The Watch - 'I May Destroy You' Is Astonishing. Plus, Sam Boyd, the Creator of ‘Love Life’

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

‘I May Destroy You,’ written by and starring Michaela Coel, may be the one of the best new shows of 2020 (5:16). The show feels like Coel announcing herself as a new voice in television (12:16). Plus, an interview with Sam Boyd, the creator of ‘Love Life’ (20:39). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Sam Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me on the other line, as always, it's Andy Greenwald. Hey. Hi.

Hi, guys. Hey, man. It's like looking into a mirror today. I don't think this is going to be video, but Kaya called us out on our relatively similar wardrobe. We're just some guys in gray teas today. Yeah, I really do feel like, um, like a college RA or something today. Like I just, that's basically the look I'm going for.

It's Thursday. Greenwald, what is up, man? So good to talk to you. Chris, it's Top Chef Day. I mean, we're not even talking about it today, but I have to be honest with you. The penultimate episode. It's all I've been thinking about today.

I am so hype. We will definitely break down Top Chef on Monday after, after we come back from the weekend. And today we have my interview in the second half of the show with Sam Boyd, who is a creator of HBO Max's Love Life, which is a show I really, really like quite a bit. And it was great to talk to Sam about a bunch of different stuff. Did you see the news? Did you talk to him about the news? Season two, no, this was recorded earlier in the week, so we didn't know. I felt like that was, there was like a implication that that was going to happen, but no, I didn't, we didn't talk about that.

But we talked about a lot of other stuff, including Linsanity, which plays a role in Love Life, which I really enjoyed. But we are going to open up the show. I mean, first of all, any opening comments. I feel like I should always open the floor. Any running updates? Any senior fish updates? Wow. You know, you really blindsided me here.

I mean, thanks for asking you about the running. You know, I know, I don't know if I've said this to you because I've tried to keep it pretty buttoned up. But I have learned that the only thing kind of weirder than telling someone about a dream you had is telling them about your running regimen. Because it's not interesting. Yeah. at all to anyone, except the effect of that is I am so thirsty, both because I'm overheated because I'm running too much, but also I'm so thirsty to talk to someone about it, that if anyone shows, just throws me a crumb, I will talk about it, which led me to be, the other

week I was busted, just busted at a socially distant hang. By the way, it's much easier to be busted in socially distanced hangs because you cannot just like, Lyndon B. Johnson someone in the corner and just have a private conversation. You know what I mean? You kind of, it's all one conversation. And if you try a strategy of a diagonal cross-talk, you are done.

But I was just kind of, I saw an opening with an old friend and I was like, because she admitted that she used to run too. And my wife heard me say the words, oh, a banana and milk that's so interesting. And I have not lived it down since. because there's nothing interesting about that at all.

But I was like, really, really before the run. So thank you for asking. And I've now just bored and alienated everyone on this call as well. No, listeners, I got to tell you, I've witnessed this firsthand. I'm on a couple of text threads with Andy, one of which is largely dedicated to Philadelphia rap appreciation and also just like childhood memories with our old buddy Matt. And in that thread, Andy mentioned.

listening to a mixtape that is on NTS Live by a DJ named Ted Draws that is like a Philadelphia rap compilation, which if people are interested, we could tweet out. I listen to it all the time. And this has become Greenwald's running soundtrack, which he told everybody. And I did not comment for, I. You just, it was like, it was like a, it's like you were on a Zen Buddhist retreat. You felt so silent for hours. I was Don Draper at the end of Mad Men. And, and. Andy, the guy, our buddy, was like, oh, what are you talking about? You run? And then, like, I looked at my phone, like, an hour and a half later. And it was, like, 96 unread messages of Andy posting screenshots of running apps, but, like, also having an internal dialogue about which kind of running apps are invasive to his personal information. And, like, I didn't traffic in the running apps. That was recommended to me. What I did, which I will cop to because I assumed I was already preparing my defense because I assumed this was where you're coming, was I assumed you, after a busy day at the office, you're managing a website, you're doing multiple podcasts. You're keeping abreast of the news, which is fast and furious,

and making people furious. You opened up your phone. Like, ah, the bosom of old friends, my one, my one, you know, my one respite in this, this uncertain time. And you saw a screenshot of my running sneakers. Yeah. I had helpfully provided. So put the little moon, I, like, on that thread. So it's going. Yeah, do not disturb. It's going great. But I did want to say,

I'm eager to listen to this interview you did with Sam Boy, but I think that for people who haven't watched Love Life and are maybe on the fence about it, but are dire fans of our podcast, they should know that Jamie from Devs has quite a comeback season. Yes. It is really a remarkable rebound. And not one I saw.

coming. No, I know. Jamie from Devs comes through. Scoot McNary comes through. There's a cast of thousands. Anna Kendrick does a really good job on this show. So I was really excited to talk to Sam. But Andy, before we get to that, that'll come up in a little bit. I wanted to talk to you about a show that debuted on Sunday on HBO, regular HBO, not HBO backs. And that is, I May Destroy You, which is the new show from Michaela Cole, who people might know from Chewing Gum, which was on a few years ago and she's made some appearances in shows that we've talked about on and off here and there like a London spy and Black Mirror and Black Earth Rising. She was the star of Black Earth Rising, which was the follow-up to Honorable Woman that

Hugh O'Hoplich did. That's right. And so this is her new show. She's written and starred in. And it's a 12-episode half-hour drama set in London and follows the life of this woman named Arabella, who Michaela Cole plays, who is essentially kind of a, I guess, a millennial literary star is somebody who kind of has a growing following in the literary circles based on some work she's done on Twitter and kind of burgeoning literary career and is on the precipice

of, I guess, kind of more of a mainstream level of success. She's about to turn in a draft for a book. She's got a boyfriend in Italy that she sees on and off, although who knows if he's her boyfriend. I mean, that's basically the first scene of the show. And by the way, I, you know, I hope, sorry to interrupt you because I'm very excited to talk about this show. But the one trend that I'm so worried is going to, there are many things, but I've obviously fallen victim to this terrible pandemic. But the growing trend of Italy is just a quick, romantic vacation getaway on shows that are otherwise completely filmed in other places, a trend we saw in normal people, a trend that is in this show. show, a trend that was in zero-zero-zero. Lots of romance in zero-zero. That's how I choose to remember it. Yeah. Stephanie and his wife just kind of making their way through Italy. I thought it was a love

affair between the oversized pig and the bad acting members of the cartel who were fed to the pig, but I digress. I made a story of opens with a surgeon in Italy, but takes place mostly in London. And it is going to be, I think, essentially a show about Arabella, piecing together, what happens on a terrible night when she's about to turn in the draft for her book and she goes out and she is sexually assaulted. The first episode ends with her kind of coming to an initial realization that that is what has happened to her. She's been drugged. Right. She's been drugged and as she begins to realize it's been assaulted and has to sort of piece together the events of this night. Right. And this is drawn from Michaela Cole's life. A similar thing happened to her when

she was working on a draft of a screenplay and of a script. And so the show comes Sunday, and obviously it's very heavy material. But I would say just like my initial impressions of this first episode. And I've kind of, I was telling Kaya before we started, I've got screeners, but I really want to watch this one every once a one, you know, weekly with everybody else. Because I feel like that's part of like the kind of way it should be interpreted or understood. I was blown away by the show. And I was blown away on a number of different levels. What were some of your initial thoughts?

I was too. This is, I'm trying to think. I mean, it's been a great year for TV. There have been a lot of shows that we've loved and have talked about. This may have been the most exciting debut that we've seen yet this year. It is absolutely exhilarating television. Michael Cole, as he said, writes every year. episode stars in it. She's a phenomenal performer. She's totally charismatic. You can't take your eyes

off her. There is an energy to this show, to the performances, to the filmmaking, to London itself, to the way technology interacts with young people's lives that feels like, and this is something that I think is a through line through the very best television shows when a new voice sort of announces itself. It feels like a window has been cracked open and you can peek your head out and there's an entirely different world there. Yep. And, you know, as Chris said, it's, it begins with some, the series kicks off with some very, very uncomfortable subject matter.

So I'm not saying this is like a holiday to watch the show, but to be transported into Arabella's life and her friend group. And also, you know, frankly for us, it's, there's a generational tourism at play too. This show, I look, I welcome our younger listeners to tell us that we're wrong about this, but it feels truthful to a lived experience that is extremely, extremely hard to do. Very easy to say you're going to do it and extremely hard to do. And furthermore, I would say that, you know, the sexual assault that occurs in this episode and in the spirit of, you know, the idea of trigger warnings and things, there's nothing on screen in this episode. I imagine that may change.

Yeah, it's a brief flash, yeah. To a memory. Yeah. That there's a reason why, a lot of the coverage and, you know, gushingly positive reviews of the show have focused on that event, which obviously is the event that sets in motion whatever is to come over the next 11 episodes. But is it weird to say that it doesn't define this, at least through one episode, as a series? Because that is a huge part of it. But it is also just so completely and immediately alive to, in so many ways. It's very funny. It's very lived in.

It's familiar. it's exciting. You know, the music. You know, as soon as I was done watching it, I texted Chris a, someone to put together, started to put together Spotify playlist. It goes from like Little Wayne and Drake

to Rosalia to Tierra Wack to British groups I've never heard of. There's like a great dance sequence set to what I immediately am sure is like a, some classic two-step hit from the turn of the millennium that I've never heard before, but everyone the show seems to love, which is really cool.

And it's just a vibrant, multiracial view of London that is really welcome. And I'm just thrilled by. Like, my favorite shows are ones that drop you in the middle of a world and let you keep up and let you pick up the pace. Like, and that can be, I may destroy you, it could be sports night. It can be any number of things, but I love shows that are like, we now join this world already in progress. not here is an outsider who's come into this new place and they're going to be the audience avatar and step by step someone will come up to this person

and explain well that's Dr. House and this is how he gets things done on a day-to-day basis you know it's not like that it's like I'm in this world immediately I'm immersed in the sounds of the sites and I love it's exceptional writing and directing because from the first interaction between Arabella and her

this Italian guy that she's seen through the very last seconds of the show to her realization and even like the huh she gives at the very last second of the first episode where she seems to be kind of coming to grips with what's going on

so much is in between the lines so much gets left unsaid or just gestured at there's a sort of B plot that is obviously going to get woven into the entire thing about another couple who are,

what we're about to experiment with having a threesome. And the guy in the relationship is friends with Arabella, but that they were like sort of basically orchestrating a threesome over like an app over a dating app. And so much of like what happens

between those two people and then as their group kind of expands throughout the episode is like little stolen glances at one another or someone looking at their phone at a moment where you're like, why is that person looking at their phone? And the way in which Cole, like, brings the use of technology and the use of phones and the,

both the secrecy and the almost performative transparency that sometimes happens on phones and collides those things is mind-blowing. Like, I actually don't think I've ever seen a show that shows how people really use technology. Yeah. In this way. I mean, also, there are just moments. that are too real, like when she Googles how to write quickly. Oh, my God.

She has a deadline. She has a deadline and she sets herself an hour-long timer. And all, like, the way that whole scene is shot with, like, her opening and closing her laptop and putting on different songs on, like, her Bluetooth speaker, getting high, not getting high. Like, just like the relationship to the creative process is incredible. Yeah. And particularly, I mean, I was reading an interview with her that she did and she talks about

how one of, and I, you and I can both attest to this, one of the more challenging things to navigate as a writer, particularly if you're freelance or, you know, work or at least at your own schedule, is that because you could always be working, there is no delineation between on time and off time. And to see it through her eyes as someone who, you know, is 10 years younger than us. And so just the constant barrage of information and temptation and distraction and procrastination, but also obligation. You know, she has these over-eager agents who are invading every corner of her life, including checking her Instagram to see if she's working or not.

It's just like a full crush humanity that is really something to see. And for as much as bleak as that sounds, that part of it, The thing that the show doesn't skimp on that I just loved is the warmth of friendships. You know, there's something, it's so hard to do to make, I mean, it's just, this is a very banal comment, but like it's really hard to make genuine emotion pop on the screen, especially in relatively small amount of real estate. We often talk about classic friendships or will they or won't days or romances on shows, and we always point to the way the great shows, whether they are friends or madmen, did it over dozens of episodes.

right in 30 minutes actually i mean i was looking at the timer on the bottom of the hbio go app like in 12 minutes we've seen arabella interact with eight different people and you can gauge her intimacy with all of them and there's such a warmth to her friends who will obviously become bigger parts of the show as it goes forward to the series that is really you just immediately feel at ease and then we should also just say like the talent pool she's drawing from like the dude who's in episode extremely briefly, who plays one of her best friends who visits her briefly in her sort of self-imposed writing exile and goes off to hook up with someone on Grindr. All I do is Google this guy's name. I've never seen him on the screen before. And all of a sudden,

I'm watching him do Hamlet with Royal Shakespeare Company. I'm like, holy shit, is this guy the best actor of his generation? Is this guy the best actor of his generation? Are they all on this show? It's exciting. It's just really exciting to discover something like this. And I just, you know, I urge people who maybe had heard about the show or seen it come up on their apps or whatever, or maybe because this is a very busy and hectic time and just saw the headline. And the headline for a lot of pieces are about the trauma that is at the heart of the show or about sexual assault, about her own experiences, about working through things. If those things, and people have their own reasons for choosing to watch or not choosing to watch

something, and far be it for me to tell anyone what to do with their time. but if that gave you pause, I encourage you to unpause and check it out. Absolutely. All right. Well, we can just wrap it up there and we can go into my interview with Sam.

Is there anything else you want to talk about today? I did want to say one, sorry, I have one other thing. Yeah. You did such a good segue, and I took a drink of my sparkling water, and I got one more burst in me. No, it was only because you just gave, you put such a nice punctuation at the end of that.

Let's keep going. It's our podcast. Let's fucking, like, open it up. Yeah. Just to say, we're talking about how, like, vibrant and like young in London the show feels like. And I was like, who is this young, brilliant collaborator that brought the visuals to her wonderful words and performance? I'm like, Sam Miller, Google Sam Miller. Fifty-seven-year-old dude. Yeah. Also did Luther. And just, it's like

done episodic TV. And at first that, that gave me pause. And then it reminded me, you know, and this is the first time we've made this comparison. And maybe it won't be the last. It reminded me of Fleabag where Phoebe Waller Bridge's words, and performance and voice and singular vision is so strong. And then you remember that, like, Harry Bradbeard directed it. And he's also an older male, white, British dude. And I'm very interested in these collaborations, you know. Are these guys young at heart?

Are they particularly open-minded and empathetic to working with collaborators? It's pretty interesting, you know, because this feels, generally TV directors, you know, especially when they're working with not first, I mean, Phoebe Wallerbridge had done stuff. Michaela Cole has done stuff. But it's pretty remarkable that at least from this vantage point, they were able to service the vision of the creator so fully in such an exciting way. Yeah, and I just think that they do such an incredible job of exploring the different physical spaces

that the show occupies. You get such a sense of her apartment. You get such a sense of where her Italian boyfriend lives in Italy. You get such a sense of the we work that she seems to be kind of operating out of for the night that she's doing her deadline. and the different spots that they go to. Once she goes out and meets up with Simon and goes out for the rest of the night, where they go to this little bar that has, you know,

like where they're doing shots and dancing and stuff like that, like they're so specific that they feel and they feel so real. They only make the story that much more vibrant. So, yeah, just absolutely stunning stuff. I'm sure we'll talk about it a lot more over the course of the next couple of weeks. We finish the conversation twice. dare I open it up a third time? No, I'm done. Dude, absolutely. I just

love podcasting. There are no rules. I mean, like, I'm trying to think of. Do you have anything else you wanted to hit today? No, I've got nothing. It's, you know, I'm just just saving my reps for Top Chef tonight. Okay. Yeah. Top Chef, we'll have a big episode on Monday about Top Chef, and hopefully we're going to have some

pretty cool guests related to Top Chef coming soon. So we'll get into that. We'll take a quick break. And then we'll be back with my interview with Sam Boyd, talking about his show Love Life. Have a great weekend. Stay safe for Anskins. I'm joined by Sam Boyd, who is the creator of one of my favorite shows of the year, Love Life on HBO Max. Still seems strange to say HBO Max, but I'm getting used to it. Sam, what's going on, man? Thank you for joining me. How's it going?

Thank you so much. A huge fan of your guys as well. Oh, thank you so much. I wanted to start with something very near and dear to my heart. Every show that I wind up liking a lot has like a moment where I'm kind of like, it has a grab you by the lapel moment that sort of shakes you a little bit. And for me, Love Life, probably predictably, it was the Linsanity moment. Uh-huh. Right. And so I wanted to ask because it's such a great, it's in the, for people who haven't seen, it's no spoiler to say that Linsanity plays a brief role in the opening episode.

I know you wrote that episode. So do you have like a relationship to Linsanity? Because it's such a grounding experience for anyone who was in New York at that time. Totally. Yeah. I think, you know, a big part of the show from the beginning is the way that we jump through time from episode to episode. And when I was writing the pilot

and focusing on 2012 and especially 2012 in New York, which is sort of the tail end of my college years there, a lot of it became about just trying to think back to what the kind of most evocative highlights

of that time were. And what, you know, in trying to kind of get as close to that feeling as possible, Linsanity emerged pretty quickly as just a very simple shortcut to kind of, you know,

of 2012, especially just I remember being in bars in the East Village and the way that that felt those few weeks, like the way the city kind of lit up and being able to like weave that in as, as, you know, admittedly, a fairly minor part of the episode, but definitely an important one, and I think important, especially in terms of how it variance us in kind of time and place, hopefully. How much did you find yourself pulling little details like that from your life, from the lives of the people in the writer's room. Yeah.

Because I find that, you know, this show is, it's relatively high concept in some ways, but there are these really fine point details that I think can only come from people's experiences, right? Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think it's funny. Like, sometimes I'm so obsessed with those details that I forget about the story, you know?

So that's how into it I am where I'll be like, I'm trying to think that there were just funny examples as we were writing where I would just, get sort of unnecessarily obsessed with some small detail, whether it was a song or some kind of element of the pop cultural backdrop. So that stuff is the most fun for me because in addition to writing it,

I directed the pilot and I directed the finale. And for me, that just always is, you know, those details are what makes it feel evocative and what makes it feel lived in to me. Yeah. So, you know, I think especially when you're telling what is ostensibly, you know, as you pointed out, it's maybe a little high concept structurally, but, you know, on the surface,

it's just, it's a story about a person trying to find connections. And so any way that we could ratchet that up, we looked for it. I think for me, especially, you know, with this and really with everything I've ever written, that those details are, are the most fun and, and I think some of the most telling aspects of it. I guess this is kind of a, what came first, the music or the lyrics question, but did you have an idea to tell a story of someone's young adult life through their romantic relationships and have each episode be sort of a discrete thing? Or did you have this idea about Darby and then the concept came afterwards? It was definitely the concept first and it was a situation where it even actually started as like an idea for a book of short stories or something. I think the

feels that way. It feels that way. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, the first germ of it was just that idea of, oh, it would be cool. You know, I think I love a lot of different kinds of movies and shows and stuff, but I've always been really inspired by the Before Sunrise movies and Boyhood and, you know, and like the Francois-Rufo's movies about the character from 400 Blows series that kind of follow a character over time. That's always been super interesting to me. And so that was the first seat of it was that would be cool to kind of do a character study,

But really, you're looking at these different capsules of their life and these different connections as parts of the whole and how each of these smaller stories add up to this bigger story, make this person who they are. And so that was the idea at first for a while. And there were kind of different versions of it. And ultimately, I became really interested in kind of tapping into my personal nostalgia for New York and, you know, created this character who, unlike myself, is a young woman and wanting to explore this character as a starting point,

but also knowing that if we're lucky enough to do multiple seasons, that's really the potential of the show to me always is its ability to reset. I think Darby's story in and of itself I'm really proud of, but I'm excited and hopeful that we get the opportunity to have each character that we follow from season to season be as different as possible and to explore all of the kind of facets of being a person and trying to love somebody. You know, you were talking about this idea that, you know, you even considered making this into short stories.

Yeah. And then that's something that's so personal, and you're going to have complete creative control over that. You're obviously going to be limited by the, like, the page. But in some ways, that's all you. What happened to Darby and what happened to the story once it hits the writer's room and once you start kind of bringing in these other creative voices? Because I've found that this is one of my favorite. kinds of shows where each written episode, you know, they have like their own signature to them,

even though they feel part of a whole, but they feel different. You know, like the Magnus episodes feel different. The flashback episode feels different. I was curious about what that was like. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you know, I had written the pilot, to be honest, not ever expecting it to actually be a television show. So when we actually had a writer's room and in working with my co-show who was Brigid Bedard, who worked on Rami and worked on Transparent in that same capacity, I always was looking forward to that opportunity to crack it open with other people. And it's the way I've always worked. It's the way that I made the one independent film that I directed before I made this show.

I'm always sort of thirsting for collaboration. And to me, the way that I treat the script is, you know, in this case, the pilot, it, I had written it and, you know, was proud of it. And I always feel like I come to my collaborators and say, okay, I've done this work. And I've figured a certain amount of things out. But now let's run with this together and let's get it on its feet in a real way. And so in working with Anna, who, you know, also was an executive producer and

working with Bridget in the writer's room, you know, the simplest way to say it is that it just got better. But really, it just got deeper. got fuller, and I think a lot of it was me also knowing the limits of my experience as a young person and as a man and wanting to bring other voices and experiences into the fold and have all of these people come together to make the show as good as it could be. So that was something I was excited for and a huge part of it. Tell me a little bit about working with Anna, because I mean, I imagine that she,

to take on a role like this to play like this sort of huge swath of a character's life, that it's a different kind of commitment from her and it's a different kind of creative partnership for her. Definitely, yeah. I mean, you know, getting to work with Anna was incredible. She's so good in the show, but she's also just, she's such a smart person and her instincts are so right on

and she just so totally, I think, got what we were trying to do that I really did feel like she was a complete, you know, a complete and total collaborator. And, you know, really it was about building the character together because I had had this kind of starting point, as I said, in the pilot. But as I got to start working with her and even before we were shooting, you know, and figuring out what each episode was going to be and figuring out where we were going to take this character, she was so instrumental in crafting that and developing it and bringing anecdotes, you know,

and experiences of her own and stories she'd heard. And, you know, I think the same way I worked with the writer's room and really everyone, honestly, was to sort of just have everyone dig into their own. pasts and memories and experiences and feelings as much as possible so that we could really try to try to dig at the heart of that as best we could. I imagine it's pretty hard. I was thinking about this a lot in relationship to the Scoot McNary focused episode in the second episode, which I thought I'm a huge Scoot McNary fan and I thought Anna was incredible in that episode. And I was thinking about how hard it must be because you're essentially like you're asking Anna, you're

talking with the writer's room about, oh, we're going to bring in all these different anecdotes, all these different life experiences from all these different maybe points in time. And then we're going to try and distill those down into something that can only have happened to this person. Right. Right. How hard is that? Like, because I was like, that's not like a wake that anyone else has been to.

You know what I mean? Right. Right. Right. Now, that's a good question. I mean, I think what was awesome was to see that whether it's Darby or any other character we end up following, there are obviously superficial details. about any person that you would think would preclude experiences like that,

but then you just see how, you know, obviously there are definitely things that would happen to one person and not to another, but there also is like a very universal undercurrent to all of it. And even if something like the wake doesn't necessarily come literally from someone's experience, those feelings do. And I think you pinpointing that example is great. because it's one of my favorite sequences in the show. You know, Bridget, my co-show runner, wrote that episode

and did such an amazing job. And what I love about that sequence is something that was exciting to me about the idea from the beginning, which is, you know, normally with a show like this, which is sort of superficially about a young person in New York looking for love, which we've obviously seen before, and they have friends and whatever, you know, you're usually with those characters in real time.

And I love almost all the shows about, you know, about those kinds of stuff. stories. But when you're in the character, you're in those stories with the characters in real time, you're having to live with whatever version of the character you're seeing for the whole season. And so basically, if they're 24 in that season and as such an asshole, you know, like, you have to live with that for the whole season. And so it was really fun to go, okay, well, actually, only in episode two, is she going to be this age and make this mistake? And maybe it's not in conventional terms the most quote-unquote

likable thing for a main character to do, but if you treat them maybe more like a person that you know or like yourself, you'll see that it's the kind of mistake that most people make at that age. And so, I think that sequence just does feel like the kind of, you know, the first microcosm of that

within the show to me where we're able to really see her fuck up. Yeah. You know, and that it can hopefully remind us of ourselves instead of make us not like her, you know? I have a sort of bigger picture question. Do you have to bear with me? Because this is kind of like, it involves multiple sourcing of like,

so like Andy and I just talked about this Marine Ryan article that was in Vanity Fair that was, that was kind of about the vanishing sense of attachment people have to shows like whether it's like the office or even something like house or whatever, where it's like you're essentially building up a relationship with Pam and Jim over the course of 50 episodes before they get together,

whatever, however long I was. And you guys are coming in and you're doing Love Life. It's essentially the first 4A and original programming that Max is doing. And you're doing it in this fairly, I think only in the last year or two really would, maybe like three or four years, would somebody have considered making a show like this? Right. Where you would go through the trouble of having a really cool character and getting Anna Kendrick to player and creating this world with all these supporting characters that people are like,

I want to see more of that person. Totally. And then you're like, there's a clock. Yeah. And I was wondering whether or not, not if you had regrets, because obviously, you know, but whether or not you ever play the what if game with yourself about like, oh, if the show had been made in 2004, we would be hoping to get like our fourth or fifth season out of this. Right, right.

Yeah, it's funny because I think it's something I've considered a lot. But on the contrary, I feel like the way. that we're doing it is, I think, the best way to do it because I think so many shows overstay their welcome with characters and drag things out. And it was even part of the original pitch for this show was this kind of this idea that I had that was like, oh, if every year we're watching some show we love over the course of five years. And in each season, there are two or three episodes that we go, that fucking episode was unbelievable. So, you know, you think about the Patrick Wilson episode of Girls or, you know, that's just one

example that springs to mind, but so many great shows that have these kind of banner, you know, episodes that everybody talks about. And, you know, and then the episodes in between that are good, but they're normal episodes of a show. The idea was sort of let's take one person's arc over the course of five seasons of a conventional show, strip out all the B&C stories, and compress that into one season so that we're essentially just jamming that all in, making it kind of as dense as possible, and telling this complete story and then getting out before we're like, oh yeah, now she dates 10 more people, you know what I mean?

Right. And so I think, yeah, that was really like, one of my favorite things about it from the beginning was being able to do that and being able to kind of play with the archetypes, play with the versions of this show that we've seen before and kind of hopefully deepen that or push past it, you know, push past what people are expecting.

And just, you know, we also wanted to make a show that was character-driven but was never boring. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's a fail-safe, right? Because it's like, otherwise, one of the shows that I thought of when I was watching Love Life was Felicity, you know? And there was, aside from the fact that there was a huge amount of like, please watch Felicity. You know, that was like a huge part of like saving Felicity and keeping it on and when, how many seasons will this go? And there was always just for some of my favorite shows, I remember Friday at Lights. It was just like, this thing is not coming back. And

people kind of look back on that like it's the Sopranos. I was like, that was on Hulu for a while or direct TV. And then it was like, it would be on nine months later, but some people had seen it. And we don't really do that as much anymore. I mean, there is a sort of, because of the platforms, it's like, here it is. Take it or take or leave it. Totally. Yeah.

And I think when you're not beholden to like the traditional format of 22 episodes to air once a week for a year with sweeps and like whatever, you know, when you can tell these more concise stories and you can trim out all the fat. And I think especially in this case where we were trying to do, you know, again, like what some shows would try over the course of a series, but doing it in one season. Yeah. You know, or what a show would do over a season in one episode, you know,

it became really exciting to try to figure out new ways to do that and fresh ways to use the real estate of a season of television. And it was pretty heavily inspired by, I think, a lot of the shows you guys talk about, which are these incredible sort of ambitious feats of half-hour storytelling that we've gotten in the last five or ten years, whether it's girls or Atlanta or, you know, any number of shows. Yeah, Fleabag and transparent and, you know, just so many shows where all the sudden you have this sort of format and this vessel where you can tell small, stories within it. I think that's what's really exciting to me too, because I also am, you know,

as kind of high concept as the overall structure of the show is, for me, that's just a way to be able to tell these smaller stories, you know, and there are episodes where it's like, you can't make them, this couldn't be a movie, you know, if I, if I pitched someone a movie that was like, oh, you know, this young girl starts dating her boss or, or, you know, any of these relationships, it wouldn't be enough. But when you're able to kind of make it this little short story, you can just dig so much deeper into these smaller things. And that really came from watching all those shows and going, oh, you can just have an episode that's just about a feeling

or about one thing that happened to you or one idea, you know, and that became really exciting. That's really cool, man. Well, I love the show. Thank you. I think people are really digging it, obviously. Sam, thank you so much for joining me today. And obviously, Love Life's Available in HBO Max for people to check out.