“I’m Jealous of Every Show I Watch”: Brett Goldstein, Mindy Kaling and the Producers Roundtable

“I’m Jealous of Every Show I Watch”: Brett Goldstein, Mindy Kaling and the Producers Roundtable

John Wells was in the middle of his explanation about why he doesn’t envy other writers’ work when Tracey Wigfield began to laugh. “John,” she said, stopping him. “I’m jealous of every show I watch.”

Mindy Kaling fell somewhere in the middle. “When I watch TV, I just want it to be good,” she said. “I think when jealousy comes in is when something you think is not that good is getting a lot of praise. Why are they saying that’s so good? It’s just OK!”

Praise is one thing everybody on THR‘s Producers Emmy Roundtable had in common. The live event, held May 28 at Soho House West Hollywood, gathered the minds behind (and, in some instances, faces in front of) the most critically acclaimed comedies and dramas of the past year. Joining Kaling (Running Point), Wells (The Pitt) and Wigfield (The Four Seasons), were Paul W. Downs (Hacks), Brett Goldstein (Shrinking), Stephen Graham (Adolescence) and Liz Meriwether (Dying for Sex). For one raucous hour, these writer-producers swapped war stories on the script notes that they took, fought against and wish to this day that they’d ignored.

Among your shows, there’s suicidal ideation, child-on-child murder, jokes about terminal cancer and possibly the most graphic birth scene in TV history. What was the last scene you wrote or filmed that made you or your partners genuinely nervous?

PAUL W. DOWNS We were nervous to write our last episode of Hacks this season where Deborah [Jean Smart] gives up her white whale … spoiler!

LIZ MERIWETHER What!? (Laughter.)

DOWNS It was something that we were building to for four seasons. We didn’t know how people would take it. Also, we were trying to wrap our arms around all the changes happening in the industry. To try to do that in a way that was funny, touching and hopefully coherent was challenging and scary.

Brett, you wrote yourself into Shrinking as the drunk driver who made Jason Segel’s character a widower.

BRETT GOLDSTEIN Well, I didn’t write it for me, but then I did play it. (Laughs.) Then you realize that it’s a shortcut, because you know [the role]. Suicide and death, you have to be careful writing that stuff — especially in comedy. You do a lot of research, read lots of firsthand accounts and hope that you’re not being callous.

JOHN WELLS We wanted to show what it’s really like to be an emergency room physician or health provider. It’s very graphic, very real, and we didn’t know if the audience would keep watching. So we titrated it, to use the medical term. It’s not as graphic at the beginning. You become more able to accept what’s going to happen leading to the birth — which we said is a gift to all women. They should look at all their children and husbands and say, “That’s what I did for you!”

MERIWETHER I make my husband watch it every morning. (Laughter.)

STEPHEN GRAHAM One of the key elements is honesty. [My writing partner] Jack [Thorne] got rather frightened when I said, “By the end of the first episode, we know it’s him that’s done it.” It’s not a “Who done it?” It’s more about why — looking into the aspects of what’s made a child commit this horrific act and exploring the possibility that we’re all slightly accountable. But that was the scary bit, when I said, “No, no, no. We know he’s done it. We see it at the end of the first episode.”

MERIWETHER I put off writing the last episode of Dying for Sex for a really long time. I didn’t want her to actually die. And I felt like I had some sort of control over that for a second. Then it got weird, and people were like, “You need to write that.”

TRACEY WIGFIELD “It’s shooting tomorrow.” (Laughter.)

MERIWETHER You can tell by the tone of the email. Those sentences get shorter. I don’t know what it’s like to write not nervous, but that was particularly daunting — where to find the comedy in it and in a way that made sense.

WIGFIELD Similar spoiler alert: We killed Steve Carell on our show. Because Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and I created it and our whole room was all comedy writers, we had not written about death. So in navigating how [the other characters] find out he dies, they go to tell his ex-wife, who’s getting oral sex from her boyfriend. They have to tell her, and she has this heartbreaking reaction. When you first see the cut, you’re like, “Oh God, there are so many left and right turns.” Are people just going to be like, “I hate you. What is this?”

MINDY KALING I’ve worked on shows about teenagers and the Indian diaspora. If you get it wrong, people pounce. And I have a very fragile ego. I hate criticism. So in doing a show about a basketball team, where people have to do basketball speak and sound legitimate, it takes an enormous amount of research. I like to do things that are easy — shows about ambitious women who try to date, get married and feel acceptance. That had been my career. And I had to learn this new skill, which was uncomfortable but worth it.

Liz, at one point FX asked you to pull back on the male full frontal “just slightly.” Since this is your first series that explores sex, what surprised you about incorporating the intimacy and nudity? And what does “just slightly” look like?

MERIWETHER I wanted to write sex on The Dropout and was told that any sex, for legal reasons, had to be “good sex.” I don’t know to write a scene where they’re like, “This is so good!” (Laughter.)

KALING You mean the quality of the sex, like no one would regret it?

MERIWETHER I actually went to a Zoom with the Writers Guild on how to write sex. I took notes. It was really useful, because I didn’t know how to do it. It was just like, “Be very clear and clinical. Say exactly what you want to see.” [On Dying for Sex], I did it. I was blushing a little, but I’m proud that we got to a place where FX was like, “You need to pull back.” And that meant counting the frames that we saw the penis.

GRAHAM Frame by frame?

MERIWETHER Yeah, because that’s what American values are. (Laughter.) It was specifically when the penis sprouted butterfly wings. There was a moment that we had to cut that I will regret to my end days, where the penis is flying toward the camera and then, in a flirty way, flutters away.

WIGFIELD I feel like legal notes are often worse [than creative notes]. We had a penis situation on The Four Seasons. There was a joke where they turn on a TV and a really graphic porn is playing. We were told — and this is a studio rule — “We cannot license pornography. You have to shoot it yourself.” What? I’m a Catholic girl. I’m not shooting a porno! The rule comes from a good place. With a lot of porn, they don’t know if they’re totally consensual. So we go back and forth and finally there’s this list of legitimate [porn from] a producer that they had some relationship with. So when we were in Puerto Rico, any time we weren’t shooting, people would see me on set (mimes scrolling her phone).

GRAHAM You picked the scenes?

WIGFIELD Yeah, I watched this gentleman’s body of work and found the best one. The lawyer was like, “This comes up on a lot of shows, and they always end up filming it themselves. This will change a lot of things.” Certainly for the gentleman who made all this pornography. He’s so excited.

KALING I love that you keep calling him “the gentleman.”

MERIWETHER I had to send reference photos for the prosthetic penis. That was a weird email.

GOLDSTEIN Where did you find your photos?

MERIWETHER Gentleman.com.

Stephen, Adolescence is dark. It doesn’t scream “commercial hit,” yet it’s the second-most-watched English-language title in Netflix history. What is the lesson from this kind of surprise success?

GRAHAM It’s a colloquial story. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but we didn’t make it to be successful. We were under no obligation to make it successful. We made a lovely little gem. And we had a wonderful summer. It was like a holiday. We only took two takes a day, so it was performance. I think it just caught something in the zeitgeist. A lot of parents really related to it. I hoped it would create conversation with parents and children.

WELLS There’s a lot of time that we spend talking about, “Is this going to work or not?” Write something that you really care about. The audience is very sophisticated — visually, narratively sophisticated. We can trust them a lot more to come along with us.

GRAHAM It’s having that respect for your audience as well. You don’t have to spoon-feed them.

Brett and Liz, you’re here for comedies about death. How do you walk the tightrope, especially with so much chatter about what is and what is not “a comedy”?

GOLDSTEIN When Bill Lawrence, Jason and I created the show, we had a strict rule that this is a comedy. But I think, not consciously, we write it as a drama and then fill it with jokes. The tone, it’s instinctual — or we have a shared agreement of what is the right amount of funny and sad. There’s a middle ground, and it isn’t that hard to find. It’s how we see the world, funny-sad. (To Meriwether) Is that fair?

MERIWETHER Yeah, that was great. He was speaking for both of us. I really nailed that. (Laughter.)

Mindy, you’re a successful actor, but you haven’t appeared in any of the series you’ve produced since The Mindy Project — and I imagine not for a lack of requests. How did you establish those boundaries?

KALING I like how you made it sound like a conscious decision. (Laughs.) I love performing. But after we did Never Have I Ever, a show about an Indian family in Southern California, and I wasn’t in it … I was like, “Well, if I’m not in that show, where it was easy to incorporate me, then maybe I shouldn’t be in the shows?” But it’s not like I don’t think about it. Especially on Running Point, the cast and set are so fun, I get jealous. I’ll watch it and just sit there wishing I could be onscreen. So to answer your question, I’m mad about it. There have been times where you want to Alfred Hitchcock it — come out at the beginning, talk about the themes of the show and then disappear.

Paul, you wrote an episode for Cher to guest star in. When she passed, her manager said it was because she just didn’t want to do it. Do you still get passes? I think people assume it’s all incoming calls at this point.

DOWNS She was a very straightforward “no.” We asked her in season three and then again this season. She has an ice cream brand, Cherlato. Her manager said, “Look, if you write in Cherlato, she’s in.” So we wrote a commercial for Cherlato. Deborah goes to the Cherlato factory to taste it all. Then, at the end, Cher was going to say, “I just wanted you to get the extra calories. I’m not doing your show, because you stole my backup dancers in the ’80s. Eff off.” Anyway, we get a lot of passes that are very nice.

Who else has had a guest star ovation gone wrong?

WIGFIELD I did a reboot of Saved by the Bell, and I feel like this was a directive from Universal, but we were trying to get someone from The Voice. We couldn’t get Adam Levine, so we took [the offer] to someone else. It kept going down until finally they were like, “OK, no one wants it. We can get you the chair.” The chair. Guys, we wrote in the chair from The Voice. And the chairs are heavy, so we had to build a special stage to hold it that was maybe a little expensive. And the day of, we got a call from The Voice: “The chair is not coming.” (Laughter.) The chair canceled! It was my darkest moment in Hollywood.

KALING Real diva behavior from the chair.

WIGFIELD But look at me now!

What’s the most troubling conversation you’ve had with an executive this year? 

WELLS  Every time I suggest shooting in Los Angeles, somebody says, “We don’t even want to budget it.” It’s become a truism that you can’t do it. And that’s not [the case]. We’re shooting The Pitt in Los Angeles. There’s a general sense that you can’t afford to do it, so we have to prove to everybody that we can.

MERIWETHER New York, too. Same thing. 

WELLS The thing that’s worrying me the most is that we may hollow out a lot of really talented crews who are moving and leaving town.

GRAHAM  ‘Cause they can’t work in the place where they live? Doesn’t make any sense.

WELLS It kind of starts with us saying that we’re going to design a show that we can actually [shoot here.] What’s the budget? Let us design to that number and write to that number so that we can actually do the show that we want to do in the place we want to do it. On The Pitt, we had 325 speaking parts in the first 15 episodes. You’re not gonna do that in Atlanta or Toronto.

Brett, the last time we spoke, you said that most scripts are “fucking dog shit.” What are the traps and tropes in screenwriting that bother you the most?

GOLDSTEIN I’m going to let Liz answer this one. (Laughter.)

MERIWETHER Yeah, I hate writers. 

GOLDSTEIN When you read a lot of scripts, I find the good ones are so obvious. I care about the characters. It sounds like [how] people talk. It’s basic stuff, but it’s all hard. We have a fucking big room of writers to try and make fun scrip. It isn’t easy, But when you read a lot of scripts that are shit, you get excited by the one that is just competent. I’m sorry. It’s really hard to write! 

MERIWETHER I just look for a spark of a voice. There’s a New Girl writer, Noah Garfinkel, who I love. When I hired him, he’d written a spec script called Horny Ghosts. It was just about teenagers that died and became horny ghosts. (Laughs.) Structurally, it was… but there was something there. Like, “Oh, I have to meet this person.” And I think anybody who finishes a script is a bit of a miracle. 

GOLDSTEIN You all do it, but, in the end, every TV show is about a family. And do you want to spend time with this family? When you read the characters, you have to want hang out with these people.

MINDY By the time a script gets to people at our level, it tends to be…it’s not horrific. It’s just familiar. Right? 

WIGFIELD And boring a lot of times. 

MINDY It’s that thing: good is the enemy of great. If it reminds me of something else that I saw, that tends to be the reason why I’m uninspired. But then when someone writes something that’s — not always personal — really true, an observation, that’s usually the thing that feels refreshing. 

MERIWETHER I know I like it when there’s a pit in my stomach, like, “I’m mad that I didn’t write it.”

People talk a lot about killing your darlings, but what are the darlings you didn’t kill? What is the pettiest hill that you’ve ever died on?

KALING I’m constantly getting riled up. And then later that day, sitting there with my children, I’m like …

WIGFIELD Who cares?

KALING Why did I do that? Because I want to win all the time.

WELLS I ended up in a big fight on Shameless. It’s one of my least favorite notes ever. One of the characters stole a library book and the network told us, “You cannot have a character steal a library book.” This is in an episode in which someone pissed on somebody else’s head. (Laughter.) I fought on that hill, and then I got it in. But it was a three-week fight, and a complete waste of time.

WIGFIELD Are librarians very litigious? Realtors are that way, because I’ve gotten a note before that you can’t make fun of Realtors. They’re like, “No, not them!” (Laughter.)

DOWNS That executive was in escrow.

MERIWETHER I’m always talking about standards and practices, but they count the number of times you say “vagina.” There was one episode of New Girl where [there were] so many euphemisms for vagina that it was so much worse than saying it. You find yourself drilling down — I do at least — and then you’re like, “I need to move on with my life.”

WIGFIELD As I get older, I don’t die on hills anymore. Maybe that’s a sign of maturity. Back when I was 28, and this was all I had, I was like, “No, she has to go to the circus!” (Laughter.) She’s not real! I made her up. Who cares?

What’s the professional call that you still dream of getting? 

KALING I want to be on The Gilded Age. I don’t think Indian people were in the United States, so it wouldn’t make any sense, but I want to be one of those women they’re not rich enough to talk to.

WELLS I’d like to have a call that started with, “We have no notes.”

KALING You get notes? Oh, that makes me feel great. I’m always on a notes call, like, “Fucking John Wells doesn’t get these.” (Laughter.) 

MERIWETHER I do think about you a lot. When I’m failing in the writer’s room, I’m like, “John Wells wouldn’t do this.”

WELLS  No, you fail all the time. That’s how you know the writer’s room is kind of working.

WIGFIELD Do you really feel that? Still? When you can’t break something?

DOWNS It’s hard to remember, though. You’re always going to get back there but the process is going to be really hard. You have to get to the despair to get to the breakthrough. It’s so hard. 

WELLS Then you go home. Like, “Maybe I’ll get it tomorrow. Maybe somebody else will come up with an idea!”

DOWN Should we talk about something else? 

WELLS Yeah, because we all suck right now. We’re all terrible.

MERIWETHER (Gesturing to Goldstein and Graham) They’re not joining in. 

GRAHAM We suffer! It’s the art of living, suffering. (Laughter.)

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.