes.
David: Absolutely.
John: Why is that such an exception? Because I never hear that story. It makes so much sense from both sides. From your side, you don’t want to pitch to every place. You just want to go to the one place that will actually maybe do it that feels right. From their side, they don’t want a bidding war. It’s the right idea. If it did go out further, they might lose it.
Susanna: I know. I really admired just her autonomy in saying that. She wasn’t the head of the network or anything. She just said, yes, we’ll buy that as opposed to needing a bidding war to tell her that it’s worth buying.
John: Exactly.
Susanna: We just took the yes, and we wrote it. We had a great experience developing. Then that network folded into a different network. We wrote backup scripts. We were many years spending waiting to see if this would go at that network. Ultimately, it didn’t. We reshopped it with multiple scripts and a Bible and a chap.
John: Multiple scripts that you’d written because you never had rooms together?
David: We just had one script. We had one script. Then we had figured out what the rest of the show would be. This was deep pandemic because I remember I was house sitting for my in-laws when we pitched this to Peacock. I think we only pitched around three places. Other people had heard the premise, and it wasn’t for them. We couldn’t–
Susanna: Mostly because it was an original period piece, and everyone says, “Don’t try to sell that.”
David: It was very scary because this is, again, what people tell you never to do right now. Period. End. Original ideas are both not things that people tell you to try to sell, and we pitched to peacock.
Susanna: Let’s dig into that a little bit more. You’re pitching the show, but the script is already written. At what point are they reading the script versus you pitching first and they’re reading afterward? Because I’m going through this with a project that’s already written as well. Were they reading the script first, and then you could answer specific questions about the show, or are you pitching broad strokes? Did you have–
Susanna: These details are so fuzzy for me because it’s been so long.
David: I’ve done both versions of this. I’ve pitched shows in the past and then handed them the script at the end of it. I’m almost positive they’ve read the script before, and then we pitched.
Susanna: I think because they were inheriting a bunch of ideas already, we shared those ideas, I think.
David: Yes. Then also because what we’re going to talk about is tone. I don’t like pitching tone. I think tone is a really– it is such a vague thing to pitch. It’s–
Susanna: Trying to describe why a joke is funny.
David: Try to describe something, and then also just having to find a comp, and then the comp might not be right. I think that we gave them all the script and we pitched the show. I think at that point, because this is just what television is now, we had many seasons of ideas. We pitched the first season in detail and then said, “Here’s where we would go with season two, and here’s where we would go with season three.” Yes. It was pretty elaborate.
John: The show is visually very distinct and interesting. Were you bringing visuals to the pitch to show them what it would look like and what it would feel like, or was it just talking?
Susanna: Oh, yes, we did. Part of the idea behind the aesthetic of the show is that, like David was saying, there was an explosion of color and pattern. When you see Cold War content, mostly it’s really dramatic, and it’s really dreary-looking. There isn’t summertime, and there aren’t flowers, and there aren’t people with lively patterns on their clothes. The reality is, looking at pictures of people in that time, there’s so much vibrancy to it, in an imitation of American pop culture in a way.
We really wanted to do a loudly colorful look.
John: Yes, [unintelligible 00:12:06].
Susanna: Yes, so it could still have the muscularity of a spy thing, but also the fun of just people wanting to watch things that pop, because it was actually how a lot of the world looked. Yes, that was what we wanted to show in the deck. We wanted to say, this isn’t a dreary, depressing thing. Not only do we not want the tone to be that on the page, but we also want you to know that this is going to be a fun show to watch with lots of a feast for the senses when you’re looking at the clothes and the design and all that.
David: I think for me and Susanna, sometimes you hear people use the word entertaining almost pejoratively. Entertaining is the kind of show that those are the shows you fold your laundry to. They’re not the serious, important shows.
John: They’re lean-back shows rather than lean-in shows, yes.
David: I don’t feel like that is true in the media that we grew up with, the movies we love, the television we love. It just is how film and television has become a little bit bifurcated now. I think we are always trying to lead with being entertaining, and part of that is trying to be visually bold, but also to try to be as significant as we hope to be. To not make it light, to not be soft, to have the emotions real, to try to work to the top of our abilities, but also to not bore an audience. I think being visually bold comes hand-in-hand with that idea.
John: You get the yes from Universal for Peacock?
David: For Peacock, and then went to Universal.
John: It’s always so complicated. Are you going to the studio, or are you going to the network?
Susanna: Yes. We didn’t have a studio on at our first buyer, and so we came to Peacock clean of that. We did bring on a producer in the interim between parting ways with this other Network and shopping it around. I brought on Pacesetter, who had produced this Gillian Flynn show that I directed a couple of episodes of Utopia for Amazon. I had a good experience working with her. I floated it to her and said, “Can you–” She was doing a lot of commercial but elevated stuff, and I thought that she’d be a good match. With her, she became our partner, and then we had her on the journey since then. UTB came on.
David: We went right to networks, and then the networks laid it off to the studios. When we pitched to Peacock, we pitched, among others, to Alex Sepiel, who is somebody who we just knew forever. You lived in a Melrose–
Susanna: He was my neighbor in a hipster, downtrodden version of Melrose Place when we were in our 20s, where we just-
John: Yes, we all have those.
Susanna: -had gross, slummy apartments and a sketchy landlord who was running from the law. He and I were on a trivia team together every Monday. I knew him really from way back. Every time I’ve pitched to him since, it’s like there’s a legitimate familiarity there of just we know too many of each other’s dirty secrets from that time. Anyway, having him as our executive has been really fun. It was fun to work with him because we just know him. He’s a peer. He’s the person who shares our sensibilities, our taste.
Susanna: You have this deal to be making it at Peacock Universal. You have a script written. You need to write backup scripts. Then, at a certain point with backup scripts, you get the order to finish writing everything and to go to a series. How does it work? Did you ever have a room? How did it all fit together?
David: If it were so simple. We sold this in deep pandemic, and it just took time. Basically, between selling it in whatever 2020, 2021, where we got what they call the cast contingent pickup, which happened on the eve of the actor strike.
Susanna: On the eve of the strike. It all took a while.
David: It all took a while. This ultimately just became years. We were paid at different points to do two more scripts. Then we also just were waiting around. We wrote two more after that, just betting on ourselves and assuming that the show would eventually get picked up.
Susanna: We got the cast contingent pickup as we were waiting for actor offer. Actually, we were waiting for an actor deal to close. We’re like, if the deal doesn’t close, it’s not picked up, but it probably will. Then they’re going to be rushing us so fast to get these scripts ready. We should–
John: Just do it.
Susanna: Even though we were grumbling about it, we were like, “We should just write these ourselves.”
David: I think at that point-
Susanna: We had Amelia.
David: -we had Amelia, and we were just making her deal. We just wrote two more scripts. Then–
John: There’s five scripts as you’re coming into–
David: Yes. We did do a writer’s room because we believe in writer’s rooms, but also because we had– This is a spy show with a lot of heavy plotting that we were just doing ourselves piecemeal over the course of many years. We just wanted some smart, interesting people to vet the plot, but also vet the characters. We wanted to build to a really satisfying ending and set up everything that we need to in hopes of a new season.
Susanna: We also felt like maybe if I was going to be directing the first couple of episodes, that we might get in a situation where they would send me over there to start working on crap, and we’d be separated. We just wanted to have as much of it buttoned up as we could before I left.
David: Fortunately, it didn’t happen. We had everything written by the time we started.
John: Eight episodes, right?
David: Eight episodes.
John: Eight episodes. It’s written before you go. Are you block shooting it? How are you figuring out the best ways to do that?
Susanna: Well, I want to say one thing, which I think we can admit now because it all worked out, which is that we definitely lied about having episodes four and five written when we–
David: Yes, and tell them.
Susanna: We had to be like, “We’re thinking it could be something like,” and we go through the whole process. I am glad we did it that way. It made us really interrogate those scripts. We had a lot secretly done.
David: We shot blocks. Yes, we shot two episodes at a time.
Susanna: I knew I wanted to do three or four, and we were trying to figure out– Normally, if it wasn’t a show that I also wrote, I would come in and do the first two or three.
As we were in the writer’s room, my thought was, I knew I wanted to do the first couple. Then there was a mid-season episode that I just was personally really connected to. I knew I wanted to do that. We were like, how can we be creative? I was going to do a middle block so I could do that.
Then, as we started breaking the finale, it sounded like it was so much fun that I called Jessica during a lunch break, and I was like, “I’m going to be really annoyed if someone else directs the finale because now I love it. Can I do it?”
She’s like, “Yes.” Anyway, I ended up basically being there the whole time more or less. It was fun having the experience of breaking the episodes and deciding there which ones. I got attached to different episodes as a director, too, which was nice.
John: Talk about your writer’s room. How did you pick writers you wanted to be in the room with you? Obviously, the two of you have a clear vision, a clear voice. Were you looking for people who complemented you in ways, things you weren’t particularly good at? What were the criteria, and how many writers did you end up ultimately bringing in?
David: It’s funny because we had this conversation a lot, and I’d been in a lot of rooms. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot of what to do and what not to do. Also, it was a thing that would keep me up at night before a room started because it’s like I’ve been in great rooms, I’ve been in not great rooms. I’m just like, “Oh God, I have so much pressure on myself of making sure that my room is one of the good rooms.”
John: It’s not just SNL, but also looking through your credits, you’ve been in some challenging rooms.
David: I’ve been in some challenging rooms, and every room I’ve been in, I’ve learned a ton, but also, yes, some were harder than others. One thing that I do feel strongly about from just witnessing it in other rooms is that I am not a huge fan of bringing in specialists. I’m not somebody who’s like, “Okay, we have comedy in the show, we have a mystery in the show. Let’s bring in a really good mystery person. Let’s bring in a really good comedy person.” Eventually, you want people to be able to write the show, and you want people to write the show fully.
Selfishly, we just wanted to bring in writers who at least had a sensibility like us. We wanted to bring in people who had different experiences and different perspectives, and a diversity of types of people. At the end of the day, we wanted people to be able to execute a script that could both have the banter that is emblematic of our show, have the emotional grounding that is emblematic of our show, and be able to speak to the twist. I read a ton of samples, and I met with great people. They met with great people that I would have hired, and I couldn’t afford.
There was a lot of shaping to find the puzzle pieces. What was really exciting putting together is that a lot of the writers just still came about being able to have a sensibility that was shared with different skill sets. We had a writer who was just really good at making a map of who knows what, when, and the board. That’s just not how my mind works. It was just really helpful to see it. Other writers who just really could hook into the emotions of the friendship, drama, and in a way that felt very personal, that we were just able to use there. We built a really nice family, a very small group of writers in a very short amount of time, and all people that we care a lot about.
John: Did the two of you ever disagree in front of the writers?
David: Yes, of course.
Susanna: Yes, probably.
David: Susanna and I have a sibling–
Susanna: We’re very like, “Shut up. I don’t want to do that.”
David: Yes. It’s also helpful to have your ideas challenged and to be able to back it up.
Susanna: The dynamic of the room is like Dave has so much more room experience than I do. At the same time, within a hierarchy of a room, it takes a while for people to know that they can challenge the showrunner’s ideas sometimes. It’s maybe like a learning curve with people knowing that it’s going to go over well if there’s a meritocracy of ideas in the room, and that’s how David is wired. Until they learn that, there’s a certain fear around pushing back on stuff, even if we want the ideas challenged.
Weirdly, although I didn’t have as much room experience as many of the writers that were under us, for a while, it was like I was the only person sometimes who would be like, “No, no,” because other people are just not sure if they can do that in a writer’s room just because of how those rooms work. We really do share tastes pretty specifically. It’s very rare that we have a disagreement about how something is executed. It’s pretty amazing, actually. I’ve worked with a lot of people, but there’s always a sense of if I have to miss a meeting or miss something, I know you’re going to make the decisions I would make, which is a relief, I think, especially if I’m off directing something. I don’t know. I know you’ll catch the thing if I miss it.
David: It was helpful in casting, too. It was just being able to see. Clearly, we had the same vision in our head of who the characters were because we would definitely be like, “Oh, of course, it is this person.”
John: I have almost no TV writing room experience, so I have all these showrunners who come through, and they tell me their stories. A thing that’s always struck me as strange is that you hire writers based on how good they are at writing. You’re reading samples, and you want really good writers. David, you were saying you want writers who can write the whole show, and yet for the weeks and weeks of the show, they’re not writing. There’s very little writing. You’re just using their brain. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that weird that the people aren’t writing more during the course of the writer’s room?
Susanna: Especially in this room, because we had written so much. We were like, “Okay, there’s two available episodes for all of y’all to do.”
David: Yes. It is very weird. Also, when I think about other rooms that I’ve been in and rooms that I had no hiring and firing power and rooms where I was just an observer in, I think that people who are incredibly skilled at the politics of a room or just how to have a great disposition and have everybody like them or have really good ideas, all really great. If you can’t deliver a script, you’re toast. Ultimately, that is what the hard part is.
I would say that what makes you good in a room is being in a room more, but what should get you in the room is being able to write the script. A lot of the process of running a show is going back to my job’s past and where I didn’t do a good job, or where I would have done differently, or where I can see my place in it. I remember in a very, very early job, a very famous producer who I won’t name, but he has a voice like this.
John: It was Alfred Hitchcock, wasn’t it?
David: It was Alfred Hitchcock. He gave negative feedback about me that his certainty does not match with his experience at all. I took it to heart, and I really tried to internalize it. I didn’t know any other way to be in a room, but feel that I had to feel strongly about my ideas. Now, running a show, you can’t just be like, “Meh, it can be this, it can be that.” You have to be certain. It is a process of just knowing that, aha, I have the solution. Also, I am the 17th person down on the hierarchy of this room. How do I do that? It takes time.
I think now I absolutely love helping other friends with their stuff, coming up with ideas because I have no personal investment other than just wanting to do it. It’s not like if you don’t listen to my idea that it’s going to hurt my heart. I absolutely don’t care. I’ve now done so many versions of what a room is and what breaking a story is and what fixing a story is that I have all of that ammunition. I only have that because I’ve been in a lot of rooms, and I’ve only gotten those rooms because I was able to write the script.
John: Let’s talk about what is so specific and unexpected for me in your show is the tone in that, first off, it’s a period show that almost feels like it could have been shot in the time. Some of that is how Susanna you chose to direct it. You’re going for that pillar box format, so rather than widescreen, it’s square screen. Obviously, everything looks right and feels right, and Budapest stands in really well for Moscow.
The camera movements and everything else, it tells you that we’re in a ’70s place without a shot. The show shot in that time wouldn’t have looked like that. It would have looked crappy and then this looks great. That is part of the tone. Also, the comedic tone between the actors and how the world is presented and how the stakes are presented is just a little lighter than the equivalent other spy show would be. How really did you know that and how did you anchor into that?
Susanna: I think something that we’ve always been interested in is if most spy movies are on plot most of the time, if you went home with those people at the end of the day, they would still call their moms and fight with their husbands. They would still have a life where they’re not acting in character as spy. I think there is a truth to that. We just wanted to shift where the lens is sometimes to that. It naturally has the other parts of a person’s personality that come forward when they’re not on the job in a high-stakes situation are by nature, lighter if their job is high stakes. We’re interested in that.
If it feels true and grounded enough, then it doesn’t feel like the tone is confused. I think sometimes with a mixed tone and what scares people about it is people don’t want it to feel like you’re in two different shows and hopefully if it all feels grounded.
John: You feel like you’re one show, but it’s a very specific unusual show to sort of be in. The Americans is a great show where you have spies who are in their home lives. The difference is they’re incredibly competent. They see attention, even like they’re the best of their game and they’re still struggling with it. Here you have two women who are new to all this. They’re fish out of water as they’re getting started in this. That is essentially a comedic environment to be in. They’re in over their heads, which is relatable but also fun, but just that’s not a thing we see so often. We saw it in Spy Who Dumped Me, yes.
David: Both of us bring a lot to our work because I think this is just how we are as people in the world. I consider myself a funny person. I consider most people I surround myself with as funny people. If I am in a really tense situation, if I’m going into surgery, if I’m going into a funeral, if I have some sort of crisis in my life, I don’t know that part of me is still, I’m putting it away. People are still making jokes. This is another lesson I learned from actually, when I was very briefly on Mad Men was that the rule of writing comedy in a drama versus writing comedy in a comedy is that in comedy, other people in the scene are servicing your joke.
In a drama, there could be a funny person. The other person’s purpose in that scene is not to set up your joke. People are funny because this is the world that they’re in. Twila, in our show, Haley Lu Richardson’s character, is somebody who uses humor as armor in her life. That is just such a true thing for so many people who have-
Susanna: Not for me.
[laughter]
David: -had really difficult lives as she has, that is who she is going to be, and that is how she’s going to deal with crisis. B is very neurotic, not like you. [laughs]
Susanna: Not like you.
David: She’s going to spin out, and-
John: She’s going to overthink, yes.
David: -she’s going to overthink when she is in crisis. These are just true things that these people are going to do, and it is still going to be enjoyable. The fact that these are also people who have jobs in an office, and also Moscow is a really weird place, particularly in the USSR, and that is funny. We are able to try to live in a world that still feels like the world. That the stakes are high and that when there is a life or death moment, it was very important to us that the final sequence of our pilot, which I won’t spoil, but that it should really, really feel extremely dangerous, but there are still jokes before them, and there’s still awkwardness within it. Also, you better be scared.
John: I want to circle back to something you raised through, but was actually such a good point. I want to underline it. You’re talking about Mad Men and how, in a comedy, the characters are there to set up the joke for someone to spike. In a drama, that would feel really weird. There’s just an expectation about how people can be funny in a drama that’s just so different than a comedy, and so just a really smart distinction there. Thank you for that.
David: Oh, you’re very welcome.
[laughter]
John: A few last things. Looking through the script, it has ad breaks, and you feel them in the show also. Is that something that was always there? Did you ever consider taking them out? Because people were watching on a Peacock. They might have ads. They might not have ads.
David: We didn’t write them with ad breaks. We were asked to put them in.
John: Storytelling power. At what point did you know who could actually drive scenes by themselves? Because in the pilot, you established that Andrei can drive scenes by himself, which was a surprise when that happened. Talk to me about when you decided who could hold scenes by themselves.
David: Perspective-wise? Behind the curtain. We added that scene of Andrei late. That was the last scene of the entire series that we shot because we were looking at the already cut pilot. We knew how scary Andrei was because we knew. Because we wrote in the script, this is the scariest person you’ve ever seen.
Susanna: We knew what would happen in episode two.
David: We knew what would happen in episode two, but we needed to have the audience feel that when we see him at the end of the episode, that we are scared to death of his presence. We cast a fantastic but unknown actor, Artjom Gilz. If we had cast a famous movie star who was famous for being a villain, then we would already know– if Christoff Waltz walked in, then we wouldn’t have had to do that. We gave him perspective. I think we just learned more and more about our characters and what they brought, and who gets their own scenes.
Dane, Adrian Lester plays him, and he’s being Twila’s boss. He is somebody who is elusive in a lot of the shows. Part of what he brings is mystery. We don’t know what his life is really like. We don’t know what his secrets are. We have a sense that he has secrets. We really wanted to build several episodes before we could see him be vulnerable and display some of his secrets, and we get a sense of who that man behind the curtain is. For the first chunk of the season, we want to see him as this all-knowing, unknowable person that he projects to be in Twila. The audience know that that couldn’t be true because no one is like that.
John: The rules of the world you’ve established. No one is especially competent. It’s not like they’re bumblingly competent, but they have very limited power to do things. Literally, they can’t turn on the power to their own building, which is established. Let’s wrap up by talking about Budapest because I think you probably knew that this was going to be shooting in Budapest or someplace like it from the start. It’s not a show where you’re forced to go to Budapest. That’s the place where you go to shoot.
Susanna: It wasn’t Budapest for Boston.
John: Yes. That’s the place you go to do Moscow. It’s a reasonable place. Talk to us about shooting there, pros and cons, things you loved, things you learned, shooting there in 2025.
David: Just to get it out of the way, they have a bad government, and they passed some really bad laws while we were there. That did make shooting there complicated. Our studio’s lawyers were really great and helpful and supportive in just trying to make sure that everybody felt safe because they passed some anti-gay laws while we were there. It was very actually moving at the very end of our production. The Pride parade, which was a thing that they banned. The people of the city did it anyway. It was–
Susanna: It came in from other European cities. It was the biggest. It was on the cover of the New York Times.
David: Multiple and it’s larger than it had ever been. It is a blue city in a red country. Our crew, for the most part, was very progressive and lovely, but it’s complicated.
John: Are our crews in Budapest drawn from around Europe, or really, it’s a Budapest crew?
David: They’re Hungarian.
Susanna: They’re mostly Hungarian. Yes. Typically, they have a homegrown film industry of their own that is a different thing, but then they really are home to many– the huge economic part of the country is the film and TV that shoots there, mostly American and UK productions. They have an incredible brain trust and really skilled, top-of-their-game people. Actually, some expats. Our sound guy on our show, who also did Spy Who Dumped Me, did The Martian, and did all that, but he’s an American guy. He went to UT Austin and was living out in LA, and someone said come do a movie in Budapest in the ’90s. Then he just stayed in Budapest and married a Hungarian and had a family there.
There’s a lot of people there that are like– There’s expats living there. Then it’s a city that’s very used to hosting people who want to be insulated in a bubble of a film. It’s not aggressively thrusting you into the culture if you want to be staying at the Four Seasons and whatever. Not on our budget. You can. It has those amenities. I think it’s user-friendly. At the same time, if you stay there more than a couple of weeks, you just can feel the undercurrent of what’s going on in that, politically and otherwise, in the city.
David: It’s also beautiful. There is so much aesthetic that we needed from our show that we had sets, and our sets were beautifully built, and we were on a stage. I would say we were probably 60%, 70% location. A lot of those locations felt like we were in time capsules. We were in these beautiful old buildings that just looked incredible, that we just simply would not be able to accomplish in another place.
Susanna: I had shot Small Light in Prague. We looked into a couple of places like Prague and Berlin. Yes, just as things developed. I think it would have been more expensive, and we would have had a lot less production value, and we would have probably had to send a satellite crew to Budapest anyway, or a place like it. We just decided not to do that. It’s the same argument or the same debate, I guess, about shooting in a state that passes draconian laws here. You’re like, well, I want to make my thing. I want to employ the people. I don’t want to punish the crews that are living there for living there. Also, do I want to make a statement, which seems important to do? I don’t know.
It’s really challenging to figure that out. We can’t shoot everything in. I don’t even know what country to name that isn’t problematic now, so never mind. Greenland. No, just kidding. Venezuela?
John: No.
[laughter]
John: It’s a challenging time overall. Congratulations on the show. I really just dug it.
David: Thank you.
John: As this episode’s coming out, it’s just about to debut on Peacock, right? I think it’s two days later.
David: Two days later, great. Although I’m sad Craig isn’t here, I like that on this episode, as far as television shows created by people who went to high school in Frield, New Jersey, about the USSR, we’re the top one on this episode.
John: This episode. Very nice. Let’s answer some listener questions. We have one here from Richard.
Drew: “I find I can look at a scene on a particular day and think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written, and then two days later I pick it back up and think, ‘oh, that’s actually not that bad.’ Do you guys get this too? If so, how can we ever truly trust our own judgment?”
John: I rarely do I read something and say, oh, this is absolutely awful. Honestly, the reverse happens more like, well, I absolutely loved something when I wrote it, and then I go back and it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so–”
David: It’s bloated and dumb and degressive. I think what I can relate to is I finish something and I think I’m happy with it. It did what I needed to do, but I do want a set of eyes on it. I think for that, you just need to have a very small brain trust of people that you really respect and trust. If you have a partner, if you have a friend, somebody who won’t lie to you if it’s bad, will also be meaningful if they tell you, this is really good. You did a really good job.
I think sometimes that is helpful. I also think that it is a trap to keep going back and reading the scene that you wrote a few days ago, because if you are somebody whose head does that, who looks at it and then hates everything, you’re really going to have a hard time writing that next scene. Just try to finish a version of it.
Susanna: Yes, I would say try to finish it. Then at whatever point you feel comfortable hearing it read out loud, that’s really useful too. We’ve had readings of scripts that we’ve written just for ourselves in Dave’s garage. It’s really incredibly informative every time.
John: The challenge, Richard, is you’re always, you’re both the creator and the critic. At the time you were writing it, you were the creator, and you had this feeling about it. Then you’re also the critic, and that critic is a separate part of your brain. Maybe your critic is an asshole. Maybe your critic is just not good. David, you were saying earlier about how you love helping out a person, helping out a writer, just contributing. Maybe your inner critic is just not actually recognizing what’s good and how to improve it. It’s just seeing all the flaws. Maybe just cultivate that critic a little bit more. Maybe talking to some other people about their work and being gracious with them will get you to be a little bit nicer to yourself.
Question from Daniel.
Drew: “I am a sophomore screenwriting student at an LA film school. I can tell my writing does get better with every script, but I’m not sure if I have that innate talent or ability you guys always speak about. Mainly because with every script where I say, I think I got it, I in fact do not have it. How did you guys realize that you have this innate talent and how long did it take?”
Susanna: Well, just to speak to the first part, I just want to offer some wisdom from a book that I didn’t write called The Work of Art that came out recently. I think it’s Michael Cunningham who talks about the fact that he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as innate talent. It’s just having a personality that is so obsessively committed to something being good that it will just keep drilling down into something over and over and over until it becomes good. That, to him, is what makes a person skillful, not anything that they’re innately born with. I don’t know that I agree with that completely, but it did resonate with me that there’s an obsessiveness that people have, who I admire, that I think they share.
David: I think this question is very married to the previous question. First of all, definitely the stuff I wrote when I was in college, I wouldn’t share it now as a reflection of my best work, but there were moments throughout my adolescence or into college or into my early 20s where I would write a scene or a line or have an idea and it would excite me. It would be like, “Oh, that’s it. This is what I’m trying to do.” I couldn’t imagine not having any version of that and still being excited about writing.
I’ve got to assume, I’ve got to give the question, give her the benefit of the doubt that you must have had some sort of moment that excited you enough to start doing it. From there, yes, you just have to keep getting better, but you may have it. Also, a lot of very talented people worry that they don’t have that talent. That is also a very real thing that people–
John: Feeling impostor syndrome at this point in your early career is totally natural and reasonable and makes sense. You don’t know what you’re doing, and that’s true. I hope that in entering film school, you’re a sophomore now, people must have told you, “Oh, you’re a good writer,” and you’ve had some external validation that, “Oh, you really know how to do this. This is good.” There’ve been some moments where you felt yourself like, “Oh, this was a good thing I wrote. I’m actually proud of this thing I did.” That’s foundational. That’s [unintelligible 00:42:14] that gets you going to the next one.
There’s this meme I saw this week about thinking of yourself as a verb rather than a noun, thinking of you as the person who writes rather than the end product. Maybe spend this next year really focusing on writing as the verb versus generating this thing and that thing and that thing and see if you like the actual process of doing it. We talk on the show so much about how writing sucks. It’s not a fun thing to do, but you make peace with it. You come to accept that it’s part of this process of getting to work that you’re really proud of. Maybe just focus a little bit more on that rather than the quality and see if you’re digging it.
Susanna: I also think there’s a lot of noise outside the world of just you and your laptop or your notebook or however you write, and that when the noise gets really loud, it can be really hard to just focus on the actual nugget of excitement that you have. I talk to friends a lot now as people talk about how hard the industry is, and there’s a ton of negativity in the air.
Whatever you have to do to trick your brain into just being excited about a thing and sitting down and doing the work, like John was saying, that’s the most important thing you can do, is just to stay optimistic and excited about whatever it is you’re working on and not let the outside voices or your own internal critic stop you from actually just producing things. Find the spark, whatever that is. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s really important [unintelligible 00:43:35]
John: In finding that spark, I think it’s also reasonable to say, if you decide this is not actually a thing you like, a thing you would enjoy, it’s okay to say no. It’s okay to find something else you really do love. You only have the one life, so do the thing that actually really excites you and you enjoy it. More than talking about an innate aptitude or something like you’re born with a certain talent, maybe you have a set of interests and things that you actually want to be spending your time doing, and if this isn’t it, that’s fine, that’s good. Go searching for what the thing is that you actually do really love.
David: This is probably a bigger conversation for a whole other episode of this show, but I’ve spent a lot of time lately wrestling with what is the point of this. Not that I think it is without a point, but as I am in a position to– I’m releasing something out into the world, which is very scary. I think about when I first moved to Los Angeles, when I first wanted to work in film and television, and I had this idea in my head that I wanted to manifest of sitting in a movie theater and seeing my name up there. That does not feel like what the goal is now, though I can’t necessarily pinpoint what it is.
I do like writing. I do like making things. It is also a thing that terrifies me. I think it is a really tricky thing for me, for all of us, people who’ve been doing this for decades, to make sense of why we’re doing it. If you are on the fence in your first years, that also might be a good sign that it– Also, just know that we are also wrestling with what the point is, because it’s complicated.
John: A question here from Carlos.
Drew: “A few weeks back, I partook in a pitching workshop with a former executive from a big production company. One thing this former executive said really rubbed me the wrong way. He told us to stop writing pilots. He said that today, a lot of executives will turn down series pitches if they have a pilot attached because they want to be involved in the development stage from the beginning. We should stop writing pilots and focus on just the story development, which broke me since writing pilots is what I enjoy most from series development. Is this something that’s actually happening? I know the situation is probably different over here in Mexico than on the other side of the border, but I still wanted to get your take on this.”
David: Really makes sense why this is a former executive.
Susanna: David and I both, we produce a lot of other writers. We try to really support a lot of pitches that are not just our own pitches. As a director, I take a lot of pitches out that I’m not the writer on. Really, every project is different. We’ve sold things that have a pilot. We’ve sold things that have a pitch. We’ve been dissuaded from having a pilot for one specific type of project that I just think it’s dangerous to get mired in any one dogmatic idea about how to do anything.
If you’re enjoying writing pilots and you’re writing things that you feel really represent your passions and that you’re good at, the worst thing that can happen is you get some producer that wants to take your show out and they say, “Okay, let’s send the pilot later. Let’s develop the story.” They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s such a tactical decision that shouldn’t be your problem. It should be the problem of the person who’s doing the selling and that should be your partner and not a person who’s trying to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. That’s my opinion.
David: I also think how can you tell someone, you as a beginner writer, you are a good writer and you are worth backing and gambling on if no one is able to read what you are executing. I think that, yes, perhaps for a very experienced writer who has a long track record, sure, you can pitch. I also think pitching is a scam, but it’s a scam that we all participate in because you are sitting in a room saying, “This is what this is going to be,” but you don’t–
I think I talked about this many, many episodes ago when we were last on Scriptnotes, is that I have taken out pitches that I just also needed to write the script first just so I knew what the characters sound like and I knew what the jokes were because I don’t really know any other way to do it. You’re just saying, “Trust me, this is what it’s going to be.” If you’re a writer, you should write.
Susanna: Also, if you are a newer writer and there isn’t something produced that people can look at as a sample of how you write and you’re just like, “I have all these ideas for the story,” they’re going to ask to see a writing sample. It’s such bad advice.
John: We don’t know where Carlos is at in his career, but the good thing about writing a pilot is that you wrote a script that can be a writing sample. Maybe this series, it’s not the best way to sell this series, but it’s something someone else can read and David and Susanna can staff you on their show. It’s a thing people can read.
Susanna: They’re going to ask to read something before they pay you to write something based on an outline of ideas of a show that doesn’t have a writing sample. I think it’s bad advice no matter where you are in your career, Carlos. That person should not have a career, and they don’t.
John: Let’s do one last question from Alex here. A common note I receive from coverage services is that I need to differentiate my character voices because they often sound the same. Do you have any tips for how to subtly differentiate character voices without falling into caricature-ish dialogue?
Susanna: Oh, we talk about this a lot.
John: What conclusions do you reach as you talk about it?
Susanna: Honestly, sometimes I think about my first writing class I took when I moved out to LA at 21 at Second City, sketch comedy writing class. We talked about the game of a character. It was for comedic writing, but we talk about it all the time. Each character has to have, in your mind, what is the laugh with and what is the laugh at about that person. My description of how I am is going to be different from my friend’s secret gossip about what’s annoying about me. You have to know what someone would say behind that person’s back, I think, and then write that person–
There are ways in which we all lack self-awareness. If there’s a certain game of that person, that person says things a million different ways because they use too many words to talk, or that person is really passive-aggressive generally. If you just have an idea about a person’s flaw, it can just make their writing specific. We try to do that in our show a lot, where we don’t want anyone to show up in a scene, even a side character in The Office, and not have a specific personality or a tick or a quirk. I don’t know.
David: First of all, it’s also not the absolute worst thing in the world if you have a really strong, specific voice. Yes, sure, that might be your style. It’s okay, particularly when you’re starting out, because every character is a version of you. I think the first time I really thought about this idea was Noah Baumbach’s first movie, Kicking and Screaming, because a character in it tells the other characters, “You all talk the same.”
Actually, they don’t. All those characters are really specific, and I actually don’t think you could interchange jokes from one character to another, but I think it was probably him being a little bit self-aware and self-conscious that these are all characters who are in a very similar life stage, who have a very–
Susanna: The same education [unintelligible 00:50:28]
John: [unintelligible 00:50:29]
David: You can also just look at how it looks on the page. Some people are more verbose. Some people speak more simply, but yes, you should never be able to move a joke from one character to another and have it work the same way. Everyone should have their own voice and meaning, and that was what I was talking about earlier, that I have this ethereal belief of writing that everything exists behind a wall and you have to find it, and I think that is truly characters. That is most vivid with characters. If you start writing their dialogue and you start seeing them, you start hearing them, then you are really going to get a sense of who they are and what their specificity is.
Susanna: The caricature thing, it’s okay if the first draft, they feel a little pushed or a little broad. You’re either dialing something up or down. This is such a basic thing to say, but if it seems like how people would actually talk, or you could imagine a person in your life who would talk or act the way a character is talking or acting, sometimes we do things that are a little over the top as people in life. Just as a director reading scripts that other people write and thinking about directing them, there’s a first script problem that David and I talk about sometimes where just the main character feels like the avatar for the writer.
It’s usually a person who’s more passively observing the world’s hypocrisies and they’re witty and funny and everyone around them is an idiot. I’m speaking in broad terms, but that character, to me, it’s not that interesting. I wouldn’t know how to tell an actor what they’re playing, really. I recently read a script where that was the problem and it was by a young writer. I just thought, “I bet this writer is in their 20s, and I bet this is what amount of life experience they’ve had, and I can feel that in the way it’s written.” In that case, it was a really funny script. There was just a glibness to the writing, and it felt like the writer was punching up their own best joke.
John: I absolutely hear you there.
Susanna: To me, usually those are the characters that, if it’s the main character leading you through the journey and that character is just a little bit of a cypher except for their elevated wit, it feels like a first script to me.
John: Specific advice for Alex here, I feel like maybe you’re having a hard time listening and hearing how people really are different. Assuming this is a fair note that you’re getting from multiple people, that your characters are all sounding the same, I think what you might try to do with your script is just cast it in your mind. Cast actual actors in all those places and imagine how those actors are actually saying those lines. Doing that may give you a sense of, “Oh, there’s actually so many more variables I could be dialing in here.”
If I cast this as Christopher Walken versus Woody Harrelson or– what different choices would make sense given who’s actually going to be doing these lines? That may give you a sense there because you might think, “Oh, no,” and I’m just impersonating someone else’s voice, but you’re not really. Words you’re writing in a script is not going to sound like that specific actor.
Susanna: Whoever plays the part is going to be–
John: They’re going to bring their own specificity, but if you write it for one specific actor, another actor can play that part and it will feel unique and different and it won’t sound like all the other characters. That may be a first good exercise for Alex to try.
Susanna: Real people too. If you have an uncle who is-
John: Oh, totally.
Susanna: -always drunk, I don’t know, whatever, a drunk uncle, whatever you have. You can just– basing it on someone, whether it’s your imagination of an actor or some person in your life that if you were asked in a private booth to talk about that person, you would be able to describe them, good and bad.
David: I think the other way that a lot of newer writers get into the trap of just making characters feel similar, which is another way of saying generic, is that their supporting players, their one-line parts are extremely generic. I would try to avoid too many police officer number twos and just a bunch of people that you are trying to differentiate between the characters who are important and the characters who aren’t. If everyone feels like they have interiority and if everyone feels like they have some sort of vividness, then it does sort of come through everywhere in your script.
I think there’s a lot of– Cameron Crowe does this really well. The Coen brothers do this really well. I would look at movies and just really focus on the people who are in it for one scene and are really popping as a great way to just specify everybody in your script.
John: It may also be helpful to look at some movies that you really enjoy and love, and watch them while you’re reading the script, and really get a sense of like, “Oh, it’s not just the actor’s performance. It really was the words on the page that got to that performance.” That may also remind you like, “Oh, yes, dialogue, it does start here, and characters are really found in these words I’m choosing to have them say.”
Susanna: I think also with the TV show, we were asked the other day what [unintelligible 00:55:20] about story engines for a show going forward. One thing about our show which circles back to your original question about tone, John, was that we have a married couple on the show and we sort of tried to make their marriage really specific even though they’re not the leads of the show and it’s not a show about a marriage. They’re just people in the office, but we ended up wanting more and more and more of them.
If every character has something in a dynamic or in their voice that feels like, “Oh, I want to watch that person in a million different situations,” then it tells a buyer or whoever, if it’s in a TV format, “I want to watch more episodes of those people,”-
John: Totally.
Susanna: -and it just encourages them to see more of a long life or whatever it is you’re pitching.
John: You look at The Office and-
Susanna: Yes, exactly.
John: -just how deep, and how full that room was of very specific voices, that you felt like, “Oh, you could follow any one of these people, and it would be incredibly entertaining.”
Susanna: I think comedies are a good way to study it too. I was going to recommend Jury Duty, which is so largely-
John: Love it.
Susanna: -improvised, but each person-
John: Yes, it’s so well done.
Susanna: -is so specific. You couldn’t swap anyone’s lines with anyone else’s lines.
John: No.
Susanna: That’s on the broader side. I don’t know what tone you’re writing, but yes, it’s useful to try to do that with everybody.
John: All right. It’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is an article by Adam Mastroianni. I’ve linked to him a zillion times. I feel like I should be paid a referral fee here. This blog post you did was so useful for the start of a new year, called So You Want to De-bog Yourself. De-bogging, basically, you’re stuck in a rut. You’re facing a problem, a real-life problem, not a story problem, a real-life problem. What I think Adam is so good at doing is shining a spotlight on certain aspects of a situation and giving it a name so you can actually identify, “Oh, that’s what I’m doing.”
Two examples here. First off is stroking the problem, which is like, “I’ve got a big problem. Man, I have this big problem. I have this thing and this thing and this thing.” You’re not actually trying to solve it. You’re just stroking it. You’re basically just acknowledging there’s a problem here and you’re telling everybody about this problem, but you’re not actually trying to solve it. Stroking the problem is a thing I’m going to probably start using a lot when people express their issues to me. The second thing he calls out is the try harder fallacy, which is basically like, “Oh, man, that didn’t really work at all. You really need to try harder next time.” Almost never do you actually need to try harder.
[laughter]
John: You probably were trying as hard as you possibly could. You have no shortage of effort you put into it. You gave it everything. There’s no secret reserve of energy that you could have– It just didn’t work. You’re going to need to try a different way to do it because trying harder is not going to get there. It’s two of many examples in this really good post about getting out of the muck that you find yourself stuck in.
It’s for real life, but I guess it’s our characters too, because our characters are often trapped in situations. If we as writers are telling them to try harder or to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that’s probably not going to actually really work. A good post and I’ll put a link in the show notes. David, what do you have for us?
David: I have a few connected cool things. My first artistic passion was drawing and painting and cartooning and illustration. My origin story as a writer at all is because I wanted to draw comic strips and political cartoons. Anything artistic, if you don’t use those muscles, they atrophy. I’ve been drawing with my children. I realize I’m not as good as I used to be. I’m a really big New Year’s resolution person. My New Year’s resolution is trying to draw or paint or something every day, either with a pencil and paper, pen and ink or my iPad. The essential iPad drawing program is Procreate.
There are a few companies that make brushes and color systems and fake paper to really emulate some beautiful mid-century comic book style or illustration style. Retro Supply and True Grit are two companies that do that. Retro Supply also has a lot of great videos on how to draw heads and color theory. That’s really great.
Then the other thing that is keeping me honest with my New Year’s resolution is the International Society of Character Artists, of which I am a paying member, does something called caricature resolution in January. Caricature artists all over the world, from beginners to masters, draw the same celebrity every day of the month-
John: Oh, that’s great.
David: -of January. You can find this by searching for the #caricatureresolution2026 on Instagram or on Facebook. They also have an Instagram page. It’s just a really fun way to just see what different character artists are doing, and also if it’s something you want to try whenever this airs, you can catch up.
John: What was today’s celebrity?
David: Today was Bette Midler.
John: Oh, great. She feels like a natural person. [crosstalk]
David: She’s got a lot of hair, a lot of big features.
John: That’s really great. The other things you recommended, those are plugins or things you put into Procreate?
David: Yes. You can download the brush packs and the fake paper and the color systems.
John: Great. I love it. Susanna, what do you have for us?
Susanna: I saw an incredible independent film-
John: Please.
Susanna: -that I wanted to talk about. It’s this movie called The Plague. It’s about 12-year-old boys at a water polo camp in the early aughts. I watched it because I’m on the jury of the DGA first-time feature committee. This time of year, I always get a packet of movies that either are just coming out, haven’t come out yet, or I just wouldn’t have necessarily heard of because they don’t necessarily have the marketing push. I so relate to that that I feel really strongly about seeing all these movies and getting excited about them and plugging them.
This one was really incredible. Just the writing and directing was really impressive and singular and specific, but also just having known kids that age at that time, just the zeitgeist is so perfectly captured.
John: That’s great.
Susanna: The music is perfect. The performances, which are almost all 12-year-olds. Joel Edgerton plays the coach. It’s about hazing and boys at that age. It’s really exceptional, so I recommend that movie highly.
John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Matthew did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We are low in the folder on listener outros, in part because, Drew, people are sending through outros that don’t have the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yes, very important. Basically, that is one of our only rules.
Susanna: That is it. That is what you need to do.
David: Can you just clip John just saying that and use that as an outro?
John: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
John: We definitely will. We definitely will. Send us through your outros. We’d love to have more of those, ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you get books. Get your Scriptnotes book.
David: I bought it for a bunch of young writers, and they probably really enjoyed it.
John: Hooray. Fantastic. We just got the British copies here, which are slightly narrower than the US copies, which is lovely.
David: They write a little narrower.
Susanna: It’s so pretentious.
John: It’s so pretentious. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on taste. Susanna, David, it’s so nice to have you back here.
Susanna: Thank you. This was really fun. Thanks so much.
[Bonus Segment]
David: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
John: Okay.
Susanna: Thank you.
John: Thank you, David. Thank you for bringing us back in here. Drew asked this question. [unintelligible 01:03:38] wrote in about Taste.
Drew Marquardt: I argue often with my friends about old movies, and I get accused of having bad taste, and I was wondering if there’s a method to acquiring good taste. Also, is there a definition to good taste?
John: All right, taste. Let’s talk about taste. My initial instinct when I thought about taste is I often refer back to Ira Glass has this piece about taste where it describes how you develop taste before you develop talent. There’s this conflict between the two of them, and it goes through things. I brought this up, and then I realized, oh, Susanna, you know Ira.
Susanna: I married him, and that is how I acquired good taste.
David: That’s your good taste?
[laughter]
John: That’s how you get good taste, is marry Ira Glass.
Susanna: Yes, I’m goal-oriented. I always strive to have good taste-
John: Absolutely.
Susanna: -and I just went right to the top.
John: I knew I liked you for that. Let’s talk about taste because [unintelligible 01:04:27] concern here is that they have bad taste. It’s like, “Well, no, you have your own taste. You have your own specific–”
Susanna: Who’s saying this person has bad taste? What’s their taste?
John: That’s crazy. Developing your taste and understanding your taste is, I think, a crucial stage of development. It’s basically figuring out what do I like, and then more importantly, why do I like it? What is it about this genre, about this movie, about these things that spark for me that I really enjoy? What is it about these things that I don’t enjoy that are elements of that? It’s worth some time to think about what are those things, and what is a unique fingerprint for you that defines what is good to you?
David: I think that you go through this journey in your life where when you were young, there’s definitely things you don’t like. You look back at this movie I loved when I was seven, and it is garbage, but it definitely fell within what you enjoyed then. Maybe that is something that as you get older, because I think the next step, once you start getting a little– if you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you’re a little bit pretentious, that you feel like there is some sort of value in dismissing other people’s tastes. Looking at other people and thinking, “I like smart things, and you like dumb things,” and that is how you place it.
Then you go through this other journey where you’re like, “Oh, well, actually, some things that are just a mass appeal I really enjoy,” or, “I like this little niche,” whatever. You feel less embarrassed about your taste. You feel about your taste as not something that you want to place against other people. It’s something that’s yours. You embrace. You want to see what you like. It’s this journey that you go through to finally just feel like you can reconcile it. I think what [unintelligible 01:06:10] is probably experiencing is perhaps– I don’t know how old [unintelligible 01:06:14] is, but maybe it’s his friends being a little bit pretentious as they start to learn about their own taste.
I think it’s just really important to just try to take in as much as possible. I think it’s a boring thing about me that I really, really love The Beatles, but I really, really love The Beatles. When you explore what makes them great, they’re very good at their instruments. They’re very good at singing. They’re very good at the technical ability, but they’re not the best at all of that. They took in everything. Bob Dylan too, just took in everything that was available when they were learning and coming up and almost had this encyclopedic knowledge of all of the music that came around it and synthesized it into their own stuff.
Then it was this ability to say, “This is what is good for us,” and give each other shit to say, “Not that line, Paul, not that line, John.” Then that is basically what made The Beatles great, was their very, very refined taste. That taste doesn’t happen without really, really taking in as much as you can and taking in things that you would never think you should take in. Every little piece of it is part of what you build and build and build to what you like.
John: Taste is a crucial factor when I’m looking to work with a person or to collaborate with a person. For a project that we were working on with the company, I needed a designer. The first criteria was just taste. I knew I would find people who were very talented who could build the thing, but also taste is a crucial thing because I can’t give you taste. I have my own taste, but I couldn’t explain why this thing needs to be over there. I needed somebody with that form of taste. Susanna, you, as directing movies, you’re working with collaborators, and their taste is so crucial. They need to be able to have an eye for what it is that they respond to and ability to communicate back to you why they’re making these choices, right?
Susanna: Yes, I think judging other people’s taste is a trendy thing to do. Words like basic, that person is so basic. It just means that they have a taste for certain things that are popular and a certain aesthetic that is popular in certain parts of the country and certain class. It’s all about– there are so many things that are coded in that too, that comment. I think, ultimately, my taste is just what I’m naturally drawn to and interested in and what’s pleasing to my eyes and ears and senses. Sometimes that’s just entertainment that isn’t necessarily elevated.
I would consider myself someone who has “good taste,” at least the taste that makes sense to me. I know when things are entertainment but not nutritious entertainment and when they’re not, but I guess that I would still consider that part of my taste. It’s not a secret that’s in a closet and my taste is only the things I admit that I watched.
John: No.
Susanna: It’s hard to even say what we mean when we say taste. I think it’s mostly coded with trying to say I’m smart, I have good taste, I have an eye.
John: It’s so weird that we use the word taste, because as a sense, it’s the only one that has a sense of revulsion. It’s like, “Oh, that’s delicious,” or, “That’s revolting.” You can imagine a thing. It’s weird that we’re describing a tongue experience for what art is supposed to be.
Susanna: There’s a value judgment, right?
John: Yes.
Susanna: It’s like asking someone what’s their taste and you can answer that question free of judgment, but then people also talk about, “Oh, that person has good taste,” as though we can all agree that there’s a bad taste. I think that’s what you’re saying. It’s like– I think for me, the experience of hiring people is I want to feel aligned with what they—obviously, when you’re hiring a cinematographer, you look at their lookbooks and their decks and they show you what you want the visuals to be. For me, it’s important to talk to them and make sure that the dynamic between the two of us doesn’t make me question my own judgment.
John: Absolutely. You might find a collaborator who, what they like is completely valid, but it’s just not the thing. If you don’t want to be fighting over lens selections with your cinematographer on the set, that’s not going to do anybody any good. Neither are you going to be happy with the choices. They have to be aligned on a fundamental quality. Come back to your show, the tone is a very specific taste. If you guys weren’t aligned on that, or if you’re trying to bring in somebody who didn’t get that, it’d be a mess.
David: I think if we talk about the word taste and just the idea of– I think what we experience making the show is that when something, and I think it’s also what is such a value of a writer being on set and me being on set when Susanna’s on set or whatever, is that I know immediately when this isn’t our show, in the same way that I would know immediately if the milk has turned. You see something, you’re like, “No,” and I don’t have to explain that.
John: It’s a gut reaction. You just know it.
David: I will have to explain it often if I will have to tell a collaborator or have a conversation with an actor or get a light changed or something, but basically something is– and it is also understanding this is not an objective truth.
John: No.
David: I understand that someone else would sit and do their version of a thing and they would want the line delivered that way or they would want this shirt on or whatever, but for me, I know that it tastes wrong.
John: Yes.
Susanna: Yes.
John: The reason why we’re using this tongue sense is because it is like an inherent thing.
Susanna: It’s visceral.
John: It’s visceral. It is. It’s a feeling like, “Oh, that’s wrong.” The Henson Company, we always talk about something is muppety or it’s not muppety, and something can fit in that world or it can’t.
Susanna: It’s an essential thing about it. It’s interesting too, casting comes into play all the time, or I guess just I’m casting something right now. There’s a very specific part, and thinking about different actors playing that part, it’s like they just either essentially are that part or they’re not, no matter how good they are. I don’t know. I guess that diverges a little bit from just a conversation that’s strictly about taste, but it’s just me matching something to a specific image of it in my head, it either works or doesn’t work, and how much can an actor interpret a part and get to where I need them to get to or are they limited by something in their innate self that isn’t quite–
John: I look at some executives who’ve gone on to careers, like an executive who went to a big streamer, and his job is in a very specific division at that streamer, and it’s like, it’s not his taste. I know it’s not his taste. This is not what he’s called to do, but this is what he’s doing, and that just seems like a prison to me.
Susanna: I have so many meetings with people like that. They’re like, “Well, right now I’m working in–” eye roll, whatever.
John: It’s like, well, I don’t know how to help you here because clearly, how can you be giving good notes on these projects when it’s not a thing you like or enjoy? How am I supposed to take your notes seriously when it’s like, “Yes, you can tell me what the algorithm or what you think your bosses want, but you would never watch this movie.” I think I’ve tried to be more honest in my career over time. There’ve been projects I’ve pursued because, “Well, of course I should pursue that,” but then I was like, “It’s not really my taste. It’s not really a thing that I enjoy.”
David: It’s what’s complicated about criticism, and we can all agree that there are just some things that are just bad.
John: There are things that are bad because they’re bad executions of a bad idea.
David: Yes, I think we can agree, except for a few maybe weird tax dodge reasons. No one sets out to make something bad, but yes, there are some things that are– but then other things are just like, “That’s just not for me.” I think it’s a very internet-brained thing. I think it’s thinking that not for me means it is not for existence, and I think as I’ve gotten further away from the part of me that just wants to dismiss people who don’t have my taste, like the 20-year-old version of me, I love that things exist in the world that are not for me.
On your and other people’s recommendation, I watched the first episode of Heated Rivalry, and I was like, “I respect that show. I don’t think I’m going to keep watching that, but I think what a well-made version of a thing that is not a thing for me, and that’s fine.”
Susanna: I think that I really applaud any well-executed version of whatever the person set out to make. I’m a big fan of that, and I do appreciate it even in genres I wouldn’t gravitate towards.
John: Totally. Yes, like slasher horror is not my thing, but I can recognize like, “Oh, that’s a well-executed version of that thing.” We talked on the show some time ago about the syllabus, what movies and genres should you probably see just so you actually have an understanding of what they are? Because there may be things you just don’t know that you love because you’ve never seen them, and so I think you do need to have– part of acquiring a taste, and going back to the question here, it’s like, “You’re talking about old movies because you’re having bad taste.” Well, it’s great that you’re watching old movies, for starters, because-
Susanna: What’s this person watching?
John: -you’re getting a sense of how we got to this place right now in cinema. If there’s things you love, great. If there’s things you don’t love, also great, but try to figure out what it is about those things. We’re saying it’s a visceral reaction, a gut reaction, but there may also be some details there that would be helpful for you to understand, like why don’t I like this? That’s good.
David: This is related to it, but it is part of my moviegoing experience in the last several years, is rewatching movies I’ve loved and feel like I have enough distance from them that I’m now watching them as a new person. I had this experience with The Graduate, which was always one of my favorite movies, and it remains one of my favorite movies in the rewatch, but I connected to it in a completely different way.
As an adolescent, I related to Benjamin Braddock, and that was the prism I saw it through, and now I watch it, and I find him insufferable and think the movie is great, and the movie is commenting on that, and understanding that if, for whatever reason, at any different point in my life, I watched The Graduate and didn’t like it, that it is also just much more of a reflection of me than it is of the piece. I think we as individuals, not we in this room, because we’re all perfect, but other people have a really hard time differentiating something that just does not connect with the version of who they are at this moment and think that it is a flaw of the piece of art.
Susanna: Somebody was saying, I can’t remember who said this, but I agree, that when you watch Reality Bites as a teenage girl, which I did. Everybody loves Ethan Hawke, and then when you get older, you’re like, “That guy–“ If your friend is dating that guy, you’re like, “Don’t date that guy.” Ben Stiller has a good job. He has health insurance. That’s who you want to be with.
John: Oh, so good. Thank you for this discussion of taste.
David: Of course. Our pleasure.
Links:
- PONIES Trailer | On Peacock January 15th
- Susanna Fogel and David Iserson
- The last time Susanna and David were on the show (Episode 361)
- The Work of Art by Adam Moss
- So You Want to De-Bog Yourself by Adam Mastroianni
- Procreate emulators True Grit and Retro Supply Co.
- International Society of Character Artists’ character resolution 2026
- The Plague (2025)
- The Taste Gap by Ira Glass
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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