How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Dan Levy on overcoming rejection and harnessing grief

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

We bonded over eyebrows, amongst other things. You’ll know Dan Levy as David Rose in the widely adored TV show Schitt’s Creek, which he co-wrote and created with his father Eugene Levy. If ever there was a story of failure leading to success, it’s this, as Dan tells me how his multi-award winning and critically acclaimed show was (initially) turned down by every single network in the USA. We also chat about relationship failures and a particular childhood incident involving birthday cake. Plus, we explore his fantastic new film ‘Good Grief’ - a beautiful gay love story for the modern age - and his personal influences behind it. Good Grief and Schitt’s Creek are available to stream on Netflix. And I’d LOVE to hear about your failures, no matter how profound, minor or funny they might be. Every week, my fantastic guest and I choose a selection to read out and answer on our special subscription offering Failing with Friends. We’ll endeavour to give you advice, wisdom and much, much more. Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com  And stay tuned next week for more info on how to subscribe! Production & Post Manager: Lily Hambly Studio Engineer: Matias Torres Sole Mix Engineer: Gulliver Tickell Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, author and broadcaster Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast where we flip the traditional interview format on its head, celebrating failure rather than success. Because what we learn from the former is often far more important than anything that comes from the latter. It's how we respond to failure that defines our character and helps us grow. Every episode, I ask a very special guest

to discuss three failures and how they emerged on the other side to be the person we see today. Just before we jump into our interview, I wanted to share some exciting news. Starting next week, I will be releasing not one, but two weekly episodes. We'll, of course, have our regular How to Fail episode, but I'll also be releasing a brand new Failing With Friends series for subscribers. I am so thrilled about these episodes because this is where you get to be involved. Every week on Failing With Friends, I'll be going through your failures or questions, and it gives us a chance to look at failure together. If you'd like to get in touch, follow the link in this episode's

description. Keep an eye out next week for our first ever Failing With Friends episode. When Dan Levy was 15 and on his way home from a bar mitzvah, his parents kicked him out of the car in front of a Gap Kids and told him not to come home until he'd gotten a job application. It was an early lesson in the value of hard work and it served him well. On Schitt's Creek, the sitcom he co-created and co-starred in along with his father Eugene, he was also the writer, director and unofficial wardrobe consultant. Some weeks, he later recalled, he barely slept eight hours over seven days. Levy's efforts paid off. Not only is Schitt's Creek now one of the most beloved TV programmes of all time, but Levy became the

first person to win an Emmy in all four major comedy categories in a single year for producing, writing, directing and acting. The show came to an end in 2020 after its sixth season. Since then, the Canadian Levy has launched his own production company, scored a deal with Netflix and directed and starred in his feature film debut, Good Grief, which tells the story of Mark, whose husband Oliver dies unexpectedly, and whose friends help him through the devastating aftermath. It's funnier than I've just made it sound, a classic romantic comedy delivered with Levy's impeccable taste and generous heart. I think there's beauty in loss, he says. It can inspire. Dan Levy, welcome to How to Fail. Oh gosh, what an intro. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

You are such an incredible creative presence on this earth. And then I watched Good Grief, and then I read your statement that came with the screener, and it felt so aligned to so many of my values, not least the power of friendship and how important your friends are in your life. And really, Good Grief does have at its center this love story between Mark and Oliver. But really, it's about a love of friends, isn't it? Yeah, it was sort of inverting the idea that friendship is always on the peripheral of the films that we watch. the idea that friendship is always on the peripheral of the films that we watch. I think if you look at kind of romantic comedies, it's always sort of the through line is the two people getting together and the friends act as sort of funny foil. As much as I love the genre,

it felt important for me to tell the story of friendship being the central focus and the lifeline and the true romance in this particular story and celebrating that because as a chronically single person, my friends are my family and my community and a support system. And it just felt like a really important, for me at least, an important story to tell of the love, the romance of friendship and how in adulthood the complexity of friendship changes and what we expect of people changes and somehow the closest people in our lives, the closest friends we have could be in a way the people that we excuse the most. That if someone were to walk in off the street and examine our friendships as close,

as familial as they are, they might say, well, you might need to just, some of you might need to have a chat. And that's what the movie does, essentially, is use death as a catalyst for these friends to re-examine themselves, but also who they are in relation to one another and the hope that that makes their friendship stronger.

And also, actually, without giving anything away, for Mark to re-examine what love is, what romantic love is, what he thought it was. And one of the things that I know so many millions of people around the globe value you so highly for is the way that you convey and portray queer love in all of its nuance and joy. You do that so well on screen, and yet you describe yourself as chronically single. So how do the two things mesh? Because you clearly understand what romantic love is. Why are you chronically single? I think I haven't made the space for it, if I'm being honest. It requires a kind of active quest.

I find myself really wrapped up in what I'm doing. I mean, for Schitt's Creek, for example, if I had a partner going into that experience, I certainly would not have had that partner coming out of that experience. Because it is so full on, requires so much time. And I care so much about what I'm doing that when I'm in those situations, it's hard to prioritize someone or something outside of it. And so I just don't think I've given myself that time to look and to be available. I mean, you go on dates and things and that's fine. And then you get separated by work or separated by, you know, living in different cities and they come and they go. But the act of looking for love is not something I've ever really done. And I'm in the very early stages of it right now, now that the movie is

done. You recently turned 40, didn't you? And I wonder if that has that focused the mind. Yeah, yeah. That has a tendency to really like snap you into figuring out what the priorities you need in the next 40 years. It's funny you mentioned that story about Gap Kids and my mom in particular has always done such an amazing job of contextualizing money in relation to me and the fact that what my parents have is not what I have. That growing up, it was important to know the distinction between spending their money and spending my money and the joy that comes with earning your money and spending it. And I think in a way it's kind of spiraled out of control because now I just am a workaholic

and my mom is now saying like, you have to stop. A quest for independence has always been really important for me from a young age, especially I think growing up with a parent who is so recognizable. I think it's almost inherent in my identity, this idea to be perceived as something uniquely my own and not in relation to. How aware are you when you're writing something like Schitt's Creek or Good Grief of the quiet revolutionary that you are behind your words? Because showing relationships like that between David and Patrick and Schitt's Creek, between Mark and Oliver and Good Grief, and showing them so that they're not trapped by what a straight society might perceive of as their own inherent tragedy, but showing them with nuance and warmth. It's just so refreshing,

and it is life-changing for so many people who watch it. Are you or were you aware of doing that? When you spend a lot of your life looking at versions of yourself that are constantly in pain there is a desire to to create a better outcome and that was really important for me especially in Schitt's Creek when we started tackling the the conversation of of sexual identity and how it was discussed and making this active choice that it was never going to be in question, that the town was going to be unbelievably supportive, and that the family would be the foursome that had the most to reckon with in terms of their own beliefs and their own sense of self. in terms of their own beliefs and their own sense of self. And it was in that little shift, making sure that this town that we landed in was a safe haven for them,

even though they didn't see it at first. Or maybe, I mean, in Moira's case, I don't know if she would ever fully recognize that it was a safe haven for her, but the kindness and the warmth of that town and that little domino effect of saying, okay, we're not going to make the small town the butt of the joke as it always tends to be, but rather this progressive place where it is nothing but acceptance. That created this domino effect of, well, what if nothing was questioned? And we just wrote to that.

And that was the only kind of active choice that was made. The idea of David and Patrick and the conversations that they had about their relationship and their sense of identity and who they were to each other just felt like me trying to write from as truthful a place as I could about my own experience. So much of David's ups and downs came from my failures, which we might discuss a bit later. I don't know. I pushed back on this idea that I had to sensationalize them and anything that involved who they were and what they meant. In a way, it was kind of boring to me. I'd seen it. And I've also seen people do it in really beautiful ways. So if we are going to make

a lesson out of it, let those people do that. And I'll just tell the story as is. And in a way, I think that made an impact in spite of my not expecting it to or wanting it to. I don't know. You have to just write what's truthful. You have to write life. Well, talking about writing life and writing truth i'm going to do that annoying interviewer thing where i conflate your character with who you actually are fabulous so in good grief one of the laugh out loud moments for me was when emma corrin is playing a performance artist just like knitting herself into red bull she asks your character are you scared And you reply all the time.

Are you scared, Dan? Always. In spite of your success? Yeah. I don't know whether that has anything to do with being gay. I can only imagine that it has something to do with the fact that for a large chapter of my life, I was presenting as someone who was very different from who I actually am.

I think when you're closeted for those formative years in your life, there will always be a level of questioning. Like, am I good enough? Do I deserve to be in this room? Am I equal? It's a very bizarre sort of series of questions to ask yourself. And yet, when you have been made to feel less than for those formative years of your life throughout school, et cetera, at summer camp, it stays with you. And you can have all the success in the world, but it's really hard to shake those kind of foundational layers. And I've learned to work with them and not against them. They certainly drive me. Proving those people wrong is certainly in the back of my mind. And I also wonder whether it has something to do with being Canadian. I feel

like being British and Canadian, there is this, you can't ever think too highly of yourself. It's an unbecoming quality to have like a ton of confidence. And yet navigating where a belief in yourself and overconfidence, where that clashes to me is always that dance. That idea of proving bullies wrong. I honestly, I'm so grateful for it now because I have insane drive. I will never be able to prove them wrong. Look at us go.

I know, well done us. Before we get onto your failures, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the language of quote unquote coming out. Because I'm always wary of using it because it feels like you're coming out of something or you have to appear from the disguise of being in the closet and that there's this shadowy place that you exist in and I just wanted to ask how you felt about the vocabulary that

people use around sexuality and whether it's ever bothered you? I don't know. I think it's something I've just accepted, whether that's a good or a bad thing. I think the act of coming out is such a bizarrely unnatural thing because essentially what you're asking a young person to do is proclaim who they're attracted to. And if you think about being young and trying to navigate the weird sensations of love and attraction and lust, they're so private. And for most people, or for a lot of people, they'll never have to discuss that with their family or their friends, the idea of who they're attracted to. It's such an aggressive thing at such a vulnerable age. I'm speaking specifically to young people that come out. I was a lot older, but still I felt that vulnerability of it's exposing.

And it should be a far more natural process. We should be able to kind of reveal who we're attracted to as opposed to proclaim it. And I hope that there can be a time in culture where we don't have to do that, where the assumption is it doesn't matter and it'll reveal itself over time. It's not going to require a proclamation. And it was your mother, wasn't it, who eventually said?

Who asked. Who asked you. Mm-hmm. Was that a relief that she'd asked you yeah it was and it was also something that it came at the right time it didn't feel inappropriate but i genuinely didn't know if i was ever going to say it myself and i wrote that actually into the patrick's coming out story his idea that, he just got scared of the what if, because in the back of your mind, you've seen so many things. I mean, we're talking about film and

television. How many times have we seen coming out stories where the parents kind of disown the kids? It happens. It's life. It happens all the time, every day. I actually found a great catharsis in writing that episode of television and flipping the idea of a coming out story on its head. Once we realized what that was, even writing a coming out story is so hard because it's been done really well. It's been done, in my opinion, not so great in some situations.

The fear of the parents and their reaction, having their reaction be, we only wish we could have created a world where he could have told us sooner. That thing felt like a really interesting world that hadn't been explored. In the same way that Good Grief was this amazing catharsis and expression of how I feel, I'm either incredibly emotive or I'm not emotive at all. But writing has allowed me to feel things in a way that's not physically

expressive, if that makes sense. Beautiful. Your first failure relates to a time in second grade, which for UK listeners is when you're about seven or eight years old. I would think so. It's like kindergarten for a couple years, and then first grade and second grade. So I don't know what that... Yeah. So what happened? I bring this up as a failure because sometimes, you know, there are these snags in our memory where we stick on these moments and they should have just come and gone.

And yet they are as vivid as the day it happened. And the earliest huge failure for me was, it was my birthday, except my birthday's in August. So we, you know, you're very young and you want to celebrate with everybody because everybody who has a birthday during the school year gets to have cake and thing. So my mom made me a cake to bring in right as the school year started in September in Canada. So we did a celebration around my birthday because it's in August. And I was feeling a little embarrassed anyway, because it wasn't really my birthday, but it was anyway. The cake is at the back of the classroom. My teacher says, we have a surprise for the class. I knew what the surprise was. And she said,

Daniel, I'm going to go and get the cake. And I said, no, no, no, I can get the cake. I'll get the cake. Very excited. Happy to share with the class. The cake is revealed. The class is excited. Just as I get to the front of the classroom, I trip and the cake falls out of my hand and onto my shoes and flips sort of cake first onto the ground. And the class obviously is hysterically laughing. And it is the deepest humiliation I'd felt in my young life. And I looked around and didn't know what to do. And it's that time where you're young and you don't know whether you should cry or laugh. completely pale in the face and then reach down and start to eat the cake off my shoes. I don't know what that impulse was. I think it was kind of panic and deep embarrassment. And it was a moment that I've remembered because in a way, I've kind of intellectualized it as like the first exertion of hubris or something.

Like I was like, no, no, no, I got the cake. You don't need to get the cake for me. I have it. And I didn't. I was too young. My hands were probably too small. The cake was too heavy. All of those things.

And then it just, it was a symbolic thing, I have to say. it was a symbolic thing, I have to say. It's so interesting to me how many people on this podcast do choose moments like that from their early childhood where they embarrass themselves. And I think it's that thing of when you're a child and you're trying to work out who you are in this confusing world and you don't know whether someone is making fun of you or is on your side, it can feel quite terrifying.

And I, a bit like you, I didn't have the happiest school experience for various reasons. And I wonder what you were like after that as a child at school. What was your school experience? I just, to me, I look back, I've never liked school. Me neither. Not a single day. To me, I look back, I've never liked school. Me neither.

Not a single day. And I think part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn't the truest expression of myself. And I think when you're playing a part, it gets exhausting. And you don't like yourself because you're hiding yourself, in my particular case. I just wanted to get through it. Because I think in my mind, I thought, once school is done, people will have the maturity to accept me. I think it was toward the end of the last year of my high school experience that I told some friends. It wasn't a safe space. It's tough. It's tough. And I think also when you're the butt of the joke or you are bullied, it makes sense to me that you now write the jokes.

Yeah, of course. You want to be in control of when people laugh. Yeah. I didn't think of it that way, but now that you bring it up, it makes sense. Yeah. jokes are formed and i think the one thing i i learned from both my dad and katherine o'hara during the the creation of schitt's creek was you can tell very funny jokes about people in celebration of people but not at their expense and there's a very fine line between cruel comedy and observational comedy and i i will always lean and observational comedy. And I will always lean towards observational comedy.

The roast sort of world of it all is its own subculture, which is something I would kill for the self-confidence to endure. I also think that's why shits worked. Yes. Because there was a warmth to the comedy and everyone was laughing at themselves as well as everyone else. There was a kind of democracy of comedy across the board. There was no butt of the joke. And that will always be something I'm trying to rewrite through my whole life, I think.

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your second failure is dating in your 20s that's a general that's a big general decade-long failure yeah tell us why you chose this because i think in my mind like analyzing failures to me they have to mean something they have to shape you. They have to shape you and hopefully shape you for the better. And I look back on my 20s as a decade where, again, when you're just coming into yourself, which I was at sort of 19 or 20, my relationship to romance, I wasn't dating in high school. I mean, I was, but, you know, taking a poor young girl to center stage as a date was not. What is center stage? Center stage was a movie that came out, I want to say, in like the early 2000s. Okay. Based around the ballet community. Sounds amazing. In case she couldn't tell them, I had this very stunted, like very underdeveloped sense of myself in relation to what I wanted romantically, sexually, in relationships. And it came from a very vulnerable place. And so I look at myself in my 20s and think, oh, my God, I had no self-respect I would put up with anything. I was constantly chasing people who had one foot out the door. There was almost a comfort

in knowing that it wasn't going to work out because it was almost this self-fulfilling prophecy of like, well, that can feed into the narrative that there's something wrong with me, that I'm like fated to live this kind of, you know, solitary life. When it simply wasn't the case. I was just going after people that I definitely should have avoided. And looking back on it, I mean, it's informed so much of what I do. I think going through that has... I've written about it in the TV show. In a way, I sort of wrote a little bit about it in the movie as well. Himesh Patel's character, Thomas, is someone who at one point feels very much like nothing works out for him. I pulled a little bit from my own life from those very scary decade of my 20s where I thought the same thing until you realize you have to have the confidence in yourself

to kind of override this habit of constantly putting yourself in submissive situations that don't serve you. And gosh, did I date some duds. Tell us some stories. Oh God, I moved someone once across the country, got them a job. We had dated and then sort of separated and then kept conversation. And the conversation was, but he was expressing interest in moving back to Toronto where I was based. Got him a job, landed, had a, had a, met up for an evening.

And then the next day was like, I just want, I just want you to know that I have no interest in, in being with you in a relationship. And I said, um. Are you sure you could have brought this up like months before? Yeah. And you realize I had overextended myself in this desperate way. And yet in the back of my mind was never clear about it because I think I deep down knew that there was something not totally right, but I was too scared to actually say,

what does this mean? And I think that's what your 30s does. I think when you turn 30, you have nothing to lose at that point. Not to say that 30 is old, but it shifts your perspective of what it is to date. I moved to London to get away from someone that I dated in my early 20s.

London completely saved my life in my early 20s. It brought me out of my shell. It got me my first job because I had just tortured myself with someone who was never fully committed and then was and then wasn't and then was and then wasn't. And the connection was really strong, but then it wasn't. But then it was. That's on me for putting up with that it's also on culture i think in a way because i think we are indoctrinated into the belief that passion is uncertainty and will they won't

then i don't know if it's all a game and now in my 40s i'm like no true love is knowing where you stand and it might feel less like fireworks at the beginning, but I would much rather have a slow building bonfire that sustains its heat. And so I think you do yourself a disservice when you say it was all you, because I think it's partly that. Also, I imagine that you didn't see on screen the sort of couples that you represent in your work when you were growing up. So there was no guidebook for it at the same time. Well, that's generous. And I feel lovely. Thanks to that reinterpretation. I also felt like at the time I was placing a lot of blame,

which is why I think my reaction was so opposite to that. It's more like realizing that I didn't have the kind of confidence that I do now in myself and what I deserve and what I need in order to say, yeah, I'm not. Make your mind up and let's discuss it. I'm fascinated by the fact that your first job in front of a camera was an MTV host. But you strike me as someone who is probably a natural introvert. Mm-hmm. How did those two things mesh? It was because of London, England.

Okay. I got away. I was in this, again, in this sort of on and off again relationship that the longer I participated, the less I liked myself. I'm a naturally very socially anxious person. I'm a naturally very socially anxious person. And at the time, I was on the brink of it really crippling me in an irreversible way, I felt. And I had trouble answering the phone. I avoided most social interaction. And it wasn't attractive. It wasn't attractive to people, and I didn't like myself. I didn't like the fact that I was in my 20s and scared of picking up the telephone. And so I made the office, in an agency, picking up phones and being forced out of my shell in a way that I never normally would have had I stayed and not made that choice to change because I knew that if I didn't, I was crossing that threshold between this becoming something that I wouldn't ever be able to get

rid of. And it was coming here and being a new version of myself and meeting friends and being pushed in a job that required me to be way more social than I ever could really revolutionized everything for me. It brought me out of my shell. It made me feel confident in the sense that I could exist on my own and be somewhere different. I was away from someone that I was, at the time, thought I was like madly in love with and realized I didn't need to be defined by my relationship to that person, that I am interesting and funny and people like me on my own, which in your early 20s, the drama of it all. It was huge.

And I came back to Canada after having been here, realized certainly that I did not want to be an agent. Great time, but not for me. Came back and MTV had just come to Canada and the auditions were, it was this wide open casting call. And on this run of, okay, let's keep pushing. I thought, well, I think I can do that. I think I could do that. The old me would have said, you could definitely do that, but there's no chance you're ever going to go to this audition. The new version of myself said, The new version of myself said, it's going to be excruciating, but you're going to do it. And I did it, and I got the job. But had I not done the work to get there, I would never, without question, never have gotten that job.

So London really saved you, and actually it makes such sense that Good Grief is a love letter to London as well as a love letter to love. It's played this wonderful part in my life. It's held me in moments of great vulnerability. And so to have Mark's life start here in his early 20s felt like a comfortable place for me to write. I knew that he had to be in a different place. I knew that he had to be a bit of a fish out of water. And I knew London in that way. And I knew my relation to it in that way. So it felt like a natural fit to base it here and have his life here start similar to when mine did. There's a little reference to a sex toy and an apartment in that, which is a true story of my first apartment in London. Oh, my goodness. Found a sex toy goodness. Okay. Found a sex toy. A homemade sex toy. So people might watch that movie and think, where in God's name did that come from?

True story. Real life. This is like Hitchcock. You know how Hitchcock had his little cameos? Yeah. The sex toy is the cameo. Exactly. The sex toy from like 2005 finally had its moment. Before we get onto your third and final failure, I want to talk about, now it is profound. I want to talk about eyebrows because I believe there is a misnomer that eyes are the window to the soul. Eyebrows are incredibly important. You have an exceptional pair. Thank you so much. So do you.

Thank you. I take that. That's a huge compliment coming from you. Gorgeous. Full, balanced. Thank you. Bring out the best of your face. I feel very blessed by my eyebrows.

Actually, when I was little, I trained myself to raise one eyebrow in like the rear view mirror in the car. Can you do the other one? No. Oh, you can do both. Now you're just showing off. Well, listen, it's all I've got. It's not all you've got, but you did arguably inherit them from your dad. It leads me on to your reactions on camera are so beautiful. There are moments in both Schitt's Creek and in Good Grief where the camera is just on your face responding to something. And you take us through the whole gamut of emotion. And I'm thinking particularly of the open mic episode in Schitt's Creek, where you go from arch disbelief that Patrick is going to do. It's being kind. Yeah, you're corroding your insides with your own cringe. And you go from that to this realization that he's actually doing something so beautiful

and loving for you, to then this very emotional realization and there are tears in your eyes. And it's just so beautiful. And I don't know what the question is. I suppose it's something about, how did you learn to do that? Eyebrows.

Eyebrows, ell that eyebrows eyebrows question mark i don't know i mean i feel very lucky to have inherited these eyebrows my dad sometimes says that his eyebrows have their own agents um are they insured have you insured they should be yeah they should be they should be the levy eyebrow having made this movie as well when you have actors that are as good in that particular case as Noah Reed, who played Patrick, that scene was what it was because of what he brought to the table. And it was so easy to the point where Catherine couldn't stop from crying. And it was so out of character for Moira to cry that we almost had to cut out some of her reaction to make her, to keep her more alive in that moment. And then Good Grief was the same thing. It was a very different,

it's interesting that you say that about eyebrows because David was so reactionary and the character of Mark is the polar opposite. He's so still. Yes. is the polar opposite. He's so still. Yes. Reactive, sure, but completely different in his demeanor. And so I had part of the, because I directed it and was in it,

I had a very close friend of mine who has been my sort of acting coach for a while sit behind the camera through the entire filming just to make sure that everything was feeling right. And one of the biggest things that he would come on set, like notes that he would give me, it was just like, you could downplay the eyebrow. Are you serious? Yeah. And you realize that it's habit. Yes. It was so, David was like, it was a dream because I could just, he had no filter over any of his

thoughts. And that was freeing to play a character that just reacted with no care for how people would think or or feel it was great but then when you have to actually do subtle dramatic moments on on film you realize that training might have taken me too far in one direction it was physically had to be restrained to get into this other character because i was so used to yes um using these things these tools of genius i'm so glad i asked you about them now which brings us neatly onto your third failure which is about schitt's creek yeah every network in america passed on it. What was that experience like? It was tough.

Because you have something that you believe in. Yeah. We really enjoyed it. We made a little presentation pilot. We shot it. It was 14 minutes. We took it out to these networks. We showed it around.

It had the sort of early stages of what the show would be. We had a script. And network after network, streaming service, cable network. It was just, we came close at one place and then they said no because of the name. And so we went up to Canada and built it ourselves. It's changed everything about the possibility of creating something. And sometimes we feel like, in my case, at the time, I felt like America was this place where if you can't get it made there, then there's no point. And it wasn't until we took it home, had to go home and make it quite

literally from scratch, self-finance it, figure out how to get it made, finally got an American network, very, very tiny, teeny, tiny American network that was high up on the cable rankings. No one was, I mean, it was, before it was the network, it was the TV Guide network. It was just a scrolling list of what was on television. So we had no expectation for it. And there was a freedom. There was so much freedom in we had no interference. We had no real notes. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that loved the show from when we brought it into them really just supported it from day one. And it became what it was because of that.

Because of the freedom of being allowed to play around and because the network in the States needed it, because it was doing relatively well for the network, and because it was working in Canada, we were able to continue to tell the story. And I think the success of Schitt's Creek is in the storytelling. It's in the day one to the last day. That's the experience. Because it's such a slow burn that if it were only the first season, I don't think it would have represented the scope of what we really wanted to say. But you had to earn that. And the only way we could do it is to figure it out independently, which has changed my entire relationship to making everything because it circumvented this entire business in a way people telling you what's good and what's not

or what's going to work and what's not what's hot and what's not what's what does an audience want and what don't they want and then you come out of the blue with this show that nobody wanted, and it proves everybody wrong. And that fundamentally should say to people, nobody knows what anyone wants until something singular comes along. And I think you look at all of these anomalies, these amazing movies that have crept out of nowhere and succeeded far beyond people's expectations. It's because no one knows what they want until they see something cool. There's no formula for what we want. We just want something of quality that means something,

that comes from a place of hard work and truth. I don't know. Everyone in Hollywood saying no to me has changed my whole life. That's so fascinating. I want to know what the feedback was from the people who said no, other than the one that said the name. I don't even remember it being particularly critical. It was just like a pass. Wasn't for us. Wasn't for us. Wasn't this. Didn't hit our demographic. Our audience doesn't want this. this wasn't this, didn't hit our demographic, our audience doesn't want this. I believe Netflix passed on it. And then it ended up back on Netflix.

Yeah. And I understand why they passed on it because it was out of the blue. I get it. And it took, and I remember year after year being like, I just feel like if this could get on Netflix, this could really take off. And season one, no. Season two, no. And then season three, we finally got word that they had bought it. And that was it, really. It changed everything. So how did you hold on to your own belief during that time that this was something worth making? Did it come from inside of you? Was it an instinct that you had in the pit of your stomach?

Or did it come from external support, like from your dad? Yeah, I think we just weren't ready to let it go. I think we knew we had something. We didn't know what it was particularly, but we knew that we had something worth fighting for. And we did. If Canada hadn't worked out, it would have died. But it didn't. Did it make you closer to your father?

Yeah. And my sister. It's an amazing thing to get to have six years of your life documented on film. Obviously, working with family in a highly creative, you know, relatively high pressure situation is always going to have moments of great joy and moments of hardship just because the two of us wanted so much for the show to succeed. And any kind of conflict that ever happened was out of a desire to make sure that we were doing the best thing we possibly could, which is why in the end, the best idea won. the best thing we possibly could, which is why in the end, the best idea won. Schitt's Creek, the setup is this hyper wealthy family who lose their fortune and they go back to this town that they find out that they own. And it strikes me that there is a recurring theme

through much of your work, which is loss. Good grief is also about loss. Where do you think that fascination comes from? I have always experienced the deepest humor in moments of extreme tension. I don't know if there's a more extreme tension than loss. The feeling of loss, the panic that comes with having to deal with it, it sets you at a 10 right off the bat. And playing with that vibration, if you will, allows for so much amazing character revelation and comedy to come out of circumstance. Yeah, I do feel like, I guess,

there's been a bit of a preoccupation with loss in relation to how people react to it. This film is a very different, obviously a different expression of that. It was partly informed by the loss of your grandmother as well. It was, yeah. I'm so sorry. She passed a few years back, sort of toward the tail end of the pandemic. And it was such a strange time. And I feel like we were all in this like perma state of grief. And I found myself really conflicted in terms of feeling like I

should be feeling more. Knowing how much she means to me, I just was really struggling with the fact that my body wasn't doing what my brain was feeling. And that felt to me like a really great thing to explore. And not in an exploitive way, really, but more in a way of self-examination. It might be the only way I can understand how I feel. And so I started to write the film with that in mind, and also knowing that the next thing I wanted to do was going to be something about friendship. Putting those two together, the story came quite quickly. And then the week before I got the green light to actually write the script, my dog died. No, I read them. Oh, I'm so sorry.

So it was, and he was getting old. But I remember knowing that I was in the process of developing this film, I would like look to him on my bed some night and just be like, don't do this to me. I can't deal with, I can't, you know. And yet, I don't know whether I would have had the clarity or the sensitivity or the vulnerability to have written the script that I did if that series of events hadn't happened. Yes. And all I can do now is look at this movie as an expression of my love for them. It has nothing to do with them,

but it has everything to do with them in a way. I think getting to make something and share it with the world that ultimately is an expression of your own understanding of grief, I don't know. It's all I could do, I to understand how i how i felt you know they're not here but i hope that if they're around that they see it as a love letter to them i hope that they're watching

it somewhere i'm in poor me too you you make meaning out of loss You make art out of all of the human stuff that we sometimes struggle to confront. We are so grateful for you. Oh, goodness. Thank you. And I'm so grateful to you for coming on How to Fail and gracing this podcast studio with your presence and your eyebrows. I can't tell you how excited. I know I've said it a bunch of times, but I love this podcast. Shut up. And I've been downplaying it a bunch of times, but I love this podcast. Shut up. And I've been downplaying it because otherwise I'd get really nervous. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. It is such a, and you are just, anyway, we could go back and forth all day,

but your ability to talk to people is really, really special. So I appreciate this chat very much. That means the absolute world to me. Dan Levy, thank you so, so much. Thank you so much for having me. Remember to press the follow button to get new episodes of How To Fail as soon as they're published on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music,

or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.