The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 645 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. For showrunners, the first season of a television show is often a trial by fire as they figure out what show they’re actually making and how to do it. The second season can be both easier and more difficult, as showrunners have the benefit of experience but also the burden of expectation.
Today on the show, we have two showrunners who have just delivered the third seasons of their respective shows, which was an absolute cakewalk. Am I correct? There were no issues on either of your sides?
Jen Statsky: Not anything, yeah.
Meredith Scardino: Zero.
Jen: Really simple.
John: Great. Episode’s over. It’s done. Nothing to talk about.
Jen: Not much to talk about it.
Meredith: Credits.
John: Credits roll. Thank you for joining us on the show. Let me introduce you. Meredith Scardino is a writer and producer whose impressive listener credits include Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She has four Emmys and a Peabody. She is now the creator and showrunner of (sings) Girls5eva. Bing!
Meredith: That was beautiful.
John: Thank you. I love myself a musical sting, a little introduction moment. It’s one of those few credits that you just don’t skip past, because you’ve got to embrace it while it’s there.
Meredith: It’s Jeff Richmond. He makes a good theme song.
John: After Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, we desperately needed another musical comedy to watch in the house, so we went back and re-watched Seasons 1 and 2 to get ready for Season 3. Man, I need songs. Even if they’re diegetic like they are in your show, I want characters to sing.
Meredith: It’s fun, and the cast is great at singing.
John: Yeah, which is nice. Sarah Bareilles, she’s a ringer. She’s actually genuine.
Meredith: She’s done this before.
John: Once or twice.
Meredith: A little bit.
John: But who knew she was funny? You knew she was funny.
Meredith: She’s hilarious. She’s absolutely hilarious, and so is Renee Elise Goldsberry from Hamilton fame, who no one quite knew she was absolutely hilarious, as she is, although I watched her in Co-op on Documentary Network.
John: Oh my god, so incredible.
Meredith: She was so committed to the bit.
John: Love it.
Meredith: You’re like, “Oh, that lady, committed.”
John: Alex Brightman is also in Co-op, and they’re just so fantastic in that.
Meredith: So fantastic. Then you got Paula Pell and Busy Philipps, who we knew were hilarious already, but you didn’t know they could sing.
John: All things you figured out. Jen Statsky is a writer and producer who has written for shows including Parks and Recreation, Broad City, and The Good Place. She’s the co-creator and showrunner of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody Award. Welcome back, Jen.
Jen: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m sad you didn’t sing Hacks though. I was hoping.
John: Here’s the problem. It’s a really good show.
Jen: Not a musical show though.
John: No notes except you could add some songs. Would it hurt you to have a catchy song?
Jen: I do think that catchy songs would be helpful. I guess it’s not too late. Maybe next season it can be full musical.
John: That is a prediction that I might be willing to make. We’ll get to that in a second here.
Jen: Meredith, can you lend me your entire writing staff?
Meredith: Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.
John: A lot of the times on the show we have guests who have just finished their first season and they talk about what they’ve learned, and that’s great, but I really want to talk about what’s easier and what’s more difficult about being an established show and going into things where you know stuff.
But I also want to talk about this moment we’re in as an industry, especially for series, because both of your shows debuted at a different time, when there was this era of streaming abundance. I want to talk about what’s gained and what’s lost when streamers are cutting back so much right now.
We’ll also tackle questions from listeners about nonbinary characters, mentorship using the past tense, and finally, two years ago, I made a prediction about what would happen in the third season of Hacks, and I mailed it in a sealed envelope to Jen. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will open that letter and see how right or wrong I was. She’s holding it up to the Zoom right now. I’m looking at it. I’m looking at my weird penmanship.
Jen: I’m so proud of myself that I didn’t open it. When did you send this?
John: Two years ago.
Jen: Two years ago.
John: There’s a postmark on it. Is there a date? Is it listed?
Jen: Oh yeah, June 2022. Wow. I was so terrified that if I opened it before everything was done for Season 3, you’d have a much better idea than we did, and then I would be like, “What do I do?”
John: There’s a Season 4 still, so if you’re searching for something, maybe it’s in there.
Jen: We’ll see.
John: I’m not actually 100 percent sure what I wrote, so it’ll be a surprise for both of us.
Jen: Great.
John: Only for Premium Members in the Bonus Segment.
You guys are on your third seasons, but to set the stage, can we go back in time and think about the shows you actually pitched originally when you were talking about doing these shows and figure out what that was, compared to what the show ended up becoming. Meredith, can we start with you? What was the pitch for Girls5eva?
Meredith: The pitch was a reunited girl group, one-hit wonder from the late ’90s, Y2K era reunites in the present after they get sampled by an up-and-coming rapper named Lil Stinker and tried to give it a go again. It follows four of the surviving members of Girls5eva. One sadly had swam off the edge of an infinity pool in the mid-aughts.
It follows being a woman in your 40s. There’s a lot of stuff about that. But it’s also a very big underdog story. It’s got a ton of comedy. It’s very hard jokes, fast-paced. We also look back at the past and do lots of flashbacks to their old, regrettable music, the way they got chewed up and spit out by that pop music machine that didn’t really value any of their voices. We just see the fun, ragtag comeback story of hilarious, very different women, who all internalized the pain of that big loss of the one-hit wonder going away in different ways. It’s a really fun show.
John: That very much describes the show that we end up seeing right now, but do you think that was actually all there in your original pitch? Was it a pitch, or had you written a script?
Meredith: It was both. I had written the pilot. Basically, I would go in to network streamers. I had a fake CD that I made, because I had an art background. I made a fake CD that was basically like, “This is what their… ” I made discount stickers, like it had been in the Sam Goody discount bin. I had the cover, and then on the back I had their track list, so it gave you an idea of what kind of group this was.
John: That’s incredible.
Meredith: I even sealed it with one of those plastic industrial sealer things on top, because I didn’t want anyone to open it, because I didn’t have a real CD in there and I didn’t have any music written. Again, just for weight, I put in DVDs from the Jack Lemmon collection that I had.
The pitch was very much similar to what the show became, and I think because I had the pilot. Basically, I’d do the whole pitch. I’d do the song and dance, 20-minute, like, “Here’s what it is. Here’s all the characters. Here’s where they go.” Then I’d leave behind the script. It was nice, because when you pitch something, it’s not always a complete descriptor of what you might end up writing. My producers and I made the decision to be like, the best way is just to be like, “Oh, do you like this thing that you’re reading?” That’s the best indicator of what the show is.
John: We can clarify, this is a situation where a leave-behind is completely appropriate, because you own and control everything here. You weren’t doing free work for them leaving this behind. This was, “I pitched you this. This is the evidence that I really can pull off this thing I just described to you.”
Meredith: Yeah, exactly.
John: Now, Jen, the initial pitches for Hacks, I think we talked about this when you were on the show before, but remind us, what was the process of pitching Hacks and getting it set up originally?
Jen: In 2015, my co-creators Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello and I had been talking about women of a certain generation of comedians and how they had never really gotten their due, especially in comparison to their male counterparts. And so we had this idea for a show that would be about the redemption of a comedian like that through the lens of her relationship with a younger comedy writer who had benefited from the ways in which this woman fought.
It was a long process to the pitch, because in 2015, Paul and Lucia were full time on Broad City and they were making a movie and I was full time on Good Place. It took us a while before we were ready to go out with the pitch. But that was to our advantage, I think, in many ways, because we kept working on it through those years. And by the time we got to go around town and pitch it, we had a very thorough, probably too thorough pitch, where we went through to the end of the series, to how it would end, which is still to this day what we plan on doing for the end of it. I did not have any cool leave-behinds. Maybe we would’ve gotten more yeses had I.
John: But you didn’t have a finished pilot? Did you have a script?
Jen: No, we actually hadn’t written a script. It was a pretty thorough 30, 35-minute pitch, but that was it. We didn’t have a script.
John: Wow.
Jen: We didn’t have talent attached. It was really just the idea and all the work we had done to build up the idea.
John: You said you had multiple seasons figured out for what the general arc was of the show. Now that you’re in Season 3 of it, how close are you to that plan?
Jen: We’re still very close. We’re still very close to the plan. Now, of course, obviously, there’s things within the season that happen, and your writers come in and they pitch things and you say, “Oh, that’s an amazing idea.” For example, we knew at the end of Season 1, it was in the pitch, this massive fight and that Deborah would slap her and what it would be. That was all thought out. But for example, Ava sending an email with dirt about Deborah that would then be this huge rift between them, that came in the writing of the show. There’s smaller story moves that of course have come up over the course of the years writing this show. But the major tent poles for what each season is and Deborah’s arc and Ava’s arc have remained from what we pitched.
John: Meredith, did you have multiple seasons figured out at the start?
Meredith: Yeah. I had basically eras of what I thought they would be doing, like chapters. Each season has adhered to that, where Season 1, it’s so much of the adrenaline of the reunion, trying to do everything the old way they used to, and then realizing, like, oh no, god, no, there’s a better way, and trying to just get it going again. Then Season 2 is very much about, okay, now they have an album they can make. What will they say once they have that moment to be in the studio as a group and they’re the actual songwriters? Then Season 3 felt like, okay, you gotta go promote that album and get on the road.
In their future, I would like to see them – they’ve been underdogs clawing for relevance for three seasons, and I would like to see what it looks like for them to have a little bit of success and how they navigate that.
John: Both of your shows are about women in entertainment who are grappling with their legacy, who were big stars and then they see their stars teetering, and so they’re trying to remain relevant or rebuild their careers without seeming desperate. They’re both shows about ambition, but they’re also insider shows. They’re shows about the entertainment business that look behind the curtain and inside. Classically, it’s a thing we do, but it’s also a thing we’re told, like, don’t pitch those shows, because no one wants to watch those shows, no one wants to make those shows. Did you find resistance to the fact that there were shows about the industry?
Meredith: I feel like people say that, but then there are so many shows that people – 30 Rock, even Entourage. There’s like a million shows about… I don’t know why people say that.
Jen: You do always hear that. You hear, “Don’t pitch an industry show. Don’t pitch inside baseball. No one wants it.” Then you turn on your TV and there are so many of them. So many of them have been acclaimed and awarded. I don’t know what it is. I guess no one wants to admit that they do make them.
But I will say, I don’t know how you feel, Meredith, but we pitched the show in 2019, which was during still the boom of streaming. When we pitched the show to Max, it wasn’t even Max at the time. It wasn’t even HBO Max. It was the Warner Media streamer that didn’t even have a name. They just knew that Warner Media was gonna do a streamer.
I think we very much benefited from pitching during a time when it was a seller’s market, and a good idea was a good idea. Credit to Suzanna Makkos, because she heard the pitch and she got it immediately and she made it happen. I don’t know that today, as we speak to you in 2024, I don’t know that Hacks gets bought or I don’t know that it gets made. Part of it I think would be reluctance to do a show about the industry. But I don’t think we faced it at the time. I don’t know. Did you, Meredith?
Meredith: No, I didn’t feel that coming off of anyone that we pitched to. But I also just think that in some ways the show is about the music business in some ways, of course. You get to make all those pop culture references that can be really fun to write, and all of those observations. But at its core, it’s about four women in their 40s trying to do something at the time when you’re normally retreating into the habits and ho-hum of life and you wonder if your greatest days are behind you. It’s about so much universal… I feel like Hacks is the same way. It’s not just about comedy.
Jen: No, it’s not just about… Yeah, you’re exactly right. The shows will work if they’re about universal, relatable things that any viewer, whether they’re in the industry or not, can connect with. Like you’re saying, women in their 40s and their friendship with each other, or in the case of Hacks, a very specific friendship and collaboration between two people and, honestly, just an older women in her 70s. We talk about it a lot. It’s about her quest for dignity. I think that is incredibly relatable to anyone watching of that age.
I think you’re right that what it is when they say don’t pitch an industry show, it’s kind of like don’t pitch an industry show that is about nothing else, that doesn’t have anything underneath it. As long as there’s something underneath it and you’re speaking to relatable universal themes that humans connect with, I think you can set a show anywhere.
John: Both of your shows are comedies, but they’re very different kinds of comedies. I want to talk about their relationships to jokes. Meredith, your show is in the tradition of 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt, where it’s a very joke-dense show, where there’s an expectation there’s a certain number of jokes per minute. People are being funny and they’re also not acknowledging that they’re being funny. It’s very much in that habit. Three seasons in, or more seasons when you think about Kimmy Schmidt too, is that just a natural form for you? Do you feel that in your bones?
Meredith: It is. First of all, I was attracted to it like a moth to a flame. But also, I think coming from late night, The Colbert Report, where you’re just taking in input from the news and churning out jokes and satire and character, like boom, boom, boom, boom, that muscle is the one muscle in my body that’s not atrophied. I’m very jacked in that capacity. Then going and working with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, whose style I absolutely love from 30 Rock, and they came from SNL. I think there’s something a little bit coming from sketch and late night that imbues into the episodic execution.
At Kimmy Schmidt, we had that similar rhythm. It’s joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, but you also get to say all the things. I feel like there’s no shortage of the points we’re making about women feeling irrelevant or whatever we were trying to say. You can still say them even while the breakneck joke pace is breakneck.
John: Hacks is obviously about jokes also, because literally it’s two characters who are wrestling with coming up with material. There’s a comedy writer and a comedy legend. But what’s different about the jokes in Hacks is often they will say a joke and they will acknowledge that that was funny. Both parties that were around them will acknowledge that was funny. But they’re competing basically in comedy with each other. How early in the process of actually writing this did you figure out what that was gonna feel like and where the level was? Did you even know as you started filming how you were going to play that?
Jen: Yeah, I think from the get-go, we knew that we wanted this very specific tone that was a mix of comedy and drama. I’ve said this before, but for us, casting Jean Smart was – she embodies exactly that. She can do hard, funny comedy, but she can also be incredibly grounded and dramatic and heart-wrenching in that way. Once we got her, we said, “That’s our North Star. That is the tone of the show.” That’s what we were always going for.
You’re right that we have this cheat code of we want characters to be able to say jokes and be very funny, but it’s all within the grounded realm of you’re watching a show where characters are supposed to be funny and they know they’re funny and they know they’re making a joke. That was just the particular tone that we wanted to go for with this show.
John: Question for both of you. As you’re thinking about the outline stage or figuring out what is happening in the episode, you’re figuring out what the scenes are, how much does that need to be driven by, “Okay, this is the dramatic story points I need to get across,” or can this scene actually be funny?
Maybe start with you, Meredith. I’m thinking about, they’re on tour. You need to figure out what it is that’s happening in the show. Is it mostly about the emotional stakes that are progressing, or are you thinking, “Okay, these are gonna be good arenas that will allow me to make jokes.”
Meredith: What you want is to find the match where the emotional arc that you’re trying to sell for your character and their evolution over the course of the series is then told through a story that’s funny. That’s what I’m always looking for. Sometimes you’ll have an idea that’s just funny, but you’re like, “I don’t know where it lives.” Or this is popping into my head, but Wickie on the road getting tempted to cheat on her very stable, very nice boyfriend that she has back home, who’s a lunch lord, which is the masculine version of a lunch lady. You’re like, “Okay. What would be fun about… ” You’re trying to just find the match.
We ended up coming up with this idea of her having her idea of female arousal. She was talking about having a Home Alone doorknob for this guy Torque that she meets on the road. Then we wrote a song called Home Alone Doorknob. It is all coming from the fact that she’s being tempted on the road. It’s a real story about is she going to cheat, is she going to fall prey to her old ways of thinking about herself first and not thinking about another person. You’re telling that story in an absurd way, but it has a grounded core underneath it and some emotion. Renee Elise Goldsberry is incredible at walking that line, at making you feel for a character that’s talking about a Home Alone doorknob, being tempted to cheat. Yeah, but always looking for the match.
Jen: Yeah, it is very true. When I look back at scenes in Hacks, that always has to have an emotional reason to exist. For example, I can think of a scene from a Christmas episode we did this past season. I think this was my fault. I’ll take responsibility for this.
Hannah Einbinder’s character, Ava, grew up in a suburb of Boston, which is also where I grew up. And Irish step dancing is a huge phenomenon among Boston girls growing up. I went to many an Irish step competition, in the audience, not participating, which was actually weird. Why was I there? But at some point, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Ava had Irish step danced? She should do that performance at the end of Deborah’s Christmas party.” We shot it. Hannah took days and days of Irish step lessons. She’s really good at it, because Hannah comes from a cheerleading, gymnastics background, so she’s very physically skilled. But also, it was really funny. But there was no emotional reason for it to exist in the episode. It didn’t come from, oh, and she needs the warm reception that the performance will get after a tough night or whatever. It wasn’t connected to anything. It was just purely me going, “That would be funny.”
We ultimately ended up cutting it. I think it’s a really good lesson exactly what Meredith is saying. The emotion and the story reason has to come first, or else you’re writing something different, which is like sketch comedy or something, which is great, but it’s not really the shows that either of us are making.
Meredith: You can always feel it too when you do a table read. When you have good story energy, you can just feel you’re locked in.
Jen: Yes, totally.
Meredith: You don’t feel any of the awkward tension that you might feel if you’re on a first date or if you’re talking to a new person or whatever that awkward thing is.
Jen: It just flows in a different way.
Meredith: It flows. Then when you do stop down for something that is comedy nerdery indulgence, that I love too – we all do it. We all pitch things that you want to just see on screen. But then they do stick out, and then you suddenly feel awkward. It’s not working. You’re like, “Oh, that just has to go. It’s just gotta go.”
Jen: Totally.
Meredith: Even though it’s funny. If you had the reason behind it, it might-
Jen: It might live.
Meredith: … be the greatest moment of the show.
John: This is three seasons in that you’re still encountering these situations. It feels like the first season you make the discoveries, things that work, things that don’t work, things that can fit inside one actor’s mouth. You learn things in that first season. But three seasons in, you’re still learning things about your show and what works. Going into this third season, what was the process of figuring out the shape of the season? What was the blue sky whiteboarding? How did you figure out the basic shape of what the episodes would be?
Meredith: At the end of Season 2, we bit off that Girls5eva, they pile into a van and they’re gonna go on tour. And they don’t have any idea of where they’re gonna go, except that they have a hit song in Fort Worth, Texas, because they wrote a pandering song about the city, because it was the biggest city in America that didn’t have a hit song about it.
Going into Season 3, there’s so many things to figure out, where you’re like, “Okay, we need to sell the road, but we also shoot in and around New York City, and we’re not gonna go on the road.” It was like, production-wise, how do you pull off the road without hitting it? We come up with ideas of what’s a home base they could go to. Hotel rooms. A hotel chain looks pretty much the same in every town you’re in. Does someone have reward points? Gloria did. That’s how we came up with the Marriott Divorced Dad Suitelets where they stay throughout the tour. You swap the art out. You swap the drop and whatever. That was good problem solving.
But then you’re also blue skying, like, “What would happen on the road? Dawn’s pregnant. What does it look like if she tries to get a prenatal checkup in the Ozarks? What does that look like?” You’re coming up with, what are some things that would happen that would challenge our characters, push our characters out of their comfort zone?
You’re also thinking, what is the end goal? We went into the season. I had done a lot of pre-work headed in and had the hotel and some rough ideas about, oh, maybe Wickie and Summer have never actually been alone together and they realize that in Season 3. Just a million different ideas. But then early in the blue sky, in the room, we figured out maybe Wickie bit off something massive to make this tour being a Taylor Swift-level tour, and so she books them at Radio City Music Hall, and they’re not that kind of act, and she books them on Thanksgiving. That gave us the engine, like, okay, how do you get to Radio City?
We had six episodes, so it was a short four hours of content to get them from Fort Worth to New York in six months and get a baby out. There was a little bit of math, but also just the fun of pulling off the plot of that, plus all the character development.
John: But also, in planning this to be a tour, you were blowing up your sets. Classically, in comedy, you always get to go back to your sets. Those things are established. You have to establish characters you go back to. You blew up all those things for this season, because you didn’t have those things. Her apartment is gone. A lot of the places we were expecting to see are gone.
Meredith: We did bring it back in Episode 6, because they return to New York. There was a return to some of those comfort sets that we had seen. But yeah, in some ways, the four of them together always feels like it’s somewhere. That always feels like the show to me. Whenever we get them together, no matter where they are, it feels familiar, whether it’s the Macaroni Rascals chain or the van or the hotel room or wherever it is.
John: Now, Jen, your tour was Season 2. We are leaving your sets behind and then hitting the road and going into a bus.
Jen: Same dumb problem of making the show really expensive.
John: Yeah, and the aesthetics are just different. You had to actually go places. We expect to see outdoor locations much more in your show.
Jen: Yeah, there’s a certain, I guess, tone and look that has been established with the show. Yeah, it was a lot of on-location shooting for Season 2, which was really, really challenging from a budget perspective. Also, just credit to Jean Smart. She’s 72 years old. It’s different driving to Universal to shoot on our stages than it is going to Tarzana at 5:00 in the morning.
Season 2, we knew going in it was gonna be on the road, and so those were our benchmarks. Much like Meredith is saying, the strength of a show when you have characters that are so good together, is as long as they’re together, you still feel like it’s the show. That’s how I feel about Hacks is that as long as Deborah and Ava are together, it is Hacks.
Then going into our third season, we had ended Season 2 on a pretty big cliffhanger, which was that Deborah and Ava had gone their separate ways. Deborah had fired her, benevolently, so that Ava could go pursue her own career. We had this huge question of how do we get them back together. That was really the first thing that we tackled when we came back to break Season 3.
Now, we knew that the arc of Season 3 and the thrust of it would be Deborah finding out that there was this late night position opening, and Deborah would say, “Okay, I want that chair. I’m going for it.” We always knew that that would be the thrust of the season. We specifically had to figure out how do Ava and Deborah get back together. But it ultimately felt very correct and satisfying to us that it would be only as Deborah goes after this biggest thing in her life, this biggest goal that’s she trying to achieve, she would need Ava’s help.
John: Now, can you talk about production in both of these situations? I’m trying to remember. Season 2 of Hacks, that was pre-COVID? I’m just trying to remember timelines of things.
Jen: Season 1 of Hacks was COVID, pre-vaccine. We were shooting, but I would get calls, the studio being like, “All the hospitals are full. Do you want to shoot today?” I was like, “This is up to me?” Then Season 2 was still COVID, but people were vaccinated, felt a little bit lower key. Season 3 I believe was the first time we got to shoot without masks, so kind of crazy to actually see people’s faces after three years of working with them.
John: But Season 3 also had dealt with the strikes probably. Were you able to shoot before or after the strikes or both?
Jen: We are so lucky that this show has been received the way it has been. But every season we’ve had some pretty significant production challenges. Season 3 was no different, in that a little less than halfway through shooting, we needed to shut down, because Jean Smart had a health issue and she needed to go have a procedure. We shut down for a few months so that Jean could go and take care of herself and get healthy, which of course was of the utmost importance. Then we came back for four shooting days, and then the strike was called. When I look at the calendar, we started shooting Season 3 in November 2022, and we wrapped in January 2024.
John: Wow.
Jen: Someone said to me recently, “It’s like you’re making Boyhood, the TV show.” It was taking so goddamn long. Yeah, very challenging, long Season 3 production.
John: Do you shoot episode by episode? Do you block shoot? What’s the plan?
Jen: We block shoot as much as we can. We try to get as many scripts done before we start the season as we can, so that we can be nimble and be efficient budget-wise, because if we tried to do it just episode by episode, it would be prohibitively expensive. We do block shoot. The first episode of Season 3 that was locked was Episode 8 of 9. The first shot of the season, this drone shot that comes into Caesars Palace in Vegas, that was the very last thing we shot.
John: Wow.
Jen: It’s very much boarded like a movie, in that you’re bouncing around.
John: Meredith, I noticed on Season 3, I believe it’s one director for the entire run?
Meredith: Yes, Kimmy Gatewood.
John: Has that always been the plan, or why was that choice made?
Meredith: The block shooting of the whole season was a budgetary decision. Kimmy was just also a perfect choice person who could bite that off. Obviously, it was confusing, with one scene that’s in Episode 1, you’re shooting one scene that’s in the finale, all on day one. We had done things like that in the past.
I remember being on set of the Kimmy Schmidt interactive special that had a million potential permutations and universes that you could end up going into and timelines and talking to the actors, like, “Okay, so this time you’re in the blue sweatshirt and the zombies came,” or whatever it is. That was fine.
The one benefit of block shooting is that you have to get all the scripts done ahead of time, which meant that I was free to be on set the whole time. I didn’t have to do that thing where you’re sprinting between trying to check out rehearsal and then you run upstairs and then you’re finishing a script and then you’re looking at an edit and then you’re working on an outline and then you’re pitching another thing. That was not part of this season. The scripts had to be done by this pre-production time. We did it. We prepped, and then we had a very dedicated strike of a shoot. We did the whole thing in six weeks.
John: Wow. Jen, you had a background in more traditional comedy. I’m thinking of The Good Place, or sorry, Parks and Recreation or Good Place, more episode by episode. Can you talk through pros and cons of traditional schedules versus block shooting?
Jen: I think what’s nice about the network formula, the way that Parks and Rec and Good Place were run, was that it honestly just allows you to do more episodes, because it’s this machine you have going. Parks and Rec was 22 episodes. There’s no way we could make 22 episodes of Hacks the way we do it, which is that Paul, Lucia, and I are in every step of the process. We are writing, and then we are on set every single day, and then we are editing. We all do every step of that process. That is just the way we want to do it, because we want to have all of our eyes on every single part of the process. Now, we’re allowed to do that and able to do that, because we do 8 to 10 episodes, but when you do 22, there’s just no way. There’s too much. There’s not enough months in the year to do it that way.
I think from my time on Parks and Rec and Good Place, it worked like a very well oiled machine, that Mike Schur would be in the writers’ room most of the time. Writers would be on set managing their episode and overseeing it. I think what was really nice about that model – and we’ve talked about this – is that it allows for more of a training ground. The writers are empowered. I certainly learned how to run a show by working on Mike’s shows and seeing how he did it, but also being given the power to be on set and having to take on that responsibility.
This has been well covered, but as we divorce the writing from the production from the editing, writers are given less of a chance to do that. There are certainly tremendous advantages to the older model that was tied to longer season orders in that it just makes better writers. Better writers come out of that process, because you become a producer and you become a showrunner that way.
John: Now, Meredith, Jen had a trio of people who were there to oversee stuff. On your shoots, were you the only writer around? Was there anybody else you can go to to help you out on that stuff?
Meredith: Yeah, this season we built into everyone’s contracts that they would come back for the week of their episode and be paid to be on set.
John: That’s great.
Meredith: That was important, for the exact reason that Jen’s talking about. You really learn by doing and being on the job and being empowered to make the decisions about a prop that’s not working or quickly doing a rewrite of a line that’s not working for an actor or whatever it is. You need that experience. That was very important to us.
Season 1 and 2, just because of the nature of the way the things worked, I was alone a lot on set and tired. But also, directors were very helpful. I had producers that would pop by if they were available, Robert or Tina. Jeff Richmond would be around too. Very incredibly helpful. Some writers would come by as well if they were available. By that point, our room was wrapped, so that was more like just to stop by and hang out, really. Not really on the clock. Also, during COVID, we weren’t allowed to have any visitors really.
Jen: That was for the majority of Hacks shooting it’s been COVID.
Meredith: That’s right.
Jen: Writers couldn’t come to set.
Meredith: That’s a good point. Maybe they didn’t come really Season 1 and 2, but yeah, Season 3. The new Writers Guild agreement, it has that thing in that where you have to have at least two people stay the entire course of shooting, I believe, right? Which I think is a great thing.
John: That was one of the things we heard from most going into the negotiation was it wasn’t just lower-level writers feeling like they weren’t getting experience. It was other showrunners who just felt completely abandoned and lost. They were having to carry the entire thing on their backs. It was incredibly difficult.
Jen: I give you so much credit, Meredith, because having three showrunners is incredibly helpful, and even then it’s really helpful. I’m like, “Oh, maybe we need a fourth showrunner,” sometimes. I give you so much credit, because doing it one person is really challenging.
Meredith: I lost a lot of stress weight.
Jen: That’s good.
Meredith: I was just trying to suck protein shakes. How many calories can you put in a shake?
Jen: Oh my god.
Meredith: So I can drink in as much as I can. It was still more exciting than not.
John: Season 3 is now behind you. Looking forward to a potential Season 4. When does the process start? As you’re working through Season 3, are you also thinking about, “These are the hooks we’re gonna establish for Season 4,” or are you mostly just focused on, “We gotta get Season 3 put to bed.”
Meredith: I think obviously the priority is getting Season 3 out. Then as we have in Seasons 1 and 2, we have a little bit of a tease of something to come. At the end of Season 3, you see the big time calling Wickie. It’s her old song from the early 2000s when she went solo, Yesternights.
John: Yesternights is such a great word.
Jen: So good.
Meredith: It is featured in the show The Crown, the finale of The Crown, so obviously, she’s gonna blow up and Kate Bush. That promises what could come. My phone is always just – if something occurs to me, I’ll just throw it in my notes app and revisit it later if there’s something real. But I try to always have rough designs, but not anything too prescriptive or rigid, because I feel like there’s always so many exciting surprises that come that you don’t want to be too locked into anything.
I remember in Season 2, we knew they were gonna do an album for a label. We made the label the Property Brothers label, because everybody’s branching out into so many passion projects that they have. They were on Property Records. We wrote that not knowing if we’d ever book the Property Brothers. I thought worst case, we could just get two brown-haired guys with beards. Maybe we’d get Vince Mulaney and Adam Scott to play them or something.
John: But of course they stepped up.
Meredith: But then we found out they stepped up, and they said they’d be happy to be in it. Then my favorite thing in the world happened. Drew Property, which I’m gonna say is his last name – it’s not, it’s Drew Scott – he sent us some assets to show off, “Hey, we can do all these different things.” One was a reel of voices that he did, animated voices. One was some music, because they’re very musical. Then one was this incredible reel of him doing stage combat in a backyard with guns and just attacking a stuntman and doing all this Jack Ryan stuff.
We saw that, and the writers and I were just like, “This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. How can we license this and put it on the show and use it in some way?” Then that’s what led to the big fight between Gloria and one of the Property Brothers that was I think a couple minutes, three minutes or something. We did not cut much of that out. We wanted it to be incredibly long.
Going into that season, could I have ever imagined that we would do something like that? No. I try to be loose with some of the things that we want to do, knowing that it could change.
John: Jen, we’ve established that you went into your pitch knowing all these seasons. As you’re looking at a fourth season, where are you at in your process? How do you get started?
Jen: Similar to Meredith, you set up these things at the end of Season 3 that you know you’re gonna follow through on. We knew at the end of 3, Deborah’s gonna get this show. That would be a major thing we’d be dealing with in Season 4 is Deborah having this show and getting that off the ground and how does that go, especially when she and Ava have a new dynamic to their relationship.
But it’s also very true what Meredith said. You do have to remember that the process is very much so alive, and so that even though we have figured out a lot of things and we have these benchmarks and tent poles for the entire structure of the series, there are surprises along the way, and there are things that are like, “That’s a better idea. That changes the path, but that’s a better idea.” You have to, I think, be really open to those.
I think that’s one of the reasons that I love being on set and why I can’t just go, “I wrote the script. Go execute it. I’ll do editing or whatever,” is because the process is so alive that you have to be paying attention to every part of it, because things come up while you’re shooting, while you’re witnessing the way the actors are delivering the lines, that you need to be on top of and change and be willing to change and be willing to adjust. We have these big story points that we are moving towards for Season 4, but of course, there’s always gonna be things that we adjust if it’s a better idea.
John: We have a few listener questions here. I’d love you guys’ opinions on what our listeners should do in these situations. Drew, help us out.
Drew Marquardt: Noah writes, “How should I describe nonbinary characters in action lines so as not to confuse my readers? For instance, how should I use they/them, or should I just use a character’s name instead of a pronoun?”
John: For context here, so thinking about inside a script, so it’s not how the characters around them are acknowledging, but what you’re reading on the page. What’s your instinct for that?
Jen: I guess my instinct would be, if it’s a scene that is solo with the character, you can use pronouns they/them. But yeah, if there’s maybe multiple people in a scene, I don’t use pronouns a lot in the action. Sometimes I’m trying to get the page count down, and I do. I’m almost always using their names, like, “Deborah moves to the other side of the room.” I’m just always using the character’s name anyway.
Meredith: So am I. I remember on Kimmy Schmidt, we were like, “Why did we name Jane Krakowski Jacqueline? It takes up so many characters whenever we’re describing her in an action line.”
Jen: I gotta say I love the name Ava. Ava, it has worked out.
Meredith: Ed would be great. I get why they made that show.
Jen: [Unintelligible 00:42:39] for the scripts.
John: My instinct would be, I understand the question. You’re trying to make sure the script feels inclusive. But if it’s important the character be nonbinary, great, call it out on the page if it’s gonna be acknowledged in the scene as well. But not to worry too much about it. You’re right to always be thinking about how do we not confuse the reader. Your answer in terms of just use the character’s name a lot is probably the better choice. On screen, we’re gonna be seeing that person’s face. The person’s name stands in for their face on the page. Drew, another question. How about this one from Tara?
Drew: Tara writes, “I recently won a competition for a yearlong mentorship from two major Hollywood screenwriters. I’d love some advice on how to make the most of it. For context, I’m on the East Coast and almost 48 years old and plan to do this for the rest of my life. I’m a no thanks to retirement, like Craig. I’ve written, produced, and directed three short films, and this is my first feature screenplay.”
Meredith: I think it’s great if you have a feature that you’re working on. What an amazing opportunity to have this amount of time to bounce things off of and get feedback from these mentors. The tangible stuff is always great. I think for me, when you’re mentoring someone, sometimes a lot of the questions are like, “How do get an agent?” Some of the things that have nothing to do with writing.
I think that the things that have the most to do with getting your screenplay in the best possible shape by the end of this mentorship and also, how do I navigate the business, asking questions like, “What would you do if you were me?” Those kind of things are always helpful. But I think, wow, what a great gift to have a project and two great people to be looking at it whenever you want them to.
Jen: I think that’s great advice, because of course you want to use these mentors to ask questions about the business if it feels important and relevant to you. But the business changes at breakneck speed, especially in today’s moment. But good story elements don’t change. I think like Meredith is saying, getting really specific of the script, like, “Oh, was this Act 2 break surprising to you? Did you see that?” Just really honing in on making that story and that script the best it can possibly be will be the most beneficial thing to you.
Meredith: Tina Fey always is a real big advocate of a table read, even if you don’t have production coming up. In this year, it might be worth putting together a little table read of your script when you feel like it’s in good shape and inviting these mentors or at least filming it so they can watch later. It’ll help you realize where your screenplay really needs work.
John: I’ve had a couple mentees over the years. Often, the best questions they can ask are “how” questions. We agree that this is a thing that needs to change. It’s a moment that’s not working right. But how do I get it there? How are the ways to make the scene work the way I want to do? Show some different examples.
When they come to me with questions about, “My manager wants to send it to this person,” when they come to me with a specific question about, “What should I do with this next situation?” that’s always much more helpful than, “How do I get an agent?” It’s specific advice for specific moments, or like, “This producer is taking too long to respond. Do I send this email?” Those are the quick answers I can give them. That may be something that Tara is able to use with these mentors. Last question here is from Stephen.
Drew: Stephen writes, “What’s your take about using adverbs in the past tense to convey emotion when writing action? For example, the slug line is, ‘Exterior restaurant parking lot, moments later.’ The action line is, ‘Exiting with Dre in tow, Sean checks his order. They screwed it up again.’ I want to make it known that this has happened before. I want to hammer home his frustration, but should I just find a better way to write it? Should it just be, ‘They screwed up his order,’ or am I over-thinking it?”
Meredith: Oh my god. I am so confused. Can you read it one more time so I can see what’s wrong with it?
John: It’s confusing. Here’s what it is. In the action lines, Sean is not saying they screwed up again, but there’s an uppercase line here, like, “They screwed it up again.” We’re reading this reaction that they screwed it up again.
Jen: It’s giving us the emotional feeling of, “Oh, god,” I see, I see, versus speaking to format of, why is it all of a sudden switching tense. I see.
Meredith: I think it’s fine.
Jen: I think it’s totally fine.
Meredith: It’s totally fine.
Jen: I sometimes put a smiley face in the action line. I’m really going wild and not sticking to format when I’m writing the script.
Meredith: Also, so many people don’t read the action lines. So many people read the dialog and skim them. I would always advocate just generally to keep those short. This is not the question, but don’t try to be too cute, put jokes in your action line, because that’s never gonna be on the page, something a little winky or whatever. Keep them real simple. If it makes sense as you’re reading it, even if grammatically it doesn’t agree with the tense you used earlier in the clause, I think that’s what you go with.
Jen: I think as long as the story keeps moving and it’s enjoyable to read, that’s all that matters, never a grammar shift or anything like that. As long as it’s keeping me engaged, that’s all I care about.
John: 100 percent. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Meredith, do you have something to recommend?
Meredith: I have a person to recommend.
John: I love that.
Meredith: It’s a person that Jen Statsky knows very well.
Jen: Oh, wow.
Meredith: Chris Fleming.
Jen: Yes. Oh my gosh.
Meredith: I love Chris Fleming. He’s a stand-up. So funny. Has a special. Also, I just saw him live in March at Town Hall. It was the happiest hour and a half ever. I love him. He’s so funny. I love how unpredictable he is. I’ve been in comedy a while, and you can start to get where a premise is going, even if the comedian’s incredible and has a cool execution. But I’m like, “I feel like I know where this is going.” But with Chris Fleming, you do not know where it’s going. It’s very surprising. He’s firing on all cylinders. If you see him come through your town, get a ticket.
John: Here’s a question for you, Meredith. Someone like Chris Fleming you see, like, man, this is a great comedic voice, do you think, “I want to just watch them,” or, “I want to hire them on as a writer for something.” Does that kick in?
Meredith: I want to know him. I want to go to coffee with him every morning. I want him to be in my life. I want him to be my domestic life partner. I would love to work with him. He’s great. But yes, I’m just also enjoying it. But yeah, of course.
Jen: I will say, Meredith, I’m so happy you brought up Chris. Same exact thing. You work in comedy a really long time, not to sound jaded, but it’s very rare that someone so organically surprises you and it feels like you’re seeing something new and fresh for the first time.
A friend of mine showed me Chris’s videos. I was like, “Oh my god, this is the funniest person I’ve seen in so long.” I told my manager, I said, “I will do anything to work with this person. He is so deeply funny.” Then I ended up producing his special for Peacock, which you can watch now. It’s on Peacock. I’m so happy that you shouted him out, because Chris Fleming is so deeply funny and talented and special.
John: Love it. Jen, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
Jen: I do have a One Cool Thing. We’re going on a stand-up comedy theme for this one. This one may sound like it’s connected to Hacks, and it is, but I gain nothing from promoting this. I have no financial stake in this. But Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, has her very first one-hour special coming out on Max on June 13. I have seen it. She is so phenomenal. If you’ve seen Hacks, great. If you haven’t, guess what? You can still watch this special and you will love it.
Hannah is – the same way with Chris – such a unique, special voice in comedy, doing something that I’ve truly never seen anyone do before on stage. Her tone and delivery is so specific to her. It’s unlike anyone else. She’s such a gifted also physical comedian. We do a little bit of that in Hacks, but the way she moves on stage and her physicality and her act-outs and voices, it is just so phenomenal.
Again, I financially do not benefit from this special. It’s actually bad for me if more people see her, because she’ll be unavailable to shoot the show Hacks. That’s how much I like this special and think Hannah needs to be seen as an incredible stand-up comedian. It’s called Everything Must Go. It’s Hannah Einbinder’s first special, on Max, June 13.
John: Excellent. I’m gonna break the pattern. I’m sorry. I don’t have a comedian recommendation. My recommendation is – the camera in your computer monitor is terrible. They are terrible. They’re not good. They’re not optimized for that. But the camera in your iPhone is fantastic. It would be so nice if you could just use your camera on your iPhone as your computer camera, which you can now. This thing called Continuity. If you’re on a Mac, it automatically already works. You can choose your iPhone. The problem is you need a place to actually put your iPhone. They have this thing now which is a little mount to the back of your monitor, where it just connects by MagSafe.
I’m right now using my iPhone camera. I’m gonna show the difference to you guys so you can see what the difference is. This is the built-in camera for my monitor.
Meredith: Oh, god! Hideous!
John: It’s hideous.
Meredith: It’s like a Bigfoot.
John: This is the iPhone version. It’s a better thing. We’re still stuck on Zoom for a lot of pitches and things, so if you are lamenting the terrible camera in your computer monitor, there’s a solution here. The one I have is from Belkin, but they don’t seem to make it anymore. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a thing that seems almost exactly the same. It just connects on the back. It’s lovely. It just makes things look better.
Meredith: That’s a hot tip.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Roger Corser. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions.
You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and drinkware now. They’re all great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on opening up this envelope I sent more than two years ago about the future of Hacks. Meredith, Jen, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations on three seasons of incredible entertainment.
Jen: Thank you.
Meredith: Thank you so much. Thank you.
Jen: Thanks for having us.
[Bonus Segment]
John: The time has come, Jen Statsky.
Jen: Hold on.
John: I emailed you after you were on the show last time. I’d just watched and loved Season 2, and I had a prediction about what was gonna happen in Season 3. You said, “Write it down.”
Jen: I think I made a joke, because I was like, “Wow, wonder if it’s better than what I have planned. Write it down and send it to me, please.” Then you, in a great move, said, “I absolutely will. I’ll send it. I’ll write it down. I’ll send it and put it in a sealed envelope.” I have in my hand that very envelope, postmarked from June 2022. It has been burning a hole in my desk for almost two years. Let’s open it.
John: Let’s open it up.
Jen: Let’s see what you had to say.
Meredith: Should we do a little ASMR of the opening?
Jen: John, before I read this, do you remember what you wrote?
John: I have a general sense of what it was. I think that it was about the power dynamic shifting between the two of them, where eventually Ava would be the boss. I think Ava created a TV show is where I think it is.
Meredith: Good idea.
John: Let’s see what I actually wrote down.
Jen: We’re opening it now. Here’s what it says. “John August prediction for Hacks Season 3. Ava sells a TV comedy and Deborah is ultimately one of the leads. It puts them in an uncomfortable boss-employee relationship, since Deborah isn’t used to being subordinate and Ava is constantly being undermined and second-guessed.” Then there’s a heart, which is very cute. It says, parentheses, “The show within a show barely survives.” Very good pitch. Meredith, I don’t think you’ve seen the Hacks Season 3 finale. How could you?
Meredith: I have not seen the finale.
Jen: But there is a dynamic shift very close to what you’re guessing there, John, in the Hacks season finale. While Ava doesn’t sell a TV show the way you’re predicting, you are, in a good way, I think, getting at this dynamic shift in their interpersonal relationship.
John: What I was envisioning was that it was a scripted series. It was a scripted series more like a Hacks series gonna be reflecting their dynamic. But of course, Hannah would have created it, would actually be the showrunner behind it. The talk show thing is really interesting, because that star is still the star, in a way.
Jen: Is still the star, yes. It is Deborah’s white whale.
John: It [crosstalk 00:56:34].
Jen: It always felt like that would be the thing that Deborah would be going for, to get.
John: I’m glad I wasn’t completely wrong.
Meredith: I think you did a great job.
Jen: I think you did an amazing job, because even though the plot details are slightly off, the emotional details were right on, of a dynamic shift and the power flipping. I think don’t quit your day job.
Meredith: Jen, great job not losing the letter.
Jen: Not losing it. I know.
Meredith: Where did you keep it?
Jen: I kept it in my office, my desktop drawer, and I didn’t touch it.
Meredith: That’s great.
John: That’s nice. Meredith, on your show, the shifting power dynamics are present through the whole thing. I’m thinking about Wickie clearly is the biggest star and she’s not the songwriter and those ongoing dynamics. It sounds like your next season, God willing, is a lot about how they hold together in what’s gonna come next.
Meredith: It is always interesting to see. It’s interesting, I think, to see people change and go through an evolution. Sara Bareilles’s character, seeing her find her alpha side would be interesting, I think, to explore. Every episode, somebody’s more in charge than the other and telling somebody how to live.
John: In doing the Charlie’s Angels movies, I often use this metaphor of fighting the monster. For both the original and for the second Charlie’s Angels, every day on Charlie’s Angels was fighting the monster. You weren’t quite sure who the monster was going to be. Some days you were the monster. But every day everyone had to band together and fight the monster. That’s how we made those movies and why they were so incredibly painful and difficult and bruising to make. Those challenging dynamics.
Even doing the first movie, I already recognized that, oh no, I’m the problem here, and yet I’m just gonna own – I’m not gonna change. I’m gonna just let myself be the problem of the day, and then someone else will be the monster tomorrow that has to be fought. It’s tough.
An absolute pleasure talking with both of you. I will not write down a prediction for Season 4, but I predict it’ll be great.
Jen: Do you have anything you want Meredith and I to send you a prediction for?
Meredith: Do you want us to predict anything?
John: We’re on Episode 645. We just recorded Episode 645. Episode 700 will be our next big milestone. That’s more than a year away.
Meredith: We could pick the topic.
John: Pick the topic of Episode 700.
Jen: A retrospective on the career of Jen Statsky.
John: Absolutely.
Jen: Just kidding.
John: Absolutely. What happened?
Jen: If you want the show to end on 701.
Meredith: If you want it to be done at 700.
Jen: You want subscriptions to plummet.
John: Good stuff. Thank you both so, so much.
Jen: Thanks, John. Thanks, Meredith.
Meredith: Thank you so much.
Links:
- Meredith Scardino on Instagram
- Jen Statsky on Instagram
- Girls5eva on Netflix
- Hacks on Max
- Chris Fleming
- Chris Fleming: HELL on Peacock
- Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go on Max
- Stouchi iPhone Camera Mount
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Rodger Corser (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.