The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-one-with-mike-schur).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 537 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on a mountain somewhere, which is fine, because that means I get to ask all the questions of our guest this week. Michael Schur is the award-winning writer and creative force behind so many of my favorite TV shows, including Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place. His new book, How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, is a New York Times Bestseller. Michael Schur, welcome to Scriptnotes.
**Michael Schur:** Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be number 537. That feels appropriate. That feels right on the money.
**John:** Now, I put a lot of credits in there, but you have so many more credits and also expertise in podcasting because you have your own podcast.
**Michael:** I do. My friend Joe Posnanski, who is a sportswriter of great renown, and I started a decade ago, just talking about sports and literally nothing, just blabbing incoherently. It has somehow continued for the better part of an entire decade. Now we are part of the Meadowlark Media family that Dan Le Batard started out of Miami. It’s an actual legitimate podcast that has a logo and stuff, which is very, very exciting. If you’re interested in hearing Joe Posnanski and me talk about literally nothing, but sometimes sports, you can find it at the Meadowlark, Dan Le Batard and Stugotz feed on Meadowlark Media.
**John:** Fantastic. A decade, but how many episodes does it… You haven’t hit 500 episodes of your podcast.
**Michael:** We have no way of knowing because it’s been so piecemeal over the years. It was just on his blog for a while. For the first six years it was just two people shouting into their computers, and you couldn’t even hear what we were saying. We really honestly don’t know how many we’ve done. It’s a large number of nonsense.
**John:** Now, on this podcast, are you the John or are you the Craig?
**Michael:** That’s a good question.
**John:** Are you prepared going into it? Are you just winging it the whole time?
**Michael:** I think it’s a little of both. We’re mostly winging it, but we do have a brief text exchange beforehand where we talk about what we’re going to cover. The hallmark of the podcast, if there is one, is a draft, where we draft ridiculous things. We’ll draft kinds of fruit or numbers between one and 10 or something. We at least do a tiny bit of prep to think about what we’re going to draft. I think maybe somewhere in between I guess is the answer.
**John:** That’s fair. We should also say that on Twitter you are @KenTremendous. I think I’ve told you this, but I followed you for years, not knowing that Ken Tremendous was actually you. I knew you in real life, and I followed you on Twitter. I didn’t realize they were the same person.
**Michael:** That’s a fairly frequent thing I hear is, “Oh, you’re that guy.” I started that Twitter handle just with… I didn’t think twice about whether I should use my real name or something. A lot of people follow @KenTremendous and don’t know it’s me. The funny thing is that I’m verified, which I think maybe lays bare the absurdity of verification on Twitter, because I’m verified as a fake person. Do take from that what you will.
**John:** I love it all. We will not talk baseball at all on this podcast, unless it is relevant to something else. Then I’m happy to talk baseball. I just don’t understand it whatsoever. I do want to talk a little bit about moral philosophy. One of the things I liked about your book is that you lay out that there are frameworks that can help us understand moral and philosophical issues. I’m wondering if we can apply that to writing and the choices we make both as writers and the choices we make for our characters, the frameworks of decision making. As we go through your comedy career, I wondered if we can wrap this all together in how characters are making choices and how writers are making choices about those characters.
**Michael:** That sounds very fun. I’m all in. I’ll say nothing about baseball. We’ll only talk about that topic.
**John:** Fantastic. For our bonus topic this week, I want to talk about writers room lingo, the special terms you just use inside a writers room and what they all mean.
**Michael:** Very cool.
**John:** Let’s get started with your career. Maybe just start at the beginning, because I don’t really know how you all got started as a writer in this town.
**Michael:** I was on the Harvard Lampoon. I’m one of those people.
**John:** I’ve heard of that.
**Michael:** I didn’t give any thought at all in college to being a professional writer, even though it was all around me. I really loved college and wanted to just be in college and take classes that I thought were interesting and stuff. Then when I graduated, I decided to give myself a year to see if I could make it as a writer. I’m too practical and timid a person to just commit to something as risky as screenwriting with no backup plan. My plan was one year, if I get a job, great. If I don’t, I was going to apply to grad school. I moved to New York, and I borrowed a thousand dollars from my Uncle Steve to pay rent, to put a down payment on an apartment. This is back when a thousand dollars was enough for that.
**John:** That’s amazing.
**Michael:** In Manhattan. I just started writing stuff. I wrote a packet for Letterman and for Conan and for SNL. I had some meetings with various people here and there who needed writers. I got interviewed by SNL in July of ’97, right after I graduated, but I didn’t get hired. I remember, I have a very distinct memory of, they were walking us around in pairs. I was paired up with this woman. I rem thinking, “Oh man, I’m never getting this job, because this woman is so much funnier than me.” It was Tina Fey, and I was right.
**John:** You were right.
**Michael:** Absolutely right. She got hired and I didn’t, which at the time I was like, “Yes, that is correct. You’ve made the correct decision.” Getting that interview made me feel like I at least had a shot. I kept on poking around and writing submissions and making small inroads. Jon Stewart hired me to pitch ideas to him for a book he was writing. Over the course of three months, I pitched him probably 200 ideas for comedy pieces, and he used maybe half of one, I would say, but it didn’t matter, because he was paying me just enough money to pay my rent and buy food.
Then in December of that year, December of ’97, there was this big shakeup at SNL where Norm Macdonald got fired from Weekend Update because he was making too many jokes about OJ Simpson, and Don Ohlmeyer, who was running NBC, was friends with OJ Simpson and he didn’t like that. He fired Norm. The whole writing staff of Update got fired. There was this big kerfuffle. They just needed writers. They called me and said, “You start Monday.” I started at SNL in January of ’98. That was my first job in TV.
**John:** Now, were you hired specifically to write for Weekend Update and those desk jokes or were you also writing sketches? I don’t know what the division of labor is on the writing staff there.
**Michael:** I should’ve clarified. I was hired just as a regular sketch writer. Update is its own little fiefdom within SNL. It has the host obviously, but then it has its own dedicated writers who don’t write sketches normally. Sometimes they do if they have an idea. Mostly they’re just writing jokes over the course of the week. I was just hired as a regular sketch writer. Then I was there for two and a half years or so. Then Rob Carlock, who was running Weekend Update at the time, left to move to LA and work for Friends. I then took over his job producing Weekend Update. In the second half of my time there, I wrote sketches at the beginning of the week, but then if they got chosen, I didn’t produce them. I handed them off to someone else and switched over on Thursday and just only produced Weekend Update. I was there. I was producing Weekend Update during the Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon era. That was my time there.
**John:** That’s an amazing time.
**Michael:** It was a great time. I was there for three years and then I left.
**John:** Now, talk to me about the transition between… You were just a writer. You’re pitching sketches, you’re pitching jokes, you’re trying to make things funny, so you’re more of a manager. As a producer you have other people who are working under you and you’re having to steer the ship a bit. How did you develop those skills?
**Michael:** It was a great training ground. It really was, because everything at SNL is sink or swim. They throw you into the deep end of the pool. If you sink, you’re dead. If you swim, they’re like, “Okay, you can stay here as long as you want.” No one really explained the job to me, except for Robert. He was like, “Here’s how you do this job,” on his way out. At the time I think there were three full-time joke writers, and then also people fax in jokes from everywhere. You have these people all over the country who will send in jokes. Most of them aren’t amazing.
At the time there was this guy named Alex Baze who was faxing in jokes from Chicago. Every week this guy would get a joke on the air, all the way to the end. You’re only doing 10 or 12 jokes. It’s really, really rare for a faxer to get something on the air, and this guy was consistently doing it. We ended up hiring him full-time. He became the head writer I think of that segment, and then now he’s the head writer of Seth Meyers’s show. I got a little bit lucky. Not only were there three very, very talented joke writers who were full-time workers, there were also people like Alex who were faxing in jokes and making the segment great.
Basically, what you’re doing is every day the writers will write 20, 25, 30 jokes. You’re collecting them, looking at them, editing them, trying to make them punchier, punching them up if you can. Then what happens is on Thursday night and Friday night, the host – at least this is the way it was when I was there – Tina and Jimmy and I and the writers would sit down. Tina and Jimmy would read the jokes that I had picked all the way through, just out loud, just read them out loud. We would throw them into one of two categories, no thanks, or this is good, we like this. You would end up with, I don’t know, 50 jokes that you thought were possible. You would winnow that down to 25. You would probably take 25 of them to dress rehearsal, maybe 20 to 25 to dress rehearsal. Then you do the dress and then you cut half of them basically for the air show.
As a producer what you’re doing is you’re trying to manage obviously the content, but then you’re also talking to the graphics department and you’re talking to the production department to say, “Hey, we have a bit on this thing where Chris Kattan is going to come on as this crazy character. We need him to be dressed like this. Here’s the props we need, costumes we need.”
Then the really tricky part is between dress and air, sometimes a joke would work pretty well, but you would think the key art that’s over Jimmy’s shoulder there is wrong. You’d have to run down, in real time. It’s 10:23 p.m. and you’re going on the air in 90 minutes, if you’re Update. You’d have to run down to say, “Hey, can you change this to this and this and make this change?”
It’s very, very good training, because the show is live. You get really good at editing yourself very, very quickly, throwing away everything that isn’t working, and quickly coming up with solutions for problems that you have. That happens because you have no choice, because if you don’t get good at that, then you’re going to be humiliated on national television. It really was great training for being a producer in a long form, a half-hour format, because it drove the ego out of you and it just made you very non-precious with your own material.
**John:** Now, talk to me about, you have an audience there, so you can get the immediate feedback, like that is funny, that is not funny. When you’re just going through the jokes with Tina and Jimmy, how do you know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work?
**Michael:** If you’re a once-in-a-generation comedic talent like Tina Fey, you have a pretty good instinct for what you can make funny and what you think will work. By the way, the same with Jimmy. Jimmy has a very good instinct for just punching this and relating to an audience. He’s really, really good at that. Some of it is just gut instinct. Sometimes it’d be like, “I don’t know about this one.” It would be like, “We can try it.” That’s the benefit of the dress rehearsal is if you’re iffy on something, you might as well try it, see what happens, and there’s no harm done. A lot of it is just purely them knowing their own voices and them understanding what they can make funny and what they think will work. Then of course there’s other considerations.
You always had to do at least one joke about whatever the big story of the week was. You can’t ignore… Right now, today, this week it’s Justice Breyer retiring or those documents being found in Mar-a-Lago that Trump took illegally out of the White House. If there’s a show on Saturday, right now they are trying to figure out what their joke is about those topics.
**John:** Yeah, about Trump eating paper or something like that.
**Michael:** Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It’s a little bit of everything. It’s not one thing. It’s a little bit of guesswork, a little bit of just knowing your own voice, and a little bit of a feeling that you need at some basic level to cover whatever the big story of the week is.
**John:** You’re doing this job. You’re doing it well. Why leave?
**Michael:** Great question. I had been there at that point for six and a half years. I was dating a woman who is now my wife, who was in LA. She was working for sitcoms out here as a writer. We got to this point where it was like, if this is going to really work, one of us has to move. It just made more sense for me to move to LA than for her to move to New York, because there were more jobs in LA. It was mostly that.
Then maybe 10% of it was this nagging feeling I had, which was SNL, unlike every other show essentially on the air, is never going away, which means you can stay there. If you succeed there, you can essentially stay there forever. There are people there who have been there for 30 years because it’s a really good job, you get to live in New York, it’s really fun. When you go to a cocktail party and tell people what you do for a living, they’re interested in what you have to say. I just had this sense of, if I’m ever going to be anything more as a writer than what I am now, I can’t stay here. It’s a little bit of a golden handcuffs situation. Everything aligned for me to move and to say, “This was really fun. This was a great start to my life, but now I want to do something else.”
I wrote a spec script. I wrote a Curb Your Enthusiasm spec script. That shows you how long Curb has been on the air. I took a bunch of meetings in my off weeks. I got one job offer. It was from Greg Daniels, who was adapting the British version of The Office into an American version of The Office. I thought, “This is never going to work. It’s a terrible idea to do this.” My meeting with Greg was so interesting. I found him so fascinating. I wrote an email to my agent at the time. I said, “If that guy offers me a job, I’m going to take it, because I think he’s going to teach me how to write.” That’s exactly what happened. I took the job. Greg led a master class in half-hour comedy writing that was taken by me and BJ Novak and Mindy Kaling. He literally just taught us all how to do this job. It was the greatest good fortune and good decision of my career.
**John:** Great. This is a wonderful time to talk about frameworks of comedy, because really let’s talk about the half-hour comedy as a form, because that half-hour television comedy, we think we know what it is, but in your book you talk about all moral philosophy and really all philosophy in the Western world goes back to Aristotle. What is the Aristotle of the half-hour comedy? What is the baseline from which everything’s evolved? Who are the important steps along the way in the transformation of the half-hour comedy? In your mind, where does the half-hour comedy start?
**Michael:** If you are Greg Daniels, what you would say – or now me, because I essentially adopted his worldview wholesale – there has been, traditionally speaking, a percentage give and take in the half-hour comedy world in terms of how each episode is divided up. If you imagine it as a pie, 70% of it is jokes and 30% of it is emotion or warmth or kindness or whatever you want to call it. When we were kids, when you and I were kids, because we’re old, there were things called very special episodes, which would happen during sweeps and which would change that ratio. Suddenly a given episode would be 30% jokes and 70% emotional or serious stuff.
**John:** Like when Arnold’s friend gets molested.
**Michael:** Exactly, or when Arnold tried smoking for the first time.
**John:** Or when he gets rabies.
**Michael:** Exactly. The normal episode of a half-hour show I think, and this is an Aristotelian idea. It’s interesting that you bring this in. You’re trying to find some kind of balance. You’re trying to say there are people who are coming to this show for different reasons. Some people just want to laugh and enjoy themselves and some people want to feel something. They want to feel an emotional connection to the characters. Other people might want a serious issue to be discussed. People don’t come to these sitcoms for one thing. The most successful sitcoms I think you would say, of all time, with a few exceptions, there’s always exceptions, but the most successful sitcoms are the ones that manage to find this perfect balance between being funny and then also showing human connection or warmth or emotion or something.
The exception would be something like Seinfeld. Seinfeld was 100% jokes and 0% warmth. Famously, the slogan that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld had was no hugging, no learning. They didn’t want to engage in that at all, and because they are two of the greatest comic geniuses of all time, that show was the most popular show in history. I think a lot of people maybe at the time learned a bad lesson from that show, because that’s not a replicable formula. You have to be as funny and interesting as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld in order to pull that off. There have certainly been other successful shows like 30 Rock that similarly went way heavier on the jokes and the humor than they did on any kind of emotional connection with the characters or warmth or anything like that.
Greg’s version of it was to say, look, we only have, call it 21 minutes and 30 seconds, or 22 minutes, and we are going to make sure that if you are the kind of person who wants to watch a show because they want to feel something, then we’re going to carve out time where we’re not undercutting everything with a joke, we’re not reducing this to just office hijinks. We are going to have time where Jim and Pam have serious conversations about their lives and where Michael Scott, when he falls in love with Holly Flax, late in the fourth, fifth season, whenever that was, that there is going to be scenes that are just about that and that aren’t also trying to be funny.
That’s a really tricky little slight-of-hand move to pull off, but when you do pull it off, you get something like The Office or Friends or one of those shows where people can rewatch them over and over and over again, because even though they know all the jokes and they can repeat them by heart, they’re watching it because they feel connected to the characters and to the world of the show.
**John:** Looking back to the timeline, I’m thinking back to… We had Jac Schaeffer on the show talking about WandaVision. WandaVision is all structured around the evolution of the family sitcom and over the decades and how it grows and how it changes. I think back to I Love Lucy or the Andy Griffith Show. I Love Lucy is all jokes. It’s just a joke factory. Andy Griffith is actually not that funny. There’s jokes in there, but it’s more a happy family, father, son situation. The evolution from there into Norman Lear’s shows, which have actual real conflict and stakes to them. You look at Mary Tyler Moore and the family show as an Office show. When you’re starting on The Office, which at the time was a new format – we had the British show, but the idea that there’s not an audience, we’re not going to get the feedback of the laughter – was it scary going into writing The Office, trying to think, “Is this even funny?”
**Michael:** Yes, to some extent, although what makes Greg special as a writer is he spent an entire year watching the British show over and over again and taking notes. He approaches writing like a scientist. He really puts scripts and shows under a microscope. He gets down to this molecular level where he can now explain to you, here is why what they are doing is so interesting. There were all these things that he pointed out to us about the British show that were clear but also weren’t the kind of things that you might think about if you were talking about why you liked it.
For example, he said, in the history of the sitcom, the standard is that the love story is at the center. The two young attractive people who are will they, won’t they type people, are at the center of the show. Off in the corner is the wacky boss. The wacky boss has a job. The job is to come into his scene, say something stupid and ridiculous and then go back into his office.
Part of the genius of the British show is it inverted the formula. The wacky boss was the center of the show. The love story was shoved into the margins. That did two things. One, it let a singular comedic talent like Ricky Gervais or Steve Carrell anchor the show and be so funny all the time, and to really delve into the psychology of the wacky boss was a new idea. It also meant that the love story was tantalizingly thin and gossamer and spiderwebby and you only got these little glimpses of it. You only got this tiny, tiny amount. It made you desperate to see more of it.
The studio and network would give us notes in the first few seasons where they would say, “We love Jim and Pam so much. It’s such a great story. We just want to make sure that it’s really coming through here, what Pam is feeling.” Greg would go, “Yes, great note. Absolutely.” Then he would say, “Yeah, we’re ignoring that,” because what they don’t understand is that after whatever story has played out, if the camera is peeking at Pam from behind a plant, and her eyes just glance up at Jim and linger on him for one second and then she looks away, the audience is going to really… That intimacy is so tense that the audience will certainly feel the thing we want them to feel.
We all had a lot of fear about adapting it, because we all revered the British show. We all thought it was essentially non-replicable in America. Greg had studied it and observed it and had understood it at such a deep level that at the end of the day it was much easier to make it good I think than we anticipated, because Steve can do anything. Steve is a genius. Also, that kind of romance was so new to television. No one had ever seen it before. The freshness of it really I think brought it into people’s brains and hearts very quickly.
**John:** Now, coming from The Office, your next big project is Parks and Rec. What was the genesis for that? Where did the idea come from? Also, how early on did you know that it was going to be in a similar format to The Office? What was the start of Parks and Rec?
**Michael:** Season 4 of The Office, there was a writer strike. We were picketing. Greg and I were picketing together. He said, “Hey, NBC wants me to do a new show. Would you want to do it with me?” Because I am not a fool, I said yes. They were so desperate to capitalize on The Office and the success of The Office that they basically gave Greg a blank slate and said, “You can do anything you want. We’ll put it on the air,” which now is slightly more common that you get a full season order of something. At the time it was unheard of. He and I started talking during the writer strike as we were walking around picking. Then all of a sudden we started meeting for breakfast a couple times a week at Norm’s Diner, which is Greg’s favorite restaurant in LA by far. Greg is the most thorough human being in the world. We would just pitch idea after idea after idea.
The network really wanted a spin-off, because they were looking at The Office, which was a show that had something like 20 regular characters. The normal network playbook was, this is great, we’ll just take some popular minor characters, rip them out of that show, and build a new show around them. Greg called it The Office: An American Workplace, because he always imagined, potentially, that in success you could do spinoffs that weren’t really spinoffs. You could do The Auto Body Shop: An American Workplace, or The School: An American Educational Institution, or whatever.
**John:** Were they going to say the same documentary company that was filming The Office was also filming these other places?
**Michael:** Exactly, yes. That was exactly the conceit that he was imagining. We had a number of options. We had any workplace in the world. We could just say this is the same documentary crew, and the way it’s a spin-off is just it’s a similar look. We also had the possibility of taking say Craig Robinson out of the warehouse and saying here’s the show that takes place in the warehouse. That’s really what NBC wanted, because at the time we were still in the zone of spinoffs are easy sells to affiliates. That would be the best link that we could do.
**John:** Look at Cheers to Frasier. That was such a nice easy handoff.
**Michael:** Absolutely. Then we stumbled on this idea of doing essentially for government or an entire city what The Office had done for the concept of the office. The Office was a fake company, but it had this incredible relatability where everybody’s worked in some office. At some point everybody’s had a boss. Everybody has annoying coworkers. We thought what would be really interesting would be to say we’re going to invent a whole city and we’re going to talk about the public sector instead of the private sector. That didn’t obviously translate very well to the idea of a spin-off. It would be a fake spin-off, where Andy Bernard, Ed Helms’s character, would quit Dunder Mifflin and run for mayor and then be the mayor or something like that.
**John:** It’s a stretch.
**Michael:** It would be clunky. We broke the news to them that we weren’t going to do a straight Office spin-off, but we had had such success with the documentary format. We loved what the documentary format did for comedy, because talking heads are great opportunities for exposition and jokes and that sense that you’re a fly on the wall and that you’re spying on the activities of the people that you’re watching. It just was like what we had been doing and felt very comfortable doing. We took the format and applied it to the public sector.
Then magically, again, very fortunate – this is one of the things I write about in the book, is all the good breaks that happened in my life – Amy Poehler announced that she was leaving SNL at essentially exactly the right time. We knew that we wanted the main character to be a woman. I was like, “Look, I worked with Amy Poehler for four years. There’s no one funnier on the planet. She’s the only person who can do this.”
Ironically, this is very inside baseball, but they wanted to put our pilot on after the Super Bowl. They ordered 13 episodes. The idea was The Office had the Super Bowl episode that year. The plan was we would start shooting in I think January, The Office would air right after the Super Bowl, and then our pilot would air after The Office. Even though it’s a lot of passive viewing, you’re talking about 25 or 30 million people watching your pilot.
Then Amy got pregnant and suddenly she couldn’t start shooting until March. Our first thought was like, “Oh that’s too bad, she can’t do it.” Then our second thought was, “Getting Amy Poehler in your show is a long-term proposition, and airing after the Super Bowl is a short-term proposition.” In a very risky move, we voluntarily essentially gave up seven episodes of our 13-episode order and said, “We won’t air after the Super Bowl. We’ll air in April.” Amy came to us in March, and we started shooting. We only shot six, and they aired in April and May. We hung on by a thread. Instead of 30 million people watching our pilot, probably four million people watched the pilot. It wasn’t quite as splashy or big, but ultimately it was absolutely the right move.
**John:** Doing the six episodes though, did it also give you some chance to course-correct and figure out more what your show was? I think that’s that first season of Parks and Rec. It’s great and it’s lovely, but it did change. It did morph after that first season into something more like what I really expect the show to be.
**Michael:** It changed dramatically. We only had six episodes. We were doing everything on the fly. They did testing of the pilot and the second episode. What came back was not great, frankly. Part of it was an unfair expectation that it would be as good as The Office. There’s no way that a new show in its nascent pilot form is going to be as good as something that’s in Season 4.
There was a lot of feedback just about Amy’s character just specifically and how she came off. The word was ditzy. It was wild to see that, because in our view, she was the opposite of ditzy. She was an incredibly smart, very, very determined person, whose singular goal was to improve her town and the public facilities available in the town. In our mind the problem was she just had no political acumen. She had no game is the way we thought of it. We used to describe it as a person who has read everything about golf and can tell you every winner of every major golf tournament for the past 100 years and can analyze a swing perfectly, but can’t play golf, but is terrible at golf. She was supposed to be this really smart and determined and positive person who just couldn’t be a political animal, because that requires a sort of cynicism or toughness or edginess or something that she just didn’t possess. Ditzy was just, oh no, we’ve blown it.
What was very clear was that we had an amazing comedian at the center of our show, and all of these other incredibly funny people, Aziz and Chris Pratt and Aubrey Plaza and Rashida Jones and all this incredible cast, and we just weren’t writing it correctly. Very quickly, even before that first season was over, we started to course correct very intensely. If you watch the sixth of those six episodes, it’s called Rock Show, that was the first episode that we were able to really make big changes to in terms of the way the characters came across. It’s by far the best episode I think of that first season. It does point the way toward what the show would ultimately become.
**John:** Mike, talk about this having to course-correct, because as writers, we all get these notes about, “Okay, this is not working. This is the problem. We need to fix this,” but the train has already left the station. It’s running. You have to have conversations with you and with Craig Daniels and about the show, but then with the writers. Then you have to have conversations with Amy Poehler about, this change that you’re making, you actually are changing who her character was to who you want to be. That’s got to be terrifying.
**Michael:** It was, yeah. It was very terrifying. I had a lot of sleepless nights in that first season, because I thought to myself, I’m going to be the person who ruins Amy Poehler’s career. That thought got into my head once I saw the testing and once I understood that as much as I wanted to ignore the testing, that I couldn’t, that what they were saying had a point. Amy was one of the most beloved SNL cast members maybe ever. I thought, oh my god, if I’m the one who causes her career to get derailed, I will never forgive myself.
This is where that SNL training really helps, because again, I likened it at the time to being in a NASCAR race, seeing that there’s a problem with your engine, and having to someone fix the engine as you’re still rolling around the track. You can’t pit stop here. We are shooting something on Monday. It’s Tuesday now. We have four days to fix whatever it is that we’re supposed to shoot and try to rescue the show.
There was a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of conversations with Greg, a lot of conversations with the writers, a lot of conversations with Amy. We started sifting through the detritus of the first stuff that we had shot, stuff that we had cut or stuff that hadn’t made the episodes or whatever, to just examine it, be a scientist, the way Greg was, and say, “What are we missing here? What did we cut that would’ve been better if we had left in? What did we leave in that would’ve been better if we cut?”
I remember there was one little moment where there was an episode called Boys Club, and Amy was giving this talking head. There was a bunch of guys who met for beers in the courtyard. She wasn’t invited, in her mind because she was a woman, but in reality it was just because nobody thought to invite her, because they didn’t think that she was the kind of person who wanted to have a beer in the courtyard. She went out, she crashed their boys club party, and then she accidentally knocks over the table and all the beers shatter on the ground. Then she gave this talking head where she was saying… The joke we had written for her was like, “Am I shattering a glass ceiling? I’m shattering the glass beer bottles, so that’s a start,” or something like that. It was meh.
Then what we liked to do on that show, and on The Office, was just have Amy improvise stuff, like, “Hey, do a couple where you just say whatever you want.” She was like, “Okay.” She improvised this thing where she was like, “Am I shattering the glass ceiling? I don’t know.” She turned around and pointed behind her. She said, “I don’t know, look at all those bitches cleaning up after me.” I was like, “God, that’s so much funnier. That’s a billion times funnier.” We were like, the answer here is to lean into Amy’s actual comic persona. She’s still playing a character, but she does have a funny, edgy side of her that can come out and it will still be okay. We latched on to that and we latched on to a couple other moments, and we just started writing towards those things. Luckily, we had just enough time to save the show by a hair. We saved the show, and it ran for seven years.
**John:** That’s amazing. Just a quick little sidebar on the talking head as a format, as an idea, because it is so fundamental to The Office and Parks and Rec, and also Modern Family, which doesn’t even have the documentary crew framework around it. Just the ability for a character to actually tell you what they’re really thinking and what they’re actually really experiencing is so unique and strange. As an audience we’ve just accepted it. It’s an innovation.
**Michael:** It really is. It has 50 different uses. On The Office, to have Michael Scott look at the camera and say, “Today is Diversity Day. We are getting diversity training from this guy who’s coming in and he’s doing XYZ.”
**John:** So useful.
**Michael:** To not have to work that pipe into casual conversation or dialog is incredibly useful. Then, by the way, once you get that pipe out, you can just write a punchline and have him end it with a joke and it’s great. It’s one of the most efficient plot delivery mechanisms I think that’s ever been invented. That’s not all it does. You can also just go to it for a joke. You can enter up any scene and just go quickly to any character for a funny joke.
Then when you’re talking about the more emotional relationship stuff, you can do a thing that we did all the time on The Office, less so on Parks and Rec, but all the time on The Office, which is you go to Jim, and the question that has theoretically been asked is like, “What do you think of Pam?” He says something like, “Oh, Pam’s great. Pam’s one of my best friends. She’s really great. I’m so happy that she’s with Roy. It’s so wonderful that she’s dating Roy.” Then you intercut that, or you cut right from that talking head to a scene or a moment that betrays the fact that Jim is straight up lying to the camera. The idea that you can use it as a weapon to say people are different when they know they’re being listened to and when they don’t know they’re being observed. It just has all of these amazing uses.
The last couple things I’ve written for, like The Good Place, for example, we didn’t have that, obviously. You can’t make a documentary about the afterlife. I was like, “Oh god.” It struck me again how useful that device is and how many different ways you can deploy it. It really is a wonderful innovation.
**John:** Let’s get to The Good Place. Let’s start with a listener question here from Grant and talking about the genesis and the idea. Megana, do you want to read Grant’s question?
**Megana Rao:** Yeah. Grant asked, “The hardest part of the creative process for me has always been the initial idea. Things start to flow once I get going, but I really struggle with coming up with the initial idea that I feel confident enough to commit time and effort to. I know a big part of this is that I need to practice creating ideas and eventually just make the decision to commit to one. I was wondering if you had any resources or methods to help with idea generation or could share any insight into how you come up with ideas.”
**John:** Talk to me about the idea behind The Good Place, because I know that this was something you had been working on on a slow way for 10 years. What was the initial thing that got you interested in the idea of moral philosophy or that there’s something about the ethical choices that we’re making?
**Michael:** At various times in my life, and I write about some of them in the book, I would blunder into a situation in which I didn’t fully understand really what the dilemma actually was. I certainly didn’t understand what was better ethical choice. I would make a terrible mistake and cause people pain, anxiety, anguish, and suffering. I would think to myself in those moments, if I knew anything about what the hell I was talking about here, I think I would’ve caused less pain and anxiety and anguish and suffering. That led me, in a very casual hobby way, to reading some moral philosophy, some very simple introductory books about theories of ethics and kinds of behavior and why some kinds of behavior might be better than others. That just became a very casual interest of mine that I would think about or read about or talk about with various people.
Then when Parks and Rec ended, there was an opportunity for me to do… I got what Greg got back in 2007, which was you can do whatever you want. NBC basically gave me a guarantee of one season of a show on the air. When they did that, I thought, I could write some version of what I’ve been doing, a collection of funny people in a workplace setting, and maybe it’s a mockumentary and whatever. Because I had been granted this genie in a bottle wish, I really felt like I ought to take a big swing, because I owed it to the concept of ideas to take a big swing. For a while, I had been wondering whether my casual interest in moral philosophy, whether there was a show there.
I played a game as I drove around LA, where if someone would cut me off in traffic or something, I would think to myself, “That guy just lost 18 points.” I had invented an afterlife calculator that was weighing all of our decisions and all of our actions with a point system, that we were all playing a video game we didn’t know we were playing, and that when you die, you get a score. Then the highest-scoring people, instead of getting your name on the board of the Miss Pacman machine, you get to Heaven essentially, and if you don’t, you get tortured. It started to coalesce then.
To get back to Grant’s question, I think that one of the problems I’ve had, I don’t know if this is Grant’s problem, but one of the problems I’ve had sometimes with ideas is there are really two ways to select an idea and then develop it. I think of them as outside-in or inside-out. The outside-in idea is there’s no show on the air about teachers in high school, or you know what would be an interesting setting, the International Space Station, or whatever, where you start with the location or the very simple explanation of what the show is about. Those ideas, in my experience, go nowhere, because that’s not an idea. That’s just a location.
The more effective way for me is to start inside and move outwards, where you say, “I want to do a show about what it means to be a good person.” That led me to say, “What if it’s a show about a woman who has made some really bad choices in her life, and she is now being judged for those choices?” That led me to, “Oh, what if it’s the afterlife? What if there’s an elitist country club perfect eternal paradise where the highest scoring people get in, and she gets in as a mistake and is then trying to prove herself as a good person so she doesn’t get caught?” Then that led me eventually to, “What if that whole thing, spoiler alert, is a torture chamber where this demon has created basically No Exit by Sartre and is torturing people and using them to torture each other?”
When I was asked to write a description of the show early on, after I sold it, I said, “The only thing you should say publicly about this show is that it’s a show about what it means to be a good person. That’s all you should say, because that really is what it’s about.” I knew that it would be grabbier and more interesting to say it’s set in the afterlife, it’s in Heaven or whatever, but I always wanted to go back and work on the show from the inside out, and to say everything in this show is going to be about what it means to be a good person. It happens to be set in the afterlife. It happens to have this very flashy, a high degree of difficulty premise, but I don’t want that to be what people focus on. I want people to focus on the internal stuff.
Sometimes in my life, I guess I’ll just say to Grant, when I run into a roadblock… Greg and I, for example, when we were developing Parks and Rec, the first idea, they really wanted us to do a family show. They essentially pitched us Modern Family, which wasn’t on the air at the time. They said, “You should take the mockumentary format and just apply it to a family.” We thought that was an interesting idea. We talked about it for a while. We just couldn’t get anywhere because we were starting from the outside in. We weren’t starting from a character or a central relationship or a dynamic or anything like that. We were just starting from the location and the setting. That usually makes you run into a brick wall at some point.
**John:** Getting back to Grant’s question, and thinking about what you were going through with The Good Place, you have this idea like, “I want to do a show about what it means to be a good person.” That’s all well and good, but it’s not until you have the idea of like, oh, Eleanor Shellstrop is a bad person who has to pretend that she was a good person, she’s basically caught, that’s the comedic premise. That’s the engine that’s getting you through especially that first season, that she has to pretend that she’s something that she’s not. That’s an opportunity for comedy.
**Michael:** Exactly. The stakes are immediately evident. It’s basically you snuck into a wedding where you weren’t invited and then you suddenly realize that everybody at the wedding, if they discover you, they’re going to murder you. It’s a double comedic premise, because she’s a bad person who has been mistaken for a good person, and also she has to act all the time in a way that prevents her from being revealed as a bad person. She has to cover up all of her instincts and all of her bad behavior and simultaneously try to learn what a good person would even look like, because she’s so far away from knowing.
Again, I don’t think you get there, I don’t think you arrive at that location if you’ve started from, “Oh, you know what would be fun is a show in the afterlife.” That’s too broad and there’s too many options there. If you start from a central plot idea or the central relationship of, in my case it was a woman who was a bad person, was mistaken for a good one, and was partnered up with a guy whose whole life was dedicated to writing about and thinking about what made a good person.
**John:** Chidi.
**Michael:** Chidi, yeah. You start from that orientation, and now everything else falls into place around you.
**John:** Now as you’re fleshing out The Good Place, you have Eleanor, you have Chidi. When do you know who the other people are in that world and who are going to be your central characters?
**Michael:** Again, this is the inside out thing, because I was like, “Okay, you are Eleanor Shellstrop and you have been deliberately sucked into a fake paradise in order to torture you. Who do we put around you if you’re Michael, if you’re Ted Danson’s character? You make your soulmate an ethics professor. That’s a no brainer.”
Then I was like, “What are her main flaws? She has a chip on her shoulder. She’s an incredibly jealous person. Her radar for phoniness is very, very highly regulated.” We used to say that she had a very good antenna for BS. That was ultimately what led her to figure out Michael’s whole plan. Because of that, it was like, there needs to be someone right near her who drives her crazy for 50 reasons, among them that she’s full of shit. That was Tahani. We invented this character who on paper was everything that Eleanor wasn’t. She was very tall. She was flawlessly beautiful. She was stylish. She was friends with all these famous people. She was a do-gooder, where she had raised all this money for charity. This is the important part. It was all for show. Eleanor was on to her from the very beginning. That’s where Tahani came from.
Jason Mendoza, I immediately, once I came up with the premise, knew that there should be at least one other person there early on who reveals that he is also a mistake for being there. Then we just were like, “All right, every show needs a dumb guy. We’re going to create the ultimate dumb guy.” I said at the beginning of the show to the other writers that I wanted Jason Mendoza to be so dumb that he made Andy Dwyer, Chris Pratt’s character from Parks and Rec, look like a Mensa level genius. We were going to just go full bore, no holds barred, make him the dumbest dumb guy who’s ever lived on TV. We invented him. That was also a great thing, because Eleanor and Jason had a lot in common. They were both fun, partier, trashy people who just loved to goof off and not really think about anything important. He served three or four different functions in the show simultaneously.
Again, if you’re working from the inside out, you put Eleanor at the center of this wheel, and these spokes are going out in different directions. It’s very easy to naturally fill in the blanks around her in terms of what other pieces of the puzzle you need to complete it.
**John:** Eleanor needs to learn moral philosophy, essentially. One of the real challenges you set for your show is that essentially the audience has to learn moral philosophy along with her. She’s there to literally give the textbook lessons. You had to think not just what is she trying to accomplish, but what is the framework in which we’re actually exploring this week’s issue. Talk to us about incorporating moral philosophy. Also, you brought in actual philosophy professors to help you and the writing staff figure out how to talk about some of these issues.
**Michael:** I did my own reading. In classic 2022 fashion, I’ll say I did my own research for the show. I had a pretty solid understanding of the main theories. I realized at one point if I were writing a medical drama, I would certainly need some actual surgeons and ER doctors to be consultants, to help us write the dialog and to explain what was happening to people. Grey’s Anatomy has that. We’re doing a medical drama, but it’s a metaphysical medical drama.
I read a book by a professor named Todd May who wrote about essentially what happens to the concept of ethics when someone is immortal. That was literally exactly that show we were writing. I emailed him and chatted with him for an hour. Then I asked him if he would like to advise us. He would Zoom in sometimes to the room. He came into the room a couple times. We had a list of topics for him that we wanted him to explain. There were multiple times when we would be writing about some kind of specific theory and we would get all tangled up. This happened a lot with something like existentialism, which is very, very thorny and slippery, simultaneously slippery and thorny. It’s the most dangerous of the philosophies.
**John:** Absolutely. You could hurt yourself.
**Michael:** We would email him or call him and say, “We have a philosophical emergency. You have to help us.” Then there was a woman named Pamela Hieronymi who teaches at UCLA who came in and taught us about the trolley problem, among other things. We had these people, these incredible smart people who could explain to us what the hell these philosophers were talking about when we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves.
When I pitched the show to NBC, I said to them, “Moral philosophy is baked into the center of this. It’s not going to be a casual aspect of the show. It’s going to be in every episode. We’re going to really be delving into this stuff. I promise you I won’t make it feel like homework.” That was my solemn vow is that it wouldn’t ever feel like it was homework. I don’t know, the third episode or something starts with Chidi standing at a blackboard and it says Philosophy 101 on it. I was a little bit nervous. Because the writers are funny and because the actors are funny and because we always made sure that the show had to be funny, I think we were able to get those tricky ideas across in ways that were at least in theory entertaining. That’s the difference really between audiences enjoying your show and not enjoying it is like, am I being entertained at a very basic level.
**John:** I think it’s come time for our One Cool Things. You have a similar thing in your… Your draft in your podcast, is that your One Cool Things, or is that more a collective bit where you’re upping the ante on each other?
**Michael:** Our draft is we come up with a topic of pieces of furniture and we just draft. Someone gets the first pick, and they pick a couch, and then explain why they think that’s the best pick. We do do a thing on our podcast at the very end called One Last Meaningless Thing, which I think is maybe closer to yours. Go ahead.
**John:** My One Cool Thing is a paper I read this week from JPL and JPL folks who were involved in looking for all the asteroids that could hit the Earth. We’ve done a really good job of tracking all those asteroids. If one of them were to hit the Earth or come close to the Earth, we can maybe do something about it. This paper is called Defending Human Civilization From Supervolcanic Eruptions. It’s basically making the case, we know there is the Yellowstone Supervolcano, which is not about to erupt, it’s not going to happen, but at some point could erupt, and it would be world-ending in the way that an asteroid hit would be. This paper is actually asking, we know how much energy there is there, could we bleed off that energy by putting it in wells and stuff to pull the power out of that? The answer is maybe. We actually kind of could. It would be geo engineering. You could actually get a ton of electricity out of there, and over the course of 500 years, as you build smaller and smaller concentric circles, stop the Yellowstone Volcano from ever erupting. It is a very nerdy paper, but I just loved it as a concept.
**Michael:** Very cool. You were right. That is one cool thing.
**John:** Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
**Michael:** Yeah. I’m a little prisoner of the moment here. I’ve been going around and promoting this book that I read – that I wrote, sorry. I’ve also read it.
**John:** Someone else wrote it.
**Michael:** I, like most people, I think have been living in a world where you feel like the only place to buy books is amazon.com. Then over the pandemic, there was this big push to go to bookshop.org, which is a collection of independent booksellers, where you don’t get it in 18 minutes like you do when you order from Amazon, but you support independent bookstores. I’ve also now gone to a number of independent bookstores around the country. You’re a published author, a bestselling author.
**John:** I am. I’m not a bestseller. Not a bestseller like you. I’m not on any lists like you. I’ve been to so many bookstores.
**Michael:** I just want to say that I think it’s really cool that these independent bookstores still exist. I went to one called Rainy Day Books in Kansas City that did this crazy promotion where you could have me inscribe specific messages to people. I signed and inscribed 2,700 books over two days, which was a truly insane thing to do. It was this wild stunt created by Rainy Day Books that was really cool and really interesting. Chevalier’s, which is my local bookstore here in LA, is doing something similar. I’ve signed a bunch of books and inscribed them there.
I just think it’s really cool that in this age in which everything has internetized and immediate and everything else, that these independent bookstores still exist and that people support them. I just want to give a shout-out not only to the bookstores themselves, but to all the people who actually physically go to a bookstore, look through the shelves, and decide to pay $3 more for the book that they wanted to buy to support a local business.
**John:** A tip for people who have an instinct to just buy the book immediately on Amazon, what our family does is we have a shared note called Books To Buy. Instead of actually just buying on Amazon, I’ll add the book to Books To Buy. Then once a week or so, we’ll put in the order at Chevalier’s, which is our local bookstore. They’ll order them for us. They come super quick, because the infrastructure is there for them to get those books quickly. That’s how we get away from buying books on Amazon is just have a shared note on our phones that we can all add to.
**Michael:** Great idea. That’s another cool thing. You cheated. You had two cool things.
**John:** I was just piggybacking on you. You set it up. I was just delivering it and then polishing it there a little bit more.
**Michael:** Fair enough.
**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Manzi. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Michael’s @kentremendous. What is the origin of Ken Tremendous?
**Michael:** I was walking down the street in college, taking a fiction writing class, and I thought, “Oh, you know what a funny name for a character in a short story would be is Ken Tremendous.” I went home and wrote it down. I love funny names.
**John:** It’s good.
**Michael:** I’m a Monty Python fan. I just always was like, “Someday I’ll use that,” and that’s where I used it.
**John:** Your production company is Fremulon, right?
**Michael:** Yes, a similarly dumb, meaningless, funny word, Fremulon Insurance, yeah.
**John:** I love it. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member the scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Mike Schur, thank you so much for coming on the show.
**Michael:** It is my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Let’s talk about the writing staff here. We got a question in from Lori. She was asking, “I found this list of writers terms. I was hoping you could talk about writers rooms shorthand.” This article has a bunch of things here. Just quickly, a speed round, could you talk me through what some of these things mean? Hat on a hat.
**Michael:** Hat on a hat just means there’s a joke where it’s a little bit nutty and then there’s simultaneously another thing happening that’s a little bit nutty or crazy. It’s a bridge too far would be the way to explain it. It’s too much. It’s too silly or ridiculous.
**John:** Do you ever deliberately do a hat on a hat, just to make fun of the absurdity?
**Michael:** Another way to say hat on a hat that comedy writers use is joke on a joke. It’s like, you want to tell a joke, you don’t want to tell a joke on top of that joke. Sometimes, Brent Forrester, in The Office writers room, someone would go, “I don’t know, I think that’s a joke on a joke,” and he would go, “Yeah, two jokes. It’s better than one.” It’s not always the case that you don’t want to do that, but generally speaking, your joke will probably read a little better if it isn’t confused by another simultaneous joke that’s going on.
**John:** A bottle episode.
**Michael:** Bottle episode is an episode that takes place entirely on a set. You don’t have any other locations. You don’t leave the studio. You don’t have any guest actors. It’s only the main cast and it’s only the main location of the show. It’s usually a way to save money, honestly, because it costs money to hire other actors or to go places. Some of the greatest episodes in TV history have been bottle episodes. The Friends episode, if you think about–
**John:** Where Ross is trying to get everyone to leave the apartment?
**Michael:** That’s right, yes. That is a great bottle episode. The Fly, which is the Breaking Bad episode that takes place entirely in the lab, that was a bottle episode. One truism I think about writing is that obstacles are good for drama and they’re good for comedy. If you have no obstacles, you end up doing something giant and bloated and Buddhist. Sometimes when you are forced into a bottle episode, you end up coming up with the best episode that you’ve ever done. Ron and Leslie at the end of Parks and Rec in the final season when it’s just the two of them locked in a room, that was a bottle episode. We didn’t have to do that. We just wanted to do that, because we thought that doing it in this really cloistered environment would make for a good half hour of TV.
**John:** I don’t know if this is actually a term or something that just showed up on this list. A Gilligan cut. Have you ever herd of a Gilligan cut?
**Michael:** I don’t think I have.
**John:** I get what the point is. Gilligan is fixing the boat right now, and then you cut to Gilligan accidentally setting the boat on fire. Do you have a term for that? Is there anything you would call that?
**Michael:** We would call that a cut-to joke. I think of it as a Lenny and Squiggy thing. It’s like, “Where are we going to find two people that dumb?” and then, “Hello, Laverne.” It’s anything where you tee up exactly what’s about to happen and then you cut right to it.
**John:** This list calls that a ding-dong joke, when you’re ringing at the doorbell right at that moment. A truck full of ducks or a spring-loaded cat, you ever heard of these terms?
**Michael:** No.
**John:** Truck full of ducks is from Silence of the Lambs, where you’re chasing after a thing that you think has the killer inside, and you open it up and it’s actually just a truck full of ducks, you were chasing the wrong thing. Have you ever used the term potato pitch?
**Michael:** No.
**John:** Potato pitch is so-called because it provides nourishment in a pinch but it’s not enough to sustain you. It solves a problem, but only temporarily. It sounds like a jokoid. It’s doing the function, but it’s actually not good.
**Michael:** It’s not a long-lasting nourishment for the episode or the show. I get that.
**John:** Does each writers room develop its own terms for what these things are or does it usually carry on from writers room to writers room?
**Michael:** There are certainly some of those terms. Sock barrel is another one. Sock barrel is a term for two aspects of a show that seem like they should be related but aren’t actually related. The A story, someone is shopping for a new car. In the B story, someone just got a new shirt and is showing it off to people, where they’re both about new objects, but it’s not a thematic link. It’s just those two stories are kind of similar. That term has been around forever, and it certainly is–
**John:** Sock barrel’s generally a bad thing.
**Michael:** Yes. It’s generally a bad thing. There are certainly terms like that that are handed down from room to room to room. Refrigerator logic is another one, where that’s a term for if it’s 3 in the morning and you go to the refrigerator half-asleep to get a snack and you think about something you watched that day and suddenly, you’re like, “Wait a second.”
**John:** “That doesn’t make any sense.”
**Michael:** “Why would that person have done that?” or whatever. That’s a term that people used to say if you’ve raised an objection to something in a story, some minor plot details, someone will say, “That’s refrigerator logic. We don’t need to worry about that,” because that’s not serious enough of a problem to make us not do this or whatever. Some of these are handed down from the early ‘60s or something. Some rooms generally do develop their own lingo and their own ideas about how to approach these things.
**John:** That’s amazing.
Links:
* [Michael Schur](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321658/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/KenTremendous)
* [How to be Perfect by Michael Schur](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Be-Perfect/Michael-Schur/9781982159313)
* [Todd May](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_May), academic papers [here](https://philpeople.org/profiles/todd-g-may), books [here](https://bookshop.org/contributors/todd-may)
* [The Poscast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-few-more-words/id757346885) by Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur
* [TV Writers Room Terms](https://thescriptlab.com/features/screenwriting-101/8890-13-tv-writers-room-terms-you-should-know/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
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