Transcript
Geri Cole: Hi, I’m Geri Cole and you’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers’ Guild of America East. In each episode, you’re going to hear from the people behind your favorite films and television series, talking about the writing process, how they got their project from the page to the screen, and so much more.
Today, we’re going to bring you a special conversation with Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, showrunners, executive directors and writers for Somebody Somewhere, now streaming on HBO and HBO Max.
Hannah and Paul previously wrote for High Maintenance, Mozart In The Jungle and Driveways. They’ll be interviewed by Michael Cyril Creighton, a writer and actor known for his recent performance as says Howard Boris in Only Murders In The Building as well as his work on High Maintenance, Spotlight and the Writers’ Guild of America award-winning web series Jack In The Box, which Hannah and Paul also worked on.
Somebody Somewhere stars Bridget Everett and is produced by the Duplass brothers and is a new comedy series that follows Sam, a true Kansan on the surface, who beneath it all struggles to fit into the hometown mold. As Sam grapples with loss and acceptance, singing is her saving grace and leads her on a journey to discover herself and a community of outsiders who don’t fit in, but don’t give up, showing that finding your people and finding your voice is possible anywhere somewhere. Now, let me turn it over to Michael.
Michael Cyril Creighton: Hello everybody. I am Michael Cyril Creighton and I am so honored to be here with Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, the creators, writers, showrunners and executive producers of my new favorite show, Somebody Somewhere, starring Bridget Everett. They help to be two of my favorite writers in the whole world. Hannah and Paul have written over 10 brilliant plays for their award winning theater company, The Debate Society, about half of which I’ve been in. They’ve worked on TV shows like High Maintenance and Mozart In The Jungle and their feature film debut, Driveways, was nominated for an independent spirit award for best first screenplay.
Full disclosure, we have been friends for almost 20 years, but I will keep this Q&A very professional. My first question is, Paul, what is your favorite part about being my friend? You don’t have to answer it. I know it’s my eyes. And Hannah, did I buy you that sweater?
Hannah Bos: You did buy me that sweater and it’s my favorite part of you being Paul’s friend is you buying you that sweater.
Michael Cyril Creighton: I want to talk about the show, which you already know I loved so much. How did you get connected with Bridget and how did the show come to be?
Hannah Bos: Well, Carolyn Strauss, who’s an incredible producer, was working with Bridget and with the Duplass brothers and they were looking for a show for Bridget. Bridget had an overall deal at HBO. And when they were thinking of writers to write something for her, Carolyn had thought of Paul and I because we had worked on something once before with her and also, we are Midwesterners and they were thinking about something Midwest for Bridget. So then, we pitched an idea, which was the pilot, a bit of this that you saw and it just connected to them and that’s how we connected with all of them. We had not worked with the Duplass brothers before.
Paul Thureen: And we’d known Bridget. We’d all came up together in the New York performance world, her doing cabaret, us with our theater company, so we had been in similar circles and knew her. So I think, as Hannah said, having worked with Carolyn, the Midwest vibe and then also, I think, the idea of us doing something or some Kansas, knowing something set in her hometown that was grounded, it was right in our wheelhouse and the idea of working with Bridget and Carolyn and the Duplass brothers was just a dream, so we worked really hard to pitch something that we loved and that’s where it started.
Michael Cyril Creighton: And is the pitch pretty close to what we see in the pilot?
Hannah Bos: Kinda, yeah. I mean, Paul and I have always been obsessed with dying malls and we were thinking of, because we just like malls that are really sad and empty and these relics of days gone by. And every time we go to the Midwest or any city, we always visit a mall and see where that town is at. That was initially in pilot and a loss of a sister was in the pilot and this character of Joel and this connection and this coming back to your hometown, but not being in a huge city before that. We knew a lot of things about it and there’s a lot of things from that pitch actually that are still really present.
Paul Thureen: We pitched the whole family and the relationships and the sister relationship, but I do think that, as we started developing it, the family became a bigger part of the story than that we pitched. So I think Hannah’s right, a lot of it was in the pitch, but as you dig deeper into it and figure out the stories that you want to tell, I think it was very much focused on that group of people and the choir practice community, which it still is, but I think, then, also that parallel story of the family, I think became richer as we started to develop it.
Hannah Bos: And the beauty of getting to work with Bridget is, as soon as we found the idea, not only did we get feedback after the pilot, we got feedback literally from Bridget and she was very, very much involved. And we figured out with her, now that we have this first episode, what is going to open up and how much Bridget-ization of the real Bridget from the real world that we have, how much of that is going to make it into this show. And that was the fun part of trying to figure out, because like Paul had mentioned, we had seen her live shows and we were super fans of hers. And what we love about her live shows, we’re trying to capture in this show and we figured out that it’s something in the collision of her live shows where she could be this gaudy, dirty, gorgeous/heartbreaking performer and we were like, “Why are her boobies out but she’s singing a Christmas song and we were laughing a second ago, but now we’re crying?” And there was something about that from the live show that we wanted to translate into this origin story of if she had never left Kansas.
Michael Cyril Creighton: Yeah, and you capture it absolutely beautifully. And that brings me to how much of Bridget’s real life is interwoven into this story and can you speak a little bit more about you guys growing up in the Midwest and how that influenced the piece? Because I know you both, as writers, build the world, the world is so important to you and the world here is so specific and so real, so I’m curious what, from your life you brought to it and what from Bridget’s life you brought to it?
Paul Thureen: Yeah. Whenever Bridget answer that question, she talks about how they’re just themes from her life. And I think that’s the way to think about it, that she is from Manhattan, Kansas, which works so well for this story. And she did lose a sister. I think the family relationships are very, very different. A big thing for her is, people who know her work know that she’s an amazing singer and an amazing performer, but for her music, it’s really the way that she learned how to connect with the world and learn who she was and for her, it took a really long time.
She, like us, we were waiting tables for years and years and years and she was singing karaoke and that was her one way of preserving this dream, but I think that for her, music was her way of understanding the world and I think that idea is a really big part part of this. Also, at the center of this story, I think something that we were really excited about was doing a love story that’s about friends and Hannah and I are our best friends and Michael and I are best friends and you guys will get to know each other well, I’m sure, but I think that something about her and the people that you find that see something in you and help bring that out, I think that was something that was key to her. And it is a Midwest story with universal themes, but I think for her and us being from the Midwest, that idea of looking at these lives that aren’t often examined in TV shows and films, or if they are, it can sometimes be in a squeamish way, that I think that the three of us, the details of that world are really important.
Hannah Bos: I think, as Midwesterners, you often see stories that talk down to Midwesterners or they’ll be really quirky or the joke is on them and I feel like we just really wanted, no matter what, to make it super authentic, super grounded and to be on the side of our characters. We just kept returning to, well, how do we make it as real as possible for the Midwest that we know? And then, we’d go one extra step and we’d get super Kansas-fied to check and see, what exactly Bridget, is that a Illinois thing or a Minnesota thing? What’s the Kansas exact way that we would handle that? And there’s a lot of universal things that are these Midwest towns that you have, or with a politeness or how your family might or might not deal with therapy, so that was how we brought it. Also, Paul’s from a farming family, Bridget’s not, there’s a lot of things that we did have a small room for this, Patty Breen, another wonderful writer was in the room with us, all of us worked together to use family stuff that’s universal, but then also, for the Midwest tweaking, we really try to get in there and just make it real.
Paul Thureen: And did you know, Michael, from being in the room with us for play development, we developed, Hannah and I started out in theater writing and we would spend years and years developing a play and we would always start with the world and the mood of the world and create these walls of visual research and ideas and then we would strip that down to a story. I think a lot of time when we were doing our plays, we’d end up with so much of a world on the cutting room floor and I think for us, that’s something that we just love, the details of the world, starting out with the world, nailing the mood of the world and the feel of the world. And I think that that’s something that hopefully, you feel in this show. And for us, paying attention to those details and figuring out how to tell a story through those details of the world is a fun challenge and a way that we like to tell a story.
Hannah Bos: And then, I think the fun thing about that is, too, when you decide those stories you’re going to tell, you have all this extra stuff and hopefully, there’s enough layers so that if you don’t exactly tell or see the on-screen conversation, hopefully, we’ve seeped enough into this world and these characters and these details that maybe you don’t have to see people saying exactly how they feel in every scene and you know that maybe something else just happened. I feel like that’s specific to this world because … Yeah.
Michael Cyril Creighton: That’s what impresses me so much about this series, is that all of the things that are unseen and all of the things that are not said and we just hear about, I feel like in other hands, there would be this compulsive need to show these moments and create drama, but there’s such beautiful restraint in all of your writing and it seems there are things we don’t see that we hear about. Do you write those scenes or do you just know what happened in them? Do you know what I’m saying?
Paul Thureen: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hannah Bos: Great question.
Paul Thureen: Well, I would say there’s two answers to that. We generally don’t write those scenes. And I think that that’s something … We often say that, when we’re talking it through, we tell the story about the thing that happens before or after the thing that the story’s usually told about. And we talk about it, when you think back to that feeling, in real life, when you think about the day you had before something horrible happened to you, the emotion’s connected to that day, or the aftermath. For us, we imagine what the conversation is, but we don’t see that conversation and we deal with the aftermath, hopefully, in a way that brings the audience in. I think we like to play with structure and expectations, but in a way brings the audience in. It’s never to obfuscate or be clever, it’s just the way we like to tell the story. Usually, we don’t write those things. We talk about those things and we decide what parts to tell. I will say the other part, though-
Hannah Bos: Editing. We got to be showrunners this time and we got to see a whole season be made. And then, we got to be in the editing process, in seeing every take. I mean, for a writer to be able to see every shot and show run and then to see every take in the end and go through it all and put it together. I’ve heard it so many times that it’s like another writing process, but it really, really was another writing process. We are not prone to write some of those things that you might not see, but we did write a lot of things that, in the end, in editing, we were like, “We don’t need that.” Or, “This is more interesting in the next episode.” And we really got to do this other layer of storytelling that we have never been able to do before. That was so fun. And it was also just so telling. We learned so much.
Michael Cyril Creighton: Was the leap … I know you wrote on High Maintenance at HBO, and now, this is your first time being showrunners at HBO and in general. How big is that leap, would you say, from going from a writer in a writer’s room to a showrunner on a show? Can you talk a about that leap?
Hannah Bos: It’s a big leap.
Michael Cyril Creighton: Is it big?
Hannah Bos: It was a big leap and I’m very grateful. It’s a hard job. It’s a hard job to do, I think, in general. And then, during COVID, it was extra hard just because a lot of shows are doing block shooting, but then with ours, we were doing location based because of COVID so it was our first time show running and we’re shooting all locations, one location for all episodes. So you’re shooting six episodes in one day sometimes. And it was a lot of this. We got through it, we learned a lot, it was fun, even with masks on, which makes communication hard. We had a really safe shoot and we just learned a lot from doing all-
Michael Cyril Creighton: Right.
Paul Thureen: Also, Hannah and I worked together for a really long time and I think every day we were like, “Could you imagine doing this alone?” And you definitely can do it alone, but I think we have our security blanket, which is each other and I think every step of our way and our lives, putting together this life together, we are really nerdy about learning as much as we can. And when we wrote our first TV thing, we spent a year reading every single pilot we could get our hands on. When we were doing this, we did the WGA show running training program crash course and things like that. We read a lot and we talked to everybody that we could. And then we just kept notes and planned things out and tried to be really organized and really ahead at the game and also not be afraid to ask questions, but if there was something we didn’t know, because there’s always going to be a part of the machine, we’ve been on sets as writers, we’ve been on sets as actors. We’ve never been there for the post-production process in a real hands on way.
That was the stuff, the process that we were really scared of. But you’re also working with, honestly, amazing executives at HBO, working with the Duplass brothers, working with Carolyn Strauss, having a good relationship with the unit production manager and line producer, who were the same person on this show because it was a Duplass produced show, so it was very much done in the indie film way. We’re very lucky to be working with a lot of people that we could rely on.
And then, just like anything, we come into it with values. There’s two things. No matter what, it’s always creative problem solving, there’s always going to be something that you’re not going to figure out. We were like, “We can figure it out together and if there’s something we don’t know, we know the people that we can go to and ask about it.” And that also, we can bring our values of creation and our values of collaboration to the show. And I think that was very much in the spirit of the show, just making sure everybody was taken care of, everybody was valued and Jay Duplass, who directed the pilot, set that tone on the pilot and Rob Cohen, who directed other episodes, really carried that ball. And then, Bridget being the hen mother of the whole show, we all articulated that this is the values of the show.
And then, when you’re working it that way, if there’s something that you don’t know, people want to help you, you have everybody on your side, everybody together, so it’s definitely a team thing. And we didn’t know the things we didn’t know going into it and knock on wood we get to do it again and we’ll be a little bit better, but there’s always going to be stuff that you can’t figure out and you need to [inaudible 00:15:09] too. And we’ll say there was a day where we got a note, right before we started shooting, where we had to do a major rewrite on all the scripts and Hannah and I were living together in an Airbnb where we were shooting and Hannah tells this better, but [crosstalk 00:15:24]-
Hannah Bos: Paul never pees. I pee all the time. Paul never pees. And Paul kept peeing and Paul kept pee for minute after minute after minute, I was like, “Oh, oh my God.” And then I kept peeing and we Googled it and it was definitely a fight or flight response where our bodies couldn’t handle notes, but we were just like, “We’re just going to keep figuring this out and figuring out this problem and get through it,” because the show must go on.
