Transcript
Alison Herman: Hello, I’m your host, Allison Herman. And on this episode of OnWriting, I’m thrilled to speak with Meredith Scardino. Meredith is the creator, showrunner, writer, and producer of Girls5eva, which is now in its second season on Peacock.
In this episode, I’m going to talk to Meredith about the writing and songwriting process of Girls5eva, what you learn from mentors like Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Robert Carlock, and why so much of this series is about having agency over your own life. A quick warning, this episode contains spoilers. So you really should watch Girls5eva before listening. Also, because it’s great. So here’s the interview. Meredith, how are you doing today?
Meredith Scardino: I’m good. It’s very hot in New York, but I’m very happy to be here. Thank you so much.
Alison Herman: You’re in your AC cocoon.
Meredith Scardino: I am. I just started it.
Alison Herman: Well, our producer, Jason had a suggestion for the first icebreaker question that I couldn’t pass up, which is, do you have a favorite girl group or boy band song that you like to sing at karaoke? And if so, what is it?
Meredith Scardino: Oh my gosh. What do I sing at karaoke? I like some of the older songs. I like old Dolly Parton or like… I have to say I have a terrible voice. It’s one of the worst, which is really ironic that I’m involved in a music show. So I don’t sing all that much. Although, I do send Jeff Richmond, our composer extraordinaire who’s amazing. I do send him voice memos of me singing the songs or just a bad version melody of our songs and then he makes it into something incredible. So I’m sorry. I come to that. That’s not a good answer because I don’t really sing girl group or boy band. I mean, I like Bye Bye Bye. That’s always a good one.
Alison Herman: That’s totally fair. We don’t want to pressure anyone into doing anything they don’t want to, karaoke included.
Meredith Scardino: I love karaoke. I just don’t necessarily sing those songs because I don’t think I would do them justice.
Alison Herman: I mean, I do like that you can send a voice note to Jeff Richmond and be like, “If you want to have Renée Elise Goldsberry sing for me, do my part, that would be great.”
Meredith Scardino: Yeah, exactly.
Alison Herman: Well, if you don’t do the in karaoke, I’m sure you certainly at least have like a very personal relationship with these kinds of groups because you’ve made a whole show about them and what it’s like to look back at them from right now. I guess maybe a more general place to start would just be, what is your personal relationship? How intensive a fan were you as a kid and how did that relationship change as you grew up?
Meredith Scardino: Well, I always used to watch that show Making the Band on MTV when they made assemble Danity Kane. I just watched every episode. I just felt it really interesting that they would kind of pluck people from relative obscurity and throw them into this crazy machine, which was just bananas at that particular age. So when I was thinking of ideas to develop a show and that kind of popped into my head and I thought, “Oh my gosh. That era around 2000, ’99 was very girl and boy group heavy.” And it just felt like the perfect kind of opportunity to just writing about women in their 40s and the present in New York was not a stretch for me because I’m a woman in the present in New York in my 40s.
And then just to be able to look back and unpack your past, even though I wasn’t in a girl group some of those experiences I feel like are universal for the way women existed in life back in the ’90s early on. So it just felt like when I came up with the idea, it’s one of those things when you are knocking around ideas in your head, “I had like an animated series idea. I had a bunch of different things and lights start going off.”
But then when I had this, it was just like ping, ping, ping. It was just the whole like, if you had hooked me up to one of those machines like in Ghostbusters that showed that Rick Moranis was hooked up to at the calendar on his head. I feel like it was very… Well, maybe not a monster inside hopefully, but it was very, just a lot happening at once and I just was writing a million ideas down and it felt super fertile. And just the fact that I had worked with Jeff Richmond on Kimmy Schmidt and he obviously did 30 Rock. And so it was the kind of thing that even though I’m not musical, I thought, “Oh, well, if we kind of approach it the way that they approached sketches in 30 Rock, maybe you don’t need to see so much of it and I don’t need to be the most talented songwriter.”
But then when we started getting this cast and putting this group together and started writing some of the snippets of things, it just started to get more and more fun. And those muscles went from atrophy to strong in a way that was really inspiring and fun creatively. But I love all those groups. I love Destiny’s Child. I was inspired also by groups like Dream and S Club 7. There were so many groups that were just assembled or created. Some started on their own, but then were like sort of a blip. But it made me wonder like, “Oh, what are they doing now?” Also, that show like, Where Are They Now? I remember that on VH1. It just felt like very fertile territory.
Alison Herman: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, you mentioned looking back on 1999, 2000 era, because I feel like that moment has really come up for reexamination in a lot of pop culture recently, albeit mostly in like a true crimey way. That’s a little darker than Girls5eva, but had that moment kind of already started when you were percolating this idea? Were you looking at things like the OJ Simpson shows and thinking maybe this is similar or did that just kind of a coincidence?
Meredith Scardino: Honestly, it was very organic. I was not looking at anything in particular, but it did feel like it sort of hit at the same time that other people were reexamining the way maybe we treated pop stars in the past. Shortly after I came up with the idea for the show and I can’t remember exactly how long it was, but I had watched the Lance Bass documentary about Lou Pearlman called The Boy Band Con, which was on YouTube [inaudible 00:07:50] I believe because I subscribed to it. That’s how I saw it.
But it was just the level of exploitation that that guy committed on that group was just bananas. I mean, he had no business being in the music business. I mean, he had started like just… There was a whole story about how he was leasing jets and he didn’t even have his own fleet of jets. I think he saw New Kids On The Block maybe who flew one of his flights. And he was like, “Why are they rich? Oh, I can pick out boys.”
Then I believe he leased a blimp and took out a $3 million insurance policy on it knowing that it would crash. And it was like a Jordache blimp. And then he used that money from when it crashed to startup NSYNC, which is bananas.
Alison Herman: That’s so funny because as you were describing that, I was like that’s literally a Girls5eva gag. That sounds as heightened and ridiculous as any sick, calm joke, but apparently it was real.
Meredith Scardino: No, it was real. I mean, and he was such a creep. Another thing that was so common is just like, you could have a group that’s like number one in the world and they’re living off their per diem. They’ve never seen any of the money because they are promised the world and they’re young and their parents might not know enough about the business. They sign these really restrictive contracts.
So there’s a scene in that doc where it was like, “Okay, we’re going to have this big dinner party and we’re finally going to see a big check.” And I think the guys and their parents were invited and they were number one in the world, and selling millions and millions and millions of albums. And the check was for $10,000 each, which is like… Anyway, so just sadly, it felt like interesting territory to delve into for the show.
Alison Herman: Totally. I mean, you say sadly. Some of the things you’re describing and some of the real life stories that surrounded this industry are obviously, incredibly dark and bleak. When you were formulating the show, was the tone ever hard to balance of telling this funny story about something that is adjacent to a lot of unpleasant stuff?
Meredith Scardino: Yeah. I tried to always do a gut check on the tone, just to make sure it just feels correct. I mean, I come from writing for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which had a pretty dark premise about a girl who was kidnapped for 15 years by a so-called leader, reverend. And so it was the kind of thing like if Tina Fey and Robert Carlock could figure out that tone, I felt like I could figure this one out in a way that didn’t… But also like I try to give moments of pain there due in the show. And one of the nice things about being on streaming is that we don’t have to abide by 21 and a half minutes for network.
So you can give people a little bit more time. You can see what they’re going through on their face and use music, and just ground their stories in truth so that we can earn the absurdity that we write on top of it all.
Alison Herman: Sure. I mean, you mentioned Jeff Richmond in your collaboration earlier, which is in so many ways kind of the heart of the show. I’m just really curious about the process you guys use for songwriting. Are they developed in the writer’s room and then you go to the composers? Is it more of a parallel process? What’s that kind of step by step like?
Meredith Scardino: They’re typically born out of the writer’s room, born out of… They’re always story based. So I try not to have music that feels tacked on or not part of the story in a way that feels like we’re stepping out for a musical number for no reason. It always is part of the story. And some of those things were ideas that came to myself or some writers just like without it fully tied to a story, but it was like, “Oh, this felt like the kind of…” Like this season there’s a song called BPE, which stands for Big Pussy Energy, which I had had the idea to do that song last season and I really wanted to write that song because I felt like it was in real anthem for them. It felt like the kind of thing that they would be like, “This is our anthem. We were told to be small in the past and deferred to everybody else. And this is sort of like our anthem to say, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re taking up space.'”
And there wasn’t really a good spot for it last season because we were kind of the inertia of season one was building towards this song that was very much born out of their character growth and written by Sarah Bareilles, and that was kind of what launched them into the big finale, a jingle ball.
So I didn’t do it last season, but I had it kind of earmarked in my head of like, “Oh, well, when they get in charge of their own album, that’s going to be on it.” But they all often originate from the writer’s room. So then basically we’ll write a bunch of lyrics and send them over to Jeff. And oftentimes it’s like, “Not that long before a table read.” And it’s like, “Hey, can you… What do you think about this? Maybe it sounds like a Lizzo song.” Maybe it sounds, whatever, the inspiration as we try to… Or it’s a voice memo from me trying to sing what I think it might sound like that he may or may not listen to, because I don’t know that he may not want to get pigeonholed into something from a non-musical person.
But he always makes better. So essentially, I’ll send him the idea for the song, lyrics. Oftentimes it’s sort of short or… It depends on what’s needed, but usually I try to send what we would use in the script. He might rearrange a couple things or say, “Hey, this doesn’t scan that great.” Or maybe, “Hey, the bridge should move earlier.” Or “Give me some feedback on it.” And he will basically create a demo with his voice that are all super, really enjoyable to hear him singing a lot of these girl band songs as a man in his 50s.
But that’s basically the process. It’s super collaborative, very back and forth. And then we have this wonderful thing that happens again because we’re on Peacock and we have this 92nd credit bed that we can put another piece of original music under. So what we often do is we’ll shoot the episode. The snippets that were in the show, we recorded when we shot. And then later when we’re in post, we’ll say, “Hey, oh, this song would be fun to kind of blow out and do an add to it.” So that’s how we ended up assembling the albums.
So in season one it would be like, “Oh, here’s more of that I’m afraid song from Sarah Bareilles or this season here’s more BPE or an abstinence song that summer and Kev sang.” So those all happen after the fact. And then I’ll often just send a bunch of lyrics to Jeff and the same sort of process plays out.
Alison Herman: Yeah. I think the abstinence song is my personal MVP from season two so far.
Meredith Scardino: Thank you. That was really fun. I worked on that with Michael Coleman who’s hilarious.
Alison Herman: The theme song itself has basically been stuck in my head since I first heard it. I danced to it in the shower. It’s great. But it made me think about how… These songs aren’t just funny. They’re often very good and effective pop songs. I was curious whether that was something you prioritized in terms of balancing the songs as funny spoofs versus songs that could convincingly be hits in this world.
Meredith Scardino: Well, so much of that credit goes to Jeff because oftentimes the lyrics have jokes in them and he sort of pulls off the magic trick of making it sound like a viable pop song. So I just am always amazed by the things that he comes up with when we send him things that sometimes don’t even scan well. Just to mention one song that he blew out and wrote a bunch of lyrics for was Famous 5eva, the original one, because I only had what was in the pilot where I had a bunch of the refrain and probably had like under 10 lines of it that was within the pilot.
And he was sort of like, “Hey, we have an opportunity here, I think to make a full version early on as sort of proof of concept of what this band really sounded like. And maybe we can make a music video.” Which he ended up directing at the end of the season.
But it’s also like one of those things that as a comedy writer, writing jokes, it’s this weird tone I feel like when you get into writing a song, you have to kind of like… It’s going to sound very vague, but the song tells you kind of how to write it because sometimes if you go too jokey, it takes you out of the song and it doesn’t work as well. So I feel like you kind of feel like what you can kind of get away with in a way that where the song itself can kind of like wash over you as a good song and then you might go, “Wait, what was that?” And listen to it and laugh. But maybe it operates as a piece of music first and then absurdity is sort of sneaky under the surface.
Alison Herman: Totally. I mean, speaking of joke writing, since this is the Writer’s Guild podcast, I figured maybe we can take a few minutes to go into the writer’s room and I wanted to ask you what kind of collaborators you tend to seek out and how you populated the room. I was like, “How many of these people are people who experienced the girl group, boy band era first hand? And how many are coming to this with fresher eyes to notice the absurdities?”
Meredith Scardino: Right. Well, it’s kind of interesting because even if you have, I feel like younger writers, there’s sort of this resurgence of pop culture obsession with the aughts and Y2K and stuff. So I was surprised by some of my younger writers having reference points that I was like, “Oh, you remember that? Oh, okay.” I feel like I try to pop… I mean, a room is a team. When I was in late night, when I worked at The Colbert Report, I feel like everyone did the same job in a way, so you had to have the same skill set, which was like just joke heavy, whatever it was or just taking in the news and satirizing it, spitting back out through Stephen Colbert’s character.
But once I got into the scripted world, I realized how much of a team a scripted room is. And people bring very different skill sets to the… I mean, everybody brings something amazing to the table. It’s just that they’re different. Some people have an amazing grasp of story structure. Some people are just joke machines. I mean, some people can do absolutely everything too, but it’s just nice to have also a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different perspectives because you’re writing for multiple characters and you want to bring in all those different voices and create a show from many different perspectives.
So we had a great room. And one of my writers, Ava Coleman was actually a manager, music manager and she worked for Scooter Braun or with him. And so she’s always like somebody that I was always like, “Did that happen? What happens? What do they do now? Would that happen?” And she was also great at writing lyrics too. So she wrote a lot of the lyrics of BPE and she wrote a lot of little stinkers, songs and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s very much a team. It’s definitely a group effort.
Alison Herman: Yeah. Collaborators are something I was also interested in because the show is obviously produced by Tina Fey. You came off of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. There’s really kind of a very consistent, seemingly very tight knit group of people who work on a lot of those projects. I mean, Jeff Richmond is responsible for the sound. I feel like that’s really key to what makes all those shows feel similar. I know Sam Means recently had a writing credit on Girls5eva. And I’ve seen his name across many IMDB pages of shows I’ve enjoyed.
I’m just very curious what characterizes that team in your experience and why do you think it’s proven so durable across all these different projects?
Meredith Scardino: Well, one of the things that I think where I work well with the group is that it is kind of the late night experience of not being precious with having a job to do and writing a tremendous amount of material on any given day. So nothing’s precious and you just are like, “What about this? Well, okay, what about this? What about this? What about this?” Just like [inaudible 00:21:18] all the time. So I am very at home in that environment.
Robert and Tina obviously came from SNL where they were churning out materials. Sam Means came from The Daily Show. So it’s like a shorthand that I feel like we’re all kind of speaking the same language of just taking in someone’s behavior. Oh my gosh that’s absurd. Maybe we can model it and heighten it these kinds of joke. Just being sort of like a joke cannon. We’re sort of all like that.
Tina is very good at, I feel like grounding it as well. She’s got an amazing sense of character and making sure you kind… She sometimes calls herself the fun bully a little bit, but she’s not. She’s hilarious and a genius. But she will often be like, “Okay, this might be like, guys, there’s too many ornaments on the tree. Let’s pull it back.” And she’s always right.
So it was such a great opportunity to learn from them coming from late night and just getting in there and learning story because that was something I was not… I had no idea how to write break episodes and chart someone’s growth. Like what? I don’t know. Talk about your own life and try to bring that into things. It was a learning curve and an exciting one. But yeah, I do think that we all do sort of like ping at a similar frequency when we’re pitching.
