The Taproot Podcast - The Psychology of Screenwriting with Chris Rogers

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Chris Rogers, the visionary showrunner behind critically acclaimed series like AMC's "Halt and Catch Fire," Amazon's "Paper Girls," and Apple TV+'s latest hit, "Sugar." Join us as we explore Rogers' journey through the television industry and uncover the intricate psychology behind crafting compelling narratives for the small screen. Whether you're an aspiring screenwriter, a psychology enthusiast, or simply a fan of great television, this interview offers a rare glimpse into the creative process of one of today's most innovative showrunners. Don't miss this opportunity to unlock the secrets of compelling storytelling and gain a deeper appreciation for the art and science of television writing. In this illuminating conversation, Rogers shares insights into the delicate balance of character development, plot progression, and thematic resonance that defines his work. We'll discuss how he taps into the human psyche to create relatable characters and emotionally resonant storylines that keep viewers coming back for more. #ChrisRogers #TVShowrunner #HaltAndCatchFire #PaperGirls #Sugar #AppleTV #AmazonPrime #AMC #TelevisionIndustry #CreativeProcess #Storytelling #StreamingPlatforms #WritersRoom #SciFiTV #PeriodDrama   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirmingham Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

well i'm here with chris rogers who um i have been a huge fan of Halt and Catch Fire. I've talked about it a little bit in different things. When we talk about TV and when psychology is working on television and when psychology is not working on television, which is most of the time, I think Halt and Catch Fire is a great example of just somebody who really gets character, a group of people that really gets character. I know that you had another showrunner, and there's also a writer's room, and you all had some great actors. But I'm really excited to talk to you

about the stuff that you've done. You also recently had Paper Girls on Amazon, and then are working on some other things. Anything that you want to say about your history or process? Yeah, the history history of process. Uh, yeah. The history of my process.

Uh, well, you just, your history as a writer, you know, future. I don't want to commit you to say anything about something you don't want to know.

No, nothing is a secret. Uh, right now I'm on the second season of an Apple show called sugar, starring, starring Colin Farrell, uh, that hopefully we'll film next year sometime.

Uh, I'm doing a movie project for apple that uh is an adaptation of a ted chang short story i've always loved uh and trying to get a adaptation of kurt vonnegut's cat's cradle oh that'd be great yeah so so you know always a lot of irons in the fire but uh it's a pleasure just to get to you know do one of them at a time yeah i know you had said you were just working on the second season but i looked at sugar um when you had sent that and that looks like a fun premise i'm sure that that's a that's a neat thing to play around with if you've got a big enough uh stock footage light or a film library of archival footage to yeah it's a it's a wild one i'm a little out of my usual comfort zone but i think that's what was exciting about it was to to come's a it's a wild one i'm a little out of my usual comfort zone but i think that's what was exciting about it was to to come into somebody else's um kind of playground and

get to use the pieces they had assembled uh it's the first show i've ever been on that i was not the showrunner of i'm just an executive producer and so it's also a different experience to kind of you know be one of the cooks in the kitchen and that's been rewarding and nice this year is that freeing to not have the i mean sometimes when you like are every part of conception of the character and all of it it's almost like they're your kids you really want to be careful about what somebody is allowed to do with them is it easier to kind of come in where it's more more fun there's less of not an emotional connection but more it's more of a creative thing and less of a i don't know can you could you speak to that at all yeah i mean it was new it's been a learning process for me uh and to

be honest it had a lot to do with my kids i um these these shows which i'm so proud of and love to kind of give myself to fully do often function to kind of take me away from home uh and as i was saying before we started i have younger kids um you, after I was back and forth to Atlanta for six years for Houghton Pits Fire and then Chicago for the better part of three years for Paper Girls, the opportunity came up to do Sugar here in town, which would mean I'd get to drop my kids off at school and kind of be home at dinner every night. And so I said, well, you know, for this year, I think that would be really nice. While also giving me, you know, a creative outlet. So it's fun. It's fun to be kind of like on the team, but not have to stay after for, you know, the notes calls. Which is a real, you know, the privilege of being a showrunner, but also the burden of being a showrunner.

Is there more conflict as a showrunner than as an executive producer? Just a different kind of conflict? I think so. I mean, I think you just go to bed every night with the onus of making it work. You know what I mean? You dream about it. When you're on a run, you're thinking about, like, is it clicking? Am I getting the most out of my writers?

Is it making sense what I watch? You know, like, it's a running theme. And while I'm very invested as an executive producer um i at least have kind of a showrunner to look to for the like this you know uh which is different well and i thought uh the first season of paper girls was great too i mean i um i i've always hoped like if they're if they're gonna adapt any more of his comics, I'd really like to see the... Oh, shoot, now I'm blanking on the name. What's...

Well, they did Why the Last Man. They've done Saga. Saga, yeah. I think if you're going to do something in the age of digital that really would be enhanced by that, not detracted, Saga's the one that I've always held out hope would be some sprawling. That or Southern Bastards, which is not the same same writer but it's the same publisher alabama um one can hope one can hope yeah he's he's amazing brian kivan is a sweetheart and cliff tang uh illustrated

paper girls they did that together um yeah i loved that i loved those kids you know I think it was a tough ship to sail during the pandemic you know it shut down a lot it was like kids couldn't get vaccinated um yeah younger actress would be harder yeah I think it was a little doomed by its its place in time but it was there's a lot of stuff from that series I'm really proud of so um thank you for watching well I mean really one of the things that speaks to me more than any of, I mean, really it's one, it is one of my favorite pieces of media, like halt and catch fire. I think I've seen, um, cause it became something where I was like picking it apart and seeing more every time I saw it.

And then it just kind of became comfort TV. Like when I, we had a huge crisis with the business, the stuff, nobody sees like our whole website that books, all of the appointments and everything went down. It had to be rewritten from scratch we're switching companies and it was just like i'm gonna be up for close to 72 hours i'm gonna be drinking a lot of coffee and like i've got a um i mean and i just i like i think i went through the season like four times rewriting rewriting the website it just just on in the background keeping me sane um and i uh i don't know i mean it really it really is one of my

favorite things like you see people still find it i mean like reddit and things will just blow up um but it was you know my i don't know i'd like to hear the history of the the pilot but it my guess was that it was coming out of because i i loved mad men i The Sopranos and it looks like studios at that point were like, okay, we need another period-centric or very place, sense of place centric, anti-hero group of

ambitious egos in the post-Mad Men world and that was some attempt to do that. And it really easily could have just become very derivative of people trying to recreate that and it really easily could have just become very derivative of people trying to recreate that for the amc trying to become hbo at that point and it didn't you know it became this thing that was like so disinterested and um talking like anything else that was on tv um which i really respected because a lot of tv you know was

not great at that point like you just saw all of these easy decisions that could have been made and then a refusal to do that um even when when critics largely weren't getting it i mean they came around by the end of it but those second and third seasons i was like yelling at the paper sometimes like thank you when people because they're like well everyone on this you know everyone on the show invented every single thing in the history of silicon valley and it was like no it's about how our wounds inform what make us creative yeah there was no way around that that's not the point like no uh oh god that's astute on so many levels. I mean, do I go outside in or inside out? I do think Halt and Catch Fire is a product of a time in television, right?

I often think it's like a middle child of history. The Sopranos and Mad Men and what were kind of thought of as the difficult men shows, you know, the great kind of shows that made the idea of show running and prestige TV were kind of like in their final seasons. And we had not gotten to like a proliferation of a million shows. By the time the fire ends, the only show people watch live anymore is game of Thrones or walking dead because they kill people off.

But when it starts, like it's still Sunday nights. And so I think we're like definitely taking our moves and our cues from the shows that came before and then somewhere in the middle for incredibly personal reasons kind of decide to start playing our own music um so i do think it is that place in time i do think the anti-hero is still alive and strong and you can see that in joe mcmillan and we're also incredibly lucky in that. I think we had written that pilot. AMC had it.

And then Steve Jobs passed away. And I think a lot of people were chasing the idea of like something Steve Jobs like. And they amped up the nostalgia and retrospective. And I think they said, oh, we've got something in house already that kind of has that feel. And so, you know, it's so lucky on a million levels to have the thing even read, uh, we would have been thrilled to be baby writers on Mad Men off writing that, but, um, instead they kind of, you know, read it, said, do you know where this would go? And we lied through our teeth and said, yes.

And, uh, you know, got to take this great adventure. But, uh, I do think the great stunt of Haunt and Catch Fire is, uh, it's just about people kind of trying to make it by like reinventing themselves and having their projects, make them whole and creative partnerships and how fraught those are. And I wrote it with this other guy, Chris Cantwell. Um,

and it's the giant, you know, it's the thing that took us from being kind of office drones at Disney to, to being professional writers. And so I think our, our insecurities and our fears and our kind of wide open, will this be it? Will people like it? Will it make it? Is really kind of the subtext of so much of those choices.

Well, and maybe that's what helps it work so much. I mean, do you feel like you don't see a ton of co-show writers? I mean, there's a couple people, but usually it's kind of one guy who's hard to deal with that has a fraught relationship with the network but also a financial relationship and you know what you don't see like two guys getting along um i don't know why why do you think that worked for you guys but isn't terribly common one of the great gifts of my life i mean um basically i come out of magazines i started the atlantic monthly way back when i moved to los angeles to work for Condé Nast. I think I wanted to be a New Yorker writer.

It would have been my dream. But the bottom kind of fell out of that. And I was hired by Disney to help move their brands online onto Facebook and stuff. I don't know why they thought I'd be good at that. But they hired me. And the guy who hired me was Chris Cantwell. We worked together for about a year. I think liked working with each other in a professional capacity.

And then one night went out for drinks and kind of admitted we both dreamed of being screenwriters and kind of given up on that dream. And he was kind of writing some movies that, you know, he wasn't sure anyone was ever going to see. And I was like, you know, I think the best movies are TV shows right now. We started talking about pilots. I read him. He was really good. I think he must have thought I was okay. We just shared a sensibility. I think that's incredibly rare.

I don't know. It was also nice to have someone to turn to when it was scary and uncertain and go, we're going the right way right like we're doing this we're not giving up like we I don't know it's a lonely thing trying to reach a creative endeavor through so I'm really grateful that for at least that time we were able to kind of well I think a lot of shows too that are trying to tell the story of like a decade or a period of history they just sort of use it to get they use the sense of history just to get to the the story of like a decade. Or a period of history. They just sort of use it to get. They use the sense of history.

Just to get to the inevitabilities of their character arc anyway. But like this. Your show does kind of. You watch people grow up. And change and interact. And then forget who they are. And remember who they are. In ways that are incredibly honest.

And like the insecurities of the show change you know almost like as the writing room grows up or something like that i you and harmony corinne are like the only people that have ever given me a panic attack through writing film i mean i had a like meltdown on the floor my um was like a new dad and do all this stuff with like the unlived life of the parent that you have to be, you know, that Carl Jung said, the unlived life,

the parents, the biggest force in the child's life and all that creative stuff that you haven't realized or acted on your kids feel your sort of anger at that. And they try and take that on as their project. If you don't do your project. So one of the reasons to kind of get off your ass and do stuff is for that. And so like add all this insecurity about that. And then I think it's the episode is called giant but it's where jordan is digging the hole and donna's on

the business trip and they're coming back and there probably will be some spoilers in this you should watch hot and catch fire if you haven't seen it i'll try and flag where those start if there's big ones because i would like to talk about some of the more granular things um well but like uh he's digging a hole to prove to them that's something that he thinks he deserves or should create doesn't exist and the hole's empty and you know he's drank too much and the girls are trying to help him and his wife's coming back to be like oh i made a mistake and then seeing like and like all of that i mean i i really like i had five minutes on the carpet where i couldn't breathe like it it was, I don't know.

That's good writing. Good job. Yeah, I guess I'm also going to say I'm sorry. But I know what you mean. I mean, it's interesting. I'm doing, I think the reason I'm doing this Cat's Cradle book is when I read it at 16 or 18 or whatever I was, it did. It gave me like this existential, like I couldn't move for like five to ten minutes after finishing this book it just did something to me I think that you know we want I don't know

I mean I preferably be nice to have like an enlightening or an expanding experience of art but hey you know panic attack will take but I think it was definitely enlightening and expanding for me you know a lot of it I just didn't know that was there, you know, like I wouldn't have known that was there. Yeah. But it was, and you know,

but the, the kids, the kids grow up, the, the family dynamics change over the course of your show, what the characters are running from changes almost every season in a way that's realistic. Like it doesn't just feel like,

well, we got to get to the next thing because somehow we have to move from Texas to California because the seventies became the eighties became the nineties. Um, and, and all of that stuff was so like, he said that it was almost like the stepchild or the in-between of the golden age,

you know, transitioning to screaming or streaming or something, which is kind of funny to me because it sort of is about Gen Xers, you know, like the, when the kids are at the end um you know like hayley's telling everybody about this wonderful experience uh that they're having in the buddhist temple and um it sounds like they're going through anger wad or something i don't know if it's uh yeah i think that's what it's supposed

to be yeah yeah yeah but you can yeah i just you could fast forward like six years and it was like oh here's the older brother of everybody who I went over to the house in elementary school. And, you know. Yeah, yeah. I think that's right. I mean, that was, ended up being the, what was so delightful about it was getting to live

with all those characters so long and kind of have their lives from the inside out. I don't know how to stress this enough, but the thing that was so unique about Halt and Catch Fire, at least the experience of making it, was I just think there was this kind of wide openness that I can only equate to the first time you fall in love with somebody and you're just like, oh, I can't get hurt. And you just go all in, like kind of blindly and very vulnerably. And we took that for such granted uh you know i was 30 the

week they picked that up and just kind of like did it that way and everything since you know was trying to kind of get back to that that sense of i don't know i guess it's rare and so many people embrace that and it was such a a virtuous process that I think that kind of showed up in like the themes we were able to embrace. And then we were also allowed to do that, allowed to be like, this story is about, you know,

Gordon confronting the edges of his own, uh, choices as a father and what he feels constrained by. And we were kind of allowed to go to these very discursive personal places. And, um, I don't know. I don't want it to make it about the industry and like the imperatives of

making commercial things. But, um, I just, well, the show is about that though, you know, as much as the process of making it has to be.

Yeah, I guess that's right. I guess that is right. Cause I think you can see if you zoom not too far out that it's a lot of creatives trying to say, am I happy now? Like like did this make me whole like can i can i make this live alongside my personal life and am i baking my own demons uh into the thing we're making here um well and all the time there's there's different uh forces that make it the reality but the reality for hollywood and for tech is the same

and that the best thing does not always win and something can almost be perfect it can almost be beautiful and it still doesn't happen and i mean if you just go back and be like why do we use an x86 intel processor versus a motorola i mean just a random somebody made this decision everyone jumped on board it wasn't the best one you know Betamax was probably better than VHS but we had VHS like and you know a lot of making movies in Hollywood it's the same thing you can have this beautiful script you can have nine out of ten people signed on some some executive says no this is the way it goes and then yeah history becomes something else so I don't know if that was at all uh if any of the frustrations or, you know, emotion you have as a Hollywood person, you see the metaphor with tech because I definitely felt that when you look at

the history of why those things are. Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, and I do think that aspect of it is, is so present, but you know, it's interesting because I've got a little distance from it now. I think I was out at the Austin TV festival recently and they told us it was the 10 year anniversary of the pilot coming on um and the things i'm so grateful for are the experience of making it and then um conversations like this right where people are like i found it and it meant something to me um that's like the the meaningful stuff that kind of lasts like in

the moment are you like i think we're at least as good as the Americans have been. We're not getting like nominated for anything, but yeah, that's the ego and that passes. And, um, I don't know. Uh,

yeah. I mean, in some ways I'm grateful that it kind of flew under the radar just because I think it didn't get clouded with a lot of other kind of, Oh, people liked it when we did this. So maybe we should keep doing this it was very true to itself internally so um yeah i don't know i and i'm most

fulfilled by just like the art that kind of matters to me when people kind of just say i had a personal experience with it and uh that's i don't know that's why you do it i think well and the um like i think the marketing didn't quite get across to people what it was i don't really know how much marketing and tv matters as much as hollywood so it may not but one of the things because i've been trying to get people to watch the show for 10 years and you've gotten a lot of people to watch it but one of the things i would always hear is like i don't like computers or i don't like 80s whatever and i was always like this is as much about computers as the hustlers about pool.

Yeah. You're looking at a pool table, but that's not, it's a lift. It's a fucking weird title. Yeah. I get it. There's a barrier to entry kind of built in right at the top.

And I, you know, and I do think this, the first season has a lot of that. We're trying to figure, we're trying to copy the shows we like where we're like, is this mad man? Is this,

you know what I mean? I think you can feel us like kind of aping the, what we think TV shows are supposed to be. And it really isn't until the second season of the show that I feel like we're just like going for broke playing our own music. So I think it also kind of can be a bumpy ride to get into the show sometimes. So the first season hangs together pretty solid and the pacing of it ramps up

to the end. Like it's funny. Um, the relationship of technology and like how many livers do you take with it? I mean, some things are not as consistent as they get to be later, but I don't know that that's why anyone's watching it. I mean,

the pilot does feel more like, you know, trying to to find a madman soprano's breaking bad type antihero how do you what is the you know is the american psycho really a sociopath or you know the hollywood wall street you know is there something there that's human or not or you or me or all those big questions but it doesn't really go there as much i mean joe's so much more complicated than um what what that how that character could have been written and like has been written a lot of times i mean you had really really good actors uh that kind of came together in a way that i guess everyone was affordable at that time yeah i mean what was that did that change anything like you're writing it long

before they're doing it but you reflect on a performance or see things through there no you beat me to it uh that changes everything you know and it was still a time where you would go film the pilot and then write the rest of it and so we filmed that pilot and just like certain things just jumped off the screen to us you you know, uh, where, you know, like Mackenzie Davis, who is basically a newcomer at that time, I thought was so good as Cameron Howe. It was like, well, we got to write into this and we cast Toby Huss as Bosworth. It was supposed to just be kind of this generic hard ass, but then he was kind of warm and funny. And it was like, Oh, right into that. Uh, and then Joe and Gordon, you know know i think there was a version of joe where he

was just don draper and he was always right and then i think when we kind of did the pilot we're like it feels like he's kind of faking it it feels like he's kind of not sure and it feels like it would be interesting if he was like kind of wrong-footed by these other people that kind of questioned that veneer of like kind of the steve jobs impression he's doing or if he actually stole lines from steve jobs and then likewise you know gordon was just so kind of brilliant and we could give him stuff like digging that hole and he could pull it off and you can't do that for everybody and so um in success a great show i think is a feedback loop and you just see what's working and you kind of go more of that you know not as that season went on we did a scene between cameron and donna and we're like oh this is this is something you know uh so i think that's what's working and you kind of go more of that you know as that season went on we did a scene between cameron and donna and we're like oh this is this is something you know uh so i think

that's what's really fun about it there's a show you set out to write and show you um ultimately do right and if you're not listening to the show i just think you leave so much on the table and so that uh yeah you hit the nail on the head it was so much about who we cast and that changed it completely the the thing that i love about the way that joe um so like if joe came into jungian analysis you know um what if he didn't go into psychoanalysis and it was taken a totally different 40 in direction i mean i think like what the way that that would be conceptualized is like this person is incredibly intuitive just deeply unconsciously intuitive, but it's not a choice.

So he's not able to, he's always dreaming a dream and trying to reconnect to the dream that mom was having, you know, at the end of her life. But also, um, that was the last time he was kind of contained and held by this thing,

but he can't dream his own. So it becomes this parasitic thing where it's like let me inspire you but then slowly because i'm this isn't a choice i'm going to take that over and just visually i mean every time you see him being okay then you realize he's not he's reflecting a vision of what's coming in the next five years because he can't stop seeing the future and i mean just the first scene of him looking just like a happy guy from one angle. And then from the back angle, you see that he's looking at a Calvin Klein billboard

and then he unbuttons this button that takes off his tie because he's trying to be a little bit more of the next thing than the right now to challenge everybody all the time. And I mean, the wonderful dolly zoom of him looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, all of those,

all of those things, like you, you see this guy until the very end, not really ever be an individual. He's always so unconsciously seeking a family that there's no creativity outside of his own. Like it's just his, it has to be connected to somebody else's dream,

you know, until the last shot where he kind of can see his life and it's like a person for the first time but probably you know also less important than he's ever been you know i yeah i love it all and lee paste did so much brilliant stuff with it but for me that third season too is is kind of such a i don't know he kind of hits a rock bottom he kind of he kind of goes all the way down after kind of his san francisco endeavor with ryan you know and some tragedy and then the kind of like version of him that comes back to comdex and kind of comes back to life i don't know that that's that that's really kind of

i feel like the spark of some new joe in that and that was very satisfying to me that felt very real in terms of people that kind of fake it until big tragedies in their life kind of forced them to kind of go who am i faking it for and uh i just thought he did that so beautifully uh that actor the last season there's a lot that's indoor it's like more limited sets was that was there was that a thing where um you're kind of riding to the constraint like do they say you have less money but we want to finish it because we think it's going to go be something that Netflix is going to stream. And were they seeing the show had longer legs at that point? And were, or was that,

did you have access to the same kind of budgets? And that was just the way you chose to write it. Because it's a lot more intimate, you know, that last season is a lot more people talking around a table. It works well. I just was always curious. Yeah. I mean, I got to say, that's what I love to do the talking around a table. It works well. I just was always curious. Yeah, I mean, I got to say, that's what I love to do the most as a writer. It's interesting, right?

Because I'm on this show, Sugar, right now, which is a detective piece. And there's big set pieces and stuff. And I'm always kind of trying to drive it towards, yeah, but what if he was in a restaurant emoting? I just think that's what I love. And we knew them all so well by the fourth season that it was like, I want to like go to Gordon's birthday party. I want to, I want to like be with Bob and his kid.

I don't know. There were, I think that's just what felt so attractive because we knew the characters so well, but the camera's closer to them. Yeah. Yeah. We knew, but we also knew it was ending,

which was a gift that, that, you know, every season you kind of write to a cliffhanger, but try to tell yourself, okay, if they don't renew it, at least we've given enough closure that people aren't gonna be like oh but like you know giving it a place to go and so it was trying to say goodbye a lot of that last season and so that some of the stuff that just kind of still kills me about it is uh you know

like that phoenix scene in the last episode where cameron and donna talk about like the company they won't have and obviously the episode uh you know after we lose gordon and um just because they were old friends to us by then so so i guess i mean we're choosing it we never had much money at all so that you probably feel that too but um you know you have even less by the fourth season just because everything costs a little more each year so maybe we're doing that too well and maybe i'm not reading it right but one of the things that seem to be implied is you know a lot of cameron's arc is that you know her dad is in the military and dies and she's a punk rocker and she maybe marries a version of her dad at some point or there's something there but it looks like you know if phoenix doesn't happen and she ends up going a different direction it's likely that what she's working on is going to become military

contractor technology so i don't know i don't know that was intentional but that was definitely when she's i forget the name of the the agent who's like courting her with the bangs who's talking to her in the trailer but yes when i was watching those i was being like i don't know i didn't know how intentional that was but that's what i was like i know what she's talking to you about i know what you're gonna be i know what you're gonna be doing in 15 years if you make it i mean a thing i wanted to say at some point on this podcast is i am such a strong believer in that kind of death of the author thing i'm like sure there's what i intended when it left my fingertips. But then a million people touched it between then and when it went on screen. And what it means to you is just as valid as kind of like the top spin I tried to put on it by then.

You know, so I don't know. I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. I think that's I had never thought about that. I think that's compelling. And I wish I had thought of that. Well, it's not over. But the show is written in this open way. I mean, the moments that,

because I've had a couple of patients that have watched it and talked about it, if it was up their alley and it was, it was helpful for them. But I mean, the, the, the two things that like the moments that I see on the way that y'all wrote that, that you wouldn't see on anything else, they would have missed it or it would have just been too like on the nose it's like there's like a moment where gordon and donna are talking and gordon says donna says something that was very important to gordon was never really important to her and you can tell at that moment that that it's over their marriage is over but it doesn't really end for another year or two

and you but every moment that you see that after it's her trying to ask him something on the phone. Yeah. They solve a problem together as parents. And then she says something personal and he just kind of hangs, like he doesn't care. Like, or because like the way people change or fail to change is that we

experience all this anxiety. And then maybe we put it towards a healthy behavior where we do something different, but probably we just put it towards a healthy behavior where we do something different but probably we just put it towards something that takes the anxiety away that is easy and then we forget that there was ever anything there we needed to do and when you know there's the i think probably my favorite scene in it is donna having this like wonderful reconnection with cameron you know she's smoked she's smoked weed she's like a yeah, she's able to say all these powerful things that she needs to say. And then it's in her head. She never says that, but she

feels better. And, and because that, that is, that is that thing that is so human and so true and so sad. Um, yeah, you just see all day, you know, in therapy that most people don't get about psychology enough to put it in their character. Well, two things. One, I, so I, I hadn't really, I have not watched any episodes of the show since it was on. And I don't know if that was just like psychologically, it was like too much to go back to or what, but, um, they played that scene at the, this little reunion we had.

Um, and I didn't write that one. A woman named Angelina Burnett wrote that actual scene you know we break the story together and then different writers go away to execute them oh my god and it made me it made me tear up I that's such a they're so good in that both of them but I also think it is what you're saying so psychologically true you know it's like in the world where we're brave and we say the things we really feel um but I also think back on that, and I think Chris Cantwell and I were unafraid to put a lot of our own very personal shit and literal lines from our marriage

and our marriage to each other in the show. So it's funny. I'll think of fights that characters have and say things like, because you don't like it or because it didn't come from you. And it's like, I think that's us in some way trying to have these difficult conversations with each other on the page like you know because you don't like it or because it didn't come from you and it's like i think

that's us in some way trying to have these difficult conversations with each other on the page when it's hard to have them in person and and um i don't know i mean that's why you do it is to learn a little more about yourself and this show did teach me a little about myself in terms of i didn't really know kind of i believed in this cycle of all this until we got to the end of the show. And I was like, well, I guess that's the, I guess we wrote these people the way we believe people are.

You know, you have to, that seems to be a motif. When in technology being almost like a character on the show, how do you, how do you handle that? I mean, the line that people repeat over and over is it's not,

it's not the thing, meaning technology. It's the thing that gets you to the thing. And they're all people who don't have a community, don't have a family, have some sort of obsessive, ambivalent relational style where they really like and also dislike people and really want to be alone and also really don't want to be alone. And that's kind of the driving engine under them, even though everything else is different. And so technology became this thing that they could work on together to connect people. And that's kind of the enemies in the internet. But I mean, how do you handle technology as it changes being almost like the,

you know, the silent character? Well, I mean, yeah, I think it becomes this excuse for them to have this family of choice, right? All these people that kind of feel unfulfilled in other ways that they're able to kind of like agree and come together and appreciate the beauty and the project they're working on each year.

And sometimes more overtly, you know, if it's a game like Cameron's designing, you know, put some charge of themselves out there express themselves but i also think that line thing that gets us to the thing um and i'm sure this was not said at the time ends up being so much about that that thing of how we always kind of place our better life or our happiness in the future you know what i mean like that this is always a bridge to that perfect time where we'll make it or we'll be right or we'll be first or we'll be we'll have the idea and then and then we'll be done uh and the show is that over and over again you know and i and i think that's the human condition at least as i experience it um so i think i think the technology ends up being a little bit of a vessel to talk about that but also we really

wanted to do right by the people whose story we kind of were telling so um which we felt had been kind of untold so we we really kind of interviewed a lot of people and tried to understand what the i don't know what love for those things was like what what the magic of kind of coding and taking things apart and um knowing something before everyone else knew something felt like and so you know it's some synthesis of our shit and their shit i guess that's what i'm saying yeah well and kind of like i mean though in the hustler you see pool tables and there's people doing pool but you don't have to know anything about the rules of pool you just know it's a show about a character and like what makes a man brave and you know does you know you know when he's doing good you know he's doing bad at pool based on context but you don't have to know anything about it there's no

like wide shots explaining the game i mean there's also there's no scene where they're like talking about configuring scuzzies for 30 minutes or you know there might be what a bypass driver is and i mean maybe the engineers are doing that in the background but because technology exists as a metaphor you sort of always understand what they're doing, even if you don't have any context for the time. But we did, I will say we tried to thread that needle, which is, I'm not going to claim to be an incredible engineer, but we lived in some ways in fear of the freeze frame where it was like,

if someone stops this and says, what are their hands on? What are they doing? Or like, what did she write on the board? Or what does it say on the screen? Like it has to be real, right? Because the worst thing that could happen to someone whose story we're telling. And in some ways it's the story of like Compaq and all these other little companies we stole things from for them to watch this and be like, this is bullshit.

You know, like we can't do that because we're probably the one show that's going to try to tell these stories. So we really tried to have that be true but at the same time we have this uh this mantra about like if it seems like they know what they're talking about the audience will go with it it should be true but we don't need to stop and go we don't need a scene where someone like takes a salt shaker and explains that it's the modem and i don't know we don't need to like over explain it but it also needs to not be complete nonsense yeah for sure we're in the middle we lived well yeah then the technology is right like i'm not saying that there's any place where it's where it's wrong it's just that because they're talking about it contextually you know it's accurate um it just isn't that isn't the point that accuracy i hope so yeah yeah i mean did you look to did you

look really closely at you know where these people came in and out of history i mean there's a point where joe mcmillan looks a little bit like joe mcafee for a second i mean do you read biographies of those guys or do you just kind of know enough to do what you want to do with the character uh the former that's that's astute we definitely looked at uh mcafee uh for mcmillan especially going into that third season uh yeah we just we read a ton and that's i think that if there's any consistency to my three line um a history major in college i was a researcher in magazines this show really kind of comes out of us wanting to do something like with a glenn gary glenn ross

feel chris's dad having worked a little in computers and so i went to the la public library and got all these books and we found one called breaking big blue that was kind of the story of reverse engineering the ibm pc and just reading like these kind of like nobody read them library books uh and going you know there's there are stories in here and the fact that they're not on the wikipedia yet means you know we can do something people don't necessarily know the punchline to and so i always think that's what you got to do is go way too deep and just see what stays with you and um so hopefully most of the characters feel like not one-to-one but you know that they draw from a variety of real people. And as far as doing a writer's room and two showrunners,

I mean, do y'all have a process? How do you, like, get everybody working at what they're best at? Or was there figuring that out? I don't know. Yeah, we were mentored in our first season by this guy, John Lisko, who came out of, you know, NYPD Blue and Southland and some other things and he was this incredibly benign kind of coach who kind of taught us his offense and then he stepped away to create that show Animal Kingdom and without him I think we would probably have just like sped right into the wall but by the time he left we got the second season we kind of we were ready to just kind of do our thing um and so i think you see a big change into that mutiny world we also like had not done

so well in the ratings in the first season where it was like well like the second season is probably the last season so let's just like let's just do all we've ever wanted to do in tv this season and and just just be happy with that and then we got renewed and that was a beautiful surprise. But I think the trick to the writer's room is, this will sound like lip service, but it is just to kind of create a safe space for people to feel like they can bomb and be incredibly personal and kind of say anything

and to give people a lot of autonomy and investment in it too so you're not like rewriting people we had such like studs and killers in our room that we really tried to change as little as possible when a good draft would come in um and then just to have like a warm fun time and we we really did i i look back on it very fondly it's like a constellation of people much like the actors you could never kind of put it all in the same show again just because they've all gone on to kind of these wild successes but yeah I mean that that's half the fun of it for me is sitting in those rooms and making those jokes and making those discoveries and having it go someplace you never dreamed it would go

yeah it's that that works is still like the magic of writing to me you wouldn't think that there's like a right answer but when you hear the thing everybody just oh you're oh that you know like it uh there is there's an energy to it so that's that's yeah that's the woo part of the process that i still just like an intuitive collaboration of like really listening to each other's energy almost yeah and there just turns out to be like a best version of it in some way you know and but you only get there if you're kind of open and safe and not you know putting ideas down or saying it has to be this or uh kind of trying to cook to a recipe and so that that this show is really allowed to kind of have that range so what what's next i mean you said the halton you

wanted to do the cat's cradle uh script but hopefully is that like written more for tv or like a movie yeah i think that's going to be a limited series but you know it's interesting that it was um halt ended and there was like kind of a million possibilities for what we might do next um i guess you realize just like what choppy waters things face and and the whole experience ended up being so charmed and that we were kind of like oh this is how it works is they like they like your pilot and they let you film it and they hear you with all these wonderful people and everyone just kind of uh embraces it and develops it in a positive direction forever and ever amen

um but yeah i mean i think both chris and i together and separately have in a positive direction forever and ever. Amen. I think both Chris and I, together and separately, have had a couple heartbreaks since then. Shows that never made it to air, shows that did and kind of didn't quite get realized the way we wanted them to, like Paper Girls. I say without any ill intention. The industry has changed so fast over the past 10 years, especially the last five.

It almost feels like, I mean, by the time the past 10 years, especially the last five. It almost feels like, I mean, by the time the ink is dry, it's, you're presenting it to a different industry, you know? I think so. The strike and AI debate too. I mean, I wonder what that changes, you know? And it's interesting coming off a show like Halt and Catch Fire, because like, by the time you're finishing that series, you're, you have to be aware in the writer's room, the technology is like a little bit more of a villain than it was at the beginning. You know,

that was big by the end of there's you having some Facebook data leaks and political, you know, fallout from different things. And, you know, was that something that you were? Yeah,

no, it's, it's interesting. I mean, I guess, and I haven't really talked about it, but it is true. It's like,

it was a more innocent time where we were kind of like these pioneers and these Mavericks and they're moving fast and breaking things. And that's, you know, there was the social network, but it hadn't yet kind of curdled into this kind of techno bro thing. And it's so, I don't know. Yeah. I wouldn't presume to pass judgment on a whole industry, but they did seem more like heroes. We were kind of telling that story and,

and now it's certainly got a little more complex. Well, and now, you know, it's like one of the, you know, a lot of the conditions that were just like, we want more money.

The studios cave to pretty quickly during the writer and actor strike stuff. But especially with the writers, the huge holdout was they were like we want to have the ability to use your style forever with ai we want to be able to have this stuff um and i mean the idea of ai writing television is terrible terrifying to me um i mean one just because it wouldn't it would somehow be worse than most of a lot of what is out there but like two you would have the ability to really um i don't know i kind of control and uh curate something in a way that i just i don't think is good you know

yeah i mean i think i come to tv shows kind of hoping to see myself kind of reflected or surprised or i don't know you know be able to kind of identify and it seems to me very essential that that become another human being that kind of beat the wheel of that. But yeah, I mean, to me, the very obvious terrifying possibility of AI has always been that sometimes you get notes that are well-intentioned. Like, do it this way. And you'll go, you know, and you get you reserve the right to say no. Or, you know, you can't you can't pick up my hand and make me do it that way. But AI will allow them to pick up your hand and be like, but it would look like this.

Ditto with actors, right? They can say, I'm not saying that line. Yeah, the Star Wars movies. I mean, some of the people maybe signed contracts while they were alive. But, you know, Peter Cushing, I mean, was he aware that he was going to still be in movies? I mean, that's... I don't want to digress too much, but, like, the digital actor thing terrifies me. Can you imagine, like, signing of your likeness in perpetuity to some studio that could put you in any movie forever, like, after you're dead, so you could just be in the back?

I don't know. That's wild. like after you're dead so you can just be in the back i don't know that's yeah i mean you could see like cameron listening to a punk song where they're talking about a corporation owning your soul forever or you know and then you know zoom out uh yeah and i you know it's interesting i'm 40 now the hunk gets fired i got picked up when i was 30 and i'm cognizant as i like go into my 40s i of not wanting to be the crusty, it's all going the wrong way kind of guy. The older people I admire so much are just still so curious and interested in the world and kind of open to those things.

I'm not going to lie. AI is an area where it's hard not to go like, ugh. Well, I was just curious how that changes your process as a writer. I mean, the world you're writing for is kind of different, but then also just the way that industries pick process as a writer i mean the world you're writing for is kind of different but then also just the way that industries pick things up and how they want them to i mean the incentive structure was something like streaming was already weirder and different than cable but then now it's this thing where they're like oh yeah no we have this billion dollar streaming service but it's supposed to lose money and we don't care if

anyone watches it this is what we want written right now for the next two quarters or something i mean the those are i don't know it has has it been done that way before what is does that change the way that you conceive of projects or you just kind of write what you write throw it out there and then see if it i'm clinging to maybe wrong-headedly the idea that we still we still know good when we experience good like like nobody was clamoring for give me a show about a restaurant in chicago you know what i mean like two years ago and there was something about it that just kind of just like no one was clamoring for a show about um engineers in texas you know and i just think if you try to chase a thing or kind of move the variables to be successful or hit certain targets then you're not it loses that personal charge that kind of move the variables to be successful or hit certain targets, then you're not, it loses that personal charge.

It kind of makes it vital to me. And so, so maybe there are better writers who can cook the order in that way. But for me, if I don't, if I can't feel my way inside of it, then I don't, I just don't think I'll do a good job. So I can't work that way. And so you can feel your way inside of it. Does it change just things like the aesthetics of it you know the topics that come up or is there you know a a certain tone to it or

just the pacing basing how it's on it's going to be aired there's all that stuff that you would even think about at all or that be in rewrites a lot later on well i mean yeah the great privilege of being a showrunner too is you get to get to assemble your writer's room and you pick all the directors and you pick all the actors. And so there's so many chances to kind of not repeat yourself and to kind of make sure your influences are new and interesting. And I always try to read a bunch of weird stuff that I think kind of lives in the world of the thing I'm about to take on next. And, you know, I mean, so so I feel like I have kind of new things, but at the end of the day, I'm still,

I'm still the filter. I have to kind of pass all my work through. So there might be some similarities. And someone pointed out to me recently that like the character of Mac and paper girls, maybe felt a little like Cameron and Hawkish fire. And I was like, well,

you know, probably cause I only listened to so many punk CDs when I was a certain age. And that's kind of what I can draw from at a certain point. So I don't know. But I don't know. You know, I think we come to our work to be surprised, and I and said, oh, that's what I was chewing on when I did that two years ago? I'm out of that, you know, cycle of development or onto a new arc. So I didn't know at the time, but that's why this worked just because. Well, I'll tell you, Chris Campbell and I wrote this project that I don't think is ever going to see the light like a residential rehab facility someplace beautiful presided over by like an alan watts like sage and a family that kind of um you know kind of dealt with the problems of modernity uh when it had to do with like your phone and just you know all the things we're struggling with and i think we realized when it didn't go that it was like a place we kind of

wanted to be patients but maybe not a place that we kind of knew what we were talking about so yeah uh i think that was about being pretty exhausted and new parent you know um my first child was born the week halt and catch fire wrapped filming um i got married in the middle of it uh you know chris had his first kid during it you know it was your life transforms while you're making a piece of art and hopefully they kind of can speak to each other yeah and so the stuff i'm interested in now i mean i think we'll always be contending with those ideas of happiness being placed in the future and whatnot but subconsciously i think

you probably do choose things because there's there's something you want to get out in yourself. And, uh, I'm only going to find out when I read it back, it's probably the way it'll go. Well, this is a fascinating talk. Is there anything that we don't touch on?

You feel like it's relevant or that you want to say, I don't, I don't want to, uh, take, I don't want to go over your, your time. Uh,

no, only that, you know, uh, I think I said this before we began uh i was i was so grateful to receive this this really nice kind of email from you and the thing that continues to endure about this show for me is just that people seem to find it many years later and and have a personal experience with it um and that just is so gratifying, you know, because I think everybody who makes something on some level

wants to kind of be seen and understood. And so I think we add ourselves. I think the word appreciate means to add value to. We add ourselves to the things we appreciate. And I'm just so grateful you appreciated this and added yourself to it and gave me a chance to talk about it. Well, thank you so much. That's really kind of you.

And good luck with everything you've got coming up. I'll look forward to it. You too. Season two of Sugar. Do you know if they use the same? I think there's a recent Denzel Washington horror movie that was like, what was it called? The Little Things. movie that was like uh what was it called uh little the little things i think the i think the house is the same as like his handler and in the first season of sugar but i wasn't sure i just

oh man i wouldn't be surprised there's a ton of stuff because it requires from like the beginning of the boon in atlanta filming so i mean like the nice guys there's a million of those. And I'm like, that's, you know, that's Tom Dex. That's, you know, you see, you get certain eyes, you start to see this stuff everywhere. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if, is it the hotel and sugar is used in, is it that? No, it's the, the house that his like handler or something lives at. It just has like the numbers are on this curb,

and there was almost the same kind of shot, and it looked exactly like the same. I will check and get back to you. But yeah, I think once you know, every car commercial is filmed on the same street in downtown LA. So there it is. Yeah, there's a lot of places in LA that have been shot quite a few times. What is it?

Oh, I know. One thing I forgot to ask you i've always wondered about that the the brothers that sell the printer uh at the complex thing was that were they based on tim and eric were they like tim and eric was that they're tim and eric-esque um i don't know if overtly they were i know one of the actors uh barack a little bit personally he was like a friend of a friend and He definitely gives a little Wareheim vibe. Yeah. The writer who wrote that, Mark Lafferty,

has gone on to run stuff. I thought just leaned right into that. So yeah, that's a delightful and enduring. Yeah. The first season, it gets so funny at the end. It really is just very clever. I just think it has to be too

because like you said it can be a little dry if you talk about computers and i would probably write a show where people just emoted 99 of the time but i'm really glad that's on the fire of the show where you laugh as much as you cry because i think i think the one kind of softens you up for the other and that's life well um that's that's perfect thank you so much and is there anywhere that i can point people to um other than linking to the places where uh paper girls is only available at amazon the other stuff i believe um is available to stream a couple places is there anything else i can point people to you got a website or an imdb page anything you want the show notes no just see you know watch the stuff. Love what you love.

Beware of each other. Because everything's about to change. The world is going to crack wide open. There's something on the horizon. A massive connectivity. The barriers between us will disappear. And we're not ready. We'll hurt each other in new ways. We'll sell and be sold.

We'll expose our most tender selves only to be mocked and destroyed. We'll be so vulnerable. And we'll pay the price. We won't be able to pretend that we can't protect ourselves anymore. It's a huge danger. A gigantic risk. But it's worth it. If only we can learn to take care of each other. Then this awesome, destructive new connection won't isolate us. It won't leave us in the end, so...

Totally alone.