Highlights from the Sublime Primetime Comedy Panel – The Comeback, Hacks, Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat & Widow’s Bay

Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size Text Size Print This Page Send by Email

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Sublime Primetime

Sublime Primetime

Highlights from the Sublime Primetime Comedy Panel – The Comeback, Hacks, Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat & Widow’s Bay

Each year, The Writers Guild Foundation hosts their Sublime Primetime Event to chat with the Emmy-Nominated television writers for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series.

In this two-parter, here are some highlights from the following comedy TV writers who discuss the episodes of their shows that made it to the awards.

Michael Patrick King, Lisa Kudrow – “Valerie Does It All” – The Comeback
Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, Jen Statsky – “Hacks (Finale)” – Hacks
Katie Dippold – “Welcome to Widow’s Bay!” – Widow’s Bay
Anthony King – “Mergers And Acquisitions” – Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat

The Comeback

Michael Patrick King: Lisa Kudrow and I met every day for 20 years. We asked, ‘What is Valerie doing?’ every time. But we never came up with an idea that had a big enough engine for another season. It’s a risk coming back because ten years between each season is a lot.

The Comeback has always been focused on what’s really happening in the business at the moment that we arrive. This year was the threat of AI. Season 2 was about reality television. So when we hit that, we knew we had something that was a big enough machine that we could build Valerie’s world around it.

It’s the terror of what can happen to you in show business every season. The first was the terror of reality shows taking away narrative television. The second was the terror of individual writers taking away the writing room. And this season is the idea of no writers taking away the writing room. The terror leads to the comedy. And, if you throw Valerie in it, then it feels like a story.

Inside The Comeback Writers’ Room

Michael: It’s Lisa and I sitting across from a table and we just start talking.

For the first season, we had a writers’ room. For the second season, we had a smaller one. And this year, because it was going to be the final season, it was just Lisa and I figuring it out together.

Lisa Kudrow: Michael and I kind of share a brain. It’s terrifying because there are expectations that are hard to set aside for the people who watch. You kind of get amnesia and then it all comes back. Michael and I figured out the very end of it very early on before we wrote anything.

Valerie never felt humiliation

Lisa: Valerie spun everything, but believed it. She was pain free. She does not accept humiliation. We also wanted to make sure that we left Valerie with dignity. Once we realized that Valerie was going to be seen differently, we could shape the whole season around that.

I came to respect her because she’s the most resilient person I’ve ever known. I came to understand that myself over 20 years.

Saying goodbye to Valerie

Lisa: It was emotional. We were on the Friends stage where I also said goodbye to the most important 10 years of my career. We thought it’d be really great if we filmed the last scene there on the last day, so that Friends and The Comeback are all ending on the exact same moment. It’s one take without edits.

Hacks

Saying goodbye to Deborah and Ava

Lucia, Paul & Jen: . We did a live show a couple of days ago with Deborah and Ava.

They were like themselves and it was kind of meta. Part of the reason we did that is because we were kind of desperate to keep writing for them. It was part of the grieving.

For the three of us, it was the first show we created. To make a comedy right now is so hard, but we also know it’s a privilege that we got to do it for five seasons. To say goodbye to that is really hard.

Approaching the final season. Deborah was going to get sick and potentially take her own life.

Lucia: We actually pitched the idea that, like any standup at her level, Deborah wanted to call her own light. In the end, she was gonna go out on her own terms. It felt very true to the character that she would want not to suffer or relinquish her vanity.

Inside the Hacks writers’ room

Lucia, Paul & Jen: It’s pretty consistent.

It’s us plus eight writers – mostly all the same from season one. They’re the funniest, smartest, most empathetic, unbelievable people. There’s so many jokes that they pitched throughout the years. We really couldn’t have made the show without them. They constantly helped us improve it and refine Hacks.

One of my favorite things that we get to do in our room, is that we’ll go through a draft and then sometimes we’ll have something else to revise. We’ll highlight random parts of the script to see if we can beat a particular joke.

We’ll send out a 40 page script and we’ll get back 140 pages. We don’t know who wrote what.

One thing also that was pretty seismic was we were planning to have Deborah reveal her diagnosis later in the finale. And it was one of our writers that said, ‘Maybe do it early and let the audience sit with it and deal with it?’ It allowed us to do the kind of gallows humor that I think really landed with the audience.

Even though we wanted to end with something that was about dignity and death, we couldn’t have done it without the writers’ room. Our writers’ room came from a ton of different backgrounds.

The show really did evolve so much in that room. There’s jokes, but there’s this darker side of things. The darkest moments bring out the funniest jokes.

At the end of the day, Hacks was always about these two people coming together, making comedy, and their love language is jokes. We always knew that it was really important to hire people who were excellent at crafting jokes in addition to story.

There’s a line where Deborah accuses Ava of not writing jokes, but thought poems.

Jen Statsky, Lucis Anielo, Katie Dippold & Anthony King. Photo courtesy of Writers Guild Foundation

Widow’s Bay

Katie Dippold: I wrote this as a spec script for Parks and Recreation 18 years ago.

It was an original script about an island called Widow’s Bay. It had a lot of the same characters. It was much jokier in the beginning because it had a similar kind of humor as Parks and Recreation. It would have felt more like a parody if we kept it. So that changed over the years.

I also think Widow’s Bay came from everything I learned at Parks and Rec such as a throwaway joke that comes back later in a bigger way.

I always wanted Widow’s Bay to feel like a real place. In the beginning, it didn’t feel like it. I was writing the spec for The Heat and I remember thinking this needs a better, stronger investigation. This could be a much better movie if the story line of the crime is just more interesting.

Comedy/ Horror Tone of Widow’s Bay

Katie: We’re joking, but have to deal with the horror side of things and the tension.

We have to burn the candle at both ends because the show promises these different haunts and feelings for every episode. Then you have to think about your take on that, but at the same time, make sure you’re following these characters and their emotional stories. Then you have to make sure you have a comedic conceit to the episode.

Sometimes there’ll be a really fun idea that’s very scary. But then there’s nothing fun about it. We can’t figure out what would make this funny because it’s supposed to feel cathartic. In the writers’ room, there are a couple of writers that came from shows like WandaVision and a playwright.

It was a nice mix because someone could pitch something that was very serious, but the show needs something grounded. It’s like improv where you’re taught to start off with something grounded until something funny happens. Having someone pitch something very serious and dark would make it easier for the writers to come up with what’s funny about it.

I feel like the best dramatic writing I will ever do is to save a joke, which is like a backwards way of doing it.

Jury Duty: Company Retreat

Anthony King: It’s like writing a show where your main character isn’t an actor. It’s like having a wild animal on set. The main character has no idea that he’s in a TV show. And at any point, any actor, any crew member can completely destroy the show.

Inside the Company Retreat Writers’ Room

It’s actually surprisingly similar to a normal scripted show. When I started working on it, I thought it was gonna be like one of those old choose your own adventure books.

When you think that through, in production, it would be impossible. It’s more about creating character arcs. We’re building out the story of the season. We have a character who we know we cannot predict how they will react in every scene. But we can try to game plan how they might react and how we might counter that.

Our writer’s room is trying to figure out all of the possibilities. It’s like persuasive writing. I think of Norman is our first audience member.

We had a writers’ room of seven writers. One of the things in this season, compared to season one, is that they are all strangers by nature of being jurors. Whereas this is a company and they should all know each other.

Creating Backstories

The amount of world building and backstory is completely bananas. We’re bringing someone into this world and if they sniff out that it’s fake in any way, again, the show’s over. We had to build a company, it had to be on Google Maps, it had to have a history and a website.

We created backstories and connections with all of them, but pretty quickly realized that giving an actor four pages of backstory to memorize and then say, ‘Hey, you can’t ever mess this up,’ and can never ask, ‘Oh, wait, where did I go to college?’ So instead, we gave them things and we created mechanisms to build the canon in real time. We had ways to communicate information to everyone who needed to know something.

Keeping Anthony Norman In The Dark

The idea was to bring a temp into a company where he has no reason to care, put him in situations with these people with whom he built relationships, and hopefully, by the end, care so much that he’ll go above and beyond and save the whole company.

In the first season with Ronald, who was on the jury, he was never asked to go above and beyond. He was just asked to do his job as a head juror.

It’s like an 80s movie, where we know what we were aiming for. Everything was built toward trying to build these connections with these characters and to build real relationships with them so that he hopefully would care for about two weeks.

Building up to the grand finale

On the last day, we had to try to put Norman through a real-time farce where he’s going up a hill and down a hill and up a hill. We’re bringing in the most broad comedy characters and doing it all in real time because again we can’t say, ‘Cut, let’s try that again.’

I feel like so much of the magic of the first two seasons are that the premise is so mundane – jury duty and a company retreat. You have to find the heart, the humanity and the connection between these characters in that mundane setting. That’s part of what makes it challenging, but also rewarding.