Transcript
Caroline Waxler: I’m Caroline Waxler, and you’re listening to On Writing, a podcast from the Writer’s Guild of America East. In each episode you’ll hear from writers in film, television, news, and new media about their work. From pitching to production, from process to favorite lines, and everything in between. Today we’re talking with Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, co-creators of the Comedy Central series ‘The Other Two’. The show follows two older siblings who navigate and struggle to find success in their 20s, as their much younger brother becomes a mega star thanks to a viral video he made for a song called, ‘I Wanna Marry You at Recess’.
Chris and Sarah come to the table with serious comedy chops. The duo were the youngest head co-writers in the history of Saturday Night Live. Let’s get into it with them.
Thanks Chris and Sarah so much for joining us, really excited for your show, ‘The Other Two’, to premiere. Tell me how did the story come about?
Sarah Schneider: Well Chris and I obviously were at SNL together, and we were talking about what we wanted to do next. We wanted to move in to the narrative space. We just were intrigued by the idea of telling longer stories, and we knew we wanted to tell sort of like a grounded show with stories about people in their late 20s in New York, figuring it out, but we also loved writing music videos for the girls at SNL. We loved writing pop culture stuff, stuff about topical. And so we came up with the idea of Chase Dreams, and this kind of internet instant fame culture. We meshed the two together ’cause we liked that as a backdrop to tell these stories.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, we started talking about the idea, or wanting to write a show in the last season or two while we were at SNL. So we just, anytime we had an off week of the show we would try to meet at each other’s apartments and just … I mean we really spent a lot of time coming up with the premise. We wanted to make sure we overthought that, to make sure it had enough legs for a season or seasons. It was hard to focus. So then we were like, “I think we’ve read that sometimes writers will go away to a cabin and just do a writer’s retreat.”
Chris Kelly: So we did. We rented a cabin upstate and just stayed there for three days. And it really did work.
Sarah Schneider: And I remember walking around the premises-
Chris Kelly: The property. The woods.
Sarah Schneider: Like, yeah walking around the property line and talking stuff out.
Chris Kelly: And figuring out what Brooke was gonna do with her career.
Sarah Schneider: Oh, yeah. That’s right.
Chris Kelly: And we brought my dog with me. It was a real getaway.
Caroline Waxler: I love that. What town was it?
Sarah Schneider: High Falls, New York.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: That’s great. On Airbnb?
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. This is also real estate.
Chris Kelly: Yeah. No, yeah.
Sarah Schneider: No, we found this like very beautiful house with big windows, and we were like, this will be so nice. It was so pretty, but then at night, we were like, we are city people and this is terrifying. The huge window went black, and it was so scary, like locked every door. So fun.
Caroline Waxler: But glad nothing happened.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. Fear is a good motivator.
Chris Kelly: We live to tell the tale.
Caroline Waxler: We just interviewed Barry Jenkins, and he said he wrote in an Airbnb.
Chris Kelly: Really?
Sarah Schneider: Oh. Well we’re on the level with him for sure.
Caroline Waxler: Of course. So how did you guys first pair up? There’s a ton writers at SNL. How did you guys start collaborating?
Chris Kelly: Well at first it was random in that we were hired, basically, at the same time. So we were “in the same class”, you know? That is usually, when you start together, you kind of figure out like, oh can we write with the same other people that we were hired with? And then it just kind of worked. So we wrote ‘Ish’ with each other our first year, not every single sketch, not every single week, and I think towards the end of that year, or at the beginning of our second year, it was just not even a conversation. It was a no-brainer. We just wrote together all the time because we just … It worked.
Sarah Schneider: The workload there is so big in a way that we loved, but it’s so nice to have a partner just because you can’t tackle it all by yourself. And that’s a lot of the show and a lot of the writers on the show do have people they always work with.
Chris Kelly: It really is, the whole writing staff, really is a lot of twos and threes. We tend to gravitate toward each other.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: How would you describe each of your styles?
Sarah Schneider: Writing styles?
Caroline Waxler: Yeah. Do you complement each other?
Sarah Schneider: Yes.
Chris Kelly: Yes. [crosstalk 00:04:01] Maybe we’re like kind of complimentary and a little different when we met, and now they’re more of a circle, like a [crosstalk 00:04:08] ’cause we’ve just done it for so long now.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. I know this is not like comedy writing, but sometimes we’ll write emails accidentally at the exact same time. You could have like … They are literally a copy/paste. It’s the exact same sentences.
Chris Kelly: It looks identical.
Sarah Schneider: It’s the structure.
Chris Kelly: It’s the exact same sentences but with a light email joke thrown in. It’s gross.
Sarah Schneider: It’s gross.
Caroline Waxler: And then how do you guys collaborate? I mean, physically, how do you collaborate? Are you in the same city often? For this show, where did you write it? How did that process work?
Chris Kelly: For this show, we wrote in Los Angeles, and then we shot in New York. And then we edited in LA. So it was a lot of going back and forth.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: We had a full writer’s room for this too. So it was like show running it, but we also had a great writing staff. So that helped a lot, but when we’re writing specifically an episode together, yeah we’re in the same room. Usually it’s a lot … It’s similar to SNL where it’s usually like one person up and around, pacing, walking while one person’s taking notes, and we just improvise a lot together. So if we know what a scene is or a sketch is, we will just improvise as friends, like in the voices of the characters and just whoever’s typing will type down anything that feels even remotely mediocre. And then once we’re done, we comb through it to see what we still like.
Sarah Schneider: For this show, we handed in really specific outlines. We turned in like eight or 10 page outlines per episode. So a lot of the jokes that we knew we wanted to write in each scene were already in the outline which is really nice.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: And they would get approved. So then the script that Comedy Central got, they kind of, there was no big surprises, which was nice.
Chris Kelly: We would really spend a lot of time on the outline. We would overthink it to death. I mean, thought about the whole season before we even got into each episode, obviously, but it was detailed that those took awhile.
Sarah Schneider: ‘Cause we … yeah.
Chris Kelly: Then the script would be like, we’d write it in a day, a first draft ’cause it was basically already there.
Sarah Schneider: I think we just didn’t want to leave the room, and then go by ourselves and be like, “Okay. So we know for this scene two people need to meet each other.” We just didn’t want the vagueness about. We wanted to make sure-
Chris Kelly: Yeah. We wanted the work to be done.
Sarah Schneider: Yes. Well, we wanted to be able to source the room to like figure out what the game of that scene was. So we weren’t starting from scratch.
Chris Kelly: ‘Cause writing this show was so different from SNL in a thousand ways, but I think maybe that is the same way we approach sketch writing too because … Well, SNL you only have one day. So it is truly a race against the clock, but we would do the same thing. So if we were writing five sketches in a night, we would switch off taking notes, and we would make sure that the notes and the outline for each sketch was super, super, super detailed on five sketches. And then we would go to bed from like three in the morning to five in the morning, and then we’d wake up at five. And we would only have until 11 AM or noon to turn in five sketches.
So after you like wake up from a weird two hour mid-morning nap, you don’t wanna be figuring things out. So you’re so glad the outline and the notes are so detailed that it’s just like transcribing. It’s just organizing.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: So I think that carried over to ‘The Other Two’.
Caroline Waxler: Good discipline.
Sarah Schneider: I have such specific memories of that, that post nap time.
Chris Kelly: That weird time.
Sarah Schneider: Where like people outside 30 Rock are there, start screaming for ‘The Today Show’. You start hearing all of that. Like it’s really-
Chris Kelly: Full sense memory. We may be stress describing it. It’s weird ’cause you’ll wake up and be like … You forget for a second that you’re there, and you’ll like, “Oh. It’s one of these nights. I’m not at home.”
Sarah Schneider: I’m on a filthy couch.
Chris Kelly: I have to … and then sometimes the sketches you know are fun and easy. So you’re like great, and then sometimes you’re like, “I gotta put the cold open together right now.”
Sarah Schneider: [crosstalk 00:07:36]
Caroline Waxler: Two hours sleep. The dynamic on ‘The Other Two’ reminds me of the two of you. Did your relationship inform that?
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: I think so. Yeah. Like Chris was saying, so much of how we were writing the scripts was just us being together and improvising. So we knew we wanted to emulate the way we talk so we can just put it into the script, and we wanted it to feel, we wanted the relationship to feel easy and familial and real. And that is how we are with each other.
Chris Kelly: Yeah. It’s not like I’m Cary, she’s Brooke, or anything like that, but yeah, the way they communicate. And also some of the things they go through, either some dating stories or some stories in their personal life. We would reflect on things that we’d done in our 20s that we could use, and then steal for the show.
Caroline Waxler: Like anything in particular? You wanna share without giving a spoiler alert?
Chris Kelly: Like I would say maybe every single thing.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: I guess literally all of it. No, but like yeah. Even when you meet Cary for example, he is running out of his job as a server. He’s served a bunch of tables, and then snuck out to audition for a commercial where he has to smell a fart for a second. Then he runs back to work.
Caroline Waxler: That was hilarious. Yes.
Chris Kelly: That sense of being in your early 20s and being a creative person.
Sarah Schneider: And hustling.
Chris Kelly: And hustling 24/7. So I was always a little bit more a writer than a performer, but that sense of being like, I am new to the city. I am new to New York. I really want to do this thing. I do not know how to do it. I didn’t go to school in New York. I didn’t have any connection to New York. So I literally, we talked about this, I literally landed in a plane, and was like, “Well, what the hell now?” So that feeling of I think I need to wait tables so I can have money, but then I’m gonna take classes at UCB. I’m gonna intern at The Onion. I’m gonna do another job on this day when I’m not waiting tables so I can make more money. So that kind of frantic cobbling together while you figure out how to make some sort of in road somewhere. I relate to certainly.
Sarah Schneider: Yes. Totally.
Chris Kelly: That’s one example. Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: I think that and in terms on Brooke, we both have talked about how when we meet her she’s just ended a long relationship and is just deciding to dive head first back into the world in terms of her relationships. And we’ve both have had that experience of a super long relationship that was great, but ended. And then wanting to just go for it after that, and so I think her mental state in terms of relationships is also something we’ve lived. And I think a lot of people have.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: Where you’re kind of just, maybe not specifically on a quest to seek [crosstalk 00:10:05] but that’s the vibe.
Caroline Waxler: Can you tell us about that? But yeah, the brother/sister dynamic of those two really reminds me of just your dynamic here.
Sarah Schneider: That’s nice. Those two are, Helene York and Drew Tarver, who are the other two, are incredible. They really brought those characters to life.
Caroline Waxler: They’re amazing. How did you find them? How did you make the decision?
Chris Kelly: We knew Drew a little bit from UCB ’cause I mean, there’s a lot of people at UCB, but it is sort of a small family. So you kind of know who everybody is.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: And I’d been a fan of his for a while, and then Helene, we had both seen ‘High Maintenance’. And she’s in the best episodes. I mean, they’re all good. She’s such a standout, and I just remember when we were auditioning people being like, “Well, what about Helene York from ‘High Maintenance’?” And I think people were like, “I don’t know if she’s available. She’s on something else.” Or she lives … I don’t know. We just couldn’t get here or something, and then we mentioned her so many times. But we didn’t know her. We just saw that one episode, that they were like, “Okay, let’s just quadruple check and see if she’ll read.”
And she was like, “Yeah, I’ll read.” And as soon as she did, we were like, “Yes. That’s her.” Right out. It was-
Sarah Schneider: We had a tough time casting Brooke just because we were looking for something, and we couldn’t quite even put our finger on what it was. And it wasn’t exactly on the page. It was more in the performance of the words, as acting is.
Chris Kelly: When we auditioned her, she read with Drew ’cause we had already cast him. So that actually was helpful too because we were able to see their chemistry right away. I mean, immediate chemistry which was … You don’t know if you’re ever gonna find that in casting, or if you’re supposed to feel that in casting. You’re like maybe it’ll down the road.
Sarah Schneider: Come later.
Chris Kelly: But right away, they just had a good thing going with each other.
Caroline Waxler: And then Molly Shannon, I know you guys had worked with her, especially how did you choose to work with Molly? Or was it just a no-brainer?
Chris Kelly: It was more of like a, “Yeah. We’d love it to be her. I mean, I doubt she’s free.” So we asked, and when she was free and wanted to do it, we were like, “Yes. Please.”
Sarah Schneider: She’s amazing. I mean so much of wanting to work with her was Chris’ experience with her. He loved her, and she’s so amazing in his movie. It’s kind of the same. At SNL they’d always say, “When you hire someone, make sure you wanna see them in the hallways at 5 AM.”
Caroline Waxler: I like that.
Sarah Schneider: A Tina quote maybe? And that we just knew that she great, and we’d wanna see her every day and work with her. And that really informed a lot of the [crosstalk 00:12:23]
Chris Kelly: And she’s a lot of what we were looking for in casting in general, were people who were very, very, very funny.
Sarah Schneider: Right.
Chris Kelly: But also were kind of grounded, small, dramatic actors as well ’cause we didn’t want the show to feel broad or arch. We wanted it to all feel like a real family going through these real things, and so that was another thing that was exciting about Molly. Especially because later in the season, like the show does get a little more dramatic, or a little more serialized, and her character gets a little more to do. So that was fun knowing that it was Molly Shannon who was gonna be doing that.
Caroline Waxler: She’s great and seems so perfect for the role.
Sarah Schneider: That is the benefit of doing a pilot, is ’cause you know we had our pilot script, and then didn’t know who any of the parts were gonna be. And then once we cast it, we then knew we could go to all these different places with the people that we had cast ’cause we then had Molly. We said we could go dramatic with her. We then had Ken. We said we could make his character have more depth and more dimension.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: And how ’bout Chase Dreams and the manager? How did you both of them and who are they based on?
Chris Kelly: They’re not really based on anybody.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. Well, when we were starting to cast it, Lorne Michaels produced the show with us, and he read the script, obviously. And his only note was that we had to cast an actual star.
Chris Kelly: Like whoever you get for Chase Dreams, he’s got to feel like a real star. And we’re like, “Cool.”
Sarah Schneider: Great.
Chris Kelly: Great. No big deal.
Sarah Schneider: So and we have to be like talent scouts.
Chris Kelly: It was kind of … We cast it the normal way. We went through our casting director who was amazing, but we went the traditional route. And we did start scouring social media, and we didn’t know what we were doing. We’re like, “Are young, talented people on YouTube?” Are they?” One of the producers [inaudible 00:13:58] was like, “You should check out Musically. Have you guys heard of that?” Okay-
Sarah Schneider: I have, but I didn’t know much about it.
Chris Kelly: We had not, two years ago, we hadn’t.
Sarah Schneider: No, we had. Yeah.
Chris Kelly: We felt dumb that we didn’t know it, and we went on like a top 10 Musically users list and found Case.
Sarah Schneider: Case.
Chris Kelly: And other people. So we started auditioning people in those ways as well because we wanted someone who was talented, obviously, and who could act and who could sing but also just had authenticity to them.
Sarah Schneider: Embodied the-
Caroline Waxler: Yes.
Chris Kelly: Felt like they had … I don’t know. For some young actors, you look up to other actors. You look up to other musicians. You look up to other people. I don’t know, but when you come up in the YouTube, social media world, you look up to other social media famous people. So your interests form differently, and the way you talk and move and throughout the world is just different.
Sarah Schneider: Your just entire vibe.
Chris Kelly: So he came into the room, and we were like, “Yes. You seem perfectly one of these kids.”
Sarah Schneider: ‘Cause he was.
Chris Kelly: ‘Cause he was.
Caroline Waxler: And this was his first acting job?
Chris Kelly: Yes.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, his first acting job.
Chris Kelly: It was his first audition.
Caroline Waxler: Wow.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, isn’t that infuriating?
Caroline Waxler: That’s hilarious, and how ’bout the manager? And what’s his persona based on?
Sarah Schneider: His persona, it’s not really based on anything. I mean, when we met Ken, we had pitched around a few ideas for who could play Streeter, and I think Chris pitched Ken Marino. And we just love him. He made complete sense in our brains, and we again were like, maybe he’ll do. Who knows?
Chris Kelly: Yeah, I think we like the combination because Ken is very good at playing a little … like he plays Streeter as kind of dopey in fun way and very … it’s tricky ’cause we like that Streeter … Streeter as the manager does some pretty rough things to this kid, you know what I mean? Like in some of the episodes he is like dying his tongue pink ’cause a pop star’s tongue has gotta pop and weird things like that, that are very rough and that are very satirical. We like the idea of pointing out that … Like a lot of people have said that they are surprised that the character Chase Dreams isn’t like a little shit head in the show, and he’s not full of himself. And he’s not a cocky little whatever, and we like that he’s a sweet kid. But that it’s the people and The Machine around him that is manipulating him and forcing him to do all these things and deciding his entire life for him.
So we wanted the character, Streeter, to be the embodiment of that. So we wanted him to be a satirical character, but then Ken Marino is so sweet and plays it so pathetic.
Sarah Schneider: Vulnerable.
Caroline Waxler: So desperate.
Chris Kelly: Desperate. He genuinely loves Chase and wants to be his best friend.
Caroline Waxler: Yes.
Chris Kelly: So we like that weird combination.
Caroline Waxler: Yes.
Chris Kelly: Of taking advantage of him, but genuinely being like, “I love this kid.”
Caroline Waxler: So great.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: That was a long winded answer, but I got to it.
Caroline Waxler: It was a great one.
Sarah Schneider: We landed somewhere.
Caroline Waxler: It was the embodiment of a great answer.
Chris Kelly: I [inaudible 00:16:44] then I pulled it together.
Caroline Waxler: How did you guys do the research? Like I mean, obviously some of it you completely made up, but it’s gotta be based in some sort of fact, like the girlfriend auditioning.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, yeah. Well, we talked to Case who plays Chase, and kind of was just like, “What is your day-to-day like? What do you do?” And there were a couple things that he said, or things that he told us had happened in the world. Like there have been some relationships within the Instagram world where he’s like, “They’re not actually together.”
Caroline Waxler: Are you serious?
Chris Kelly: It’s just to get followers.
Sarah Schneider: It’s just for followers. Yeah, and so-
Caroline Waxler: And someone puts them together?
Sarah Schneider: He was our main resource [crosstalk 00:17:20]
Chris Kelly: That was like even writing the show before we wrote the pilot, we went down a lot of rabbit holes.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: Looking at these type of YouTube stars. So you can kind of go to … We went to a couple different, we went to a lot of different people’s YouTube pages, but you can kind of go back and look at their presence from the very beginning of time. So you can go, and you can sort the videos by oldest, and you’ll see the first little-
Sarah Schneider: Homemade.
Chris Kelly: Music video that they made, and it’s homemade. You have the moms holding the camera. You can see her shadow on the grass, and it’s a little janky. And then you can see like a couple months later the music video is made with like a slightly better camera.
Sarah Schneider: That’s sponsored.
Chris Kelly: And a couple later, you’re like, “Uh-oh. This is a little slick. There’s some sun flares in every shot. I think a local manager got involved.” You can kind of see that it got-
Caroline Waxler: That’s fascinating.
Sarah Schneider: It is fascinating.
Chris Kelly: Now it’s, unfortunately, a little sexier, but they’re very young still. Or you have … then they’re very … It was fascinating to watch each of them kind of learn and grow and do the same thing.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, and we were just so, like what Chris was saying earlier about the manager, we were so fascinated by this like, invisible hand.
Caroline Waxler: Right. Right. Right.
Sarah Schneider: That you just start feeling because stuff gets more polished and gets more … He starts wearing like a little chain even though he’s eight years old. Like why is he doing that? And that is such an interesting dynamic to us.
Chris Kelly: And we put that in the pilot too. At the end of our pilot, you see a clip of the music video that Chase Dreams got famous off of, and it was ‘I wanna Marry You at Recess’.
Caroline Waxler: Hilarious.
Chris Kelly: And that’s based on a lot of these first music videos that we saw were like that. It was a lot of 11 year old boys being like, “Hey, girl. I will die for you.” Because these kids don’t even really know what love is or romance or sex or anything, but I think they know mom and dad are together. Or I don’t even know.
Sarah Schneider: That, and they just know that’s what Justin Bieber sings about.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: Even though he’s like 15 years older than them or whatever. 10 years older than them.
Chris Kelly: You see videos of just little kids doing homework by the fire, and the song is about I wanna do homework with you all forever. It’s just so funny, just a weird combo of not knowing about love but singing about it. We just loved it.
Sarah Schneider: Also, that music video was … Chris directed the pilot, and he did a great job. But he did not direct that.
Caroline Waxler: Who directed the music video?
Chris Kelly: It directed itself.
Sarah Schneider: The kid directed himself.
Caroline Waxler: No. Amazing.
Chris Kelly: Case is not playing himself. He obviously is playing a character, but he has done versions of this.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. It just was so natural.
Chris Kelly: So he really would be like, “Oh, I would do this in this music video, and I would do-”
Sarah Schneider: I would put a leaf on her head to flirt. [crosstalk 00:19:47]
Chris Kelly: What are some things that you would do in the music video? And he was like, “Yeah. I’d put a leaf on her head.” And I was absolutely. It’s going straight to the show.
Caroline Waxler: That’s amazing. So having had a consultant there [crosstalk 00:19:57] character. So what was it like pitching the show to Lorne? I mean, how did that process go for him to sign on as producer?
Sarah Schneider: We didn’t really pitch the idea to him, I think. We brought the script to him fully formed, and we were like, “We hope you like this. This is what we’re doing.”
Chris Kelly: That’s what we were like, “This is what we’re doing, Lorne.” Yeah, I don’t really remember.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, ’cause we decided just on our own what we were gonna write, and then we wrote the script. I mean, we gave him the script to obviously, see what he thought about it, but we weren’t like, it wasn’t a meeting like here are the four ideas we’re thinking of. Tell us what your favorite is.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: Is there like a first look deal for SNL writers that you have to give to Lorne and [inaudible 00:20:35] How did that go? Did you-
Chris Kelly: You know, there might be. I don’t know. It just kind of-
Sarah Schneider: I think it’s just kind of spoken. Yeah.
Chris Kelly: It more just felt like a no-brainer, where we involved Lorne, and we were still at SNL.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: So we just, if anything, I think we were like, “Lorne, I hope you like it or would want to do it with us.”
Sarah Schneider: Totally.
Chris Kelly: We obviously wanted to do it with him. So yeah.
Sarah Schneider: He cultivates just such a family vibe, where even now, we saw him last night, and it’s always you feel very connected to SNL after you’re there. I feel like everyone does decades later.
Chris Kelly: So it’s a no-brainer. I wanna stay in the family and keep working with him.
Caroline Waxler: And so how’s the process now, and after the pilot, after you first pitched it, what’s his involvement? And what is the process after you guys write the drafts?
Chris Kelly: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, he’s like very, lets you be in charge and run the show you wanna run. He’s hands off in a way where it’s like he’s there whenever you want him, but won’t … yeah. He empowers you to run your own show, but we would rely on him a lot, especially at the beginning because we took a really long time to cast the show. They didn’t buy the pilot, and then we shot it that next month ’cause I think they bought it. And then we still had the rest of an SNL season to finish.
Caroline Waxler: Oh, wow.
Chris Kelly: So we had like six months before we even could go into production, and I think that was a blessing ’cause then we could chip away at casting. So we would-
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, we would on our-
Chris Kelly: Do a couple episodes of SNL, then we would go to LA for a week. We would see some people for Cary. We would come back. We’d think about it, and so he was instrumental there ’cause I think he was like, it’s good to take time with casting ’cause if you mess up casting that’s the whole … It’s over.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: And so yeah, we really would show him people. We would show him audition tapes. He would give us his thoughts. We really relied on him for that.
Caroline Waxler: What an amazing resource.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. He’s pretty good at casting, I guess. I would think.
Caroline Waxler: So what lessons from SNL did you bring to running this show? And running the writer’s room in particular?
Sarah Schneider: At SNL, as you move up, you get more and more into the kind of writer management of it all. You start being more involved in their pitches, and they come, you know, the younger writers, come to you and are like, “Here are the five or six ideas I’m thinking about.” And you can kind of work with them to figure out what’s the best to write that week, and so in terms of that, that’s super helpful. You start thinking about the show as a whole, and you start making sure that people’s ideas are getting to the right place. And they’re feeling heard, and so that is super, you know, directly translated to running a room ’cause it was suddenly, we had six or eight people that we were collaborating with.
That for sure, and-
Chris Kelly: SNL also teaches you to write what you think is funny, but write smart. Write what you know is possible and doable under the amount of time. It teaches you to write like when you’re writing a video or a live sketch. It’s not just writing what you think is funny, but it’s writing what you learn to know will work. Like, some things don’t work in a live sketch, and some things have to be written a certain way to work in a live sketch. When you’re writing a video, you write it, and then the next day, they’re doing pre-production. And then you’re shooting.
And SNL is great because you get to write really ambitious things, but you can’t just write in a void. So it teaches you to write and be thinking as a producer as you’re writing because you’re gonna be producing that sketch as well. And then on this show, we were the show runners, and I directed a lot of episodes. And we were there in production. So it taught us to be thinking as a producer while we wrote as well.
Caroline Waxler: Wow. Yeah.
Chris Kelly: Do you know what I mean? Sometimes when you’re writing or you’re coming up or when you’re starting, and you’re writing a spec script, you’re writing something just to write it. I remember doing that when I was younger, like writing something just to have a piece of writing.
Caroline Waxler: Right.
Chris Kelly: But then you’re also like, if this ever got made this wouldn’t make a lot of money. I don’t how this is actually … who’s gonna … So you’re like, “Oh, we’re the ones who are gonna have to make it next month. So we need to be thinking about these problems as we’re writing this.” Right? I don’t know.
Sarah Schneider: And then we still would write it.
Chris Kelly: [crosstalk 00:24:22]
Sarah Schneider: Or be like [crosstalk 00:24:24]
Chris Kelly: Or deciding what things to fight for, like what hard scenes are worth it to us, and which ones were like, we should condense this. This one does not need to be a whole.
Sarah Schneider: I know. I do remember ’cause we … So much of our season takes place at big events because it takes place within Chase’s world. So you know we’re at a big movie premiere. We’re at his 14th birthday party, which is at a club filled with models, and so we, I remember being like, okay we have to have an episode somewhere in here that’s just like a little bit of a breath, like for production because we are just gonna run ourselves into the ground.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Sarah Schneider: So that’s nice to keep in mind, and that definitely comes from SNL too.
Caroline Waxler: That’s good to combine both the producer mindset and the writer mindset.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: So tell us about ‘The Other Two’s’ writing room. Who was in it? What was the workflow like?
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. Oh, we got so lucky.
Chris Kelly: Our main core writers-
Sarah Schneider: Cole [inaudible 00:25:14], Jordan Firstman, Joel Cambuster, and [inaudible 00:25:17]
Chris Kelly: And then just for a couple weeks, but then we lost him ’cause he had to ‘Broad City’ where Lucia Aniello and Paul Downs, who are like co-executive producers on ‘Broad City’ or something.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, and I had worked with them on ‘Broad City’ for years, and I love them. And we know them, but our writers overlapped. So we just stole them for a tiny bit, but we lost them.
Sarah Schneider: And our writer’s assistant, Brian Ashburn.
Chris Kelly: Yeah. It was fun and great and talking about workflow is weird because it’s the only real writer’s room we’ve been in because SNL was so different. Or I guess no, we’ve each been in one other one, but-
Sarah Schneider: Which were also polar opposites.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, we don’t have a ton of traditional writer’s room experience because SNL is its own deal.
Sarah Schneider: So we basically like, yeah, we started with Paul, Lucia, and us. We had like a week or so of just blue skying. We had some episode ideas going into it. We pitched like a season bible, and I think maybe like two or three of those ended up being ideas for episodes. But we kind of talked big picture with them and sketched out what we though were vague, big arcs for the season, and then everybody came in. And we started breaking individual episodes, also macro. Also talking about what happens in this episode, and so we knew where the season ended, where everybody’s arcs went character wise, and then we went into the micro and would go up.
We had a huge white board wall that was my baby that I loved to write on.
Chris Kelly: She loved to write on it, and I loved that she loved to write.
Sarah Schneider: [crosstalk 00:26:42]
Chris Kelly: I did not wanna write, and-
Sarah Schneider: I know. It’s weird.
Chris Kelly: We’re so similar that I was like, “Oh God, we’re gonna have to fight about who writes on this fucking wall.” And she loved it so much, and I was like, “I wanted to make it like, wow Sara, if you want to do it. I want to as well, but I will let you write.”
Sarah Schneider: There’s something about the organization of it and making sure there was enough space for everything. It really like tickled my-
Chris Kelly: I get it ’cause I’m the same way. So I don’t know why somewhere I fell off and don’t wanna do it, but it seems like I should want to.
Sarah Schneider: It was helpful to literally have someone up close and someone with a little distance from it, but yeah, we would break it into by acts. And when something felt right, we would write it in and be like, okay we’re figure out. We’d bullet point out like jokes within that scene. So then when we wrote our outlines or we had Joel and Cole and Paul and Lucia each wrote an episode, and they would just sit in front of the board. And so much was up there for them, or take pictures of the board.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, it was nice because whenever either us or them went out to go to script, the script was not done, but like we were saying earlier, the outlines were detailed that people were not very often being like, “Well, what happens in this scene?” ‘Cause we really figured it out as a room.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, and then once the room was over, all the scripts were done and we had table read everything and we’re feeling pretty good about it, but then we had like a month or maybe a couple weeks where we still got to overthink some things and change things around. And-
Sarah Schneider: That was really some of favorite work that we got to do ’cause we literally were like, “What storyline is there, but could be crystallized more? And how do we go back in and add a couplet of lines that set this up better for the next episode?” Do you know what I mean?
Chris Kelly: Yeah, I think we really did finesse and make the scripts a lot better. That sounds … like once the writer’s room was gone, we really-
Sarah Schneider: [crosstalk 00:28:24]
Chris Kelly: But at SNL, I mean, it’s the good and the bad thing about having more time. Like at SNL, you don’t have the luxury of overthinking things. So a lot of times something goes into air on Saturday, and you’re like, “Oh, that needed one more day.” Or sometimes you’re like, “That’s fun. I’m glad it’s up.” And with this, it was very nice once the writer’s room was over to be able to stand above all the episodes and look at it and be like, “This needs this here.”
Sarah Schneider: Right. Because also a lot of it was like, “Does the timeline of the show make sense?” Like these little things that we just got to be like, “Okay, she says six months in this episode. Later she says four months. So that timeline doesn’t work. We have to adjust that.” And what season it was. It was like little nitpicky things like that really [crosstalk 00:29:05]
Chris Kelly: Well one of the biggest things that we wanted to make sure felt real was Chase Dreams’ actual fame level.
Caroline Waxler: I laugh whenever you say that name.
Chris Kelly: Chase Dreams. [crosstalk 00:29:14] say it so matter-of-factly like it’s a real person, like it’s not a dumb name I’m saying. But we knew … The fact that you’re laughing, the fact that Chase Dreams, that idea of it is so dumb and that we’ve made this fake pop star, but we needed it to be very real and serious in the show that you believe that he was becoming like a Justin Bieber type pop star.
Caroline Waxler: Oh, 100%. Yes.
Chris Kelly: And so through the writing we needed to make sure that key details, even about like how many followers he had, or how quickly or slowly his fame happened, and in this episode, he needs to be this famous.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, has this many followers.
Chris Kelly: We needed to make sure we have a new music video coming out of for him. We need to … So every episode it was like, how do we up his level of fame?
Sarah Schneider: Like this is so stupid and small, but in the second episode, he does a Instastory. And you’ll see the number of followers is a certain number, and then in the next episode he does another Instastory. And we adjusted the number.
Caroline Waxler: I love your attention to detail.
Chris Kelly: Or even stuff that most people won’t notice, but I think it added up to us. And I think it adds up whether you realize it or not, in totality, it does. I don’t know. Hopefully, without realizing it, you just buy that he’s famous hopefully throughout the show and that he’s getting more famous. I mean a lot of it is the actor because he’s just so great.
Sarah Schneider: He is.
Chris Kelly: But yeah, we really cared about that stuff. So that kind of two week wiggle room after the writer’s room ended was very helpful to kind of dot those I’s and cross those T’s when it came to that kind of stuff.
Sarah Schneider: I mean, it’s like in line with Lorne saying, “Cast a star.” You just like, the siblings frustration and their jealousy and their … but they’re supportive and protective all just needed to feel real and grounded and needed to be able to pop and not get stuck in a cartoon backdrop. It needed to pop against something that felt real.
Chris Kelly: And another thing that we struggled with in writing this, and we talked to Comedy Central a lot about too, was the balance between … ’cause we pitched this as a family show, and it is a family show. And that’s what we think. I mean, it’s about a family.
Sarah Schneider: It’s about a family. It’s not for a family.
Chris Kelly: It’s not for a family show. It’s a not family show about a family, but it takes place in this pop culture world. And we never wanted the pop culture world to overwhelm the premise of the family show and lose sight of the family, but we also needed there to be enough pop culture stuff in the show to legitimize Chase, to make it feel like this family was really going through this. So we would talk about that. We’re like, we need an episode now. We’re due for it. We need an episode where they go on TV, or he shoots another music video. We need a very steeped in celebrity episode to push Chase up a level, fame wise so that the next episode we can chill on that a second. But we can chill on it because we know he’s more famous now or something. You know?
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: We were always negotiating that.
Caroline Waxler: It’s like a recipe.
Sarah Schneider: Writing is a negotiation.
Caroline Waxler: If we take anything away, writing is a negotiation. Speaking of pop culture, little side note, how did you choose Justin Theroux as the apartment, and is he aware that he is [crosstalk 00:32:07]
Chris Kelly: He is aware. He said yes. He was on board.
Sarah Schneider: I can’t wait for him to see it.
Caroline Waxler: Did you have to run it by him? Or is that just a nicety?
Sarah Schneider: Oh, I don’t know if-
Caroline Waxler: Like legally.
Chris Kelly: I don’t know if we legally had to, but we did.
Caroline Waxler: Yes.
Chris Kelly: We pushed it ’cause we thought it would be funny, and he is funny and is a comedy writer too and was into it and said yes.
Sarah Schneider: We landed on it because we, we’re just talking about Chase Dreams moving to New York with his mom, and just what was like the funniest, most contradictory environment to put this innocent little kid directly into? And we thought his home. We just pictured his home would be hard and masculine and have a lot of like curiosities, and that’s what we pictured. And we thought that would be funny.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, just like cement chairs in the living room, and just like only leather boots and black everywhere. Just nothing eventful to an Ohio mom and her son. Yeah, we just wanted something big and ostentatious, especially comparing it to Cary and Brooke’s regular apartments.
Sarah Schneider: Or not.
Chris Kelly: Exactly. Brooke’s no apartment.
Sarah Schneider: Brooke’s lack of. We knew that, throughout the season, we kinda knew we didn’t really wanna go back to a lot of places. [crosstalk 00:33:14] events and all these things. And so we were like, we know we’re gonna have to go back to this room, this house often because they’re staying there. So let’s make it interesting and weird and put them in all different rooms all over the house, and our location manager, Justin [inaudible 00:33:28] found that insane house with a pool. And we were-
Caroline Waxler: Amazing. Where is that?
Sarah Schneider: Great. It’s on Layfayette.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, it’s in SoHo.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. It’s crazy. It’s got an unmarked door.
Chris Kelly: It is truly one of those buildings that you walk past and don’t think anything about, and then you’re like, “Whoa. There’s so much in there. There’s a huge indoor pool. It’s insane.”
Sarah Schneider: It’s crazy.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, that also is a good example of like in the script we just guessed … We were like wrote on a vibe.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: And then based on this location that Justin found, we rewrote. So we didn’t know there was going to be a pool. So we would change scenes and jokes.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: Hilarious. One of my favorite parts is [crosstalk 00:34:01]
Sarah Schneider: That’s nice.
Caroline Waxler: What’s the scene that you think defines the show’s humor? [crosstalk 00:34:07]
Chris Kelly: Define the show’s humor?
Caroline Waxler: What we’ve talked about.
Chris Kelly: This maybe is not a good answer, but we just … That’s funny. We were just talking about that. There’s, in episode in two, there’s a little conversation that tickles us that probably nobody else would talk about, and be like, this is my favorite too.
Caroline Waxler: What was it?
Chris Kelly: When Brooke and Cary go to a party, they tag along. Chase gets invited as a social media influencer to the premier of ‘When in Gnome’, which is like one of those gnome movies. And Brooke and Cary tag along, and Brooke is like, “Hell yeah, we’re going to this party. We’re hot, cool, young people. We’re gonna go. Everyone’s gonna love us. I’m in a hot dress.” And Cary’s like, “I don’t wanna go to this. I hate parties. Also I’m an actor. I don’t wanna go to a party for a movie that I’m not in.” And as the episode progresses, Brooke has less and less fun ’cause she thought she was like a hot, cool, young girl, and everyone there is 11 and-
Sarah Schneider: A mogul.
Chris Kelly: A mogul and has an empire. And she’s jobless and 30, and her dress looks like a wedding gown. It’s just … She biffed it very hard. They have a conversation where she is like, you know, Cary’s like, “I’m not having fun.” And she’s like, “I’m having fun.” And he’s like, “You are?” And she’s like, “Well, not fun, but like party fun. You know, like where everyone at the party just pretends to have fun, and it’s the effort that makes it fun because you’re trying so hard to have fun. Then you actually do have fun, and that’s what fun is.”
And it’s this whole monologue of her negotiating how she’s technically having fun, even though deep down she knows she’s not. And that’s exactly how we feel about parties.
Sarah Schneider: Yep.
Chris Kelly: I don’t know why-
Sarah Schneider: And there is so much-
Caroline Waxler: That’s so fun.
Chris Kelly: [crosstalk 00:35:34]
Sarah Schneider: I love that. And it is her kind of … We really like the idea of this deformed confidence where underneath someone kind of knows they’re wrong, but won’t admit it. And that’s a lot of her vibe, and that is a lot of what we find funny.
Chris Kelly: But we’ve been at parties too, or even thinking about, truly right now thinking about a ‘When in Gnome’ after party ’cause they exist, and everyone goes. And you get dressed up, and you’re like, “Oh my God. This is fun.” And then you’re like, “Wait a second. Is it really fun? Are you really having fun right now?” ‘Cause the answer is obviously no. That we found funny. I don’t know. ‘Cause doesn’t it feel like you’d be like, “Oh my God. Isn’t this fun? Yes.” But is it? Wait. No. If you were asked twice, you would realize.
Sarah Schneider: The number of times you say this is fun at a party is proportionate to how much fun you’re actually having.
Chris Kelly: Not having.
Sarah Schneider: Disproportionate. Yeah, yeah.
Caroline Waxler: So true.
Sarah Schneider: The more you say you’re having fun, the less fun you’re having.
Caroline Waxler: So true. Reminds me of every New Year’s Eve party.
Sarah Schneider: Yes. Yes.
Caroline Waxler: Something you said before I wanna go back to where you’re talking about something that works in a live sketch. What are some of the things that work in a live sketch?
Chris Kelly: I gotta say, running through a wall. I gotta say-
Sarah Schneider: Cutting to Keenan.
Chris Kelly: I gotta say a game show. No, I don’t know.
Sarah Schneider: It’s surprising.
Chris Kelly: It’s a tricky balance because there are things that just work better in a live show. I mean, I think that’s why SNL does a lot of talk shows and game shows ’cause they’re-
Sarah Schneider: Impressions.
Chris Kelly: Impressions, they’re very performative. They’re very two camera. They’re very out, but then also you gotta find the balance between doing what works and then trying to change things, trying things that might fail just for the sake of, if they don’t fail, that’s interesting. It’s live TV. Let’s try some things. So those are always the sketches I like where someone’s flying, or there’s like something that can only be done on live TV in front of an audience. Often times, those sketches turn into real disasters or cut at dress ’cause it’s like, oh boy. I’m trying to think of specific … What?
Sarah Schneider: I don’t know. I was just remembering this. That whole production sketch we did that got cut where she got like 10,000 Twitter followers or something.
Chris Kelly: Oh, that got cut hard.
Sarah Schneider: But it was such a production. It was like someone came down on wires.
Chris Kelly: It was some sketch where a woman was sitting alone in her apartment, and she had written some dumb little tweet, like that wasn’t funny, like a pithy little joke. And then she tweeted it, and she was like, “Oh my God. That was my 10,000th tweet.” And then an entire band came in and sang a song that was like, “10,000 tweets. 10,000 tweets. You’ve written so many Goddamn tweets.” It was just truly celebrating something that doesn’t need to be celebrated.
Sarah Schneider: That’s nothing. That’s not an accomplishment.
Chris Kelly: And I think the mayor came in and gave her a key to the city. And she rose up on wires.
Sarah Schneider: No, God came down on wires.
Chris Kelly: Sorry. God came down on wires.
Sarah Schneider: [crosstalk 00:38:23] I think that was Edward Norton.
Chris Kelly: But Edward Norton was not hosting the show. I think he was a guest just to come in. I think Edward Norton as Edward Norton came in. It was like, “I’m Edward Norton. Congratulations on all the tweets.” And then the back wall fell away, and it was an LED screen said 10,000 tweets on it. It was so fun. We really loved it, and it was not on television.
Caroline Waxler: Oh.
Chris Kelly: I think it was posted on the internet, or no?
Sarah Schneider: It was posted on the internet I think.
Chris Kelly: That is what’s so funny ’cause so much time and absolutely so much money was spent on this sketch that only was posted as an exclusive online. It got cut from the show. It was so fun and dumb.
Sarah Schneider: It was a goddamn blast.
Caroline Waxler: Did it get any hits?
Sarah Schneider: I’m sure some people [crosstalk 00:39:06]
Chris Kelly: I will say I’m not sure, but I will say I have never heard about that sketch until now. Only heard about it when we worked on it, and then-
Sarah Schneider: And then right now.
Chris Kelly: So I don’t think it got any hits.
Sarah Schneider: I have no idea why I thought of that.
Caroline Waxler: Can we link to the sketch?
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. It’s a blast.
Chris Kelly: If you can find it. Go for it. Anyway, I don’t know [crosstalk 00:39:25]
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, what were we talking about?
Chris Kelly: What works in a live sketch. We gave you an example of, I guess, what doesn’t.
Caroline Waxler: Great. Do you have, and I’m sure everyone asks you this so indulge me, do you have any favorite sketches that you’ve worked on besides this one that were one the show?
Sarah Schneider: That’s number one for sure.
Chris Kelly: No, actually no. Well, [crosstalk 00:39:46] I mean, especially our last year at the show, and the last year and a half, we specifically wrote a lot of the political commentary ’cause it was election season. So we wrote a lot of the Bernie stuff and Hilary, and then the Hilary Trump stuff. And that was really funny, but then weirdly whenever we get this question our answers are always very little tiny things that had nothing to do with-
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, not to do with politics.
Chris Kelly: Like music. We wrote a lot of music videos. We liked a lot of those.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, we always say ‘Wishin’ Boot’ is one of our favorites, which was this country song with Blake Shelton about a magical little black boot that makes your dreams come true.
Chris Kelly: And it was just a stupid idea that was we blew out and was very small. I think we like sketches when it’s a surprise to us that the show let us make it.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris Kelly: You what I mean? When it’s like wow. 100 people are going to make this tomorrow. That is so dumb.
Sarah Schneider: They’re gonna spend money on this. Blake Shelton will come and do this? This is crazy.
Chris Kelly: We also always like it when the host is so perfect for the thing they’re in, that when we watch them in the video or sketch, we’re like wow. They made it look like a real thing. Like Blake Shelton really singing about boot really legitimized this country song.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: Because that’s what he does. Or like when we did this fake movie trailer called ‘The Beygency’ about someone who dared say that one of Beyonce’s songs wasn’t good. So like the The Beygency, which is a secret organization came to track him down and kill him, or to put him in jail. And Andrew Garfield played that man who was like, “I don’t know. Beyonce’s song is fine.” And then men storm into his home and try to get him. And Andrew Garfield is in those movies and is so good. It’s like a man on the run. So instantly putting him in that trailer just made it really look like a movie trailer.
Sarah Schneider: He just such a good actor. He was like on a roof being like Beyonce is good. This is a movie. This is real.
Chris Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. And our other one that we talk about is with this series of Totino’s commercial parodies that we made for the Superbowl, which is like Vanessa Bayer as the wife. So it’s like, you know those Superbowl commercials where all the guys are like, “yeah, yeah, yeah. Go, go. Go.” Watching the game, and then there wife comes in and is like, “Honey, try a Totino’s.” You know, whatever.
Sarah Schneider: The worst.
Chris Kelly: Like hungry guys. So it was like a series of commercials that explored what that would be like to be that woman.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Chris Kelly: And it’s … Yeah, we made three of them. We made one every year for three years on the Superbowl, and those were fun to make.
Sarah Schneider: My favorite live … Is this too many answers?
Caroline Waxler: No. These are … Never enough answers.
Chris Kelly: [crosstalk 00:42:06] I feel like what’s your favorite sketch, and then they listed 100.
Sarah Schneider: And then they talked for 20 minutes.
Caroline Waxler: Awesome.
Sarah Schneider: Well, I was trying to think of lives, just because we could easily … I think all our videos were like, we loved making videos because-
Chris Kelly: We tended to like-
Sarah Schneider: They could go a little darker.
Chris Kelly: Our writing, we would have to be like, “We have to write a live sketch. Like all of our ideas are for video. We have to … They’ll be so upset if we don’t turn in a live sketch.”
Sarah Schneider: We did this series of live sketches called High School Theater Show that I loved where it basically these kids in high school putting on what they think is a very socially progressive and-
Chris Kelly: Necessary.
Sarah Schneider: Necessary show, important that will change the world, and all their ideas are just like off. They’re just so self important about it, and we loved writing those. They performed them so well, and then in between, really hard techno-y music comes on. And they importantly move boxes around on the stage to no end.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, there was so many just little vignettes that are important, separated by a full minute of moving boxes, and then lights up on a totally on the nose social justice point. And then another minute of moving boxes.
Sarah Schneider: I loved that.
Chris Kelly: And then it just cuts to parents in the audience being like, “We don’t need this from them. Can’t they just do a play? Like, we don’t need their voice added to this issue.” So those always made us laugh.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: Is there anything that you would have done this year? As you’re looking at the news or you’re looking at videos? You’re like, if I still worked at SNL I would’ve wanted to tackle this topic?
Sarah Schneider: I don’t have political thoughts.
Chris Kelly: That’s a hard no.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. I think we did so much of that the last couple seasons. I think every once in while I have a little silly idea that I’m like, oh that would be for [crosstalk 00:43:46] he would say no.
Chris Kelly: Fun character ideas or sketches, but not like, oh man. Let me in there. I really wanna tackle this Trump week. Absolutely not.
Sarah Schneider: No.
Chris Kelly: No thank you.
Caroline Waxler: Right. So glad you don’t have to be thinking about that. Well, this has been great having you guys on here.
Sarah Schneider: We’re done?
Chris Kelly: Thanks for having us.
Caroline Waxler: We’re done-ish. Before I let you go, hopefully they’ll be a second, third and fourth season. Anything you are thinking about for Chase Dreams in those seasons? You can reveal exclusively here.
Chris Kelly: Well, it’s tricky ’cause we do have a lot of plans. We don’t wanna get ahead of ourselves because we don’t know if we’re gonna get a second season, but if we were to, we do kind of know what we wanna do. But it’s hard to talk about ’cause the very, very end of the season does twist things up a little bit in a way that the show-
Sarah Schneider: Pivots.
Chris Kelly: Yeah, we basically wanna find what we like about the show, we love about the characters, and not change that too much because if it’s working, you know? But we wanna never repeat ourselves. So we try to make sure that we wrote … That we changed the season enough that if we got a second season we’d have to be like, oh how do we do this? Like write ourselves into a corner a little bit. I don’t think that would be fun.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah. Our favorite shows kind of shake up the status quo often, and so we both loved the end of ‘Search Party’s’ first season ’cause they truly wrote themselves into a corner. And we were like, what is this next season gonna be? And we really loved that.
Chris Kelly: Chase dies at the end of season one. [crosstalk 00:45:12]
Sarah Schneider: Spoiler.
Chris Kelly: That’d be so funny.
Sarah Schneider: That would so … How did we get there?
Chris Kelly: They legitimately killed Chase. So season two is his funeral. All 10 episodes are the funeral.
Caroline Waxler: That’s great. Well thank you guys. This has been terrific. I’m excited to see your show every Thursday night starting on January 24th, after ‘Broad City’ and before ‘The Daily Show’.
Sarah Schneider: Yeah.
Caroline Waxler: And for 10 wonderful weeks.
Sarah Schneider: [crosstalk 00:45:42]
Caroline Waxler: Thank you guys and have a great rest of your day.
Sarah Schneider: You too.
Chris Kelly: Thanks for having us.
Caroline Waxler: That will do it for this episode. On Writing is production of the Writer’s Guild of America East. Tech production and original music by Stockboy Creative. You can learn more about the Writer’s Guild of America East online at wgaeast.org, and follow the Guild on social media at @wgaeast. And if you like this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. We appreciate your tuning in. Write on.
