John August

Scriptnotes, Episode 738: Building Your Audience with Courtney Kemp, Transcript

Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 738 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome the creator of Nemesis and the Power franchise to talk about writing, showrunning, staffing, production, and navigating the shifting tides of television. Welcome to Script Notes, Courtney Kemp.

Courtney Kemp: I’m so excited to be here. So excited.

John: As I said as we were starting up this call, I’d wanted you on the show for a while, but then I heard you this last week on The Business talking about your new show. It’s like, well, I have to have her on. I have to talk more about those things because The Business is a great podcast. I recommend it highly, but it’s short in its general interest. I really want to dig into the writing and the showrunning.

We recently had Haley Boston on the show. She did her great horror show, which was also number one on Netflix. We talked about her rise and her suddenly becoming a showrunner. She went from nothing, and she suddenly has a show, and she’s a first-time showrunner. You’re not. You know what you’re doing, which is so great. You rose up through the ranks. I want to talk to you about how you know what you’re doing, but also what you learned rising up through the ranks, because I’m just so curious about the steps along the way and the things you take from previous experiences that you can apply that you only get because you were on shows that were in production.

Courtney: That is such a great question. The first thing I would say is I’m so grateful for my journey because it’s interesting, we watched that whole period where they were young screenwriters, and they’d be like, “Yes, you can run a show.” No, they can’t.

John: That was me, by the way. They gave me a show. I had no idea what I was doing.

Courtney: My bad. Sorry. It’s true. The job is so different. The kind of what-ifs that we deal with as television writers are very different from the what-ifs of a feature writer. I always say the job is not what story do I want to tell. It’s what story can I tell for this amount of money and shoot it in this amount of time. It’s just a different equation. My story has a lot of ups and downs, but I think the most important part of my story is that when I came out here, my first job was on The Bernie Mac Show. I got out here in June and I was staffed in August on The Bernie Mac Show. That was huge. Then I got fired. I got fired at the end of the season because I’m not funny. I really had to pivot.

The pivot was really interesting because at the time there were a bunch of sitcoms of color, like The George Lopezs and things like that. My agent, who is still one of my agents today, Nancy Etts, said to me, “Do you want to go in that direction, or do you want to write drama?” I was like, “I would much prefer to write drama.” My favorite show was Law & Order. I was never supposed to be a comedy writer. I just was supposed to be a person who puts jokes in violent dramas. That’s what I do best. The reality is being fired was the best thing that could have happened for my career. I always try to tell young writers that. That that’s actually an important step, is figuring out what you should actually spend your time doing.

John: Great. Well, I want to dig into all of that. We’ll answer some listening questions as well. In the bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about shooting in Los Angeles because your show was shot in Los Angeles as Los Angeles. Watching that, I just said, “That’s a neighborhood I’ve never seen before.” I believe that house is in that neighborhood because it probably was in that neighborhood.

Courtney: That’s correct.

John: I want to talk through the logistics. I always hear that it’s too expensive. You’ve found ways to do it. I want to learn from you so we can just shoot more shows in LA.

Courtney: Oh, thanks. Well, it wasn’t easy. Netflix, they were very much like, “You could shoot this in Atlanta, and you should shoot this in Atlanta.” I said no. There you are.

John: We’ll get into that in the bonus segment because I want to know about, in saying no, you had to say yes to other things. We’ll figure all that stuff out. Before we talk television, I want to talk about movies for one second because over the last couple of weeks, we talked about how this was shaping up to be a huge box office year, a huge box office summer because we had so many on-paper blockbusters coming out. We had sequels and parts of franchises. I think we couldn’t have anticipated it. There’s two huge movies that were not on the radar. First, Obsession and now Backrooms, both low-budget horror films that have broken out and becoming big things.

To me, it’s just such a great lesson in, you have to try multiple things. If you have a monoculture where it’s all just sequels and franchises, you’re not going to have the opportunity to put these movies on enough screens to make tens of millions of dollars. Also recognizing that, I think for these horror films, there’s a pattern, there’s a way to do it so they know that they can make their money back. There was a floor, but what’s so encouraging is that there’s not a ceiling. The ceiling is much higher than I think we were anticipating there being. It’s just a great lesson. You have to be open to genre things that break out, that become huge phenomena. Courtney, have you seen either of these movies?

Courtney: I have not because-

John: You’ve been making and launching a show.

Courtney: I’ve been launching a show. I’ve had actually no ability to do anything, but I do have opinions on these movies that I have not seen, which is that Original Fare, Hey Guys, original ideas. Every time an original idea does well, there’s this whole wave through our business of, “Look, this original idea did well. Hello.” It’s okay for people to make movies. I don’t know the usual suspects. I can’t think of a million movies that are original ideas that are great ideas.

This allergy to original ideas that are not IP is just so frustrating. It’s so demoralizing because, as writers, we are the dreamers. We are the what-if people. We are the people who come up with this stuff. Not to say that IP isn’t other writers, but why is it that novelists are suddenly the reason? They don’t actually do what we do. Some of them do, but a lot of them don’t. Why is it that the proof of concept always has to be now that it was already digested? It feels so strange to me that we are in the business of actively discouraging new ideas.

John: Yes, or whitewashing ideas by going through like, oh, this is a short story. We’re going to hire a screenwriter to write a short story, which we will then sell, and then hire that screenwriter to adapt the short story, which is just absurd.

Courtney: Insane. I just honestly don’t understand why. So many IP things fail. It’s not like IP is the magic bullet. They fail all the time. I feel as though the whole thing is about, well, I can’t get fired for greenlighting an IP idea, so I will go ahead and greenlight this IP idea. Is it a good idea? Does anyone care if it’s good? That, to me, is the thing that is so mind-blowing about where we are in this business right now.

John: I think with the case of both Obsession and Backrooms, there were situations where you took a gamble on the original creator of the idea, the person who put that YouTube idea out there in the world, and they saw them as their talent. It’s like maybe they could just do it themselves. Rather than, okay, we’re going to take this and put this in the seasoned hands of somebody who knows the thing, sometimes you take a gamble.

We’re talking about how I got trusted with a TV show well before I should have done it, but as a feature, I probably could have maybe done it. I was very involved on go, and I knew how to make a movie. I didn’t know how to make a TV show, but I knew how to make a movie. That would have been a smarter play for people to trust me to do that than to run a TV show, which is a business. You’re hiring people, you are managing this giant team for a year, and it’s just a different beast. In the case of these two movies, they saw filmmakers with talent and said, “Great, we’re going to help you make your movie.”

Courtney: I think it’s interesting because, again, there are people all over the business now going, “Hey,” to their younger execs, “find me a Backrooms. Find me an Obsession.” That’s what’s happening. You know that’s happening everywhere. It’s like, “Well, we could have done that three weeks ago. Remember, I brought you that young filmmaker, and you said no because you wanted to put that whole budget on IP?” How many young executives are going, “I had this idea, but you said no”?

Are we going to continue to watch A24 and Neon be the only places that actually take a gamble on anything? Is that what we’re just going to continue to do? I know these are separate ideas, but I’m just saying, why? Why are we just out of the business of the new?

John: Agreed. We won’t solve those problems today on this podcast, but hopefully we’ll dig a little deeper on some TV things because you’ve actually provided some solutions for some of these questions in television. Can we start with some of your background? How did you get started? Where did you grow up? How early did you know, oh, I should be making film and television?

Courtney: Oh, well, I’m from Connecticut, the most boring place on earth. I grew up in a town called Westport, which is mostly known for the Westport Country Playhouse, Paul Newman, Shonda Rhimes lives there now. Other than that, it was shiity and whatever. I grew up in a family that was very much all about TV and movies. My taste in film is probably from my dad, who raised me on The Godfather, Q&A. Movies that were really hardcore. I think I probably saw Taxi Driver way earlier than I should have. I know I saw Purple Rain way earlier than I should have.

John: Me too.

Courtney: My dad was an early adopter of HBO, so we had HBO very early, like before my friends. I was the household where people would come over to watch HBO. Then my family, Sunday night, we would all watch 60 Minutes together because my parents wanted us to be well-informed. Then we would watch Murder, She Wrote. We would have to solve the crime. We watched Dallas as a family. For those Power fans who are listening, the Who Shot Ghost, I just ripped off Who Shot J.R. It was such a long reference that most of my audience didn’t know I was doing that. If you knew, you knew.

I came up and then went to college in Rhode Island at Brown. Did not do a film major because I thought, “I’ll never make a film. I’ll never make any TV.” I was wrong.

John: There are a lot of Brown film and TV people, though. Doug Liman is Brown. I just know a lot of executives out in this town who are from Brown. For weirdly, like a Rhode Island school, it did feed a lot of LA people.

Courtney: It’s because there’s no core curriculum. It’s because we’re like a bunch of losers who can’t do math and science. Literally. We just completely failed all of those and then stumbled into this Ivy League school. We were like, “I’m going to read a lot, and they’re going to give me a degree.” That’s literally it. Then I went to Columbia for English literature and wrote my master’s thesis on Clueless. I’m not joking.

John: You know that’s my favorite movie.

Courtney: I did not.

John: This is down to being a Clueless podcast. We’ve done a deep dive on Clueless itself because it’s just such an incredible movie.

Courtney: It’s an incredible movie. I specialized in Jane Austen at Columbia. My master’s thesis was about the book Emma, the movie Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and then the movie Clueless. They were like, “What are you doing?” Columbia is a very conservative school. There’s a film school there. They were like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “This is what’s interesting. Film as text. This is what’s interesting to me.”

Yes, Clueless is a perfect film. Going back and watching it now, it’s still perfect. I fell in love with Paul Rudd then, as did many girls my age, but also just the knowing jokes in it, all those things. It’s so great.

John: To realize that Amy Heckerling originally was trying to do it as a television series, and they said, “No, it probably is a movie,” and she needed to just hang it on a spine, so she hung it on Emma. It’s a master class. It’s like someone who really knows what they’re doing, and just all the cylinders fire. It’s so remarkable how well that film turns out. I can imagine you come out of that with a thesis that is, I’m sure, terrific. I want to read your thesis, by the way.

Courtney: It’s so not good.

John: What do you do with that thesis? What do you do with that degree? What’s next?

Courtney: Nothing. You sound like my dad. My dad was like, “What are you doing with your life?” I remember him saying, “What are you going to do? Make $33,000 a year for the rest of your life at the University of Puget Sound, teaching English literature? Is that what you’re going to do?” I was like, “I don’t know, Dad, maybe.” Then I left and went to magazines. I worked at Mademoiselle and then GQ. That’s, again, where I started to really learn how to write for a male audience a little bit more.

John: I don’t want you to elide over the fact that you have to get hired by one of these places. How do you get hired at Mademoiselle or one of these glossy magazines?

Courtney: In my case, it was a friend of mine, Cameron Smith, who had a connection at HR there. I was overqualified for the job, but they took a chance on me. I just got lucky. I could interview well. I had been trained from a young age to say all the right things and to be all the right things, and dress the correct way. I was very much my mother’s child. My mother is southern. Wear the right dress, be the nice girl, which is a really interesting thing considering what I grew up to write.

Yes, I was very much Condé Nast. I was the good girl in the good outfit, in the right hair, conservative, little pearls, pearl earrings, the whole thing. I did get hired there. Then I didn’t fit in at Mademoiselle. I belonged at GQ. A little rougher.

John: At GQ, what were you writing for them?

Courtney: I was an assistant. I was on a desk. Then I wrote one article for them about interracial dating. I believe it’s called Don’t Buy Her Fried Chicken, something. It was like a primer for white dudes on how to date a black woman. Maybe it was called How to Date a black Woman, actually. It got me an agent. This is the end of that story. It got me a book agent at ICM. Then I ended up moving to the TV side.

John: Were you one of the few black people at GQ at that time?

Courtney: Absolutely. I was one of the few black people in the building. It was me, André Leon Talley, and five other people. It was like nobody. He and I would see each other in the hallway. I’d give him the nod, and he’d give me the nod, and we’d be going our merry way. I was 22-23. I was very young and naive.

John: This article you wrote, How to Date a black Woman, and this gets you an agent, that feels like a familiar story where you write something that is so specifically your voice that it’s a thing that identifies an aspect of culture that is not being discussed enough, and that is attractive to an agent. This was ICM, and they cold-called you. How did that all work?

Courtney: Heather Schroder, who was my book agent, she called. I was still on my boss’s desk. She called. Then, after that, two TV writers called Alberghini and Chessler, who were comedy guys, they called, and they wanted to turn that into a TV show. That TV show did not sell, but I did my first pitch to HBO at 25. It was a wild convergence of things. I think that’s the thing with all of us. Our stories are all so weird. They all have some weird left turn because when I moved out to LA, I was just leaving my job at Origins, where I was doing facials and makeup.

John: Great. You have a lot of random jobs. I had many random jobs as well along the way. God bless them. They paid the bills. They kept a roof over my head. I can understand, though, that based on this book, and you’re going in with this pitch, that people think of you as a comedy writer because it’s an inherently funny premise. You can see the comedic potential out of that book, that title, and so that they got you into The Bernie Mac room. That was your first–

Courtney: Basically, yes. Basically, I went in– remember when they had freelances to give away?

John: Oh, yes. Explain that for our audience, because that doesn’t happen really anymore.

Courtney: No. It used to be that if you had a 22 or 23-episode TV show, that probably two of those episodes would be given away as freelance episodes to writers who were not on staff. That was pretty common until I was about a co-EP, I think. When I first came in, a couple of freelances were given away on most successful shows. I went in to pitch Bernie Mac for freelance, and then they ended up hiring me, which is a crazy story that never happens to anybody.

John: Just so people understand what a freelance was like, though, these are shows that are going to run 22, 23 episodes per season. There was so much to do, and the premise was so well established that a person could come in off the street and say, “In this episode, these are the things that happen,” and you’re like, “Sure, that makes sense.” That was the experience?

Courtney: Yes. That’s exactly right. Then I would say, specifically with Bernie Mac, that show’s basic premise was that you had these three kids who were from an underprivileged background who were all of a sudden in an encino, like in a very white suburb. I grew up, as I said, in a very white suburb, so I had very specific ideas that almost no one else in that room could really speak to. Again, the point that you’re making that’s so wise is you have to write what you know. What is really specific to you? Because if you are writing something that you think will sell, but it doesn’t have anything to do with you, someone else is going to do that better.

John: Yes. You were on The Bernie Mac Show. You realized writing comedy is just not what you’re put on this earth to do. What is that conversation? Because it’s hard to go to your agents and say, “Don’t put me up for comedy,” or “I’m not going to get these comedy jobs because it’s not my thing.” What is that conversation, and how do you get to the next step?

Courtney: Nancy said, “Well, I got a phone call from Warren Hutcherson, who was the showrunner at the time. They’re not asking you back.” I said, “Oh.” She said, “But the George Lopez people would like to meet with you, or we can take a beat and we can think about what we should do instead. Do you want to be in comedy?” Because Warren was like, “She’s not funny enough.” I said, “I want to write a spec CSI.” I wrote a spec CSI. Then from that spec, I got staffed on a show called Injustice, which was run by Robert and Michelle King.

John: Oh, yes. Icons.

Courtney: Yes. That’s my first staff writing drama job. Back then, there was something called a minority staff writer. They’ve called it a million different things. Basically, the show wasn’t charged for your existence. On Bernie, I was the minority staff writer. Then, on Injustice, I was a minority staff writer. That relationship with Michelle and Robert, obviously, I ended up on The Good Wife for three years after that. I’m still close with them. They really taught me so much about how to write.

John: Let’s talk about what you’ve learned in that room because it sounds like Bernie Mac, you learned, “Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this thing.”

Courtney: At all.

John: In Injustice and then on The Good Wife, what are the things you learned that helped you both as a staff writer and moving up those ranks? What were the crucial things?

Courtney: On Injustice, the showrunner of record was Jeff Melvoin. He taught me a lot about how really to run a show. I watched how to run a show from a perspective of producing that was really smart. The Kings, in terms of story, Robert and Michelle are really– that first year of The Good Wife, basically, Julianna was in every scene. They had to figure out a way to not have her be in every scene but keep the story going. I learned how to create a proxy character, characters that kept the story going even if your main character wasn’t in the scene. If you look at the first season of Power, Tommy, even though he’s the best friend, he’s also a proxy character. He’s moving that forward.

John: I want to pause for one second. Julianna Margulies, she’s the star. She’s the lead, but the literally can’t be in every scene because, production-wise, you can’t have her on set 16 hours a day for every day.

Courtney: She had a young son at the time, too. She was really shouldering a huge burden. She’s also an incredible actress which isn’t easy. Right?

John: No.

Courtney: Yes, absolutely, what you’re saying, which is that it’s not possible to put that much weight on someone. That’s a thing I will also say that is a difference between a feature writer and a television writer, is that the television writer has to think about how many days a week is this person going to be working, and am I going to be able to spell them and give them a break? Can I double shoot? If they’re in every scene, I can’t actually shoot two scenes at once. Whereas in a feature, you can have one person in every scene. You can do that movie with Ryan Reynolds in the grave in a feature, but you can’t do that–

John: Buried.

Courtney: Buried, yes. I don’t know why that didn’t come to mind. It’s a pretty obvious title. You’re absolutely right.

John: You’re learning those really practical things about how the decisions of what’s happening on the page is going to impact how you’re going to actually be able to shoot the thing and the whole franchise. You could probably do it for one episode, but you couldn’t do it over the course of eight episodes. Everything would come crashing down. You have to really be smart in thinking about the whole show, not just what this one scene needs.

Courtney: Absolutely. I’ll tell you one other lesson I learned from the Kings. In the first three seasons of The Good Wife, we would always have to build to, at the end of the third act, what is Alicia’s dilemma? She has to make a decision, one way or the other, that’s about her morality and her character. It was a way of having plot feed into character. That’s something that I learned from them, from the Kings, about how to structure an episode and then structure a season. You’re structuring the episode with that dilemma, but you’re also structuring the season with that dilemma as well.

John: What did you learn about running a room from the Kings or from these other showrunners?

Courtney: I would say the biggest things I learned about running a room came from Greg Berlanti, the year I was on Eli Stone. I run the room like this to this day, which is we come in, and we first start talking about scenes we want to see. What are the scenes we want to see this season? What are the scenes that are necessary? For example, with Nemesis, we know we want to see these men meet a couple of times, but we also know we don’t want to see them meet that often. That’s not what the show is. The show is about I’m obsessed with you and I can’t get to you, not I can get to you.

We start with that. Just a big board where there’s no wrong answer. It’s open. No one gets trashed, hurt, or judged because they come up with a bad idea because there’s no such thing as a bad idea. The worst idea that was ever come up within a Power writers’ room was from this guy. It’s totally fine. I say that to say Greg taught us that. Then the other thing that Greg was very good about was a great idea can come from anyone, from anyone. It does not matter who you are or what your title is. The best idea in the room wins no matter what. I really learned a lot about that from him.

John: That’s great. How long is that blue sky, no bad ideas phase in a writers’ room? How long do you do that before you start, “Okay, now we actually have to break episodes”?

Courtney: I do a good three or four days of that, but the writers know, come in with it. We’re not going to just shoot the shit. We’re going to come in with it. We do a lot of breaks and a lot of joking. I like to keep my room really funny because we’re doing heavy things. Once you start to get the scenes I want to see, and then if it’s a secondary season, like it’s a tertiary season, you need to have, what do we owe the audience? That’s another day. What do we owe them? Because we’ve already asked a question and we have to answer it.

John: That’s right.

Courtney: Once you get those down, you can start to actually structure your season. You can actually start to put those places, like where do those scenes go, in what order? Now you start to thematically look at what is each episode.

John: Talk to me about the transfer from you’re on these shows, you’re moving up the ranks, to, “Okay, now let’s have you do your own show. Let’s have Courtney Kemp showrunner.” What was that transition, and what happened?

Courtney: I was at CAA. Nancy left ICM and moved to CAA. I moved to CAA with her. Then I was working with Nancy and Andrew Miller, who’s, they’re both still my agents. Andrew was working with 50 Cent and with Mark Canton, also. I was working on an early iteration of Get Christie Love, which I ended up shooting as a pilot many years later. Did not go. They wanted to do, Mark and 50, who were in business already. Wanted to do a music-driven drama, but neither one of them really did TV. Mark’s a film guy, and 50 obviously is a music guy.

Andrew set me and Mark and 50 up on a creative date because I was really wanting to write in this black exploitation space, and they really didn’t know how to get into TV. Then this idea for Power, which was really a combination– that lead character Ghost is a combination of my dad and 50. My father had just died prior to this. I was trying to figure out a way to write about him. Then that’s where the idea was born.

John: That’s great. Classically, you come up with a take. You have this team. You have you writing it. You were just pitching it. Did you write an episode? Were you selling it as a spec? Were you going around town and pitching it to all the streamers?

Courtney: This is an old-school process because this is before you really would write a spec episode. This was me going into, let’s see, where did we go? We went obviously to Starz. We also went to FX, but we started at Showtime because I had been on a CBS P deal before that. Not an overall, but I was under contract to CBS P because of The Good Wife.

John: It’s so hard to remember who owned what at what point, but CBS and Showtime were the same company.

Courtney: They were the same company, yes. The first thing we did was we pitched it at Showtime. They didn’t take it. Then we pitched it at FX. They were like, “We already have a drug-dealing show.” Then we pitched it at Starz. They were already exploring a hip-hop show. Our show was not a hip-hop show. Our show was a drug-dealing show that just had a hip-hop soundtrack, really. They picked us up, and they let us write it. I was still working on Hawaii Five-0 when I was trying to figure it out. Again, still at CBS. I was still knocking around CBS studios at that time. While I was at Hawaii Five-0 and then Beauty and the Beast, I was working on this outline. It finally came together.

John: That’s an aspect I don’t hear people talking enough about. It’s that a lot of times you are staffed on one show, but you’re creating another show. You’re trying to do this other thing. It’s just so tough to be juggling so many different hats. You want to be fully present for the show you’re supposed to be working on, but you have this other project which could go at any point. That balance is tough. You were probably not the only person in those rooms who had other outside things that could catch fire.

Courtney: Absolutely. I’m not totally unsure that Jeff Rake wasn’t developing Manifest then. He went on Beauty and the Beast with me. I don’t remember. No, it was the Deborah Messing mystery show that he was working on. It’s so great to have employment. It doesn’t matter. You figure it out. It’s like you just figure it out. I was very lucky to be able to have a check.

John: Yes. You were able to make Power. Where did Power shoot? New York City?

Courtney: New York City, yes.

John: That’s great. On Stars. Stars is such a weird case because you have much more experience with Stars than I do. I have other friends who’ve had shows there, and it’s just like, they make really good things that no one sees. It was a cable network for people to think about. I now think of it as a streamer. Yet your show found an audience which not only brought it through this first season, but brought other spin-off varieties of it. You had not just a series, but a franchise out of that. You must have been pulled in so many different directions.

Courtney: First of all, just the first part of what you said, Stars was very much a mom-and-pop shop back then. It was just Carmi Zlotnik and Chris Albrecht, and whatever Chris wanted to put on, he just put on. It’s not the layers of asking and begging and waiting that you have now with the streamers. It was just like, daddy likes what daddy likes. That’s why there were so many different shows. You had my show. You had Outlander. You had Black Sales at that time. It was just whatever he thought was cool. That’s the thing I would say. Taste has gone out of our business, but he had taste. He just really liked what he liked. That was weird, yes.

The other thing is that Power was able– Our first season, we doubled our audience in our first season from the beginning to the end. Then we grew every year. We got bigger every year. By the time we were done with it, 50 very much wanted us to keep going. I was like, “We can’t. There’s no more story to tell.” I feel, really importantly, get off the stage when you’ve nothing left to say. That’s when the spin-offs started to– I said to them, “I can’t make more of this show, but I can make something else in this world.” That’s when those ideas of Ghost, Raising Kanan, and Force came up. That’s how we started. We’re shooting Origins right now, which is, I think, the fifth spin-off, maybe fourth or fifth. Yes, it’s a lot.

John: Courtney, I’ve lost track of how many spin-offs I’ve heard you say.

Courtney: She has, but only because she’s been working on Nemesis. That’s why.

John: Let’s talk about Nemesis. I have a sense of probably how you pitched Nemesis. I’m going to make a lame attempt to pitch Nemesis at you. There’s a story of two men. One of them runs a criminal gang that do heists and burglaries. The other one is a brash LAPD detective investigator. They are on a crash course to confront each other. We will learn in the pilot that the investigator’s best friend died as a result of one of these heists, and that the wives/girlfriends of these two men are also friends. That is the complicated dynamics between the two of them. It is essentially a two-hander with a lot of other hands around it. What else would be in that pitch of it all? Is that the core idea as you went in to talk to people about it?

Courtney: Yes, absolutely. I think the only thing I would say is I co-created it with my now fiancé, Tani Marole. It came from having two conversations. One, which is what is not out there for our audience right now? Which turns out to be that it’s not out there for any audience. There’s no big action show right now, before I wrote.

John: Heat is a natural comparison to it. There’s not a Heat show, which is surprising.

Courtney: Right. Then there’s that. Then there’s the other piece of it, which is are people really writing about marriage, like adult marriage? No one’s writing about that right now in a way that feels considered. We don’t talk about the other thing that’s in the show, that’s really strong, is this idea of male burden. We’re always talking about how terrible men are and all these things. There’s a lot of men who are good guys, who just want to be a good husband and a good father.

John: A good son.

Courtney: A good son. Exactly. That’s hard. I think one thing that people don’t really get is it’s hard to be a good man. It’s not easy. That’s one of the things that we’re writing about, is that these two men and they’re trying to fight their inner demons in order to be their versions of good men. One of them is a little bit more successful than the other, but that one is also a murdering thief. Whereas Isaiah is actually a white hat. It’s just a little dingy from a lot of his behavior.

John: He’s not always the most attentive father. There’s things he doesn’t do.

Courtney: No, but he doesn’t cheat either. That’s the other thing. He’s trying.

John: You have this idea, and you and Tani have created the show together. What is that partnership like? What is the creative partnership there in terms of pitching the show, making the show, feeling that this is the joint vision?

Courtney: I would love to call Lisa Joy and find out how her experience is.

John: I know Lisa has done it well, but it’s tough.

Courtney: I think in our case, I have a lot of experience running shows. This is Tani’s first. I think where we would butt heads a lot had to do with the finances of things. I’d be like, “You can’t afford that.” He has written a lot of features, and so he’s a feature guy. He’s like, “The sky’s the limit.” I’m like, “Actually, the limit is right here. It’s more of a credenza.” Especially, and I know we’ll talk about this later, but shooting LA for LA, you can’t do everything you thought you were going to do on the page. You just can’t. We did have some conflict there.

Working with a partner, one of the things that I did find was so great is that some of the things that necessarily are not the most important pieces of it to me were really important to him. He got to really invest in some moments that– I don’t know that I would have insisted on full loads, but those gunshots in episode six are great. He was right. Sound design became a big part of what we did. I don’t know that I would have focused on that. It actually made the show better.

John: Talking about then, you had this vision for a show, pitching the show, ending up at Netflix, what was the conversation there?

Courtney: I was on a deal at Netflix. I was on an overall deal. Some of the things that I had pitched then did not work. They were outside my genre. A little bit more creative than maybe what works for me. The pitching process was that Tani and I had talked about this show, and then we came in not only with a full pitch, but our leave behind was a script. We did actually– now, I remember going back to power where I didn’t write a script. This was, “Here’s the show,” because we really didn’t want to develop it. We wanted them to understand what it was.

While we went through a development process, that development process was really notes on a script, scriptnotes if you will, as opposed to trying to develop a show from scratch there, which I had not had a lot of success with. It helps concretize their thinking. It’s not really you. You know what the show is anyway. You know what the show is out of two sentences, but they can’t, so you have to really show them what it is.

John: I was reading through other earlier interviews, you were talking about Power, and you said it’s a frustration people want to describe it as a black show as a containment strategy. That’s putting a lid on it and not recognizing the overall potential of a thing. There’s shows that have black leads, that have largely black cast, but they’re not black shows. Scandal, you would never consider it to be a black show. If you have a show that has a largely black cast, how do you make sure that a place sees the potential in it beyond just one audience?

Courtney: You can’t. First of all, I think Scandal is such a really good– That’s a great reference because while Kerry’s the lead and the people that are around Kerry, like her parents, are black, the other leads of that show are not black. Your main romantic interests, they were Scott Foley and the amazing Tony Goldwyn. No, it’s not a black show. It’s just a show. It just happens to be that Kerry is based on the woman who it’s really based on is a black woman. What I would say is this idea that white people will not watch shows with black people in it is so foolish. When I was growing up, everybody watched The Cosby Show. Everybody watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

John: Everyone still watches Black-ish. Everyone still watches Abbott Elementary.

Courtney: It’s so foolish, and yet it’s still there. When you get to the higher levels of conversation at the streamers, they’re still saying these things. It so boggles the mind. You watched a little Nemesis, or you watched all of Nemesis?

John: I watched the first episode of Nemesis.

Courtney: Okay, right. It’s a lot of black people, but did you not see yourself in those characters?

John: 100%.

Courtney: Did you not see yourself as a married man? Did you not see yourself as a hardworking– It’s just people. Human beings have so much more in common than they do in terms of difference. I think we’re all supposed to be writing, as long as we’re not robots, as long as we can still hold on to humans writing, that we’re writing about the human condition. It really boggles the mind, but I can’t stop people from doing that. I can’t stop people from saying, “Your show is just– it’s a black show.”

John: Going back to this earlier conversation about Obsession and Backrooms, it does speak to the fact that there’s an underserved audience. That underserved audience can give you a potential, can get you in the door, but these movies are breakout hits because they’re moving beyond that one narrow audience that you started with. It’s because they’re good and they’re successful and they have a universal appeal to them that is making them the hits that they are. Yes, I share your frustration because the same thing happens with a gay story. It’s like, yes, there’s a floor because a gay audience may go to see a thing because they’re hungry for these stories, but the good ones will break out beyond that.

Courtney: Absolutely. Again, it does not matter. I don’t know. It’s like, at one point, Logo made RuPaul’s Drag Race, and then it became an international phenomenon. It’s like, someone said, “We can’t make that, it’s too gay.” Really? Well, you lost money, bro. It’s all that. I was told the reason that a certain place would not make Power was that it would only appeal in America. That’s not true at all. The experience of Nemesis, obviously, it’s not true.

John: Worldwide.

Courtney: It’s nuts.

John: One of the difference between Power and Nemesis is that Power was week-to-week and its typical cable schedule release, and we can see all of Nemesis today. It all drops at once. How did that change how you were thinking about storytelling episode by episode, or did it change anything for you?

Courtney: That’s a great question, and it changed a lot. When writing Power, not only did I have to contend with the fact that I was on Stars, which had this tiny audience, but I also had to contend with the fact that it was week to week, and that we were, at first, on Saturday. We weren’t even on Sunday. We weren’t even on the HBO TV night. I had to make sure that at the ending of every episode, we were causing conversation that would last a week. That was, by design, big cliffhangers, big end title songs that would cause conversation. Just anything to get people to come back.

With Nemesis, I need people to stay, keep sitting. The whole job when you’re writing for a streamer is that you need people to not get up. On Netflix, I will just tell everyone who’s listening, and if you’re developing for Netflix, first of all, those first two minutes are incredibly important of your show. They have to keep people staying there.

John: Netflix will tell you that. They will remind you that on meetings often. Yes.

Courtney: Often. If you go back and you look at the pilot of Nemesis, the first two minutes are the beginning of that heist. You just get straight into the heist. Don’t even bother with introducing people, having a conversation. Nothing. You don’t even know those characters. You get to know them during the heist, but that’s it. Then the other thing is, I have to get you to stay, which means I have to have, it’s not just a, oh, let’s have a conversation for a week. It’s, I need you to need the answer right now. Right now, which is very different from– You can’t speculate. It’s not about speculation. It’s, I just need to know.

I’ve had so many people say to me, “I just sat and watched it all eight hours. I just watched the whole thing.” Because that’s what it should feel. You need to pump that momentum. I think Tani was really instructive with that because he is a momentum guy. I’m a contemplative guy.

John: I am too. I saw you repost somebody on your stories talking about how, as a woman who’s like, “I could only watch four the first night, but I got up the first thing in the morning to watch four more.” That’s what you’re trying to do there. The great news is that people can enjoy it all at once. The challenges, like Craig and I often talk about, the footprint is smaller because it’s a sugar rush right in that moment, but you don’t get that extended discussion over time.

That’s what I’m loving about Widow’s Bay right now is because I have no idea what’s going to happen, but Drew and I will speculate about what’s happening on the island, and it’s because of that week-to-week, so it’s the trade-off. It’s the sudden rush versus the slow release.

Courtney: I do think, though, that right now the platforms do their release strategy per the platform, whereas I actually think it should be per the show. Widow’s Bay definitely benefits from that on Apple, but Hijack could have been a dump, and people would have watched all of that, especially that first season, because you’re stuck on that plane and it’s so intense. You could have just dumped that, and it would have been a really interesting thing. I just think there are ways to do it. Nemesis works that way. If you are telling a story that’s little and crafted and maybe needs a little time to breathe.

Adolescence is four episodes, so you can deal with it, but you can’t deal with that if it was eight episodes. Maybe I will just say, for your more contemplative kind of writing, which is what I am naturally, maybe you put those contemplative moments in the middle of the episode and not at the beginning or end.

John: Something you mentioned in an earlier interview, this may have been from your time on Berlanti shows, which is where you do a pass on a script saying like, “Did you just see that? Did they really do that shit? Did they actually–” like a pass where you actually just like, “Is there sizzle, is there magic to something?” Is that something you’re still thinking about with Nemesis?

Courtney: Absolutely. The “oh shit” moment is necessary. It’s very, very necessary. We need to have at least two or three in an episode where you’re just like, “What the hell? Did that really happen?” Because first of all, two things. One, necessary, and two, you’re fighting this.

John: You are fighting your phone.

Courtney: All the time. You have to build in, even if it is a moment where the person looks up from their phone and goes, “What did I just miss?” You have to build that in because we are fighting that second screen all the time.

John: I want to talk about an article that came out this last week. Leslie Goldberg wrote up a piece in The Ankler about streamers wanting less of a gap between seasons, which I thought was really interesting, which is that so often, these prestige shows, it’s like two years between seasons and audience falls off, which is understandable because it’s just like, “I forgot whose people were and wasn’t relevant.” The point she’s making is that, in some cases, they’re opening writers’ rooms early so they can get a lead on scripts, so even before they know they’re going to do a second season, they’ll put together a writers’ room.

They’ll do whatever they can to close the gap between seasons because they’re recognizing that a lot of the falloff that’s happening is just because of time. It’s because you’ve lost the momentum of what that show was. When two full years have happened between the thing, House of the Dragons was an amazing show, but good Lord, I don’t remember who any of those characters are yet. Is that a thing that resonates with you? Because you were on a cable schedule that– were you on an annual cycle for Power?

Courtney: Cadence, absolutely. That’s one of the things that’s been very hard to understand about how the streamer culture works, at least at Netflix, where they want to see your show air fully before they necessarily make a decision. I didn’t grow up that way. In Power, we were getting two seasons at a time. They were like, “Just do them.” We had a schedule. We had a cadence because we had to hit that target. The audience was expecting that show every end of June or early July. We were either July 7th or we were June 25th almost every single year. We were on the schedule.

By the way, people used to make 24 episodes on a schedule. This is not because we can’t do it as writers. It’s because the streamers, I believe, are so afraid of making a mistake creatively that they’re just like, “Well, let’s be sure that there will be ROI.” That’s not our business. Our business is not the business of being sure. Our business is the business of obsession, which is somebody took a shot.

John: Yes, agreed. You have so much experience running shows, staffing shows. If you were to arrive in Los Angeles now as a 26-year-old who maybe worked in New York City, but you got here, and you’re getting started, what would you do first if you were a newly arrived Courtney Kemp right now? Where would you focus your time and energy? Would you be trying to staff? Would you be trying to do a feature? What are the things you think are the best things for a new writer to be working on if they just arrived in town?

Courtney: If I were under 30, like I was when I got here, I would make a 5-episode with 8 minutes for each episode series that I would shoot myself or with some friends, cast a couple of my friends who are young actors, everybody my age, and not make it just about our fun lives, but make it about a specific thing, like a specific story that you can tell in those 5 episodes. The bad version is off the top of my head, like Jane’s dad dies and we all have to go to the funeral. There’s a problem, which is that not everybody knows that Jane has just recently come out, or whatever it is.

I would make that. I would edit it. I would make it tight. I would put it on YouTube. I would have all my friends who were in it post about it. I would get it so that people start to see it. Then I would get my specs together: a couple of spec episodes of existing shows, two episodes of two pilots, and one short story. That’s what I would do. I’d have my writing, but I would shoot something that was working for me while I was sleeping, because that’s the thing we couldn’t do. We couldn’t do that. Our scripts did the work, but now you’ve got a phone. You can make a show, so make it.

That’s what I would do first, because that’s the Issa Rae model, but she made Awkward Black Girl, and then we got Insecure. I think that’s so powerful, and kids can do that. Now you could do it even shorter. I’d probably shoot it in vertical, to be honest with you.

John: Because most of the verticals we see are terrible and trapped, so if you make something that’s actually really good, people are going to be surprised, like, “Oh my God, that was good and actually felt like a thing.”

Courtney: Absolutely. 100%. That’s what I would do.

John: The other thing I’m noticing in your answer here is you think people should write spec episodes of existing series, which is not a thing I hear a lot about anymore. Tell me why that is, and do you like to read specs of existing shows as you’re staffing?

Courtney: I only read specs of existing shows as I’m staffing. I do not read your pilot.

John: All right. Tell me why.

Courtney: I know I sound like everybody else. Because I’m not hiring you to come in and write your pilot over again. I’m hiring you to come in and ape the voice of the show. If you can ape somebody else’s voice, most of the people I’ve hired wrote a spec Black-ish; they wrote a spec like Insecure or something, because I know that you can make those voices work, and you can do the math of going, “This is what one character would say that another character wouldn’t say.” I always say to young writers, “You should be able to cover the character name, and by what the line of dialogue is, I should be able to know which character said it.”

John: Wow.

Courtney: If I don’t, then you didn’t make it specific enough. You haven’t drilled down into your characterization enough to let me know what a person is saying. I think that’s the thing that the specs teach you, that your own pilot doesn’t. When you read a weak pilot from a young writer, it’s not their fault. They just don’t have the 10,000 hours. When you read a great spec script from a young person, you know they studied the show. I got hired by Greg off of a spec Grey’s Anatomy. That was the job back then. I really believe in them still to this day.

John: That’s great. You and Mindy Kaling are the two people I’ve heard actually really stand up for specs. Your point about covering over the character’s name is so smart, and I don’t hear people talking about that, but yes, every line of dialogue should only be able to come from that one character. If you could move it around to another character, it’s not the right line.

Courtney: You know what’s a classic example of that? If you go and you look at the Sex and the City pilot, the original pilot, those women come across as their characters in that pilot. That’s why that show, it worked. Worked, worked, worked. That’s it. I fully believe in that.

John: Awesome. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, help us out with Anonymous.

Drew: “How transparent should you be with your reps about your financial struggles? Obviously, my manager and agent know that I haven’t worked for a year. I don’t think for a second that they are gatekeeping opportunities from me. Should I tell them that I’m four months from having to sell my house, or could that kind of honesty give them the ick? For what it’s worth, I’m hustling nonstop. I’m pitching, open writing assignments, doing freelance outside of our industry, all while plastering on a hopeful smile. Unfortunately, time, along with my bank account, is running out.”

John: Courtney, what’s your instinct there?

Courtney: That’s such a great, great question. I would not tell them.

John: I would not tell them either because I don’t think it’s going to help. It’s going to create this weird negative feedback loop. They’re going to feel guilty every time they’re thinking about you or putting something up for you. It’s not going to make them move faster. I don’t think it helps. I’m sorry for Anonymous. I’m sorry for the situation. It’s a very common situation for writers in this town at this moment. I don’t think telling them is going to change anything. Where I would say is, let’s say you’re a feature writer who’s like you’re trying to close a deal on something, talking to your reps like, “Okay, the paperwork is taking a long time.”

I think then you say like, “Listen, I really need this to close so that I can make this a payment or so I don’t lose my health insurance.” When you’re just looking for a job overall, I don’t think that’s going to help you out.

Courtney: To yes, and what John is saying, I think the other thing is that if you have an attorney, when you are doing a deal, the attorney can say to the agent, “Hey, man, don’t go back and forth 800 times. We’re just going to close this deal and get this dude some money.” Rather than you saying it, let the attorney say it to your agent, and let that conversation be without you.

John: Agreed. All right. Answer a question from Mitchell here.

Drew: “How important is having a clear answer to the question of why now when developing or pitching a project? Many of the films and shows I love feel timeless. Their appeal comes from story and characters rather than a sense of immediacy. Relatedly, what advice would you give to a writer who feels that they have a strong script but no compelling answer to why now? Is that something that can be developed later, or does its absence signal a deeper issue with the material?”

John: Courtney, as you were pitching Nemesis. Was there a why now?

Courtney: There wasn’t anything on that was like it. We were very singular in the fact that it was just this eight-episode hardcore note contemplation canon. We knew we were going to be doing something that was heavy action, and so that’s why. What I would say is if we’re talking about a TV show, it takes so long to get these things up that the why now may no longer be relevant. It’s like if you were going to pitch somebody a story about ice right now, I just feel like it would feel dated, even though those things are still happening.

Because of one battle after another, it feels like it’s been done, weirdly enough, even though it is current. I think actually having too much currency is lame. Just be like, why do I want to tell the story now is actually much more interesting than why would it do well now. If you can figure out a why do you need to tell the story now, then that’s probably the best way to pitch it.

John: I fully agree. According to what you’re describing, there is often called a why me. Why am I the person for this? You’re selling like, “Not only is this a good idea, but I’m the person who’s uniquely qualified to tell it. This is why I’m going to devote my entire creative process to this idea because I really feel it for me.” It’s making sure that it’s clear to the people you’re pitching to that why it resonates for you is important.

The why now, you can be pitching something timeless. As long as you can sometimes find ways that this railroad tycoon reminds me of what we’re seeing in terms of our modern-day billionaires. While it’s not about them, it feels like it’s speaking to this moment.

Courtney: That is the most important thing. What you just said is so right. Why me is so important. Going into the why me is really huge. Why am I the person who has to tell this story? Even though it’s about two men who are a cop and a criminal, and I’m a nice girl from Connecticut, why?

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. Courtney, what would you like to share with our audience?

Courtney: My one cool thing is a YouTuber named Ryan Walker who does hotel reviews.

John: Oh.

Courtney: He goes all over the world and does hotel reviews. He is not biased, and he is dreamy to look at. He goes to all these great like Four Seasons and all these places all over the world. The thing is, I’m not traveling. I’m writing. I’m hunched over a laptop with a little bit of tequila next to me. I ain’t going anywhere. I’m a parent, and I’m in a relationship, and I’m not traveling. Ryan gets to go everywhere. He’s pleasant and lovely. He’s great. I recommend that highly as just escapist. The videos are 10, 11 minutes. You can take a break from writing. You can take a break.

John: I love that. My one cool thing is the show Star City, which just started on Apple. This is a spin-off of For All Mankind. For All Mankind tells the story of the space program in an alternate universe where Russia got to the moon first and then started off a big space race that ends up very differently than our space race. This is Russia’s side of the story, so in Star City, which was their development for where they did all their things. Megan McDonnell, our previous Scriptnotes producer, is a co-EP on the show.

I’m sure it’s great for many reasons, but I’m sure it’s partly great because Megan McDonnell was on the show and was in Eastern Europe for months and months and months, actually making the show. It’s delightful. Well, it’s not fun. It’s not a fun show. It’s not a laugh-a-minute. It is like Chernobyl, but with the space program. If that sounds great to you, it’s really great. It’s really well done. It’s gorgeous to look at. Great writing throughout. I encourage you to check out Star City on Apple TV.

Courtney: Can I say a shout-out to Chernobyl? Love Chernobyl.

John: Chernobyl’s a great show. Craig Mazin, somehow, he made a really great show there.

Courtney: Yes, it’s weird. It’s weird that Craig keeps making stuff that’s so great. It’s weird.

John: That’s so great. Courtney, I suspect you have many people who have worked with you and for you on different shows who are killing it. Is that correct?

Courtney: Yes, mostly directors who have moved around. Like Anthony Hemingway, who directed the pilot of Power. I work with Rob Hardy a lot. Obviously, Mario Van Peebles. Crazy that I would be watching New Jack City as a kid and then getting to work with him. A lot of my writers have been with me a long time. They’ve come up the ranks with me. Most of them, I’ve actually stayed in the Power universe. It’s the thing, there’s so many shows, nobody leaves.

John: Why would you? You’re like Pixar. You’re like golden handcuffs. Like, “Let us stay close to Courtney Kemp.”

Courtney: Here’s the thing. Our shows keep going, and we have multiple seasons and people need work. I think it’s been harder for people to get an original idea off, and it’s easier to get a Power Book 19 signed off on.

John: That’s great. I have one last request for our listeners. Many people know my company also makes software. We make apps for writers. We have something new that’s in beta testing. We are looking for Mac users who rely on assistive technology or alternative input methods. Switches, foot pedals, the sip and puff devices, mouth controls, head or eye tracking, adaptive keyboards. Basically, if you have some sort of non-standard input setup, we need to make sure our app works great with all those devices.

If you are someone who uses these technologies on a Mac, write in to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com so we can send you a link to beta test this because we can do what we can do, but we won’t know until actual people who use these things try it out. If you are a person who uses these things or knows someone who uses these things on a Mac, we would love to have them test it out.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

That 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 signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has links to lots of things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.

You’ll find us on Instagram at scriptnotespodcast. Courtney, where should they follow you on Instagram?

Courtney: @CourtneyAKemp.

John: @CourtneyAKemp. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with all the links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to 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. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on shooting in Los Angeles. Courtney Kemp, what an incredible pleasure it was to talk with you.

Courtney: This has been so great. So awesome.

John: Please come back often. You are a delight. Oh, and congratulations on Nemesis, number one on Netflix.

Courtney: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Let’s hope we hang in there. [laughs]

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Courtney Kemp, not only did you make a delightful show, but you’ve made a show that is shot in Los Angeles that looks like it’s shot in Los Angeles because it is shot in Los Angeles. Tell us about holding your ground on shooting in Los Angeles and the, I don’t want to say compromises, but there are compromises, the decisions you had to make in order to make that make sense.

Courtney: We wrote a show that was LA for LA, and we really wanted to make a show that showed parts of LA that aren’t usually on TV. I will always say this: Issa Rae showed a lot of these places, too, but we wanted to show both the top and the bottom, View Park and Baldwin Hills and the grittier places in Los Angeles. You can’t do that in Atlanta. You just can’t. It doesn’t work. When we started to talk about shooting in LA, every time I said, “Well, we’re going to shoot in LA,” the Netflix people would frown. They would make frowny faces at me.

I was like, “Look, I’m a mom of a trans kid. I’m not going anywhere. My kid needs me. I’m going to be here. I’m not going to mess around with that. If you force us to do it in Atlanta, that’s fine. I won’t be there. I am not going to be on set.” I stood my ground, which was uncomfortable because you want to do everything to get that green light, but I really needed the show to be here. Plus, LA crews need the work. Plus, I know I’m going to hire Black and Brown crew. I know they need me. I know that I’m going to have a heavy LGBT presence on my crew.

I know that my job is to not just represent that in front of the camera, but behind the camera. It was a bigger, I don’t want to say crusade for me, but it was a point of pride for me. Then once they said yes, we looked at our budget and I was like, “Yes.” There was a moment where they were like, “We’re only going to say yes if you can cut the scripts down.” All the scripts we had, I had to cut them all down in two days, which I did.

John: Cutting it down so that there would be fewer days of production, right?

Courtney: Fewer days of production. I had to cut it down to 11 days of production. Our original scripts were 14, so I had to cut it down to 11 days of production, then to 10. Some shows got a little bit of 11. We did some block shooting. We block shot everything.

John: Tell me about cutting them down from 14 to 11, is it mostly cutting scenes or is it cutting locations, combining locations? What are the ways that you get it down from 14 to 11? You have sets you come back to, but I couldn’t tell off the pilot what was built and what was practical.

Courtney: Homes were built. Inside of homes were built. The RHD set is a set. You didn’t see it in the pilot, but in Episode 2, you will see Coltrane Wilder’s office. We had to do some creative stuff. We had a building that we rented, and the top floor was RHD, and the bottom floor was Coltrane Wilder’s office. Creative stuff like that. Cutting scenes, definitely cutting scenes. Cutting a lot of scenes, trimming them down, or combining information. Information that took three scenes to arrive at, we made it to cutting characters.

John: I would say your experience in broadcast was probably incredibly helpful for that because you were probably used to making shows in eight or nine days back in the broadcast days, where you may have had more in Power.

Courtney: That’s absolutely right. I think I will just say very specifically that those years coming up the ranks and watching that happen and learning how to do that and seeing my showrunners really cut that down, that’s that experience that’s invaluable for the moment that a Netflix production exec says, “I don’t think you can do this.” You’re like, “Yes, I can because I watched Greg do it, because I watched Robert do it, because I watched all these people do it. I know how to do this.” It’s very hard. If you were a young showrunner, you’d be screwed. You wouldn’t know how to do it.

John: No.

Courtney: You’d end up in Atlanta, is what would happen.

John: Let’s talk about the not ending up in Atlanta because 2016, 2017, I was living in Paris for the year, and I got really homesick. That was when Issa Rae’s Insecure came on. I remember just watching the show. I’m like, “It’s Los Angeles.” It’s a beautiful Los Angeles. It wasn’t just Beverly Hills and the Hollywood sign. It was like you could tell you were really in Los Angeles, and it does make a difference. The textures are just different. I can tell the houses in your show; the exterior is like, “I know where the house is.”

Courtney: That’s right.

John: That’s important.

Courtney: It was a huge thing for me to write a love letter to my adopted city in the same way that Power is a love letter to New York, to make Los Angeles a character, and to really make the show full of all different kinds of people. Again, that whole Black show thing. A lot of the leads are Black, but there’s also Brown folks. There’s Asian folks. We have a giant, lovely, wonderful Samoan cop. We have all these great people in here because that’s what LA actually is as opposed to the fake LA that you see on TV.

John: I saw a meme yesterday that was talking about you have the stereotypes of Los Angeles, but the median LA voter is a 50-year-old Latina woman who goes to church. That’s what the median person in Los Angeles actually is. It’s so different than how it’s portrayed on screen. Talk to us about shooting in Los Angeles because I hear horror stories of like, “Oh, it’s hard to get permits.” It’s hard to do this. You have to deal with all that rigmarole. Do you have a location manager? How involved did you have to get into negotiating the ups and downs of shooting in Los Angeles? Was it tough?

Courtney: Carolyn, our location manager, is amazing. She was so on top of everything. What I would say is our biggest challenges were there’s a very large shootout where we shut down Century City. That was really crazy because we had to shoot in Century City over a Saturday and a Sunday and do a lot of setups with a lot of guns and make sure it was safe. She got that to happen, but that’s permitting and all those things. I think the biggest challenge for us is that we did end up shooting sometimes in not the safest neighborhoods. You really have to make some good local conversations happen and take care of people.

John: What people don’t think about, it’s you’re in a neighborhood, but also it’s not just the physical location you’re shooting at. It’s where you’re putting your trucks, where you’re putting the trailers, where you’re putting everybody else, how people are moving from wherever the trailers are to the place where they are. Where’s the parking lot? Where’s the village? All those things you have to think about, which are not showing up on screen, but they’re logistically so important.

Courtney: And so expensive. If the job of the showrunner is to get as much money on screen as possible, if you are in a place where you’ve got to put your base camp 30 minutes away from where you’re shooting, that’s going to soak up your day. It’s just so bad. It’s not easy. We were very, very fortunate. My line producer, Phil Barnett, was a genius. He really helped me navigate getting LA. I had never made a show in LA before. That’s where I was new. I didn’t know how to do this, but I was determined to do it. Then the fires happened. Then it was like, “Okay, well, we’re proud to be here in LA.”

All those things happened where it’s like, “We’re proud, LA strong.” It’s like, “Yes, well, I really wanted to be here,” but it was tough.

John: Congratulations on the show. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Courtney: That was fun. I would keep talking to you forever. This is so great. This is super fun. Thank you.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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