Giving Black Boys Their Boyhood Back: Mara Brock Akil Offers A Fresh Take on Judy Blume’s “Forever”
In this updated version of Judy Blume’s 19711 novel Forever, showrunner Mara Brock Akil (Girlfriends, Moesha) takes a fresh look at the classic story of teenage love and intimacy through the prism of race, parenting, and today’s culture. What started as a simple story about first love and relationships between Justin Edwards (Michael Cooper Jr.) […]
Inside “Adults” Showrunner Stefani Robinson On Crafting a Comedy About Growing Up (Or Not)
When Stefani Robinson, Emmy-nominated writer and executive producer (Atlanta, What We Do in the Shadows), first read the pilot for Adults, she didn’t expect to feel something so familiar. “By the end of it, I really felt like I was the sixth character,” she recalls. “There was a coziness, a closeness.” Adults, the new comedy […]
“Every Episode Has Its Own DNA” Todd Harthan on ‘High Potential’
“I caught the bug and sort of fell in love with it the second I started writing,” Todd Harthan recalls of his unexpected journey into screenwriting. The showrunner of ABC’s High Potential starring Kaitlin Olson wasn’t always destined for Hollywood. In fact, his career began on a completely different track – business school at Fordham […]
“Yellowjackets Is A Comedy – A Very, Very Dark Comedy” Say Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson
“I remember the first time I tried to write a screenplay, I took a class in college,” Ashley Lyle recalls. As an English major at Columbia University in New York, Lyle found herself in a screenwriting class after dropping an overly challenging art history course. “I immediately loved it. I already loved movies. Kim’s Video […]
Sirens: From Stage To Stream. How Molly Smith Metzler’s Play Became a Mythic TV Series
It’s not often that a stage play becomes the genesis of a five-hour prestige TV series. For Molly Smith Metzler, the Emmy-nominated creator of Maid, her latest project, Sirens—now streaming on Netflix—was born not from a best-selling novel or franchise IP, but from a modest five-character play she wrote as a student at Juilliard. Back […]
