HUMANITAS INDUSTRY 101 PODCAST
Episode 6: Amy Lippman and Chris Keyser
This episode comes from a writing workshop with Chris Keyser and Amy Lippman recorded October 21, 1995.
They give an in-depth look at the show Party of Five and its characters.
Chris and Amy first met as college students when Amy was studying playwriting and Chris was studying law. They would go on to work for television series including Sisters, L.A. Law, and Lone Star, before co-creating Party of Five. The show ran for 142 episodes across six seasons, won a Humanitas Prize in 1995, and was nominated a second time in 1996.
In addition to their work together, Amy’s credits include Masters of Sex, In Treatment, and Ruth & Erica. And Chris’s credits include The Society, The Last Tycoon, and Julia. He served as the president of WGA West from 2011-2015.
Humanitas's Industry 101 is made possible with support from our series sponsor Sony Pictures Entertainment.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
00;00;06;08 - 00;02;00;25
MICHELLE FRANKE
Welcome to Humanitas’s Industry 101 podcast. I'm Michelle Franke, Executive Director of Humanitas. Industry 101 is a conversation series that introduces topics foundational to understanding and launching television and film writing careers. Humanitas has a long history of presenting conversations and workshops for writers exploring craft and career issues. Industry 101 is our continuation of that work. It includes our online event series, in-person events, and this podcast, which will present both new episodes and conversations from our archives, highlighting our history.
Today's episode comes from a writing workshop with Chris Keyser and Amy Lippman, recorded on October 21st, 1995. They give an in-depth look at the show Party of Five and its characters. Chris and Amy first met as college students when Amy was studying playwriting, and Chris was studying law. They would go on to work for television series including Sisters, L.A. Law, and Lone Star, before co-creating Party of Five.
The show ran for 142 episodes across six seasons, won a Humanitas Prize in 1995, and was nominated a second time in 1996. In addition to their work together, Amy's credits include Masters of Sex, In Treatment, and Ruth & Erica, and Chris's credits include The Society, The Last Tycoon, and Julia. He served as the president of WGA West from 2011 to 2015.
To introduce the archival recording, we caught up with Chris recently and asked him to reflect on his career, writing Party of Five, and how his background as a lawyer influences his writing. Stick around for a brief writing prompt at the end of the episode, inspired by the conversation. And now, here's Chris.
[MUSIC]
00;02;00;27 - 00;05;44;03
CHRIS KEYSER
I began as a lawyer. I didn't ever practice law, but I went to school to be a lawyer and almost immediately dropped law and became a writer. And I would say, as I look back on all these things in my career, a couple of things occurred to me. The first thing is that generally, I would say that I was very glad that I went to law school first.
I don't think it necessary to do that to become a writer by any means, but I don't think any experience you have is necessarily disadvantageous when you want to spend a whole life writing. I tend to think of the world the way a lawyer thinks of the world, and it has helped me in my writing career, and I tend to think still, by the way, even in the writing, that I'm making an emotional argument to people. Like a lawyer, it is my job to convince the jury of an audience to feel the way I want them to feel, and I think it does come down to that. It's like some people may think about argument as - it just means that people are battling it out somewhere. But the truth is, every scene is in some ways, thesis and a counter thesis, two people with two different points of view or desires, some goals in that scene that come into conflict and they need to work through those things.
So, in every way, a scene is about a couple of points of view that work themselves out to the very end. And so that's part of what I mean, but I also mean, in this sense, which is that I have something I want you to believe or feel by the end of a given scene or a given episode.
And like anyone else, I am in some sense pleading my case to you through these characters and the plot. And that is, for me, a version of an argument. It doesn't present itself as an argument, but it is in fact an argument for tolerance or believing that love at first sight exists, or that it's okay to be selfish sometimes, even though you have a responsibility to each other.
Those are obviously random examples, but they're all - they're all arguments I'm making or we are making as our writing staff, in the course of a given show and a given scene that we'd love an audience to either agree with, or I suppose, in some ways, it's perfectly okay to say “oh, you know what? I don't agree with that.
I'm not on that character side in this case. I understand what they're saying, perhaps, or not, but at least I, I understand that there's a conversation going on about how to be a human being in the world.” It's been over 30 years since we made Party of Five. I have no idea how long people will talk about the show itself.
All shows, or almost all shows essentially fade from memory. The thing that I remember most and that I would pass on to almost everybody, and maybe it's obvious too - although, I think that sometimes that writers and other people don't think about it all the time - is that the only thing that matters in the long run, in addition to making a career out of it, is that fact of having done the work with other people who you cared about.
And I have 30 years on - I think Amy has too - maintained friendships with all of the writers we began with, with many of the directors, with our producer, with a lot of that cast. Those people are still in my life, and we obviously have more time together because we did a show for six years, and sometimes that doesn't happen.
But to me, when I look back on this and being able to talk about it, what remains is the feeling of having made something together. That's more important than almost everything else. Because eventually, unless you're incredibly lucky and maybe Sopranos or The Wire or something like that, what you've written will no longer be remembered. And what you have is the life you had making it.
Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy.
[MUSIC]
00;05;44;05 - 00;06;14;28
AMY LIPPMAN
We wrote this spec script and sent it to Wonder Years. And I think as it's true almost everywhere, the script that you write for any given show will never get you work at that show, but it will get you work other places. And oddly enough, this small Wonder Year script that we wrote ended up getting us an L.A. Law episode and then it was off and running because it was a great credit and -
00;06;14;28
CHRIS KEYSER
-law shows for a long time.
00;06;15;00 - 00;06;33;28
AMY LIPPMAN
Well, Chris, being a lawyer, it certainly helped -
CHRIS KEYSER
- welI, got to write all the interrogations and she wrote all the law scenes.
AMY LIPPMAN
Yeah. That's true.
CHRIS KEYSER
“How long have you been employed, Mr. Smith?”
AMY LIPPMAN
That's right. And I was, you know, I'd be in my office saying, you know, “do they have sex in the bedroom? Do they have sex in the living room? Where should they do it?”
00;06;34;01 - 00;07;16;00
AMY LIPPMAN
But, and from there, we wrote a series of episodes for various, various series. And it wasn't until we ended up in Sisters that we really had a long run on a show, and began to learn about what it means to create a series, what it means to keep a series up and running.
And then we sort of, as recently as two years ago, ended up with this series, and we can, I'm sure, down the road talk more specifically about what that experience was like.
00;07;16;00
CHRIS KEYSER
Well, we don't for example, we don't read over each other's shoulders and write together. We don't, we don't type together.
00;07;16;00 - 00;07;39;17
AMY LIPPMAN
We actually tried that occasionally, and it just takes so long. It's just we - even when we say “okay, let's just do it together. Let's - What does she say?” It takes about eight times doing it.
00;07;39;17
CHRIS KEYSER
We spent a lot of time in a room together talking about story, about ideas, planning out the structure of an episode probably 75% of the time is just work on structure and being. And, after that, we go off and we write separately, and then we edit and reread each other’s work.
00;07;39;19 - 00;08;17;21
AMY LIPPMAN
Although we have this strange experience - I actually I don't know if I can speak for you, but - now, occasionally when we see, we can turn on television, Sisters is in reruns on Lifetime, and occasionally I'll see an episode and I - first, I won't remember if I wrote it or not, and then I won't remember - when I remember that I sort of wrote it, I can't remember which, which of us wrote the scene - and we do actually divide work by scene. It's not by storylines and not by acts, but we - actually there's this interesting sort of negotiation process that goes on.
00;08;17;21
CHRIS KEYSER
We do, we do. We list every scene, we decide how long they're going to be, we each privately decide which ones are harder or easier -
00;08;17;22 - 00;08;34;07
AMY LIPPMAN
And then I say, well, you know, I'll take the Bailey scene, but but okay, you get -
CHRIS KEYSER
It’s usually what don't you want to write?
AMY LIPPMAN
That's true. I always get I get dibs, strangely. But I'm the girl.
CHRIS KEYSER
Just like my marriage.
00;08;34;10 - 00;09;22;19
AMY LIPPMAN
And, that's, you know, that's that's really the way we work it. Then we, we write separately, we swap pages, we edit each other's work. And, I think over the course of the years, our voices have become very similar to each other. And I don't think there is, scenes I'm better writing or - those interrogation scenes which I never want to write again.
There are no kinds of scenes that, that one or the other of us is better at, and it certainly doesn't follow along gender lines.
00;09;22;19 - 00;10;18;00
CHRIS KEYSER
First of all, these - obviously you make all the decisions yourself, and it's a lot better to have no one saying no to you in the long run. But also, I mean, it's easier to write characters that you have created yourself.
And one of the jobs of, of either a freelance writer or a staff writer is - and probably a lot of, you know, that is - really to be able to be a good mimic and you have to go in and say, this is what a show is like, and I can do that too. I can, I can write like you write.
And there’s sometimes you have to force that. Sometimes you don't believe any of those things, but you don't have a choice because you want to stay on that show. You write like that and you don't have any of those problems anymore. Because we said this is what Bailey sounds like and this is what Charlie sounds like, and it sort of comes naturally now, which is probably one of the reasons why our work begins to mesh much more closely because, if it works well, you're not writing Amy, you not writing Chris, you’re writing Bailey, and that should be the same no matter what.
00;10;20;00 - 00;10;42;28
AMY LIPPMAN
That said, that being said, hopefully, you know, our intent when we created the show was to allow other voices into the mix. I think one of the pleasures of the process is not just being able to make decisions yourself, but welcoming other writers to it who understand your show well enough that it doesn't sound like you're writing a completely different series, but they're writing - they're writing in their own voice as well.
00;10;42;28 - 00;11;06;15
CHRIS KEYSER
And what we thought we'd talk a little bit about is how we, how we came to figure out what the characters were going to be - in other words, what happens. What happened in the process is that Fox came to us actually, and said, we'd like to do a show about kids without parents, and that was all they said, then they sent us off. So -
00;11;06;15
AMY LIPPMAN
And I have this, we have this sneaking suspicion that the idea of human values really did not not enter into the original picture.
00;11;07;00 - 00;11;32;11
CHRIS KEYSER
The joke, the joke was that they said that they, they wanted to avert something. Don't tell the babies that their mom and dad are dead, which was, you know, the idea that, you know, the kids are driving down the Golden Gate Bridge at 3:00 in the morning with a top off. And, you know, “isn’t it great to be orphans?” - and the fun of orphanhood.
00;11;32;11
AMY LIPPMAN
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was, you know, it's a network that's really built on the success of soap operas of, of, you know, Melrose Place and 90210, and when they came to us, we were, let's be honest, the worst possible choice, to write, to write that kind of show.
00;11;32;12 - 00;12;21;26
CHRIS KEYSER
We actually didn't want to do it. We I mean, we didn't we were in a position where we had never done a pilot before. It was very late in the pilot season. We had had a very bad experience earlier in the year with a pilot that was supposed to get we were supposed to write and then politics, the network, changed all of that. And so we really wanted to say, look, this is just a really bad idea, the idea of doing this. First of all, we can't do a series that's funny about orphans and you don't want to series that seriously explores what it’s like to not to live with parents. So we came very close to saying no, but, but we had nothing else going on.
00;12;21;27 - 00;13;31;23
AMY LIPPMAN
It's very depressing. And, ironically, we discovered that it is actually a fantastic premise for a show because what we didn't know when we, you know, sat in my living room around that Thanksgiving, actually, and try and, you know, sat with all these post-its and tried to figure out what, what are we going to do?
What's the pilot story? What are the characters? What we didn't realize was, how much power there is in a premise. You know, I think Fox, as Chris said, envisioned a series that was kind of larky with kids really having no one to make rules for them and sort of celebrating their own freedom, independence. And what we found was that when you take parents out of the equation, and yet you have a group of kids who are a family, you speak very directly to what it means to be a family because there is no mother at the beginning of the fourth act who says “No, sweetheart, I think you're making a mistake.
I think this is what you should be doing.” And it allowed us to have characters who made mistakes without immediate repercussions. Characters who had to realize what it meant to love each other without a presence in the house that said “this is important”. And once we began to find that in the series, we were sort of off and running.
00;13;31;26 - 00;15;19;16
CHRIS KEYSER
Seriously, when you talk about values, which we don't, we don't come to it and say, “look, what values are we going to espouse this week or next week?” but, as it turns out, Amy said that the series has this natural tension in it which is present in every single episode and gives us our stories all the time, which is that like - what Fox thought this series is going to be about, it's about a bunch of kids who are enjoying adolescence or 24 years old and about to leave, you know, go leave school or leave home and go off. It's about people who ought to be sowing their wild oats who, in the natural course of development, would be saying “I don't actually care as much about other people. I care about me right now.
I need to figure out who I am. You know, I’m 16. I want to figure out why I'm not - you know, everyone doesn't love me - or why I have a boyfriend or girlfriend.” And those people at that point in their lives where they have to be selfish, also because of the premise of the show, had to be selfless and they have to figure out how to take care of each other.
And that's - that doesn't change from episode to episode, is the one thing that we have every single week that makes every decision that they make powerful, because - I have a sister and we grew up together, and when I was 16, I would go off at night. Actually, she would go off and I would stay home and, but she had no obligation to me.
I mean, there was no issue there. No one ever thought, boy, you’re sister and brother, you ought to be taking care of each other. These people have to take care of each other because there's no one else. And so we happened on to it. We didn't realize it was going to be true. But actually we have this essential issue.
This is the heart of every one of these episodes -
00;15;19;16
AMY LIPPMAN
And it’s in that way, I think that the premise of the show works in almost, in almost every single episode that that there is that feeling that, the parents’ absence figures largely in everything and everything that they do. So we, getting back to actually I guess the, the experience of doing this, we, we sat we thought about the series.
00;15;19;18 - 00;17;10;11
CHRIS KEYSER
Yeah. We started by saying - we sort of it feels calculated, but we said like “what are the things you would expect?” I mean, first of all, we said “how many kids should there be?” We had no idea. We just, we started from really a blank slate. We could have, you know, two kids or ten kids. How many should there be?
And what do you expect those kids to be? And how can we turn that on, on its head so that we get storylines out of it? And, the kind of tension that you need week after week. And in fact, as you find out, too, when you work on a series, that may be the most important, you know, couple of days that you spend because if you design those characters right, if you figure out what their issues are, you'll have stories for years to come. If you don't, you can get in big trouble. I mean, we came under a show, the show Sisters, and it was not exactly the show that we would have written if we had created it ourselves. But in the third year, we could look back and say, you know, Ron Cowen and Dan Lipman, when they created that show, did a really good job figuring out who those characters should be, because there are conflicts and like archetypal conflicts between oldest and youngest or, you know, popular and unpopular, whatever you want that actually serve you really well. So that was the thing Amy and I did, just sat there and said “we kind of expect the oldest brother to be the most responsible.
Let's not do that. You expect the females in the family to be the most nurturing. What if we don't do that? You know what if we make, you know, who should be, you know, who should have all the brains? And should the person who has all the brains have all the self-confidence?” and all of those sorts of things, and it was a bit more complicated than that, but those were the questions. We threw everything up in the air and started to say, you know “what would give us the most interesting mix?”
00;17;10;11 - 00;17;30;11
AMY LIPPMAN
The one thing that we actually got really stuck on was the baby, because we knew that the baby was the reason for the show existing, in a way, we knew that the care of that child was the reason the family was together.
00;17;30;11 - 00;18;49;01
CHRIS KEYSER
We had a thought, I guess, early on - you're coming off of things like L.A. Law, which always began every episode with a conference scene - that we would try at some point in every episode to have the family come together and eat, eat a meal together at the restaurant once, once every episode. We have, we have since that time, realized that that's an impossible burden.
We can't, we can't structure episodes around that. But the idea of everyone coming together and eating a meal together actually stays, comes up periodically, maybe every 3 or 4 episodes. And when people miss meals, it becomes really important in the pilot - and the whole pilot actually is framed around the idea of eating, eating at the restaurant. Julia misses, for the first time, a family dinner together in the pilot and, in the end, shows up for a family dinner. So the thing were saying, the restaurant comes to symbolize that coming together, the idea that you don't have to do that, but they make a conscious decision, at least in one part of their lives, to come together and eat together.
Which we thought, by the way, was something that was sort of relevant when we talk about people and families and everyone says that, you know, no one eats together anymore, that you can be a real family but people are running in and out and mom and dad come home late from work and the kids are, you know, rushing off to do something else so that even in a family that has a natural reason, it has the structure to support getting together once a day, that doesn't happen.
And the amazing thing about this family is that, with no reason to do that, they make a decision to drop everything else and, at least once a week, have dinner in the place that was their father’s restaurant.
00;18;49;01
AMY LIPPMAN
And those, those stories that, that seemed to be about one character, but have a lot of emotional resonance for another character are stories that, again, let you tell episode after episode after episode, and they work very well.
00;18;49;03 - 00;19;51;26
CHRIS KEYSER
You watch the show, you'll see that almost every supporting character has parent issues, so that other people's parents become questions for our characters’ parents. Either the fact that they have them and they function really well, or more frequently that, that they have parents and they don't function really well, and that this family without parents actually works a lot better.
And, you know, sometimes our characters become substitute parents. Sometimes, the parents of other characters use our characters to work out their family problems, but we find that using the idea of parents and other families really meshes really nicely - Some people look at that and say that the message of the, of our show is that the only good parent is a dead parent, because everyone is - all of these miserable parents taking care of all these other people.
We don't mean that. I mean, that's not obviously what we're talking about , but the issue of how do parents and kids take care of each other is obviously important and every family becomes more universal I think, in the show at least, when you see it as an issue outside of the Salinger house.
00;19;51;27 - 00;20;39;26
AMY LIPPMAN
And we actually wanted to tell a story about what it means to have a character look like, look like they're okay, and they're actually not. And we thought it actually sent an incredibly strong anti-drug message as opposed to sort of a fairy tale about, you know, a girl who has really profound problems, is involved in drugs, goes into rehab, and her life is never better. We thought we'd tell a story that said, it looks like that's what's going on, but actually, something else is going on.
In fact, the clip of the last, the last clip that will show deals directly with Bailey dealing with, with, with her dad.
00;20;39;26 - 00;20;39;27
CHRIS KEYSER
A couple of things. I mean, one thing that was true and it actually worked with the way we told the last story, is that actually the arc that we tell about Jill is not, is probably not principally, the story about a person with a drug problem, but the story about a person who's in love with a person with a drug problem.
00;20;39;27 - 00;22;10;27
CHRIS KEYSER
And so it's told from Bailey's perspective, and I think that we tried and we always try - everyone tries to tell things a little differently - and it's a well-worn story about what happens to a drug addict. And you see this on TV or alcoholics or any of those things. And we thought it would be interesting to tell the story about a boy who was pulled in, to a relationship with the person with a drug problem who says “no, I'm going to be okay,” and “no, you can't leave me. No, you got to still love me,” and “yes, I'm giving it up” and “okay, I didn't give it up, but me now, I'll never give it up,” and, you know, all of that sort of stuff that happens. And we told it from Bailey's perspective in the last episode, too, is about, Jill dies from a drug overdose and it's completely off screen.
You never see her and it is actually told, again it's told - and maybe in some places, in some ways, it's my perspective on this friend of mine who was off in New York, and you get a phone call a year later and they say, you know, he was found dead, and then you had to deal with that, and you never talked to him and you never dealt with it, you never worked anything out. So that was the idea of that, and it worked well in that last episode. The other thing that worked really well was that what we ended up with was twin tragedies in the series. We had death of the parents before the series began, and then this tragedy in the last episode, what that did for us is that it gave a shape to the whole season because it lets you see how, how tragedies were dealt with differently 21 episodes later.
00;22;10;27 - 00;23;22;25
AMY LIPPMAN
Lisa wrote a, wrote a scene in an episode that comes up in which, Bailey's hurt in a football accident, and Sarah, this girl that we've given him to play scenes with this, this season says “does it hurt?” and he says “not enough.” And we thought that was sort of the, the, the theme of, the theme of the series.
But I hope - I mean, it's, it's been our contention all along that even though there is a profound sadness to these scenes, that they're also very uplifting in a way. I mean, they are hopefully, if we are successful at this, a combination of, sad and uplifting and particularly, for example, when we show the Thanksgiving episode, it's always something that we're juggling in the show.
People who say they like the show say they like it because they always cry at the end of it, and, while that's not always our intention, I think it is, for me and I know for Chris, that when we are moved by things we see, that's this kind of stuff that we want to emulate. It's stuff that you, you, I think if it moves you, hopefully you can relate to it or you feel the way the characters do.
00;23;22;25 - 00;24;12;11
CHRIS KEYSER
And it's never hopeless. I mean, we don't we, we try to tell stories in the long run, where as in this scene, although tragedy happens, people come through that. They come through it for each other. And so we said, I mean, when I said that the theme of the series is that, that these people struggle to figure out a way to love each other and they end up doing it.
You know, it would be, be really depressing if, if at the end of the episode, Bailey was sitting alone and said “I can't talk to anyone,” and Charlie said “and I don't know how to take care of you,” but that's not the way, not the way it ends. And although it may be true in families that sometimes that is the truth, the series, maybe you're unrealistic in the sense that what it says over and over again is that family, no matter how you define family - and this is obviously an atypical family - works, works really well. It's the best way we know how, taking care of each other. So that's, that's the hopeful part of it. And also it's, it's once every 4 or 5 episodes, funny.
00;24;12;11 - 00;24;32;09
AMY LIPPMAN
What we did in the pilot, which was, a little controversial, is that we never explained the circumstances of the parents’ death except in passing. In one scene, someone says “it was six months ago, right? It was a drunk driving accident.” Actually, it was a car accident. I don't know if we made reference to the fact that it was drunk, a drunk driving accident initially.
00;24;32;09
CHRIS KEYSER
But there was another calculation that we made, which was we knew that if we placed it a week or a month afterward, there was no way we could get to episode 2 or 3 and in any way move past the, the intensity of the grief.
00;24;32;09 - 00;24;52;18
CHRIS KEYSER
So we needed to find some midway point where the process was still going on, but was not so intense that you were obligated to watch, you know, the intense sorrow - it's more I mean, I guess the truth is, and it's more about loss than grief because they have moved past, in general, that intense grief stage, to the point where it just feels like it's a hole in their lives.
00;24;52;22 - 00;25;36;07
AMY LIPPMAN
Well, I procrastinate and Chris doesn't. There's, there's that. You know, actually, I feel tremendously advantaged by the fact that, you know, my partner is someone who actually does have a lawyer's approach to writing, which is, I now get my scenes done on time, I turn them in on time. I'm sort of a last minute kind of person.
It's worked very well. I don't understand how showrunners do it on their own without a partner, because we are, first of all, I mean - as Lisa can attest, actually to probably her tremendous restoration - we are seldom in the same place at the same time. And, we split responsibilities completely equally, in fact, alternate on which shows we sort of shepherd through the editing process.
00;25;36;09 - 00;25;56;19
CHRIS KEYSER
We both pick music for the series. We are - on set a lot, since it’s only three minutes away from the office.
00;25;56;19
AMY LIPPMAN
Yeah. We're very, I mean - it's, it's, it works out very well. I think when you are a single showrunner, you, you, either you don't have control issues in your life or you, you just let it go and you decide the one thing that interests you.
00;25;56;19 - 00;27;00;20
AMY LIPPMAN
And, well, I think individually, we each have preferences to which part of the process we, we most enjoy. We hold on to it. We pretty much hold on to it, so I don't, I don't think - we certainly haven't been disadvantaged, by the fact that, I'm a woman and Chris is a man, I don't think.
I think actually, that’s served us, that’s served us quite well. But I do have to say that our biggest challenge in the first season was realizing that the way in which we solve problems as a team, which is I mean, we can be very ferocious. I mean, we sit in a room and we fight with each other and then, you know, go off and have a nice lunch.
It's only about the work. And, we all - what's interesting when you've worked together, as we have, is that the best argument wins. It's not an ego thing. It's not, look, you got your way 4 or 5 times. It is, who's making the best argument and -
00;27;00;20
CHRIS KEYSER
Convince me.
00;27;00;23 - 00;28;29;05
AMY LIPPMAN
Yeah, if you can convince me, let's move on. And that is actually not true in, in, in the politics of getting a show on the air and keeping it on the air, because there are a lot of very fragile egos at stake and people who want to feel validated, when they give a note and they're understood. So that was, it was a very humbling experience. It's advice that I would give to anyone who was in our position because, boy, those first five months were awful.
They were just awful. I mean, you wake up every morning and think, “well, today they will cancel the show. Today they will cancel the show.” And what we learned was to say - I mean, just very briefly, as an example, we turned in the first episode this season and we got a call from the Head of Business Affairs at Columbia who said, “look, I, you know, I read the first episode, I'm a little concerned about Charlie.”
Now, this is a man who has, to be honest, no right to have any kind of creative input on the show. He signs the contracts. But you know what? He cares enough about the show to actually have a point of view. And my first reaction was okay, so now he's giving me notes, and my second reaction was that's great. That's really great. I'm really glad you care about it. And that's sort of been the spirit with which we've tried to deal with outside concerns about, concerns about the show.
00;28;29;05 - 00;28;46;01
CHRIS KEYSER
It’s really important, I mean, the show is probably on the air in large part because weird people you wouldn't expect to actually support the show, like the sales department at Fox, the people who sell advertising - it’s no joke.
The people who deal with the affiliates like the show, and that has made a big difference. And so when you take every one of those people seriously, you have a much better chance - at least we do because - of staying on the air.
00;28;46;01 - 00;29;34;18
AMY LIPPMAN
The way we arrived at the other characters’ ages had a lot to do with the kinds of stories we wanted to tell.
Because we put them at sort of the, the cusp of - I mean, Claudia is right on the edge of adolescence. Julia's becoming a, you know, she's a teenager and she's sort of on the cusp of womanhood. Bailey's got one foot in, you know, teenage issues and the idea of becoming an adult and going off to college, and, and Charlie’s at the age where he's not quite an adult, but he's also not a child. So we, we very deliberately put them at ages where we would yield the most stories.
00;29;34;18 - 00;30;10;05
CHRIS KEYSER
They are really fine actors. They're incredibly good with each other. They act like a family off screen, which I think helps when they act like a family on screen.
But television is about caring about - I mean, we're proud of our writing. We're proud of the directing. In the long run, a show stays on the air because you watch those people and you say “I like them and I want to come back and see them the next time.” And so if you don't have likable actors - they can do unlikable things, but if you don't have likable actors - you don't have a series. And we have very likable actors.
00;30;10;05 - 00;30;32;21
AMY LIPPMAN
It was a real, turning point in the life of the series because it was, as Chris said, it was the first episode that we, we had that really dealt with why this family was the way they were. What happened to this family?
And in the course of writing it, I don't actually think when we set out to write the episode, we knew the circumstances of the, the, the actual tragedy. I think we, we didn't realize that Charlie held himself responsible until we began to write it. What should we say?
00;30;32;21 - 00;30;32;23
CHRIS KEYSER
It's a weird thing to say because it means we -
00;30;32;23 - 00;31;46;16
CHRIS KEYSER
I mean, we did eight episodes not knowing that this was Charlie's issue, but that's actually the way it works. And, you know, it was a hard episode because it was only one thing happens in the episode. This guy got let out of prison, and there's no other event in the entire episode. And, so we did two things.
We said, look, let's just take a look at the, the four characters we have - because Owen obviously is not going to forgive - and figure out what each of their issues are and structure it, and came up with this idea that we would end each act essentially with one of the four kids going to see, going to see the drunk driver.
And the other thing that we said we would do, because it was so strongly about, about this theme, is that every single thing in the episode would reflect the exact same theme, so that you thought, the teaser is about Julia saying she's never going to forgive Claudia for stealing her stuff - and there's a small storyline, a comic storyline about Forgiveness - and Bailey and a story that we didn't talk about has to ask his girlfriend for forgiveness.
And these things keep on coming back so that we hope, and this is one of the ways we structure episodes, that every single thing reflects back on the central theme. And then we sat down. We used to talk about this about, and talked about what the reasonable responses would be to, you know, to the question of are you willing to forgive?
00;31;46;24 - 00;34;38;21
AMY LIPPMAN
And we actually, we talked a lot about Claudia because - actually, I don't think you and I necessarily agreed on this - at first, our our concern was what would her reaction be? And we, we thought, we thought she was actually too young to deal with the bigger issues, and that her reaction would be “I can't deal with this. I want to see him and I want to put it aside.” And we did it because, in part because we knew that later in the season or maybe in seasons to come, we would actually deal with the implications more head on.
But we thought an interesting and realistic response would be one in which she said “all I want to do is actually just look at him. I just want to see who he is and then move on.” And we talked a lot about whether that was a realistic approach and decided, decided that we would try it. We, we thought that, that Bailey, as really the most, kind of loving and open character on the show, an interesting response to give him would be, that he was actually unable to forgive.
And in fact, his story is probably the least resolved of anyone's. And what it allowed us to do, in a strange way, was tell the last episode, which is one in which he actually grieves. He doesn't grieve in this episode. He, he's just angry. And it's the last episode in which he really, in grieving for his girlfriend, he's also really grieving for his parents. So we decided to, to, have his reaction be one of just really pure anger, that I think he lets go of partially in the episode, but not entirely. And then of course, there was Charlie, and, it was interesting to us, I - it's a peculiar twist in the story because he is very absent from the story.
I think when you look back on it, you can see what we did, which was he, he has almost nothing to do in the entire episode. He keeps saying things like “look, I don't care,” and “I don't want to see her,” and “leave her alone,” but he doesn't have a presence at all in the episode. And our goal was that, when you finally got him to that place, that the interesting turn was not that he was angry at this man, but that he was angry at himself.
And it actually informed a lot of the stories that we told him up to that - with him - up to that point, which we were unaware of, which was he feels not just a responsibility to take care of these kids, but a tremendous guilt over having caused them to be in this situation.
00;34;38;21 - 00;36;46;13
CHRIS KEYSER
Julia is - actually in this matter -
Julia is my favorite part of the episode. Actually, I think the most interesting thing in the episode is the end of the third act, when Julia comes to, to talk to Alcott. And that's partially because we played eight episodes before, nine episodes before, where she was selfish, and - I mean, she was she was doing things that like running off and faking IDs and working at clubs and not being there for Bailey or for, for Claudia and just saying “look, I to take care of myself. I've got to figure out who I am.” And this was the first episode in which she, she snapped out of it a little bit. It gave her the chance to, to step back and, in some ways, although, you know, obviously the Charlie moment is the most surprising, the idea that she can go to him and say, and actually try to forgive and say “I'm going to, I'm going to make some attempt, I'm going to tell you that we're going to be okay.
And that's the best thing I can do for you,” is the most generous thing that any character in some ways does. In fact, she keeps on being generous of the whole episode. She says to Charlie, “please go.” But the idea was to, was to give her a moment to strengthen all of this and say, you'll, you'll give something to him, you'll, you'll make some attempt.
And the other thing that was interesting about Julia story is we actually got to, we sort of got into a position where we didn't know what else to do because we thought, you know, you can't just send Julia to Walter Alcott, and you're doing everything - everyone's doing the exact same thing, which led us to the idea of giving Walter Alcott a daughter as well, and saying that it's interesting not only to talk about the results, what happens in a tragedy on the side of the people who have lost something, but a tragedy when you're on the side of the person who took something away.
And then actually, Walter Alcott's daughter is every bit as tragic figure as Julia is. And what meeting her gave us a chance to do is give Julia some insight into that, because we thought it seemed a little forced to say that Walter Alcott comes home and immediately Julia says “you know what? I'm willing to forgive.” She, she needs some kind of insight into the, you know, the senselessness, obviously, of the tragedy and the fact that it's never going to end unless somebody says “you know what I'm going to make?
I'm going to make some step forward.” So that, that led us to Walter Alcott's daughter and then eventually to Julia making that gesture.
00;36;46;13 - 00;37;34;22
AMY LIPPMAN
The other decision that we did make was, actually, to make this drunk driver not an alcoholic, because we thought that that was actually a more interesting story, that you would expect him to be an alcoholic.
And obviously, alcoholism is frequently involved in tragedies like this, but it doesn't have to be. And we thought that there was a stronger lesson in someone who simply has too much to drink with dinner and gets in a car. And we were very aware that we were sort of making a, you know, a public service announcement about it and writing it.
And we wanted to, to pick the stronger message to tell -
00;37;34;22 - 00;38;18;21
CHRIS KEYSER
Which was I guess that, I mean, obviously, which is be careful no matter what, because something terrible can happen, but, also, we just we were really interested in the idea that these things happen without reason in some ways. I mean, these, these moments - and this is sort of Walter Alcott’s speech - that it's just impossible to know why something like that happens, and these moments change your whole life, and no one plans them, and it's no one's fault necessarily, although in this case, obviously it was his fault. But it's, you know, that they come at completely at meaningless times in your life. He says “it was a meaningless day in my life, except for that,” and that seemed interesting to us that, that, you know, there were no bright light shining around, pointing down to us and saying “a big thing is going to happen.”
But it changed all of their lives anyway.
00;38;18;21 - 00;40;11;21
AMY LIPPMAN
And the, the other, I guess, interesting anecdote to tell about the, the writing and producing of this episode was, we did have a battle with the network actually over the ending, and they asked us to end with the dinner, and we knew, along, alongside this, this, this, idea we had to deal with this drunk driver head on, we knew we actually, at one point in the season, wanted to go to a cemetery. And, Chris and I fought very hard to keep the end of the episode because we kept arguing that it was a very dark episode, and there was something about seeing this family in the graveyard playing tag, which is very incongruous. It's a very strange thing to do, but that we said that ultimately it's very uplifting, that it is a sign.
It's a symbol that this family, will survive. And in fact, when, we received the Humanitas award, we spoke specifically about the episode, about that moment in the episode, because it speaks to really the theme of the series, which is, tragedy and joy happened very close together in our lives. That the proximity of, of death and a game of tag, is very significant.
And what we find incredibly moving about the idea of the series - which we really need to credit Fox for, because God knows we wouldn't come up with it ourselves - but it was, I think it was a battle well worth fighting because I think it's a very strong, strong moment at the end of this, this show and one that really for us is - I mean, we tried very hard, actually, to work that image into the main title sequence this season and found that you actually cannot show this family out of context playing tag in a cemetery.
It just it just doesn't work. But that was such a beautiful image. But when you just see three seconds of it, it looks very callous. But I think when you, when you get through the whole episode, you understand and, you know, to the network’s credit, they came around, that it was a really, it was a really critical moment to play in the life of the show.
00;40;11;21
CHRIS KEYSER
The ways in which we, we, we deal with themes in episodes.
00;40;11;22 - 00;42;13;08
CHRIS KEYSER
This is one of them, which is have a single event that represents the theme and then every other storyline in some ways connected. This episode Amy was talking about where Kirsten moves back into the house is also an episode which is all about that single major event causes all the other events to happen, like Julia dealing with her mother, loss of her mother, and Claudia talking to her about religion.
All of those things cluster around a single event. There are then other episodes where we have a theme, you know, like the episode that we showed you with, with Julia saying to Justin “I gave the mother, my mother, your mother, my poem because I need to have a mother to talk to” was an episode where every single story was about substitute parents.
So Charlie was a substitute parent for Owen, and Bailey dealt with Jill's problem of drug abuse when her mother wouldn't do that and Cody’s friend Artie had his parents were in trouble, and Claudia stepped in and essentially became a mother to him. So those sorts of episodes deal with themes in a different way. They, they reinforce it by every story being parallel and I mean the staying together of the family or in any form saying “I'm going to come through for you, even though there's something more important for me to take care of on my end.”
That is the one thing that probably is present in every single, every single episode. We have a tendency not to go into episodes saying we would like to deal with - we don't deal with issues. Although there are episodes - we did a whole series of episodes, obviously about drug abuse - but we don't generally sit down and say “now we're going to deal with drug abuse, and now we're going to deal with teen sex, and now we'll deal with...” I don't know what else.
Alcoholism. We tend not to do that. What we almost always do is go in and say “what's the first story we really want to tell?” We gotten to the point where Julia is an exercise where we take a lap and we figure out what that great story is, you say “what's the thing that's done? What, what is that essentially about?”
I mean, we understand that people, if you're lucky, they begin to associate with your characters and they, you know, and kids look at them as role models from time to time. And you need to be careful about what those role models do.
00;42;13;08 - 00;42;32;15
AMY LIPPMAN
I think we did get one letter, actually, in which a woman said “I really loved your show until Charlie's girlfriend moved into the house, and I don't approve of that.”
And you know something? I actually I understand that, and then I understand why someone would have a concern about that. But it happens in life. And I think if we let it happen and then deal with it responsibly and deal with it, you know, deal with the implications of it, then we're on safe ground. And it's ground I feel comfortable with.
00;42;32;17 - 00;43;50;29
CHRIS KEYSER
I think we were also, in the long run, you're probably much more effective at teaching people, teaching kids, or whatever certain moral lessons if all your characters aren't just proponents of a, you know, a really simple morality. If everyone's saying “no, I'm never going to have sex because it's wrong to have sex,” people will tune that off. And so you need - you actually get a lot more out of, I mean, it's an example, you get a lot more out of somebody taking drugs and dying than you do out of somebody saying “you know what? I'm just not going to take them because it's wrong.” I mean, it's just a much more powerful lesson to have people make mistakes.
And even if you don't want people, you don't want to watch people make mistakes, we sometimes talk about the fact that we, we get responses from people about how they want the characters to behave because they care about them. They would really like them all to be happy, when you get right down to it. I mean, they like to see relationships continue. They like them not to make mistakes. They like Julia or Bailey or whoever at any point, not to have sex, but they wouldn't actually want to watch that.
I mean, we couldn't, we couldn't actually put that on the air. This is not just about television writing, and it's probably obvious advice, which is I think we keep at it. I mean, it's, you know, there's it takes an incredibly long time for any of this stuff to happen. I was talking to somebody or I said, but, you know, I decided to be a writer and, like a month and a half later, I had written a screenplay and I actually had a studio saying “we may be interested in this.” And I thought, wow, this is like, like an incredible story. And it was about four years before anyone talked to me again. You know, nothing happened. And so it was really have to keep writing and writing.
00;43;50;29 - 00;43;54;18
AMY LIPPMAN
Right.
[MUSIC]
00;43;54;21 - 00;45;00;11
MICHELLE FRANKE
Thanks again for listening to the Humanitas Industry 101 podcast. At the end of each episode, we asked writers to apply lessons learned from the episode to their own writing. For this exercise, let's think about writing for an ensemble and how three character voices must feel distinct from one another. To work on building this muscle, imagine what three characters from one of your writing projects would say in a specific social scenario.
Write down what each character would say if they were, for example, asking someone out on a date, on the phone with an unhelpful tech support center, or haggling over the price of a used car. You can write specific dialog or the general gist of what they would say, but each character's voice must be distinct. And with that, thank you for listening to Humanitas’s Industry 101 podcast, which is made possible with support from our series sponsor, Sony Pictures Entertainment.
If you'd like to learn more about Humanitas and the work we do, please visit our website at humanitasprize.org. Until our next episode, be well and be writing.
Credits:
Host/Writer-Producer: Michelle Franke
Featuring: Chris Keyser and Amy Lippman
Audio Editor-Producer: Campbell Moore
Writer-Producer: Daniel Plagens
Mixing/Mastering: Jeff Schoeny at Voxstop
Music: "We Don't Stop" and "Got to Be" by Mooveka
Music Licensing: Artlist.io
SERIES SPONSOR
Humanitas's Industry 101 event series is made possible with support from our series sponsor Sony Pictures Entertainment.