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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-veep-episode).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 415 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We are going to skip the usual bits because today we are joined by two of the executive producers of HBO’s remarkable and award-winning comedy series Veep. David Mandel serves as showrunner. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Selina Meyer. It is such a pleasure to have you both here talking with us about your amazing show.

**Julia Louis-Dreyfus:** Thank you very much.

**David Mandel:** Thank you. Thanks for having us.

**Craig:** How about this? We are coming up in the world. I’ve got to be honest with you, John.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve had Alec Berg a couple of times.

**Craig:** Which is not great.

**John:** No, but I mean–

**Craig:** Not great.

**John:** But to have the better HBO comedy.

**Craig:** Well, so Alec Berg used to work in a three-part writing partnership with Dave Mandel and Jeff Schaffer.

**David:** A three-headed monster.

**Craig:** Correct. And as everybody used to say, Alec Berg was the worst of them. So we would always get the worst. And now we have – and I guess Schaffer is in the middle.

**David:** I mean, show 600 you might get Schaffer.

**Craig:** We’re working up to Schaffer. Working up to Schaffer. But now we have world famous television star Julia Louis-Dreyfus. And we have the greatest of all Mandels in Hollywood. Sorry Howie.

**Julia:** Hey, you know what?

**David:** I’m a fan of Babaloo. But anyway.

**Julia:** Mandel means almond. You know that right? OK.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**Julia:** I forgot to tell you that I took pictures of packaging at the grocery store where it said Mandel Mandel. Anyway, never mind. You can cut that part of the show out.

**Craig:** No, no, that’s staying.

**John:** That’s crucial.

**David:** Leave that in and let’s expand on it.

**Craig:** Mandelbrot.

**David:** Expand and sort of improv.

**Craig:** If you were fully Jewish, we had a little discussion of our Jewish provenance which happens when you’re discussing comedy. Mandelbrot is almond bread, right?

**David:** It’s kind of gross.

**Craig:** You know what? Like most Jewish pastries, disgusting.

**David:** It is a treat that is not much of a treat.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a treat relative to the things we’ve suffered as a people.

**David:** Like they gave it to us at Hebrew school and, yuck.

**Craig:** Here you go. Doesn’t this remind you of something good? But it’s not.

**John:** I hope that today we are going to talk with you guys about some things—

**David:** This is of interest to screenwriters, yes?

**Julia:** Yeah, really.

**John:** That do not include almonds. You probably don’t get asked so much about the process of writing your show and putting together your show, so we really want to dig into some process stuff. I want to talk about tone and likeability, which is a thing that Craig and I get hit on a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. The number one complaint that I have about notes, whether it’s from a studio or a network, or when people ask us what do I do about this, the big complaint is my character is not likeable enough. And I always think like good, you’re on the path to success.

**Julia:** That note is a red flag to me. Likeability is overrated as a virtue. In fact, it’s not a virtue – certainly when it comes to writing comedy.

**David:** It’s blandness. It’s literally blandness.

**Julia:** Or drama for that matter.

**Craig:** Agreed. Agreed.

**David:** There was some executive back in the day in the Seinfeld days, not connected to Seinfeld, but the writers who had come from other shows and what not. And I literally don’t even remember who it was, but I just remember there was an impression of this person giving a note which was sort of like having listened to a script and then going, “Mm, I don’t like our guy.”

**Craig:** “I don’t like our guy.”

**David:** “I don’t like our guy.” And that was this sort of—

**Julia:** Oh, I know who that was.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll take that off the air.

**David:** OK. Fascinating.

**Craig:** But it is essentially a torpedo aimed at your work because the entire purpose of drama or comedy, and I think it’s particularly clear in comedy, is to underline the absurdity and the brutality of the human condition. And I’m not interested in doing that with people who are nice. I don’t mind people who are truly good. Those are interesting characters. Like Saints can be interesting in their own way. It’s like that line from Into the Woods, “You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice.” It’s such a bad note.

**David:** They just want to round those sharp edges off. And like I said I just keep going back to blandness.

**Julia:** Well, also, I mean, very fundamentally if you’re really reading a good story or watching a good story, dramatic or comedic, conflict is what you need, right? Aren’t you looking for that? And how does likeability fit into conflict?

**David:** Yeah, conflict. And I would add to that and then choices. Choices based on who you are.

**Julia:** Right.

**David:** And if you’re just likeable or whatever, well then what are your choices? What are you faced with? And it just seems like it eliminates a lot of those things, too. Or at least interesting choices I guess.

**Julia:** Right.

**John:** Julia, can we start with you and start with the sharp edges of Selina Meyer and sort of where that all came from and the initial discuss of this character Selina Meyer, the idea of doing a show. Can you take us back, that’s 2011. What is that initial conversation about the show like?

**David:** It was drinks with Armando right?

**Julia:** Exactly. It was drinks with Armando. It was pitched to me that – he was developing a show about a female vice president who was miserable. So I thought, ooh, that sounds like, oh, I can’t believe that this is – immediately I was drawn to it conceptually. We were supposed to meet for a cup of tea or whatever, just to chat it up. Anyway, three hours later we’re still yacking and we got along really well and I was pitching to him in this meeting ideas about behavior and in that meeting a couple of things I pitched were then worked into the script actually that were fundamental. Like the bending of the spoon that was made out of cornstarch and so on and so forth.

And so we got along really well. I was familiar with his work because of In the Loop. I had seen the movie. I did not know The Thick of It, however, which was this series about parliamentary politics. And so then he wrote the script and he folded it in and then I remember getting this script and loving it. Although at that point they hadn’t made a deal with me, so I was like, god, I hope they’re – some of my ideas are in there and I hope they include me in this show. But anyway, they did. And it was fabulous.

**John:** A lot of our writers who are listening to this show, they’re going to be meeting with an actor. They’re going to be meeting with an actor who they want to involve in a project and it sounds like he had a general vision but he also included you in from an early stage.

**Julia:** Totally. Yes, exactly. This was his—

**John:** You felt like the match was right?

**Julia:** Yeah. And I grew up in Washington, DC. They’re in New York. But I was very familiar with inside the beltway culture. Too familiar really. And so – and also I’m active politically, so I’ve been on the campaign trail as a matter of fact. I had experience to bring to this, which I think was intriguing to him. But his style of making entertainment was really intriguing to me. Because the gritty quality of his work was something that I was desperate to do.

And then off we went and we made this pilot and we rehearsed for I want to say something crazy like two weeks.

**Craig:** Oh my god, what a luxury.

**Julia:** Oh yeah. Can I say, so much rehearsal for the pilot and then subsequent – I think we made six or seven more episodes, yeah, seven. And rehearsal for that as well. So it was just gobs of rehearsal, which was fantastic. And the cast that we put together were very adept at improvisation which was very important to Armando. He really, really wanted people who could think on their feet and work on script from an improvisational point of view.

**Craig:** It seems to me that there are some actors that writers understand instinctively they can partner with in this way. And then there are others that you can’t quite do it with. And I’m sure you’ve noticed this along your path, too.

**Julia:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** You know, some actors really are kind of receivers of stuff and they perform and they may have questions about it. But there is a writerly kind of actor. And one thing that’s always indicated that to me is an actor that has things to say about the other characters.

**Julia:** Yes.

**Craig:** That they understand everything actually comes out in relationships, not just me, me, me, but how does this work with the other person. And so early on I have to assume that you were talking with Armando not just about Selina but about everyone.

**Julia:** Oh yeah, completely. 100%. I mean, I was there for the casting of everybody other than Anna Chlumsky who had already been hired, because she worked with In the Loop, and so he was a huge fan of her. So she was on board. But everybody else we sort of went through the process and improvising and doing scenes in the audition with everybody who came through.

And in fact some of the people who didn’t get the roles as regular cast members subsequently came back as huge players in the show. Dan Bakkedahl, Brian Huskey, just to name a few.

**Craig:** You end up with kind of a theater troupe surrounding—

**Julia:** Correct.

**David:** And I know from talking to the guys that they had like – you know, Armando had done a lot of research and definitely sort of created these archetypes.

**Julia:** Tons. Yes.

**David:** But then obviously in the casting process the vision of what you think someone is going to be and then Tim Simons walks in and that’s not what you thought Jonah was, but then that becomes Jonah.

**Julia:** Well, Jonah was written as a tiny, I believe, balding, overweight guy.

**Craig:** Nailed it. [laughs]

**Julia:** Exactly.

**John:** So talk about that rehearsal and the improvisation part, because one thing I’ve heard about your show is that after a table read or during a table read there’s also an opportunity for the actors to sort of experiment. What happens in that process?

**Julia:** Well, just so you know, there was one way of doing it frankly with Armando and that worked really well, and then Dave come on board season five and that shifted. And neither one is better than the other, it just was a shift. And everybody was able to do it, which is great.

**David:** I think one led to another also in that—

**Julia:** Yes. Yes.

**David:** Because of the improv and the improvisational style of the early days which allowed I think all of the actors – this is just my take on it – I wasn’t there. But allowed the actors to imbue the characters with so much of their own stuff and really take possession of them. Then when you walk in in season five, I’m the first to say, a lot of the heavy lifting was done. And a lot of these characters were a lot more set in stone. And if you look at who the characters became in sort of season three and four they’re very different than who they were in one and two. Not in a bad way, but you can see in sort of the first season—

**Julia:** The evolution.

**David:** Everybody is a little similar. And then they start to find who they are.

**Craig:** And so you have the advantage of writing now for characters that the actors had sort of improved their way towards.

**David:** Yes. So I get this sort of slightly more – I shouldn’t say slightly – these more complete full-fledged people to play with. But I will say from talking with Armando who I spend a little bit of time with and he was just so gracious and wonderful with the handover and emailed and spoke on the phone and I flew to London. And then I think that first year I went to, he was getting an award at one of the comedy festivals – it must have been Montreal. And I went there and we did like a thing together there. And he just works differently. I mean, forget about who went first. He definitely experiments and looks to find things.

And one of the things I remember when I took over the show, it was like you have to have three editors. And I was like, OK. I don’t–

**Craig:** Seems like a lot.

**David:** Yeah. Seems like a lot. But you need three editors. And I was like, all right. And we hired three editors. And I worked with an editor and I finished a show and I went to the next set and I finished a show or whatever. And somewhere along the way I realized, oh I see, when he’s looking at all of this footage he is looking for stuff and he’s finding it in there. So he’s giving some notes in one edit room and moving to another edit room, and moving to another edit room. That’s just not me.

I am far from the most organized writer. I am a procrastinator. I have many, many bad habits.

**Craig:** We’ll get into those.

**David:** But at the end of the day the way I learned to write, which really from Seinfeld into Curb, you know, really Larry and Jerry but especially Larry, outline, outline, outline. And structure, structure, structure. And so I map the season out and it’s a pretty hard map. And things move from episode to episode, but when you look at our whiteboards, like at the end of the season it’s sort of like, oh no, no, no, it was all there. Do you know what I mean?

**Craig:** It was planned.

**David:** And so I didn’t quite need three editors. And obviously I think my scripts were certainly much more the script. But that being said, again, because I have these wonderful creatures, we would pick – maybe sometimes more pick and choose scenes to throw on their feet and try out and play with. And always good stuff came from that. And almost as a rule we always picked what I sometimes thought were the harder scenes.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**David:** And we always picked anything with you and Hugh. And you and Hugh scene was something we always almost took almost three shots at. We put it on its feet, did a big rewrite off of that and discovered so much stuff. Rewrote it, then put that back on its feet. At that point hopefully maybe even on the set. And then maybe a little fine tuning.

**Craig:** It would be a crime to not with those two together.

**David:** Yes. And so much, the physical – like a lot also the physical stuff that is never—

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** It’s hinted at in the script but it’s just not till you’re there that you get that kind of stuff.

**Julia:** Just to back up to the Armando process for a minute, when we were originally like in that first season and we were doing rehearsal and I just remember all of us were terrified. It was pretty scary. Because, you know, there was a script and we’d read it. And then he would say, OK, now just throw those out. Everybody come up. And let’s just – let’s pretend it doesn’t happen that way. Let’s pretend such and such comes through the door who wasn’t originally in the scene and needs this. And everyone was just sort of – it was scary.

But then after a while you sort of got used to it. And meanwhile writers are there taking notes furiously. And if anything works, you know, it gets folded into the stew. And this happened quite regularly. But that is to say it was also very written. So I don’t mean to imply at all that the show wasn’t written by the incredible writing staff. But it was just – we just came at it a slightly different way.

So the ability though to sort of think about a scene wholly was very much strengthened during that period of time. And it was something we could apply working with—

**David:** And I’m fascinated by that, but I would rather kill myself than work like – I just couldn’t even—

**Julia:** And by the way we tried it, didn’t we? We tried it like exactly that. That was not a good fit.

**Craig:** How was it for your anxiety level? Was it good?

**David:** Well, I’ll give you the [double] which was we read the first I think three scripts, or I can’t remember, I think we maybe didn’t read the third one. But we read the first two and we were scheduled to read three. I think it was like the Monday after they won the Emmy. And it was a goddamn disaster. And I know exactly what was wrong, but it was horrific.

And so then in a world where nothing was working we attempted our version of the Armando system because Chris Addison who had been a director in the old world and then we had him on that first episode sort of did—

**Julia:** Applied those same—

**David:** Applied the version. And to me it was just people marching in circles. I mean, I just remember going like blech. Because it was just like OK now you’re with a doctor. And the writers, the non-British writers, because three British writers had stuck around, but then I had put together this other team. And we’re all just looking at each other like—

**Craig:** What is this?

**David:** Yeah. And I knew what to fix. But for me it was just not it.

**John:** Now, back up though because both of you had worked on multicam. So in multicam traditionally the room has created a script. There’s a reading but you’re rehearsing over the course of that week. Isn’t that sort of the process that you’re getting to there where you’re trying a scene, you’re putting it on its feet, and writers are rewriting it?

**Craig:** Larry was pretty strict, right? In Seinfeld he was fairly strict?

**Julia:** Strict-ish. I mean, if we came up with shit in rehearsal and if it was good—

**David:** And you guys with Andy came up with a lot of business.

**Julia:** We came up with a lot of business.

**David:** Which became a lot of comedy that wasn’t necessarily in the script.

**Craig:** But it wasn’t, I mean, my understanding – like Seinfeld wasn’t like Curb for instance?

**David:** Well I was going to say no. Seinfeld had scripts. Curb has outlines. Although they are outlines that – and I always try and point this out. They’re like six, seven-page outlines that any writer worth his salt could take home and turn into a script in under 24 hours. It’s all there. It’s just not laid out. But it’s all there. And in some cases it’s all there plus we’ve got a couple of like secret things that we didn’t put in but we’re sort of saving for take three. So we’ve got even additional stuff.

But what I was going to say, just to back it all up somewhere, is the way Larry and Jerry ran the “writers’ room” is there was no writers’ room. Each writer was sort of individually crafting their episode, pitching their stories, and then being sent off. When Larry left Jerry rigged a sort of mini-version of the same system which was individual writers writing their episode and bringing it back in. And then in lieu of Larry and Jerry going through the script and sort of rewriting and making it better we did sort of a baby mini-room of usually Jerry, the writer, and then some combination of senior management so to speak.

But very much not the sort of group room write that I think has sort of—

**Julia:** That is the norm.

**David:** That has [ruined] the sitcom form in a lot of – you know, the reason that you’re not seeing multi-cams. But the process of, I guess, that week thing, it is different. This was really sometimes just wholesale just throwing things away and just going what if now you’re over here. I mean, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But my one day of it, it was very loose.

**Craig:** Well it didn’t fit your—

**Julia:** It was very loose, but at the same time it was also not loose. It was a different, I mean, the looseness was important sort of fundamentally for a feeling of what you were doing. And it definitely informed, it was that gritty thing. So people talking over each other the way people do in life which you don’t normally see actually anywhere really.

**David:** Robert Altman movies.

**Julia:** Yes, exactly. Which I love. And that all stayed and we kept that in place. And in fact I would say when Dave came onboard and then moving forward from there, you know, sometimes I would say to Dave, “Is this feeling too written? We need to zhoosh this up, which is the word I use for it, which is to just mess it up, zhoosh it, make it—

**David:** Especially in that world of like take five. Everybody has kind of got it down. But it’s getting a little my line your line. You know what I mean?

**Craig:** Yes. Take the polish off. Go faster. My favorite direction of all time. Faster. Something about speed people start to lose a little bit of that sense of line-line. They will start to overlap. It will – I don’t know, I just always find that—

**Julia:** Speed can be really helpful. It can open up something that you didn’t realize. It really can.

**Craig:** It’s almost now you’re flying by the seat of your pants. Your instincts start coming out.

**David:** Seinfeld was crazy fast, and Curb was faster. And Veep was fast before I got there. And I think we made it faster.

**Craig:** Speed is wonderful.

**David:** I mean, I always think about like Billy Wilder, like One, Two, Three. You guys know that movie?

**Craig:** Yes, great movie.

**David:** Just boom, boom, boom, boom. And not only do we squeeze every ounce of air out of it in the editing room. Also by the way just to try and get more stuff in. But on the set I guess in that next step of the process which is when you actually get to the set, we’re getting it on its feet for the camera blocking. We’re making changes. And any hole that’s there, how do we jam another line in? And plus the realization—

**Julia:** Or behavior. Or behavior.

**David:** By the way, both. So there’s behavior here. And Richard is throwing a line away there behind her that she never hears. And it’s just all there. And we’re jamming it full.

**Craig:** Then you get that sense, and I love this in comedy. And it’s something that you can start to do on the page, but ultimately you do have to work together as a troupe to get it done. The sense of overabundance. We’re not short on jokes here. In fact, we have too many for you. If you miss something, good. Watch it again.

**David:** Watch it again. And every time people are like, oh, I have to stop and go back I’m like great. Fantastic.

**Craig:** That’s wonderful.

**David:** And in fact when we sometimes do these screenings, we’re always sitting near each other when the audience is getting to see it. And obviously it’s so fun when you do like a screening for a theater because that level of laugh is wonderful. But we’re always a little bit upset when they miss that second joke.

**Julia:** Oh, shit, they missed it. Shut up! Shut up!

**David:** They’re laughing too much at joke one and it just blew by them.

**Craig:** Good. Love it.

**Julia:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** Love that.

**Julia:** But it was also this idea too of things having an imperfect veneer over it. So, forgetting a line, or saying things wrong, or whatever, we carry – I mean, we just blow past it and maybe can use it because it seems real.

**David:** Right. If somebody screws up a line or stutters on it, Julia is more likely to make fun of the character in the scene.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Julia:** Yes.

**David:** Which then may become something but now all of a sudden she’s jumping down, whatever, I’m thinking of like Matt Walsh’s thing. Jumping down his throat. But it feels very real. The other thing, too, is – and again this ties into I think sort of the—

**Julia:** Sorry to interrupt. I think that’s where that aye-aye-aye—

**Craig:** Came from originally. Because he actually did it?

**Julia:** No. He just said something dumb and I just started making fun. [makes stuttering noises]

**David:** And then he said please don’t do that and then you’re off to the races.

**Craig:** That’s the best thing you could possibly hear. Please don’t do that.

**David:** But I was just going to say and then this sort of Veep sort of doc style, also the same thing to this messiness which is we are big and wide at times where other shows would be close. We are close but we’re on the other person. We’re on the reactions. Because so much of—

**Craig:** Where it’s at.

**David:** Exactly. It’s all reactions. And so that kind of stuff. Or obviously that moving camera thing where you’re getting a little bit of both.

**Julia:** Pieces of this.

**David:** And not necessarily ending the scene on a joke, or at least a joke-joke. Sometimes even just maybe an angry storm out that just sort of Peters out with everybody feeling—

**Craig:** Avoiding the traditional rhythm.

**David:** Yes.

**Julia:** Yeah. And we are always very careful, because we got burned a couple of times, actually I think just once, to get a hyper wide shot. Because the wide was our friend. And also in so doing I would add we got away with a lot of broad performance. Because if you’re hyper wide you can do it.

**David:** You know, and occasionally you have a line and you go, well, that’s feeling a little jokey, you pull back about ten feet it’s a lot less jokey.

**Craig:** No question.

**Julia:** Right.

**John:** Can we talk about Selina as the center character what she wants seems to drive everything. It drives the whole ambition of the series. But within every scene it’s so focused on sort of what Selina wants. The thing she’s trying to get someone else to do. Or that she’s hungry. Or that she needs this thing that’s in her bag.

**Craig:** [laughs] She’s hungry.

**John:** So as you’re writing scenes is that pretty much always top of mind. Sort of like what she wants, what each of the characters want in that moment, what they’re trying to do?

**David:** I don’t know if it’s specifically that. But I guess I’ll go macro for a second which is – especially in the first season Armando had sort of written it into this sort of exquisite corner which was the Electoral College tie. So, so much of coming into the show – and this goes back to when Julia and I first sat down with this idea of maybe I’ll come in and do this – obviously we were talking so much about Selina and really the bigger picture of just how badly she just wants the presidency. And so in some ways I can’t say that we’re sitting there going, no, no, it’s all about what she wants in any individual scene. But that paintbrush, even in the season where she wasn’t in the White House just drives everything.

**Craig:** She’s defined by her wanting.

**David:** Yes. Exactly. And that’s definitely something we’re just always thinking about. Plus, I guess just a general, again, this for me goes back to Larry, which is just every scene has to move things forward. Something has to move forward. You can’t just—

**Julia:** Masturbate for a while.

**David:** And in our first season—

**Craig:** What a shame.

**David:** Once we got going and we sort of rewrote those scripts and everybody was very happy and we solved it all and we went going we reshot one scene from the first episode which was a scene of – Selina had this giant stress pimple from the tie, sort of the way George W. Bush had gotten sort of his own weird boil thing. And we shot of scene of her with the doctor, the president’s doctor. A very funny actor whose name is escaping me right now, but he was really funny. And there was some funny weird energy between him and Tony Hale, being possessive of each other. And this very funny way that like a lot of fans thought—

**Craig:** They were into each other.

**David:** It was all to do that was wonderful. But the scene was sort of dead on arrival.

**Craig:** It didn’t change anything or move.

**David:** Yes. Exactly. And we ended up – and it was something that kind of slipped through the first time, because there was fun dialogue and stuff about the pimple and all that kind of stuff. Second time through and it wasn’t until like sort of again you sort of realize it watching it in the editing room it’s like we know how to fix this. And it was just like add three more characters and add some—

**Julia:** Other conversations.

**David:** Yeah. There’s a disaster in the Midwest.

**Julia:** Flooding or—

**Craig:** Which led to a background thing that’s going on.

**David:** Which led to a funny conversation about favorite disasters.

**Julia:** Favorite disasters is unbelievably irreverent to say the least.

**David:** And just a whole bunch of other stuff. And the doctor dialogue and her dialogue with him and the Tony stuff, none of that ever changed. It’s just now—

**Craig:** Takes the pressure off of that stuff to be funny on its own.

**David:** The fear of trying to continue to govern, to be presidential, to seem presidential. That all now comes into this scene. When it was just talking to the doctor you lost – even though the scene was in the Oval you lost that, again, that feeling of she is obsessed with how do we get through this tie. And those things all come through.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well it does seem like once you have a character that is defined by this wanting that you’ve learned something about her which is – it’s too limiting to say that a character really just wants to be president. That’s a person that just wants. Right? So that never goes away. We kind of have this sense that people that really want to be president are trying to fill a hole that will never be filled. So everything is trying to fill the hole and it will never happen.

**David:** And one of the great things, and again I think this connects a little bit to coming in in season five that maybe you don’t do in season one is coming into the show as a fan of the show, but also now it’s season five, again, some of the stuff we started talking about right in that first sort of – and there was a series of them. I feel like – I don’t know, two or three lunches. And it sounds silly, but a lot of those conversations just informed the three seasons we did together.

**Julia:** Totally.

**David:** We didn’t know how long anything was, but the journey, the losing the tie, then ultimately the idea of losing the tie to another woman. Then the notion that the show would transform yet again into former president of the United States and then into the window opening and her throwing things away. All of these ideas, I mean, were in those early conversations. And we were so simpatico about like what to do with this thing. But in there was this initial idea that ended up being the fourth episode of the season which was Selina’s mother who had been mentioned – and again the fan, I remember thinking about these things.

**Julia:** Mee-maw.

**David:** Mee-maw had been mentioned three or four times.

**Craig:** Mee-maw.

**David:** As this hateful character. And we sort of had this idea of like she dies. And now season five we’re going to start digging into where do these wants come from.

**Craig:** Right. What’s the origin story here?

**David:** Why is she like this with her daughter? Well I’ll tell you why she’s like this with her daughter. Because her mother was even worse to her. And what’s her relationship with her dad? Well she thinks it’s good, but why is she with so many shitty guys? Because it wasn’t so good. And you get this chance to kind of dig in. And I do think – and again, it’s not good or bad or better or worse, it was sort of I think the three seasons we did together we got to kind of dig into that stuff in a way and start to – I hate to say it was home life, but you got a little more into the characters.

**Julia:** And I apply that, too, to other characters on the show. We were able to dig into Gary Walsh’s life.

**David:** We met his parents.

**Julia:** Anna Chlumsky’s life. My god.

**David:** Mike having babies.

**Julia:** Amy Brookheimer. Yes.

**David:** All of these things.

**Julia:** It was fun to delve.

**David:** And it was just a chance to kind of, because that’s what – I guess I’ll simply say I was both – that was what I was interested in. And it was an opportunity to also make it a little different.

**Julia:** Widen it out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because they had already done the stuff that you have to do first.

**David:** A thousand percent.

**Craig:** Because there’s no context for it.

**David:** The second episode can’t be Selina’s mother’s funeral.

**Julia:** Nobody gives a shit.

**David:** But four years in–

**Craig:** Nobody Gives a Shit. That would have been a great title for that episode.

**David:** You start to kind of go, oh, this is interesting. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about the plans for this season. So the blue sky-ing of what’s going to happen this season. Because you could have had a plan for like these three seasons, but then there was a break and there’s a new president. A whole bunch of stuff has changed. So when it came time to really think about what are the episodes of this season what is that process like for you, for the two of you together? What was the discussion like?

**Julia:** Well the first big discussion was are we doing seventh season and out or an eighth season and out. And that took a lot of personal, you know, there was turmoil in our hearts and souls over that. But we made the right call because I should say we did have an idea if we were going to do another season what that trajectory was if we were to do a season eight. So then when we decided it’s a season seven it was a question of crunching those ideas into season seven.

**David:** And again a lot of this all just starts with us sort of either, just phone calls sort of in the offseason, or even occasionally an email. But usually leads to a phone call. And sometimes she’s calling me going I had this thing that was funny. This could be a Selina thing. And I’m going, hey, I’ve been thinking about this thing of like this. And so a lot of it just starts like that during the sort of maybe – during the editing process. When I’m editing and we’re seeing each other to go over cuts and stuff. But it’s free form ideas as these things do.

But I always – this is for me – I always like to – when I go into a season I like to kind of know what the first scene is and I like to know what the last scene is. And that last scene also secretly informs the first scene of the next one if that makes any sense.

**Craig:** Absolutely yes.

**David:** And so we started talking, again, about how do we end this, how do we figure this out. And I will admit in my own mind I was pushing for two. It’s a good job. I like it. I like working with these people.

**Craig:** Sure. You have a lot of debt. Gambling debt.

**David:** Gambling debt. But as the show often does it was like – it was like one of those things where you start putting it up and it’s like, oh, it’s one. And it just was.

**Julia:** Yeah. Story dictated it.

**David:** Yeah. So we talk through a lot of stuff. I start meeting with the writers. We have a lot of special guests. We bring in all these people. It’s almost like a little salon.

**John:** Let’s talk about some special guests.

**Craig:** I was one of them.

**David:** That’s right.

**Craig:** I was a special guest.

**John:** What did you talk about?

**Craig:** Ted Cruz.

**John:** All right, oh great.

**Julia:** Oh.

**Craig:** The worst politician in the world – well, second worst politician in the world.

**David:** Exactly. He’s looking really good now.

**Craig:** Let’s not get crazy.

**David:** But when Jonah became a congressman, when he won, and then we were going into the notion of what’s next for him, and it led to his sort of mini Tea Party revolt. And we were sort of definitely kind of stealing a little Newt Gingrich, a little Ted Cruz and whatever, we brought in the Ted Cruz expert. Because we had this idea that we wanted Jonah to be the most hated member of the House of Representatives. And so we thought the most hated member of the Senate would be a good reference point.

**Craig:** No question.

**Julia:** In its inception the show relied tremendously, heavily on research. So, in the very beginning we went to DC and met with this person and that person. I mean, you can’t believe it. It was like field trip after field trip, in the best way. And we all did it together, writers and cast. And this happened every season and then when Dave came aboard we did another Washington trip.

**David:** When I took over we did a Washington trip as well. We took all the writers to DC. We were in the White House at like nine at night. I mean, we were in the Situation Room at like 10:30 at night on a quiet Wednesday or something.

**Julia:** We spent a lot of time meeting with consultants and lobbyists and chiefs of staff. I mean, really just a ton of people.

**David:** And the nice thing is obviously people are fans of the show from both sides of the aisle. So we had Mitt Romney in after he lost. And he was fascinating, but one of the most fascinating things for me just story wise we sort of said to him like what’s it like to lose. And he definitely – we stole a couple of lines from him. We definitely took some things. But one of the best things he said was he talked so much about—

**Julia:** If you’re explaining you’re losing.

**David:** Yes, exactly. And we just put that right into the show.

**Craig:** Wow. If you’re explaining you’re losing.

**David:** There were little phrases. Anytime anybody used a phrase, I remember somebody said simple block and tackle politics. And it’s like Ben is going to say that. So you get little bits of dialogue that give you that authenticity. And then obviously you just get stories. So that for example the Pod Saves America guys came in and told us about Obama flying to the wrong airport. And we know that’s—

**Julia:** Done.

**David:** Literally opening scene of the season.

**Craig:** Can’t not do that.

**David:** Sorry, back to Romney really quickly. He talked so much about the comfort of this large and extensive family sort of giving him solace that it was so clear like, oh, Selina would have no solace. It was sort of like a—

**Craig:** They were going to leave her alone.

**David:** Yes. It was just like oh my god she’s going to lose her mind. And we started the season with the notion of her coming back from basically the looney bin. And in those things you just get these wonderful pieces of reality that go into the stew.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** Can we talk about the second episode which is the Aspen one, the Discovery Institute? What was the genesis of that idea? Just getting you out of the normal backdrops?

**Julia:** Well, I mean, because it’s a reality. These – what do we call them – retreat conferences led by billionaires.

**David:** Or you hear about these weekends in the Hamptons where like Kamala Harris is going to the Hamptons and she’s throwing a giant party.

**Craig:** Jeffrey Epstein used to attend quite a few of these.

**David:** I’m sure he was quite the guest.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Not anymore.

**David:** And so again these things come at us and it seemed like just again obviously an interesting thing and this is – I’ll throw this out which is we started with a ten-episode season that was so complicated from a production standpoint that the episode shooting went from six-day shoots with three cameras to eight-day shoots with four camera.

**Craig:** Four?

**David:** Four.

**John:** Four cameras.

**Craig:** What do you do with the fourth one?

**David:** Our DP David Miller, I mean, he found usage—

**Julia:** Killed it. He killed it.

**Craig:** To be honest with you I’ve never seen a single cam four cam.

**David:** It was incredible. And it allowed us to – especially now that the group was back together, so you’re in a table or an office scene.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**David:** That fourth camera is picking up extra coverage.

**Craig:** Tables are the worst. The worst.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**David:** But not with four cameras. Four cameras makes it a little easier. But as it grew and we ended up going, OK, I think from a – I hate to say – budget reality we’re going to crunch the season a little bit. I think in retrospect I do wish maybe one or two of the people hadn’t been at that retreat and just maybe a little less of a – it was almost a bottle show. And that’s not a bad thing. But in a seven-episode season when I look back on it I wish it maybe wasn’t quite the bottle. I wish maybe – and again the perfect writer’s hindsight. I wish maybe we had moved Amy and Dan going off on the abortion into that episode, taking them out of. I think it was a luxury in a ten-episode season. Again, this is all hindsight.

**Julia:** It’s all right. It’s all right, Dave.

**Craig:** No, I think you should torture yourself over it. Forever.

**David:** I will. I will. Do not worry.

**Julia:** He is.

**David:** But again it came out of this reality. It came out of this notion of—

**Julia:** Money driving politics.

**David:** Trying to show money. Exactly.

**Julia:** Money. Money. Money.

**David:** Basically we have that line in there somewhere, Ben says to you, “You’re going to have money so dark it’s going to get shot going into its own apartment.” And that was, if you had to pick a line of what is this episode about, that is what that episode is about. It’s about the money and all of–

**John:** And setting up the season. It’s also going to be the Chinese influence and a lot of other things that’s going to happen. Basically asking the question is there anything Selina Meyer won’t do. And the answer is, of course, she will do anything she absolutely—

**Julia:** The China thing by the way was set up in season five.

**David:** We were setting that up in season five. I don’t think we necessarily knew obviously, well A, we didn’t know the Russians were going to interfere in our election. So I can’t say to you we 100 percent knew how it was going to play out. But all of that Tibet stuff has been a constant thing.

**Craig:** It worked out great for both of our shows in its own way.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What I did not predict was that the Russians would explode another nuclear reactor and lie about it.

**David:** And lie about it for about, what, eight days or so?

**John:** HBO did really well by you getting that to happen.

**Craig:** And then have Scandinavia detect it.

**David:** Again. Almost the same way.

**Craig:** Sort of embarrassing.

**David:** A little smaller.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**David:** But where I was going to bring this all back around to was, so, let’s back up. Summer 2017, yeah, Summer 2017 we mapped these ten episodes out. When I’ve got it on the board, maybe not perfect-perfect, but at that point Julia has heard most of it, but not all of it. And then she and I go through it together and she adds her stuff and we move some more things around. And then at some point we get HBO to kind of sign off on it. And then we start writing the episodes.

And I think we had read like three or four episodes when it was September and we won the Emmy and the next day—

**Julia:** Breast cancer arrived.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, yes.

**David:** And we ended up shutting down.

**Julia:** How do you do?

**Craig:** Hello, breast cancer. Welcome.

**David:** And I don’t want to gloss over that period but I guess jumping forward when we were shut down Trump enters the second year of his presidency and as I sort of think about it he got very comfortable. Like all of a sudden like if you go back to that period he really steps on the gas. The lies go up. The craziness goes up.

**Craig:** All of his minders have been eliminated one by one.

**David:** Exactly. And so year two is where he really goes crazy. And as bad as it was in that kind of like it can’t get any worse, it started to get a lot worse.

**Craig:** Every day.

**David:** Yes. Every day.

**Craig:** There is no bottom.

**David:** And so now as this is kind of happening and I can remember these feelings in January and I will also say it also ties into, I think January is when you – forgive me if I’m not remembering exactly right – but somewhere towards the end of January you kind of got a thumbs up on the chemo had gone well and things were good.

**Julia:** Yes.

**David:** So knowing all is well and we’re going to – I don’t know when we’re coming back, but we’re coming back, it’s like what is this show? So many of the staples of what we did and talked about–

**Julia:** The bad behavior. In the pilot episode the big scandal is she says hoisted by your own retard. That’s the pilot episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. That wouldn’t even be a blink today.

**Julia:** That’s nothing.

**David:** It almost cost her her career.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s nothing now.

**David:** And the construct of Selina being constantly hoisted on her own petard, or retard, is a constant throughout the show in a way that it affects her. But it just seems like consequences have gone out the window. The notion of this is how we are secretly, but in public we’re different.

**Julia:** Public we’re somebody else.

**John:** So all of these sort of Veep staples go out the window.

**Craig:** He’s blown them up because you can’t compete with him because he’s real and he’s worse than you’ll ever possibly be.

**Julia:** Correct.

**David:** And then let’s go further. Our incompetent staff seems like geniuses compared to who he hired and vetted.

**Craig:** And this kind of goes to an interesting thing about comedy, we’ll go back to unlikeable characters, unlikeable characters aren’t stupid characters. In fact, you need to be rational in some way to be funny. Your rational pursuit may be insane. In other words the thing you want may be crazy. And the depth you go to and the lengths you go to. But it makes sense at least internally.

**David:** Or at least you can function to realize I’ve screwed up.

**Craig:** Correct. You have a sense of shame.

**David:** And that can create fear. Shame and fear.

**Craig:** This guy would be the worst character in a show ever because he just makes no sense. He doesn’t remember anything he did. He feels no shame or guilt. He would be a C or D character. I mean, he’s not even – he doesn’t even have what Louie De Palma had in Taxi. Like every now and then Louie would have a conscience.

**Julia:** Yeah. He’s too broad.

**Craig:** He’s too broad.

**Julia:** He’s too broad.

**John:** And he’s running the country. Yeah.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**David:** So all of this happens.

**Julia:** Ugh.

**David:** And now we’re starting to be able to get on the phone every now and then a little more. And I remember having this conversation of like I’m worried–

**Craig:** How do we compete?

**David:** And we were worried even when he won, but we kind of got away with it because it was our she’s not in office season.

**Julia:** Right.

**David:** We had shot most of that season, we were in the middle of I think our sixth or seventh episode, the Georgia episode. I can’t remember the order. We were mostly through the season when he won. And when we aired that season thank god she wasn’t in office because I honestly believe had she still been president—

**Julia:** We would have had a real problem.

**David:** And we’d been putting up these episodes of Mike doing bad press briefings.

**Craig:** It would have been embarrassing.

**David:** Yes. We would have looked very out of touch. And so my fears were not just what are we, what is our relevancy, how do we not seem out of touch, how do we not seem old fashioned, but also how do you deal with this, because so much for us when we are mining interesting real political history we have distance. Even when we did the Florida recount, I mean, we had distance. And we’re living in this thing. So it was a full reevaluation of I guess taking a darker paint brush and just going if we’re talking about the quest for power and this is now the example of just this insane, insane quest for power, and if Selina Meyer truly was willing to throw away love at the end of season six, what else is she prepared to do? And where can we go? And also why should she lose? Because our original version of it was she was going to lose the presidency yet again and then eventually become a vice president to Sam Richardson.

And so why does she lose when horrible people all over the globe are winning?

**Craig:** Correct. In fact, yeah, that’s the trend right now.

**David:** And dare I say some sense that I guess maybe was wistful but now I don’t necessarily think is true which is I guess early on I had this vision sometimes that at night he went up to his room and maybe was a little scared or like what am I doing here, which I now no longer think that’s even possible.

**John:** Oh no.

**David:** But that inspired at least the notion of let her make these decisions and then suffer consequences.

**Julia:** The consequences. Right.

**David:** And so we changed – I don’t want to say we changed everything, because on a story point of like where we went and the things a lot of it stayed the same.

**Julia:** But actually certain fundamental things really changed. I mean, people got shall we say killed off episode by episode until at the end of it we’re—

**David:** We got very Godfather and Godfather Part II. Which is by the end the family ain’t around anymore. And this idea which was at the end of the season she would be with no one we knew. I mean, we knew them but none of the regulars would be with her.

**Julia:** None of the core group.

**Craig:** She’s killed her whole family.

**David:** Yes. And she has to kill Fredo. Because as we started to think of well what can she do that’s bad, talking about her passing bills and what not, or burning down a forest, it’s relationships. And so who is the person she would never – and you get there. But it was a process and a real journey. And then, of course, if we’re playing all this darkness how do we also keep it funny? So it got very brutal but it got very funny in a really dark way.

**Julia:** And it got pretty dramatic, too.

**Craig:** Which is why it all kind of comes together and ends well.

**David:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I mean, not for necessarily the character—

**Julia:** No, no.

**Craig:** But ending a show is really hard. I personally, I don’t care, I love the last episode of Seinfeld. I do. At least I think I understand what was happening there which was essentially the show was saying these people you’ve enjoyed all this time are terrible and they deserve justice. They deserve it. Because they’ve done terrible things. And I thought that was wonderful. It was like a great way of a show kind of accounting for itself.

**Julia:** I could never really get an opinion about that for myself. I had never had an opinion about the final episode other than I enjoyed making it so much. Which I did. But in fact I know it was a controversial episode for a lot of people, but I think we were sort of set up in such a way that people would be disappointed regardless.

**David:** It was sort of a Game of Thrones of its time.

**Craig:** It’s hard. It’s really hard to end something that is designed to not end.

**Julia:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**David:** At the time I remember thinking, or the one thing I took from it and sort of I guess applied to us, which was it was what Larry wanted. Forget everything else. It’s exactly what Larry wanted. And all I cared about was there was a moment sort of like as we were finishing the cut of like we really like it. And the rest will happen or not happen as the world goes.

**Julia:** Yes.

**David:** Both in every phase, just the stories, the outlines, first draft, second draft, on its feet, rough cut, locked cut. And kind of we like it.

**Craig:** You’re accountable to yourselves. That’s the most important thing. I mean, then you can defend anything because there’s nothing to defend. We like it. We love it. We’re the same people.

**Julia:** Yeah. We like it. I think it’s funny.

**Craig:** Right. We’re the people that made the thing that you love. And we love this. So take it or leave it.

**Julia:** Yay.

**Craig:** Exactly, yay. But as it turns out I think it’s considered one of the best series endings.

**David:** When people do like it, don’t get me wrong, it’s quite nice.

**Craig:** No one likes it.

**David:** I was prepared for—

**Craig:** Sure, of course.

**David:** Like I said, to me the two most important people were me and her. And then I kind of had like a couple of my high school buddies in mind. This is aimed at them.

**Craig:** And where was I in there?

**David:** You’re like number 36.

**Craig:** That’s not bad actually.

**David:** It’s not bad. I only know about 35 people though.

**Craig:** I know. That’s still, I’m OK with that.

**David:** But I mean, I don’t know, when you make something for the world, what is that going to be?

**Julia:** You can’t do that.

**Craig:** Well I think it worked out great. It is considered, and I think reasonably so, and well deserved, a really good ending for a series that had been going for years and also had gone through so many changes. Sometimes those are the hardest things to end. When characters have gone through these wild journeys. You saw with like Dexter was sort of an infamously poorly-received ending where he had gone like seven, eight seasons, and then just didn’t quite figure it out I guess.

**David:** I think one of the things that also again going back to like you get to build on what was there in the past, I think one of the things that has always helped Veep is that despite the show being called Veep she stopped being Veep in season three.

**Julia:** And they blew up the premise.

**David:** And yet it was completely different every year and yet it was always this woman who suffered from having been the Veep. And the notion of—

**Julia:** And how we ended. She gets to be president, but something is off, isn’t it? So, she will never be satisfied. She’s a fundamentally unhappy human being. And she thinks X is going to give her joy. But she’s wrong.

**Craig:** I mean, there is a wonderful irony in somebody who is miserable because they’re the vice president because the presidency is right there. And then they get it and they still feel like the vice president. Because there must be something more. And there isn’t. And that’s when you realize you’re kind of in hell.

**David:** The life of a writer.

**Craig:** Yeah. The life of a writer. Exactly. It never ends.

**John:** So it’s the end of this series, but it’s not the end of what you guys are working on.

**Craig:** Oh no it is. They’re done.

**John:** They’re done?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**David:** Retired.

**John:** Retired?

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t think anybody – they’ve burned so many bridges.

**Julia:** Bonbons. Champagne. That’s all it’s about.

**Craig:** Actually sounds pretty good.

**John:** Julia, what will we see you in next? What’s the next thing we’ll see for you?

**Julia:** I don’t know. What do you got? I’ll do anything.

**Craig:** OK. Well let’s get to work.

**Julia:** I made a movie on the hills of Veep called Downhill which is a remake of Force Majeure.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Yeah. Love that movie.

**Julia:** Yeah. And I did that for Searchlight with Will Ferrell and, yeah, Faxon and Rash directed it. So I’m in post-production on that right now.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** That’s a heavy—

**Julia:** Lift?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it’s a great movie. But it’s really, that casting is fascinating to me.

**Julia:** I know.

**Craig:** I mean, I assume it’s not tonally similar?

**Julia:** Ish. Not completely.

**Craig:** Slightly funnier I would imagine.

**Julia:** Yeah. But, it is a dramatic film with comedic elements to it. But I would say it’s more drama than comedy. And it’s more comedy than the original.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Julia:** So that’s what I’m doing. And then trying to decide my next move. Maybe one of you boys has something I can do.

**Craig:** Chernobyl season two.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**John:** David, what are you working on next?

**David:** I have been gloriously taking a break and I will keep taking a break hopefully for about another month or so.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**David:** I signed a deal with HBO and I obviously hope to create something. I’d like to start from scratch on something and then hand it off to some other schmuck later on about four seasons in.

**Craig:** Right. You want to Iannucci it is what you want to do.

**David:** Exactly. It seems like a really smart move.

**Craig:** And continue to collect money I would hope.

**David:** Oh yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Craig:** God, how do you get that where you don’t do anything and they give you money?

**David:** Or I’ll get Schaffer to run it.

**Craig:** Get Schaffer to run it. Of course.

**David:** But, you know, look, everybody works hard. I was fried when we were done. And I have just recently been able to put sentences sort of back together.

**Julia:** Yeah. It was a hard show to make. I mean, we were really wiped by it.

**Craig:** That makes absolute sense. But tremendous success with it and really when I say tremendous success the only kind I really care about is creative success, because I don’t think I own shares of AT&T. So, it’s really just the creative success of it. And it is so lovely to see – that’s why we wanted you guys to come on together. To see actors and writers working together in this way where they are both writing and they’re both weirdly acting also. It’s like it all gets sort of blended together in this lovely and unique mixture that ends up with something like this. Where there’s not another show like this. I can’t imagine another one coming along. It’s got its own fingerprint. And I think that’s why it was so successful.

**Julia:** I consider myself very lucky that Dave – or I don’t consider – I am very lucky that Dave came onboard because we had worked together before, but never this intimately. It was as if we always had.

**David:** Yeah. I mean—

**Julia:** From the get go, right?

**David:** You know, I use the word, I mean I call her, she’s like my writing partner. I say that. And I will say, and I think I’ve said this in an interview somewhere or whatever, but it’s true. And I can truly remember it, which was when you were in the chemo stuff and obviously chemo is chemo, whatever.

**Craig:** No fun.

**David:** I would occasionally email you but I didn’t want to bother you also. But I was so palpably aware of how much at that moment we actually spoke every day and then weren’t.

**Craig:** You missed her.

**David:** Yeah, I don’t know what else. I mean, it was crazy. And I just realized like, oh, like we’re not speaking and I was sort of just losing my mind.

**Julia:** Ooh.

**Craig:** That’s how John is going to feel about me.

**John:** One day.

**Craig:** I’ve decided that’s how he’s going to feel about me. And I don’t want to have to go through chemo for it. Honestly. I would love just a long flu, like a two-week flu. But towards the end of those two weeks—

**David:** He starts to really miss you.

**Craig:** He’s going to feel an ache.

**John:** As I cycle through guest hosts and eventually it’s like, you know what, it’s just not the same without Craig.

**Craig:** You know man? Have the flu again. It’s working out better. For you and me. I like it when people explain to you that something is working better for you when it’s not at all. But mostly me.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did today’s outro. If you have a question you can write into ask@johnaugust.com.

Thank you very, very much.

**David:** Oh my gosh, thank you so much.

**Julia:** Thank you.

**John:** And have a great rest of your season and a great rest of your vacation. I cannot wait to see your movie.

**Julia:** Oh god, I hope you like it.

**Craig:** I’m gonna.

**Julia:** You are?

**Craig:** Yeah. I decided. It’s happening.

**Julia:** Oh goodie.

**John:** One ticket sold. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**Julia:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Veep](https://www.hbo.com/veep)
* [Julia Louis-Dreyfus](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000506/)
* [David Mandel](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0541635/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [The Shadows Casting Call](https://johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15-year-old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Julia Louis-Dreyfus](https://twitter.com/OfficialJLD) on Twitter
* [David Mandel](https://twitter.com/DavidHMandel) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Julia Louis-Dreyfus](https://www.instagram.com/officialjld/?hl=en) on Instagram
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-one-with-charlie-brooker).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 404 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off this week, but he will be back next week. Luckily I have somebody really remarkable to talk with about things. This is Charlie Brooker, the creator-writer-executive producer of the remarkable anthology series Black Mirror, the most recent installments of which dropped on Netflix this past week. Charlie Brooker, welcome to the show.

**Craig Brooker:** Hello. It’s a pleasure to be here.

**John:** I want to talk to you about so many things about the individual series, individual episodes, bigger questions such as what is television, what is reality. So…

**Charlie:** Yeah. I might not have answers to all of those things. I’ll try.

**John:** I’ll give you about 30 seconds. I’m going to plug the live show one last time.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** So be thinking.

**Charlie:** 30 seconds. Right.

**John:** Our next live show is this Thursday, June 13, and the Ace Hotel. It’s a benefit for Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney, the showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, Kourtney Kang of Fresh Off the Boat.

Oh my god, we have too many guests. I don’t know how we’ll fit all that in, but it’s going to be a remarkable show. So come see us this Thursday, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. They released some more tickets so you can still get a seat if you would like to see that live show.

If you’re there at the live show there are going to be some games, there’s going to be giveaways, there’s going to be cool stuff that you can only encounter at the show. So, please come out and support a great charity, Hollywood Heart. Craig and I will be together on stage. Craig’s head will be immense from the success of Chernobyl. But, you know, he has still graciously agreed to participate in this live show.

**Charlie:** He’s lowering himself. You see, he’s lowering himself to take part.

**John:** So someone on Twitter this last week asked, “Have you and Craig ever had successes at the same time?” Because Craig has Chernobyl and I have Aladdin. And I said, no, not that I’m aware of. And so I think we’re going to become insufferable.

**Charlie:** You can’t call each other out on it.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** Because you’d both be right.

**John:** So it’s going to be a really interesting live show. So there could be some fireworks.

**Charlie:** But you’re not going to listen to anyone. You’ll just be monsters. You’ll be like Godzilla.

**John:** Craig’s rider for just this live show has been crazy. It’s been months of negotiation. But I think we finally got through most of it. We’ll try.

Charlie Brooker, welcome to Los Angeles. People by your accident might guess that you do not live in America.

**Charlie:** No, I don’t.

**John:** I did not know anything about you or your show until I was on a live show for Slate Culture Gabfest with Craig. We did a little crossover episode. And Natasha Lyonne as her sort of endorsement, her One Cool Thing essentially, said you have to watch this series Black Mirror and I didn’t know what it was. I wrote it down and I started watching it immediately. It is a remarkable program. And I would have assumed that you had done nothing before that, but then I checked your credits and you’ve done a tremendous amount. You have credits all the way back to ’99.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And most of them seem like comedy things that are related to cultural moments. Rewind your–

**Charlie:** That’s fair enough. I mean, I’ve had an odd kind of accidental career. I started out I was a cartoonist at one point when I was a teenager. Then I became a video games reviewer. Then I started doing a website that had sort of topical – it was extremely vicious satire of television on it. And that led me to get work. Simultaneously I started working for a topical comedy show in the UK. And I got a gig writing TV reviews for The Guardian.

So most of the stuff that I’d done until about 2008, in fact everything I’d done until 2008 was comedy. So all the TV stuff I’d done was comedy. And in the UK I sometimes present shows. So I do a show intermittently now that’s kind of Daily Show esque, I guess you’d call it, which was called Screen Wipe. It was about TV. Then we did News Wipe, which was about the news. Started doing annual 2016 Wipe or whatever you’d call it.

And then I sort of developed a parallel career I guess, 2008 we did a show called Dead Set which was like a zombie series. It’s kind of like a prototype Black Mirror in a way in that it’s an absurd premise that we then play straight. So a zombie apocalypse happens and the only people who survive are the participants in a series of Big Brother that’s going out in the UK. And they’re 10 people who have been chosen to not get on.

So, yeah, and then myself and Annabel Jones who is my sort of co-conspirator on all of this stuff, we were asked would you like to do something us. And we’d always been a fan of shows like The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected. I don’t know if you’ve got that over here.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** It’s like Roald Dahl short stories. Really creepy. And Hammer House of Horror was another show, don’t know if you ever saw. And the show we came up with was Black Mirror and we that was in 2011. At the same time as we were doing Black Mirror we were also doing a show called A Touch of Cloth, it’s like Naked Gun. So polar opposite stuff.

So in the UK I guess up until 2008, 2011, I was mainly known for doing comedy stuff.

**John:** So talk to me about that initial conversation about the idea of Black Mirror. Going in they say how about an anthology series. What is the discussion that leads to the specific idea for Black Mirror and what does it look like in those meetings? What are you describing to them?

**Charlie:** Well, initially it was slightly different in that it was – there wasn’t going to be a focus on technology so much. It’s become sort of shorthand for that in a way. It was very much just going to be an update on Twilight Zone style stories. I’d read a biography of Rod Sterling. I felt that at the time those kind of things were missing from television. And when I was growing up – I didn’t see The Twilight Zone until I was a teenager, but the BBC used to put on really strange one-off controversial, thought-provoking, high-concept plays that would always generate a lot of controversy and often be quite horrifying.

And I felt that that sort of thing at the time was slightly missing on television. And then when they rebooted Dr. Who, which was about 2006 or so, I thought well maybe – because that’s almost an anthology show.

**John:** It is. Yeah.

**Charlie:** I thought well maybe there’d be an appetite for this. So that was what we – originally the pitch was it was going to be eight half hours. I was only supposed to write like two of them or something. And it said, I think originally it definitely mentioned technology might be one of the themes, but the idea was just to look at shows like The Twilight Zone and where they would be doing an episode about McCarthyism or something like that we’d be doing terrorism say.

And then because we were only doing three we ended up – the technological stories seemed to be the most interesting ones. Although actually I’d written a whole completely different episode first which we were about to start shooting that, again, didn’t have any technological element to it at all. It was incredibly earnest. And then a new head of Channel 4, the Channel that put it out in the UK, a new head of Channel 4 came in and she did not like this script. I have to say probably in retrospect she was right. They were going to pull the plug on it and if this wasn’t going ahead basically the whole show wasn’t going ahead.

So, there was some panic going on on our part. So I had a meeting with her where my job was to try and persuade her that this was a good idea, that this very earnest episode we were doing about the Iraq War was well worth her time. And if she wasn’t going to go for it, in my back pocket I had the idea for the national anthem episode which is the one with the prime minister and the pig. And I thought well if she doesn’t go for this I might as well pitch that because what have I got to lose.

**John:** Absolutely. Something versus nothing.

**Charlie:** Exactly. So, I ended up pitching that and luckily for me she laughed. Her first question was does it have to be a pig.

**John:** That’s a classic development note question. Does it have to be a pig?

**Charlie:** [laughs] Well, and we went through all the different things it could be there in the meeting. At one point I think I suggested a wheel of cheese or a frozen chicken. And then we went, no, a pig is probably best.

**John:** It has to be a pig.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And I went off and wrote the first ten pages or so, just to try and persuade her. And it was a parody of 24 that I was basically writing. And luckily for us she went for it. So, I mean, that episode is obviously one of our most divisive ones and I think in the UK it’s received slightly differently than it is say here, because I was known for doing fairly unusual comedy stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. So people could see the joke of it played differently there than it does here.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** But I want to get back to this idea of you talk about Twilight Zone, we had Tales from the Dark Side which sounds like a similar kind of thing, generally they’re self-contained stories that ask a question and there’s always a fantastical element or big sci-fi element that lets you focus on differently. In your case it’s technology and it’s a what-if on technology but a generally a very near technology. Things that are almost possible today. And how early in the process of these first three episodes of this first season – so the first three episodes are The National Anthem, which is the one with the pig, Fifteen Million Merits which is the prison-ish situation, and The Entire History of You. So those last two are much more clearly near future technology things. How soon did you know that that was the unifying theme?

**Charlie:** I guess it was, so Fifteen Million Merits had been written but so had this other earnest episode. As soon as that one was – the one that we were going to do was sort of scrapped, The National Anthem I realized there was a sort of drumbeat of social media going throughout it. And I thought, well hang on a minute, and we’d already been speaking to Jesse Armstrong who wrote The Entire History of You which was the third one. And so we realized well all three of these are about technology. And then we realized that, well, really we can use technology in the same way that The Twilight Zone would use the supernatural to tell a story. We can have fantastical things happening. And a lot of the technology we show is impossible, but because of the era we’re living in you kind of go along with it. As long as it looks grounded enough, and it looks like it functions the way you imagine it should, you kind of go with it. So, I think it was then. And then once we’d done that first – I think it must have been by the time we were finishing Entire History of You I thought well this is the way forward for the rest of the season.

It’s strange though, because then looking at the second season one of the episodes there is White Bear which – it looks like it’s a comment saying aren’t people on phones zombies. It’s a zombie movie with people filming things. So I think that was – sometimes we like to remind ourselves it’s not a sci-fi show basically. On the show itself we can lose sight of that.

**John:** Let’s talk about, as you’re figuring out an episode, because with an anthology show like this where each show is about a thing, are you starting with what the one-hour of entertainment is going to be about? Is it the idea or is it the character? Because ultimately the character has to drive that thing. But in this anthology that is so idea-driven you have to be able to sell that idea. So where was the push and pull between those two?

**Charlie:** Yeah. And that’s something that I think I got better at now. There’s certainly – when we’ve done weaker episodes it’s because the story is dictating what happens. It really depends. So sometimes – sometimes the story idea comes about from as you were saying a what-if, some crazy scenario that you imagined. You think, OK, that’s interesting. The different ways that could play out, I’m immediately interested in that. Other times it really depends – something like San Junipero which was – actually I’m going to rewind a bit. Actually Be Right Back was probably – Be Right Back was an interesting one.

So Be Right Back which is in season two, and I think it’s – I feel it’s one that’s slightly unjustly overlooked as an episode. It’s one of my favorites. And Owen Harris directed it who also did San Junipero. And that had stemmed from an experience I’d had that was in the ‘90s a former flat mate and friend of mine had died. And then it was one of the first times that somebody I knew had passed away. And then a couple of years after that, if you remember at the time when cell phones had limited memory and you could only store like a set number of phone numbers in there.

**John:** Oh, of course, yeah.

**Charlie:** And I was trying to make room for a new phone number in my phone which meant I had to delete old ones. And I scrolled through and I saw the name of this friend of mine and thought I can’t delete that. Even though it’s just a number I literally can’t ring that ever again. And there was something very strange – unexpected and strange about that moment. And so I knew I wanted to do a story that sort of spoke to that strange connection you can feel with – a very impersonal piece of technology can throw up something, an incredibly personal moment.

**John:** So I want to clarify that. So that leads to an idea that can be the premise of an episode, but it’s really an emotional spark. It’s like I have an emotional connection to this thing that I know is not the actual person. It’s just all of my memories is embodied in this slot in the phone.

**Charlie:** Yeah. It’s a little souvenir. It’s like one of the few reminders I had of this person. I didn’t have photos of this person. That was the one thing I had. And I was suddenly struck by it.

And then as is often the case, I think, with our episodes what happens is you’ve got an idea like that or really not an idea just a feeling, you’ve got that, and then I got really interested in the world of sort of psychics and mediums who purport to be putting people in place with their loved ones who’ve passed on. And these two ideas sort of glommed together and I was sitting up late one night. We’d just had our first baby. And I was doing the sort of night shift, which incidentally was weirdly a brilliant motivator because I knew I could only work in short bursts.

**John:** So many writers I’ve talked to say productivity actually soared because they knew they only had little windows of time.

**Charlie:** Yeah. It’s like Pomodoro technique or something that screams at you. And you can’t go outside. You can’t go anywhere. You’ve got nothing else to do. And I was on Twitter or something like that and I just saw updates from people scrolling past and I was just struck by what if I was the last person on earth, all these people were dead, and these messages were being generated by some kind of AI. And then you sort of remember these other ideas you had and you go, OK, I’m starting to see a story here.

Now, at that point I thought, so then you sort of end up creating the characters. I’m not sure the process by which I sort of thought who would find this the most upsetting possibly, if there was something that could generate text based on someone’s personality. Who would find that most upsetting? And the answer was a sort of recently bereaved widow who is expecting a baby, sort of my port of call, and so I think this is a very rambling answer I’m giving here.

**John:** I like it though.

**Charlie:** And that’s an odd one, because that episode I didn’t – at that stage in doing the show I hadn’t learned to plan things either. So I would write scripts as I went along.

**John:** You were just doing it by feel.

**Charlie:** Yeah. Just. Which meant that I ended up making all sorts of errors.

**John:** What’s an example of an error you would make by doing it that way?

**Charlie:** Ooh, in the original National Anthem there was a whole subplot involving the government picking up anyone who had ever been on some sort of terror watch list and trying to beat a confession out of them that tonally went – I was trying to play for comedy. It was like somebody gets beaten to death in an interrogation room and it–

**John:** Did it shoot?

**Charlie:** No. No it didn’t. So there was one scene in National Anthem as well that tonally, there’s a porn star he meets in National Anthem, there’s a guy they rope in to try and perform this act. There’s a moment when the two of them, the prime minister and the porn star meet in the corridor in the original script, and the porn star gives him the only good advice he gets all day long about how to deal with what’s about to happen. And we dropped it because just tonally it was very much at odds – but sometimes, White Bear I completely – White Bear is a good example of something where I totally messed it up. I wrote the whole – that was the next episode.

Now it’s one of my favorites because it’s got a really horrific twist and it’s a bit – I was trying to channel things like the Wicker Man and like there’s a short Spanish film called, I think it’s Spanish, called La Cabina. Have you ever seen that?

**John:** No, I don’t know La Cabina.

**Charlie:** Look it up. I won’t tell you anything about it except it’s about a guy and a phone booth. That’s all I’m going to say. It’s about 15 minutes. I was trying to channel that sort of thing. And I originally wrote that script three times. We were about to shoot it. I had written this thing, I had this notion about if you’ve seen White Bear there’s a story they tell the main character in it about–

**John:** About what’s actually going on.

**Charlie:** About what’s going on. And they say there’s a symbol appeared on all the TVs and everyone is behaving like zombies effectively. In the original script that was–

**John:** The actual premise.

**Charlie:** That was the actual premise. There was just this mysterious symbol appeared that made 30% of the population act like psychopaths and 30% act like bystanders. And 30% were the quarry. And I wrote it – it was very confused. But we had to shoot it because we were running out of time. We were literally scouting locations we were trying to work out, because I’d written in all these complicated locations, and we were based on a sort of former maybe US Air Force base in the UK. And we were looking for places to shoot the locations that were mentioned in the script. And one of them, it said it was a shop, but we couldn’t find a shop, but we could find this gas station.

And the location guy, we were looking around, and he said well you’ll have to film this way because there’s a fence around this whole place. So we can’t ever see in that direction. And I thought well a fence around the whole, that’s actually – oh, hang on a minute. And suddenly had a much more interesting idea. And just went off and rewrote the whole thing. Like just threw it away and rewrote the whole thing in like two days or something.

We had a director on board already, so we had to say to him, Carl Tibbetts, I had to say to him, sorry, I’ve totally rewritten the entire script. And luckily he was – but that happened because, and I’m in two minds about that. That happened because I hadn’t been doing any planning, I’d just been trying to write this story from a slightly confused premise. And then because I was forced into a corner suddenly I was in a position where literally I saw this fence around the thing and suddenly I sort of had a eureka moment and realized I could sort of dig myself out of the hole. You can’t dig yourself out of a hole, can you?

**John:** Well, you can dig a different hole to–

**Charlie:** You could dig some stairs?

**John:** Yes, you could use your shovel to maybe dig your way up to something.

**Charlie:** Yes.

**John:** That’s probably. You dug yourself out of it in a way.

**Charlie:** I dug myself, I stood on the shovel.

**John:** What it sounds like though is you’re trying to both plan for what you’re going to need, but also be flexible for better ideas as they come up.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you were ready to be lucky. If you had felt confident about the episode that you’d written you probably would have ignored the fence and stuck with what you had.

**Charlie:** Yes. Definitely.

**John:** Because you allowed yourself to feel some insecurity you could say, oh, OK, there’s a better idea. There’s a way of containing this. Because I mean what you’re describing sounds like a completely different episode. Because I love White Bear. I think it is great. And it relies on that twist at the end about what’s really going on. And it sounds like if you hadn’t planned for the episode to be one way that twist never would have come.

**Charlie:** Absolutely. And that was why, I mean, I just knew it was – it was like sort of realizing at the altar you had married the wrong person or something. This was happening and I knew it wasn’t right. And everyone basically knew the script wasn’t right. And then so suddenly to have had this moment was such a relief, but it was also terrifying. And then on the next episode of that season, which was the Waldo Moment one, that’s where I really ran out of time. And I was kind of not happy with my finished script. I think there were lots of good ideas in it but I didn’t – weirdly it should have been a separate thing. It should have been like a separate miniseries or something like that. I should have had more time to develop.

**John:** Absolutely. It didn’t feel like it wanted to be in one hour of time.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And let’s talk about that though because the format of an anthology series is about an hour long for episodes, although you’ve gone past those boundaries now. You have to set up your premise very quickly, or at least your world-building premise. Like this is what is possible in this universe of this episode. And people have a general expectation about what kinds of things can happen in a given episode, but there’s a pretty wide range.

You need to establish your characters very, very quickly. And you though have to decide at what point do you let the audience know what the episode is about. And that feels like a fundamental choice you’re making pretty early in the process or not?

**Charlie:** Yeah. I mean, White Bear was a good example of something where I guess in a way, I haven’t really thought about it, but because I had a story that I then was going to throw out but was going to use as the fiction they tell her within the episode, it meant that I had to sort of cover story that I could tell the viewer for about 75% of the running time. And then in a strange way, once you know what it is you’re hiding and you’ve worked out how long you’re going to hide it, it curiously makes some things easier because it actually limits your range of options. It sort of forces your hands on all sorts of decisions I guess. Which I hadn’t really thought about.

I mean, I found the stress of doing White Bear, it nearly falling apart and then me feeling like I hadn’t really done a good enough job with the Waldo Moment meant that when we did the Christmas one and that one I planned like meticulously. And that was interesting because that was another story where there was this big sort of reveal. We knew there was going to be a big reveal. Once you know that it sort of means you can spend, yes, and I’m always slightly worried that the audience is going to get there first. That they will – San Junipero, I thought people were going to get that in the first instance, like when they first – there’s a moment early on where Mackenzie as Yorkie is trying on different outfits. And it looks like a sort of a montage that you’d see in a John Hughes movie or something like that. Owen who directed that as well is a huge John Hughes fan and wanted to sort of channel all these things.

And in the script what it’s saying is that she – at one point it says she sort of magically changes outfits. And look. And Girlfriend in a Coma is playing on the radio at one point. And I thought everyone is going to immediately twig what is going on here. And I was pleasantly surprised when people didn’t. Although that’s again something – the other thing I guess I’ve learned is that I think that the most important draft in a way of the script is the edit. So myself and Annabel spend a lot of time in the edit and it never ceases to amaze me how much you can continue to tweak and change – you can rescue things that haven’t worked and you can bring in new things you didn’t notice yourself. And when you’re playing – when you’re revealing something that’s also crucial because that’s how you – you’re trying to gauge at what point people are going to understand exactly what’s going on.

White Bear actually there’s little flashbacks in that as well which I thought, oh, people are going to guess this.

**John:** And they don’t.

**Charlie:** And they don’t.

**John:** So White Bear is an example of sort of a two-stage reveal. First that the world is not what she thinks it is, and that we think we have good insight into who this character is or sort of that we’re seeing it through her eyes. And she’s a trustworthy narrator to some degree but there’s more going on. Shut Up and Dance is again that sort of same situation where we think we understand the premise quite early on that he’s being compelled to do these things and we don’t realize that there’s more to him than we sort of knew at the start. And looking back it’s like, oh, that is what that first scene was and we don’t know that’s why he was chosen.

**Charlie:** That was another one that changed actually. So Shut Up and Dance originally, so there’s like Kenny who is the young kid and Hector who is the older guy who he meets, and originally there was a reveal that Hector who Kenny – they’re both being blackmailed. For people who haven’t seen the episode they’re both being blackmailed by anonymous hackers. And originally the reveal was that Hector had been waiting for an underage prostitute in the room. And so the story was he’s sort of guiding Kenny along and he’s forcing Kenny into doing the more unpleasant aspects of this sort of horrible game they’ve been sent on.

And I came to the end of the script and we’re like it just doesn’t – you sort of know he’s a bastard from the first time he turns up and that’s not very interesting. Well, what if Kenny has got that secret then? That’s more interesting. And, oh OK, we care about him from the first time we see him. Then you can go back and you can go, well OK, what’s a good way of making us care about Kenny. Well, we’ll show him doing something that seems kind. So in just about the first scene you see him handing – a little girl has left her toy behind and he goes and hands it to her. And of course on the second watch that takes on a very sort of sinister – it’s actually Annabel’s daughter.

**John:** Oh no.

**Charlie:** Well no one wanted to put their own kids forward for that. [Unintelligible] She won’t mind me saying that. Her kids are all – they’re in lots of the episodes actually. And so afterwards you realize so that I realized was the beauty of knowing what the ending was. I’m so amateur. I realized that it’s helpful to know what the ending is when you’re writing the bit at the start. Because you can start kind of doing all of that stuff.

**John:** But everyone listening to this episode would assume though that you start at the ending. Like a mystery story where you sort of start with the ending and work your way forward. It doesn’t sound like that really is the process for you.

**Charlie:** Sometimes it is. Sometimes – I mean, when I get very excited about and episode, when it works at its best is when I sort of see what the end scene is. And sometimes then when you’re writing it that changes. San Junipero, good example where originally I did write a sort of story treatment for that. And, again, originally, I should say these things in order. So originally I’d written a short story treatment and it was a man and a woman. And the reveal was, oh, they’re old people. That was sort of the extent of it. And it ended at the point one of them meets the other one in real life and sees that they’re paraplegic. That was the ending.

And then I was sort of thinking, well, isn’t this more interesting – and they were going to get married in it, but isn’t this more interesting if they’re getting married – if we make it a same sex couple they can get married in 1987 which wasn’t possible in 1987 and that in itself is sort of more interesting. I started writing the script from this sort of rough outline I’ve got. And when I got to the point where they meet in real life in the script I thought, oh, I’ll keep going then. I don’t want it to stop here. I wonder what happens when they do get married then. So I sort of just kept going.

So from that point on it was much more – that was me sort of feeling my way along to the end. And then what that meant was, and I never used to believe it when people would say, “Oh, I started writing a scene and the characters just did this and I didn’t know where it…” I used to think you liar. And but that’s what happened. There’s a scene where Kelly and Yorkie have a kind of confrontation and you find out what is going on and what’s Kelly’s deal basically. And why she doesn’t really want to put roots down in San Junipero. A backstory with a husband and daughter. And that kind of just came out – and I don’t think that really changed at any point. And it was sort of like, you know, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the episode.

So, that was a good combination I guess of the two approaches, sort of planning it, thinking I knew where the ending was going. And then I went for a run in the middle of it, because like any basically dying mammal I now have to do exercise just to stay breathing. And I was going running and Spotify was on. And I was listening to ‘80s music because the thing was set in the ‘80s. And Heaven is a Place on Earth came on.

**John:** Perfect.

**Charlie:** And I was like, oh, that describes, and I liked the rye joke that they’re in a server basically on earth. And then I was immediately worried that we weren’t going to be able to clear it. And so I came back and wrote the ending really quickly. And so the whole script was one of the fastest ones I’ve written. It’s Sod’s Law that it’s turned out to be one of the most popular. It’s typical.

**John:** Now, after that season you went on – so season four had USS Callister, Metalhead, Black Museum. USS Callister sort of stands alone as just a great science fiction – it’s a remarkable episode.

**Charlie:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** Congratulations on it. But talk to us about the genesis of that because it’s obviously a very clear appreciation and reaction to a certain kind of Star Trek type TV show and, again, you established the premise really early on and yet our central character who seems like our point of entry ends up becoming the villain of the story. How does that develop as you’re working through story on that?

**Charlie:** That was, I can remember very clearly the genesis for – the whole story came about, we were shooting an episode for season three called Play Test and we were on the set and they were setting up for a scene involving special effects which we hadn’t used many of. And I said wouldn’t it be good, now that we’ve got this sort of tool, we can use special effects, why don’t we just do a space episode. That’s quite often how we think our way into episodes is how can – because we’re sort of almost – it helps oddly for me to imagine what’s the Black Mirror version of a space opera basically.

**John:** Sure.

**Charlie:** So, we knew we wanted to do an episode set in space and I’d also – somewhere along the lines been thinking what if you had – this is a horrible story – have you heard of Josef Fritzl? Do you know Josef Fritzl?

**John:** I don’t know who it is.

**Charlie:** He was this horrible man who kept a family in a dungeon. There was a guy in America who kept women in a dungeon. And so there was a sort of well what if you had someone who is a tyrant but they’re wielding ultimate power over a bunch of people who are copies of real people. And so those two ideas sort of glommed together and you think, OK, you could do – immediately there was something appealing about the idea of a world in which you have the captain of a spaceship who you think is the hero and then you realize none of this is real and he’s a madman effectively. Within this world he’s a horrific tyrant.

And then you think well why is he a tyrant in this world and then it’s like, oh, OK, he’s kind of – he’s enacting his grudged from his daily life where he feels powerless. And it’s office coworkers. And immediately there there’s a sort of comic gulf between the two worlds. That was an interesting example of, again, the first draft of that actually didn’t have the 1960s element in it. And I was thinking it would be fun if it had something else. I think it came about from an idea like well what should the spaceship look like. And I was like I’d love it if we did a Black Mirror episode that opened and it looked like Star Trek from the ‘60s. That would really confuse people. And then you think actually that’s quite interesting.

**John:** And appropriate.

**Charlie:** It’s a great look and also the power dynamics within there that now look dated, even though Star Trek was an incredibly progressive show, Kirk is going around the universe sort of trying to romance green women half the time. So, yeah, so that added an extra element. When we came to the – the original script that we shot, it was much clearer early on that Daly, there was something wrong with him. And I remember this was one of the times we got a note back from Netflix on the first sort of loose cut they saw where – so very early on Daly is in the office Nanette Cole comes in and they meet and he clearly – he’s delighted that somebody is being nice to him and seems to admire him.

And then Walton played by Jimmi Simpson comes in and sort of whisks her off and he’s very slick. And you see Daly looking sort of jealous. Now originally it was written in that you see his fist clenches. And Netflix said I don’t know that you need that actually. It’s really more interesting if you don’t know how you feel about him. And we cut it out and immediately it was much more interesting because it meant that the reveal that, oh, this guy is a bastard came just a few minutes later. You see him walk it onto the deck of the ship and grab Walton by the throat. And you realize he’s a monster.

So that’s a good example of something where losing something that I thought was a clever bit of a foreshadowing delayed the reveal to such a degree that it just had a lot more power I think for people. Because you really – people sympathize with him at the start because he seems – we also cut some dialogue, there was a bit where Michaela Cole’s character is talking to Cristin, who is Nanette, and she says, “Oh, Daly is a bit of a creep basically.” And we toned that – we cut – again, there was something in there that made it more apparent. She was like he’s creepy. She went into more detail. And again it gave too much away.

That was really good fun writing that episode as well because it meant we got to do all the stuff that we thought we could never do in Black Mirror. So it ends in a sort of chase through an asteroid belt towards a wormhole. All of that was just really good fun.

**John:** So let’s talk about, many of these episodes, I’m thinking of USS Callister, fresh example, is there’s a bit of magic hand-waving. You have to accept this is part of the world. And that’s true also in features. Like most features are based on sort of a premise concept that you have to accept that this is a thing that we’re going to say is legitimate in this. And so in the case of USS Callister it’s not only can he build these virtual worlds but he can just off a piece of DNA recreate the entire person.

**Charlie:** Yes.

**John:** So that doesn’t actually make sense and yet it is so fundamental to the premise that you are willing to accept it.

**Charlie:** Well that’s a very good point actually. Because we did spend, again, I’d forgotten this. This is one of those where you repress a memory. I’d forgotten that we spent a long time in the original draft, it was co-written with Will Bridges. And we spent a lot of time trying to explain why when Nanette wakes up on the ship she has all her memories in place. If she’s a clone she wouldn’t know anything.

And actually so in the original draft there’s a whole bit of business that involves – there’s a piece of technology from Season One/Episode Three, Entire History of You, the Grain, that records all your memories. So what we had, we had a whole explanation of that. Everyone has these memory grains and Daly has hacked her memory grain and he’s uploaded. And it was like well why would he do that? What’s the point? And also why do we have to establish that?

And I knew some people would go, “Well that doesn’t make sense.” There’s a line in it where somebody starts explaining, I think that Dudani starts explaining why they’ve got their memories intact. And Michaela Coel’s character just tells him to shut up.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Charlie:** And you kind of get away with it. I remember when we did Dead Set, the director of that was a guy called Yann Demange, and he used to wave away bits – I sometimes get very caught up on the logic of things. And he’d go, “It’s a movie moment. It’s a movie moment. It doesn’t matter. It’s a movie moment.” And he was right. I spent days arguing that it wouldn’t rain in San Junipero. Days. Because Owen wanted to shoot a scene in the rain and I was like, no, no, it wouldn’t – why would they make it rain. It’s paradise. Why would they make it rain? And he was like, “No one cares about that. It will look lovely.”

**John:** Yes.

**Charlie:** And he was right.

**John:** Rain can be nice. It can rain in paradise. One of the strange things about Black Mirror is that you’re writing about culture that is constantly changing and because you have become – because your shows have entered the cultural conversation people say like, “Oh, this is such a Black Mirror moment.” What does it feel like to be reflecting culture that you’re also changing? And to what degree are you aware that, you know, like these three episodes that are dropping right now, they’re going to enter the cultural conversation and change thoughts on that.

Are you mindful of that now in your success with the series?

**Charlie:** You can’t not be, I guess, to an extent. But you have to try. I mean, I just find that a terrifying thought. There’s something about that that’s absolutely terrifying. Because also it means that you’re – we generally try to give away very little about our episodes in advance because we want them to be a surprise. But we also know that, yeah, and I suppose also with an anthology where you’re – one of the things that, you know, we became known for was doing incredibly brutal endings and wiping all hope from the universe for a moment. Which I love doing every now and then. And sometimes we kind of almost deliberately overdo it, like Crocodile was a deliberate – well that’s a whole story actually.

So, you’re aware that – there’s a large subset of people who are coming to your show who want that. They want that horrible sort of feeling. But if you give it to them every time you’re not doing your job, I think, of the anthology show – of our anthology show we’re trying to be as varied in tone as we can within the… – I wanted to do an Airplane style episode.

**John:** Great.

**Charlie:** And I was talked out of it. I was talked out of it. I’m still not sure. I vacillate on that. I’m not sure whether it was a good idea or a terrible one. I really wanted to do one. I’ll have to do it under some other guise.

So there’s a weight of expectation I guess and I think – I mean, it’s very flattering when people go this is a bit like Black Mirror. Oh, that thing they’re doing in China, that’s quite Black Mirror. Oh, have you seen the news? It’s like an episode of Black Mirror. It’s flattering, it’s free publicity. It’s also terrifying as a mammal. It’s just frightening to think that the worst case scenarios that we’ve often been describing that those are reminding people of things they’re seeing in everyday life.

It’s something we don’t tend to – Annabel and I, we never really know whether the show has that much impact because we’re so busy. Because it takes so much time basically. Because they’re all – they’ve all got individual directors and individual casts. And a lot of the crew is completely different. We literally don’t really often get to go out and speak to people. [laughs] So it’s quite jarring when, I think last time I came to the US I was at immigration. They said what are you doing here. And I said I’m doing a thing, I’m doing a show. And they said what is it, and I said Black Mirror, and they’re like, “Oh!” And they called someone else over and said this is the guy who does Black Mirror. That’s really surprising and frightening because you think I’m going to just inevitably at one point going to let these people down.

I am now resigned to the fact that because we try – I think because we try to make the episodes as idiosyncratic as possible, when people inevitably compile their lists of which ones are their favorites you get some which are always near the top, but generally speaking I’ve read people hating on episodes that other people have loved. So you know that you’re never going to please everybody. And I think that’s sort of – hopefully that means we’re doing our job. Or at least failing in the right way.

**John:** I mean, you’re kind of unique in the realm of showrunners, and we’ve had many showrunners on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna, Benioff and Weiss, Damon Lindelof, who have been running these long time shows that have these huge fan bases who are invested in characters who they’ve seen over the course of years. And you don’t have that baggage. Every episode is its own thing and starting its own moment. So you don’t get the benefit of returning characters who can do stuff where you don’t have to set them up from scratch every time. But you get the freedom from expectation. A very limited set of expectations placed on any given installment of Black Mirror.

And I want to talk about Bandersnatch in relation to that because it’s billed as a Black Mirror experiment, a thing. Was it originally going to be a normal episode? When was the decision to make it its own event moment thing?

**Charlie:** Well originally it was part of season five. So we actually shot, so the season that we’ve just – they don’t like you to say dropped apparently. I was about to say dropped. No, no, no, it’s fine. I mean, I say dropped all the time. They say, “Don’t say dropped.” But I don’t think they gave me another word to say.

**John:** OK.

**Charlie:** So, what? Appeared?

**John:** Launched? No. Season five…debuted?

**Charlie:** Slithered? Slithered out?

**John:** Yeah.

**Charlie:** So Striking Vipers which is the first of the three, we’d already shot that. Smithereens had been written and there was some overlap with the filming of that with Bandersnatch.

Bandersnatch was always going to be interactive and that was an idea that – so Netflix had said to us, I think we were over for some season four stuff, and they said we’d like you to do an interactive story.

**John:** Oh, great.

**Charlie:** And they showed us how this tech worked. And me and Annabel both nodded and were very polite and said that looks great. And then we left the room and went no flipping way are we doing that because it’s going to be a gimmick. We don’t want to do it. And then a few weeks later we were having a – so the way it works – so I generally write all the scripts but I’m always working with Annabel, bouncing ideas off her. We have a healthy disrespect for each other, so she will not be shy about telling me that she thinks an idea stinks.

And so we have a sort of back and forth conversation. And during one of those conversations I had – I wanted to do another episode set in the past. And I wanted to do something about vintage computer games. That was–

**John:** Because that’s your background as well.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And so there’s a lot of real nostalgia for me in Bandersnatch. And then I had this idea which was, oh well, what if you’re controlling – it was about somebody starts receiving messages from their computer. And then I remembered the interactive thing they’d just shown us. And I was like well what if that’s you and then so he becomes aware that you’re there. Oh, that’s interesting.

And also, and I didn’t realize this at the time, but I’ll get onto that in a minute. Sorry. Because there’s a thing about interactive stories that’s just interesting generally. So that was it. Then we went back to Netflix and said, OK, we’ve got an idea. Originally it was much more simple. And then I started – so in trying to work out how to literally just write the story outline for this, I started out literally we were in the office and we had a whiteboard and I started with the flow chart. And then you quickly go on. I need a bigger whiteboard because I’ve run out of room. And then it was like, OK, there’s some software that does a flowchart for me. Maybe. No, actually, I need it to track what’s going on and remember what’s going on. And Netflix were also saying please test as many different things as you can.

So, then somebody said you should use Twine which is this interactive fiction software. And I looked at it and I thought I don’t have the time to learn that. That just looks complicated. It’s like html basically. And I used to do a bit of html stuff years ago.

**John:** But then you have to mark which characters are there and if there are any items that would carry through.

**Charlie:** Yeah. But what was useful, I ended up going back to Twine because it worked like flowchart software. So you’d make a cell and you’d type something in it and then it would automatically do the sort of piles that joined up. And as I did that it got fun. Planning it got fun. And it kept growing out into – so it kept expanding sort of length ways and width ways. And then suddenly you’d sort of think oh I can add a whole branch where this happens. And before you know it, you’ve of course fractionally it all expands out. So I did that. And then what I think what we realized I think was that it’s useful – if you’re doing an interactive story I think it was – what we stumbled across that I think was useful was because the main character of Stefan is separate, he understands that these commands are being given to him. It’s not like something where you’re just telling him what to do and he just does it. Because it’s hard to keep him consistent if you do that.

So I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 which I think is a very, very good open world game. It’s great. There’s a scene in it early on where you go and sort of have a conversation with one of your lost loves. And it was like quite well done. He has a conversation with this ex love of his on the doorstep and it’s quite poignant. And the turns away, gets on his horse. And then I accidentally like ran into a pig and then thought, oh, I’ll get off. I think the pig ran at me. So I shot the pig, sort of by accident. And then like somebody came running after me. And I thought what sort of character is this guy now? Murders a pig on the doorstep of his lost love. He’s a psychopath.

Whereas when there’s some sort of narrative distance it means that no matter how successful people found Bandersnatch or didn’t, it meant that hopefully Stefan was always a troubled young man reacting to a problem. And so he would start to resist what you were telling him to do.

So that was interesting. And then I learned a lot – there was one big thing that we had to cut out, and it’s incredibly hard to cut things out of an interactive story. That was the other thing I discovered. So originally the whole thing was structured a bit more like an escape room. So there was a central puzzle that you had to work out, which we have a bit of it down one branch. There’s a bit to do with the phone number. The psychiatrist’s phone number.

It was originally structured so you would always come to a point where he was trying to remember a phone number and he couldn’t remember it. And the idea was that the first time you encountered this you’re like well how am I supposed to know what the phone number. I can’t possibly. And so you’d get frustrated and it would sort of loop you back. And then by the time you’d failed in two different ways you’d realize that these recaps it was showing you–

**John:** Had new information.

**Charlie:** Were telling you the number. We had to massively simplify it because people just did not – I mean, we shot it. But people just did not understand what was going on.

**John:** Well ultimately you’re making a show about a guy developing a video game and the end product is sort of like the video game. It has to be tested and played like a video game to see whether people can actually get it. It’s not normally audience testing. It’s literally like can you – and people aren’t necessarily expecting a puzzle.

**Charlie:** No. They’re not expecting a puzzle, although weirdly – well, we did get some feedback afterwards. People did understand, one thing which was terrifying was that it was appearing quickly that people couldn’t remember a number. It was a five-digit number they were given and they couldn’t remember it for more than like 15 seconds. That was one of the first big boulders in the road we discovered.

Then we had a problem with translation. Because I hadn’t really thought that through. The numbers were buried in dialogue. So there were numbers like two which were just it’s two, what, but obviously when you translate that around the suddenly you can’t do it. So that was a problem. And you can’t predict what – people did understand that it was a puzzle and it was interesting that they said that people appreciated the fact that there was a puzzle involved and they enjoyed that. That was something they came back and said they enjoyed. But they also found it quite confusing and baffling.

So I don’t think that’s something we quite nailed.

**John:** You couldn’t cross that gap.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And another thing was there were some things – there was one branch of it, this is one thing that frustrates me about it. There’s one branch of it where we completely break the fourth wall and you can tell the main character that you’re watching him on Netflix.

**John:** I really liked that moment. It’s absurd and also–

**Charlie:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** And it makes you feel like, OK, I’m aware that there’s a comedy happening here.

**Charlie:** Exactly. Well, that’s the comedy. Totally upends it and it turns it into a comedy. The thing that I can’t quite – originally that was not accessible on your first go through. And then we were sort of concerned – it was one of these things where we were concerned that people would just get down to a more normal real world ending so to speak, certainly a less fourth wall breaking ending, and would miss that. And that was probably a bit of insecurity on our part to make that accessible from the start. But what that meant was that when it came to that point and it gives you two options, frustratingly slightly more people pick the Netflix branch because they didn’t quite understand what the other one was. It was like a symbol.

And so I think for some people that meant that their first experience of getting to a sort of fairly meaty ending broke the fourth wall and therefore sort of possibly undermined the drama of everything else in a way. So I’m not sure – I’m in sort of two minds about that. It was also a lot of business to do with dreams. Like you have to – where he goes through the mirror and stuff. There was such a logistical nightmare going on. Yeah.

And we ended up having to cut a couple of endings out because we just – it was just getting unwieldy.

**John:** Do you get data back showing which paths people took most?

**Charlie:** Yes. We had a whole sort of postmortem debrief they did where they showed us – or we don’t get numbers, of which I’m delighted about because there’s just such relief. But they did tell us – the one that really stuck in my head was when it comes to why the chopping up the body or burying the body it was exactly the same percentage split as Brexit in the UK. It was 52 to 48. Which surprised me actually because I thought most people would not want to – it was 48% wanted to chop the body up and I thought that would be much lower than that because that seemed such a gruesome option.

But generally speaking most of the sort of percentages were kind of roughly where we thought they would land. There were a couple of exceptions. There was a certain amount of stuff we could tweak because the whole thing was obviously weird because having done – just to rewind a bit – having done the story outline in Twine I then started – I realized that I couldn’t find tools that did this, that let you write screenplays in this interactive way. I just couldn’t find something that did that.

So, we ended up realizing, OK, what we need to do is assign a sort of number to each of these cells, at 1A, 2B, and so then I used Scrivener to create this confetti of individual little scenes. Wrote those up. And then had to export those into something else. Paste them back into Twine. So there was this convoluted route we went to. Because we had to get to a point where we had a script that you could read and it would say if you want to do this turn to page such and such.

And also you could read on an iPad and literally click on it and it would take you there, which sort of made life a lot easier for actors. But because the tools weren’t there it was one of those things where you end up with about five different applications open. Then Netflix built a tool for the edit which then managed to import – they imported my Twine thing directly into the edit which made life a lot easier. But it would crash. There would be things where it would be like, oh no, Colin is alive. He’s meant to be dead.

**John:** Yeah. Your episode crashed Netflix probably. The entire system probably.

**Charlie:** The outline crashed. The outline would crash. There was this whole thing where Colin Whitman can jump off a balcony and if he does he’s dead for the rest of the story. And sometimes he would just pop up again and we were like what’s going on?

**John:** What’s happened?

**Charlie:** Which was quite in character for him actually. That was why I kept adding more Colin Whitman. As soon as we knew we had Will Poulter I kept adding more and more Colin Whitman as well because he’s great.

**John:** We have questions from listeners and I picked a few that I thought might be good for you. Chelsea from London asks…

**Charlie:** I’ve come all this way to hear from somebody from London. And they’re called Chelsea.

**John:** “I watched Searching the other night, a film that’s basically all social media, and towards the end I found it was asking too much of me in terms of suspending disbelief. As writers, how can you tell when you’re asking too much regarding the suspension of disbelief? Obviously genre plays a large role in this, but for a film set in the real world how do you know where to draw the line?”

Suspension of disbelief. So, within your shows you are establishing the fundamental premise of sort of like what happens in this world. But do you struggle with suspension of disbelief in your episodes?

**Charlie:** You’ve cited a couple of examples. There’s a good example in USS Callister where we sort of hope you’ll just go with it. Striking Vipers, the new one, there’s a whole thing that they can do in this game that they shouldn’t really be able to do. But we just think you’ll go with it. So sometimes you just sort of gauge it that way.

I haven’t seen Searching so I don’t know specifically what it is. I often find that with the depiction of computers still a lot of the time in movies or TV they are shown doing things they can’t possibly do in the present day. And that’s often quite frustrating.

I think we do spend a lot of time kind of on product design as well to try and make it look like all the technology is just very functional, like quite sleek. A lot of the time we’re sort of trying to remove technology from the backgrounds as well. So there will only be a couple of little devices. And hopefully that makes it feel more grounded.

And there’s also generally that rule that you can withstand one fantastical thing happening.

**John:** Exactly.

**Charlie:** As long as that’s – I think as long as people enjoy that enough. That’s the other thing. As long as people enjoy that enough they’ll go with it. And if two impossible things happen. That’s the famous Speed example. The bus jumping in Speed where you don’t really believe it could do that.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** So you get that fundamental suspension of disbelief that is part of the premise. And so I think your episodes tend to do that. It sounds like what Chelsea is reacting to is choices that characters have made or twists that are revealed that she’s not believing the characters are really doing that thing.

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** It didn’t feel real to the rest of the world that she’d set up.

**Charlie:** I mean, well that is a trickier one. Because that is – and that’s just done to how authentically you think the character is reacting. I mean, in Black Mirror really quite often, and this is something that sort of depresses me when I look back at it, we’ve got in our episode somebody – it starts out somebody slowly realizes they’re in a trap. They start struggling. It gets worse. The end.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] There’s a premise!

**Charlie:** So in a way we often don’t let them escape which is one of the reasons why hopefully people go with it. I don’t really know. I think a lot of it is just as long as you feel that the characters are reacting authentically to the moment then you will go with it. And in terms of the concepts, again, as long as you’re only trying to do one crazy thing at a time, again, people will hopefully go along with that.

It’s a difficult one though because, yeah, that is a tricky one. I mean, we’re lucky as well in a way that we don’t often I guess, because our stories are shorter, we can kind of burn all the characters up and the scenario up really quickly before the logic would strain it too much.

**John:** Well also the universes that you’re creating and because they’re only a single episode we can assume that this technology exists and we are seeing it in the context of this one story. And we don’t have to worry about like, wait, if you could do that your entire universe would be very different. I look at Westworld and Westworld is a show that has to grapple with that because there is technology that exists in Westworld and you’re like would it really be used in this way?

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** And so if it is used in this way, what does the world outside of Westworld look like? And that’s what they’re dealing with in the third season of Westworld.

**Charlie:** See, now I deliberately haven’t watched Westworld because I’ll get crippling professional jealousy. I tend to avoid things that I think might be – and the number of times we’ve gone, “Oh, it would be great to do a Black Mirror western. Oh, hang on, Westworld exists.”

So another good example I guess, so Be Right Back. Actually so Be Right Back is a good example I guess of something where when writing it I was aware that – so it starts off she starts communicating via email, a messaging app, with her deceased husband. Then it sort of escalates and she’s talking to a synthesized version of him on the phone. Then he says would you like to meet me. And at this point I thought people are not going to go along with this. That there’s a sort of android version that shows up.

And there were two things that helped. One was the story was deliberately set in the middle of nowhere. So they were in an isolated farmhouse. She was on her own. So you’re not thinking does somebody down the road have one of these? And there’s a scene we cut out. There’s a woman who originally recommends this to her. And originally there was a scene where you see Martha phoning this woman up and going why did you do this. And you see that this woman is in bed with a robot of her own. I think we actually shot that and we cut it out.

So, we isolated them so you’re not thinking too much about the outside world. And so hopefully those logical questions don’t come into it.

**John:** That’s Westworld as well. Westworld is on a ranch.

**Charlie:** Yeah. The other thing we weirdly lent into the absurdity there, so when she gets this thing it literally comes sort of packaged up like a rubber man. And she puts it in a bathtub and drops nutrients into the water. And meanwhile she’s got Donald Gleason in her ear telling her how weird this is and weirdly acknowledging that it’s weird and it’s crazy.

**John:** You’re hanging a lantern on it to make it clear that this show is acknowledging that this is an odd moment.

**Charlie:** So you’re not sitting there going, well, come on, this wouldn’t happen. Because somebody onscreen is saying that. Saying isn’t this strange? So, I think hopefully, yeah, those are two tricks we got away with there. We quite often tend to isolate our characters generally because it means you’re not considering the whole of society.

Jesse’s original script for Entire History of You had loads of really great extra details about the world in which everyone is recording everything all the time. But it was just too much. Stuff for a whole movie or a series in its own right.

**John:** Brett asks, “As a musician transitioning to a writing career I’ve been wondering given the power of streaming in both music and film is this the best time or the worst time to get a foot in the door?”

So we are clearly in a really strange, interesting time. This is also a moment where I can ask, “What is television?”

**Charlie:** Yeah. I don’t know. I really don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what constitutes. I mean, if I look at, obviously Bandersnatch, what is that? I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of a game. It’s sort of a film. It’s not on a gaming platform.

**John:** But it could be. I mean–

**Charlie:** It could be.

**John:** If it weren’t filmed, if it were done all just with CG characters then it literally would feel like a game.

**Charlie:** The number of times I was like it would be so much easier to do, when we were filming it, would have been so much easier. Yeah, I don’t know. And then things like, so Roma I watched at home, because I’ve got two young kids, really busy doing the show all the time. Never get to go out to go to the cinema. So I watched Roma at home and I had such limited windows in which to watch it. I watched it over three nights in sittings, divided up, like it was a series I was binge-watching, which I was perfectly happy to do. Which makes me a huge philistine.

So like we don’t even know quite what, like Black Mirror is an anthology show, but then sometimes we do standalone one-offs. I think we’ll probably do more of that sort of thing as well in the future. So, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know. I know we got some stick for when we did San Junipero it was like 61 minutes long and it got entered into the Best TV Movie category. And I know that annoyed some people. But tough luck.

I mean, I was delighted that we won, but I sort of thought, well, hopefully that means if we can be entered in that category and then people liked it enough to vote for it, well, you should get extra points shouldn’t you for taking up less of people’s time in this day and age? Like the shorter the better.

Something like Russian Doll, I really loved Russian Doll.

**John:** Oh my god, l loved those episodes were so short.

**Charlie:** 30 minutes long.

**John:** Going back to Natasha Lyonne again.

**Charlie:** And, well I met her the other night because I went to a Russian Doll event and I told her my favorite thing to say to people who I admire their work, and it’s true, I said I liked Russian Doll so much it made me angry.

**John:** Oh, me too.

**Charlie:** I was furious that I hadn’t thought of this show and I hadn’t written this show. And obviously there were certain things that it had in common with Bandersnatch. It was brilliant. And it was short. Don’t you wish sometimes you could sort things by length? Make life easier.

Sorry. So the question–

**John:** The question is–

**Charlie:** Is it the best time or the worst time? I would say it’s surly one of the best times.

**John:** I think it’s one of the best times, too.

**Charlie:** Because there’s so much. I mean, there’s a sort of probably unsustainable mountain of stuff being made that that means by just logic would dictate that there’s a need for more stuff. The machine needs more coal being shoved into it. So, it’s a pretty good time to do that. And also I guess technology is at the point – the thing that sort of changed my whole career, so he talks about transitioning from one career into another. So I was a video games reviewer. And I did sort of comic strips. And I felt I was in a sort of ghetto. And I wanted to be doing TV comedy and things like that. And the way – and this was like 1998 – and the way I managed to make that jump was by doing this small little website that was sort of I guess uniquely mine. It was a small thing I was doing on a deadline that meant people were noticing it. And now the technology exists for you to make – you only get two chances to make your own stuff in your career. One is at the very beginning and then sort of near the end.

**John:** Yes. You’re either a nobody or JJ Abrams.

**Charlie:** Exactly. So you might as well, so you have the means to produce stuff. Write a script. Make a short film. Just do anything that is uniquely yours. And then hopefully people can see it. The problem is of course you’re up against everyone else who is doing the same thing. That’s the downside.

**John:** Absolutely. The firehose problem is that there’s so much content it’s hard to pull those things out. So there’s at least three series that I have sort of backed up, like I really want to watch those things because I know they’re fantastic. I just have only the same 24 hours.

**Charlie:** It’s like being air traffic control, isn’t it? These things are taxiing round and round and round. Well, I mean, even something like Game of Thrones which is like the most – was it the most popular show in the world? Still, you know, I watched it all. Most of the people I know haven’t seen it. It’s the most popular show in the world. This is the only period in history when – I was watching a reality show not that long ago in the UK and one of the contestants his job was described as TV Presenter and Barman. And I thought this is the only period in history where those two – that’s two valid careers that one person can have. Because there’s so much content around.

**John:** I think the other reason why this is the best time is that with the globalization of things your show and any show is available everywhere to the culture at once. And so when I was in Scandinavia doing Arlo Finch press I was talking to one of my publishers and she said, “Oh, what are you watching?” And I said there’s a few things I really want to watch. Haunting Hill House. And she’s like, “I love that.” And it had just dropped. Sorry, we can’t say dropped anymore.

**Charlie:** Oh, you can say dropped. No. Say dropped.

**John:** It had debuted worldwide. So she was watching it in her own language. I was watching it in English. And we could have this conversation in ways that never happened before. So that globalization of things is a unique moment now.

**Charlie:** And you can watch – so I binged watch – I mean they’ve given a terrible title in English, Money Heist. Have you seen Money Heist? It’s called La Casa de Papel which I guess translates as the House of Paper, or something. So that’s probably too close to House of Cards. I guess that’s why they changed it to Money Heist. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But it’s incredibly addictive. It’s basically 24, it’s Spanish though. It’s 24 about one bank heist.

**John:** Great.

**Charlie:** I mean, it knows it’s ridiculous. It gets so ridiculous. And it’s something that I probably wouldn’t have stumbled across if it hadn’t been for streaming platforms. Yeah. And that’s one of the most popular shows in the world I think outside of the US and Britain. It’s amazing.

We never thought Black Mirror would travel, because it seemed so idiosyncratic to us. But it’s very odd when they drop it. I’m going to say drop it. When they drop it. Drop it. What are they going to do? Delete it? They’re not going to delete it now. It’s too late.

When they drop it on the service it is a really weird sensation that you start getting feedback from around the world in a sort of wave as it goes through time zones.

**John:** So one thing I do want to point out that’s different though is Netflix, let’s hope it goes on for 100 years, but likely it won’t. And so at some point the episodes that you’ve made will exist somewhere? So traditionally there’s been a way to find old episodes of things and you can find those things, or a movie exists. We talked before about movies used to be on DVDs so you could at least like always find a movie. Sometimes you can’t find a movie. Something like the Bandersnatch episode without a server to run it on it doesn’t exist as a thing people can enjoy.

**Charlie:** But then someone will build a 2019 Netflix emulator. Emulation. I’ve got massively into emulation which is probably apparent from Bandersnatch. So hopefully the emulator – the emulation community will save the day.

**John:** Well, we’re already in a simulation.

**Charlie:** We are.

**John:** There will be emulation within the simulation.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** It stacks nicely.

**Charlie:** Which is something–

**John:** Turtles all the way down.

**Charlie:** We wanted to do that in the episode, have a bit in it where he’s playing a simple game and you actually – like a Frogger type game. But we didn’t have time.

**John:** I get that. It’s time for our One Cool Things though.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** My One Cool Thing, so I was back in Colorado this last week which is why Craig was hosting by himself. And we’re listening to Colorado Public Radio and there’s a voice and I’m like wait that’s me. And it was the only time in my life I’ve encountered my voice twin. I’m used to hearing my voice on the podcast. And this person sounded exactly like me. And so I listened enough so I could find out what his name was. His name is Matthew Zalkind. He is a cellist living is Colorado. And it was just a really odd moment for me because I almost only get recognized for my voice. I’ll be out at a Trader Joe’s paying for something and I’ll say something and they’re like, “Oh wait, you’re John August.”

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** It’s almost entirely by my voice. So it was so odd for me to be hearing someone else’s voice. I could give this person a script and he could read it and be like, oh, well that’s John. If I do get hit by a bus Craig could just bring this person on to do my job.

**Charlie:** Well, and presumably the technology to do that anyway is five seconds away if it’s not already.

**John:** Oh clearly.

**Charlie:** I think it’s partly in existence. So it’s nice that you’ve discovered that voice just before the tidal wave.

**John:** And going back to some of your previous episodes, I think I brought this up on the show before is that I’ve taken all of the text from Scriptnotes, because we have transcripts for all of the episodes and broken them down into Craig and John, everything we’ve said separately. Run through a Markov chain generator. So I do have a little bot that can generate Craig sentences and John sentences and have them talking to each other. So at some point there will just be–

**Charlie:** Auto-generated–

**John:** Of Scriptnotes. We’ll have one episode that is just generated dialogue for me and Craig talking about things.

**Charlie:** It will be like, there’s a short Roald Dahl story about that. About an automatic writing machine. Because he was writing it in the ‘70s or something, it’s got literally foot pedals. He steps on a pedal to make it a bit more erotic and accidentally steps too far and stuff. So it’ll be like that. You’ll be able to just generate it constantly like 24-hour, an unending loop. What if it’s better?

**John:** What if it’s better? I mean, what is reality? Going back to your first episode of this new season which is the question of like who is the real person and what is reality if you know somebody only in a virtual way.

**Charlie:** And does it matter? If it’s as compelling as they’re finding it in that episode, yeah. Sometimes when we do stories like that it’s like I am no clearer on really – I don’t know that you always need to know the answer to the question you’re raising in a story, because I think it can be hopefully interesting if you literally do not know the answer to what’s going on entirely in that episode. I think that in terms of what that means is as confusing for me as it is for the characters I think. Maybe that’s just a weakness on my part and I should have just worked it out properly. Oh, you never know.

**John:** We’ll see. Craig could tell you because Craig wrote Chernobyl and he knows the answers to all–

**Charlie:** He does. But I have got to watch that. Literally everyone is telling me to watch that. And then I spoke to my wife last night and she was like, “I want to watch Chernobyl.” I’m like, all right. Yeah.

**John:** You’ll get home. You’ll watch it.

**Charlie:** Well, the government will make me watch it at this rate. It will be issued to me by the government. I have to wait. There’s an odd sensation. I have to wait. So I can’t start watching it now until I get home and watch it with my wife. We have to watch a nuclear meltdown together or my life won’t be worth living. And I’ll have to wait. I’m going to save that up. I’m going to save the Chernobyl disaster up to make my life better.

**John:** Charlie, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Charlie:** My One Cool Thing is a game called Baba is You.

**John:** Baba is You.

**Charlie:** Baba is You. You can get it on the Nintendo Switch and I think from Steam and probably on other things. It’s a puzzle game and a logic game the likes of which is almost impossible to describe, but it basically involved – you’re a little white like a gerbil or a rabbit, I don’t know quite what you are in it. But you’re Baba. And you scurry around and you can push – how can I explain this? There are blocks of rules, so Baba is You could be one rule. Door is Shut would be one.

Now, you can shove the word shut out of the way and you can put You in its space and then you are the door.

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Charlie:** If you see what I mean. And so from that sort of – it’s quite a mind-bending premise in itself. And then it spins out these incredibly clever and mind-mangling puzzles. And my 7-year-old is obsessed with video games and I played it with him and had one of those incredibly humiliating moments where I was – because you can sit there sort of your brain sweating for hours as you try and solve one of these things. And we had one of those things where I was insistent that I knew the answer and I was trying to do something. And he eventually wrestled the joy pad from me and solved it in 10 seconds because that’s the future.

Just that. I’m obsolete. All of us becoming obsolete. But it’s brilliant.

**John:** Great. Baba is You.

**Charlie:** Baba is You.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Mackey Landy. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. I believe you are on Twitter. Do you want people to reach you on Twitter?

**Charlie:** Well, they can. I don’t often – I generally use it now for shameless promotion and then I don’t look often.

**John:** But that’s how I reached you.

**Charlie:** That’s how we met. See, I sometimes use it. It’s for DM’ing. But I tend to skulk I think is the word. Skulking. Yeah. Because I figured it was bad for productivity and general mental well-being.

**John:** I think that’s often likely the case. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs so we can Markov chains so that Craig and I can be talking in perpetuity for all time.

Some folks do recaps of the show and discussion on the screenwriting Sub-Reddit. So check us out there. Tell us what you think of the Charlie Brooker episode. I keep trying to drop your R.

**Charlie:** I constantly get that in America. Constantly I’m Booker. Everywhere I go. Is there a famous Booker here?

**John:** Well there’s Cory Booker. He’s running for–

**Charlie:** I’ve never heard of him. Who is he?

**John:** He’s running for President.

**Charlie:** How would I have heard of him? I’m from Britain. I’ve heard of Trump.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Charlie:** Of course I’ve heard of Trump. I had a proper argument with an Uber driver the other day because I got in the car, here, and he said, “Well they’re really rolling out the red carpet for Trump back in your country aren’t they?” And I said, no, people hate him. People hate him in London. And there was immediately an argument. Anyway. How did I get into that?

**John:** Because you have an R.

**Charlie:** Yes. There’s an R. And also I would like to make the case for like quite often I see people writing quite accurate parodies of Black Mirror where it’s my accent going, “What if, what if your mum run on batteries? What if you could 3D print an egg? Some British dude saying what-if.” And I think that is accurate, but I find it disturbing that Americans call the show Black Mir-Or. It’s not Black Meer. That sounds like a place. Black Meer sounds like a place. Blackmere. It’s Black Mirror.

But how do you say Mirror in–?

**John:** Mirror.

**Charlie:** You said it properly. Why do people keep saying Black Meer?

**John:** Because we live in slightly different countries and languages are constantly evolving.

**Charlie:** I feel churlish now. I feel like I’ve really – yeah, sorry. [laughs]

**John:** Well you’re coming from a land that often does glottal stops instead of syllables.

**Charlie:** We just can’t talk properly in my country.

**John:** That’s fine.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

You may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide to hear which episodes our listeners liked most.

Come to the live show. The live show is this Thursday at the Ace Hotel. Amazing people will be there. Also, I think by the time this new episode comes out Highland 2.5 will have shipped which has revision mode in it which is remarkable, so it’s what I’ve used to write all my stuff recently. You can have stars in the margins. You can use it for writing your next Twine episode.

**Charlie:** Yeah. I like the sound of that.

**John:** I’m going to send you a beta right now.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** Charlie Brooker, thank you very much for being on the show.

**Charlie:** Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes LIVE](https://theatre.acehotel.com/events/scriptnotes-live-podcast-taping-benefit-hollywood-heart/) this Thursday, June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets [here](https://www.axs.com/events/374457/scriptnotes-live-tickets?skin=acehotel)!
* [Black Mirror](https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888)
* [La Cabina](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065513/)
* [Russian Doll](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627)
* [Money Heist](https://www.netflix.com/title/80192098)
* [Matthew Zalkind](http://matthewzalkind.com/) John’s Voice Twin
* [Baba is You](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/baba-is-you-switch/)
* Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks [(Light)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-light#/1506766/tee-men-standard-tee-heather-white-tri-blend-s) and [(Dark)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-dark#/1506818/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Charlie Brooker](https://twitter.com/charltonbrooker) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Mackey Landy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_404_the_one_with_charlie_brooker.mp3).