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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Getty
Despite solo acts like Taylor Sheridan, Mike White, and Sam Levinson dominating so much of the pop-cultural discourse, the value of group collaboration remains television’s true North Star. That’s where Vulture’s Roomy Award comes in: While the Emmys award specific episodes, this award celebrates when the chemistry of an entire writing staff results in the funniest and most interesting writing on television. The best example of this in 2026 is the writers’ room of NBC freshman comedy The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, the winners of our second-ever Roomy.
The mockumentary was created by former 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock and his longtime collaborator Sam Means. It centers on the titular former football star, played by Tracy Morgan, who tanked his career by publicly gambling on himself, a choice that affects the lives of his ex-wife, Monica (Erika Alexander); son, Carmelo (Jalyn Way); new fiancée (Precious Way); and live-in friend, Rusty (Bobby Moynihan). Now, he’s tapped a similarly disgraced documentary filmmaker, Arthur Tobin (Daniel Radcliffe), to try and rehabilitate his image. The show’s writers hail from both streaming and network shows and imbue Reggie Dinkins with an array of TV-comedy experience, including prestige (Insecure), lowbrow (Running Point), sketch (SNL), and high concept (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). That’s allowed the show to remain nimble and never fully embrace labels other than “comedy.” It’s a comedy show about work but not a workplace comedy; it’s a comedy focused on family but without oversentimentality or every episode ending inwith hugging and learning.
The most powerful weapon in Reggie Dinkins’ arsenal is its rate of jokes per minute: Nearly every sentence that comes out of characters’ mouths is either a setup or a punch line. Like its predecessor 30 Rock, that constant patter defines the show’s tone by heightening its world into near absurdity, all while remaining grounded in the emotional realities of its characters. They’re all defined by a desperate need for love, whether from football fans or documentary viewers or one each another, and that drive gives the writers the tools they need to pay off both jokes and pathos, sometimes in the same moment. Like Reggie Dinkins himself, the show is simply one of one, and that’s worth celebrating.
In recognition of the superlative television writing produced by: Phil Augusta Jackson, Robert Carlock, Grace Edwards, Bradley Lewis, Sam Means, Mamoudou N’Diaye, Neda Jebelli, Meredith Scardino, and Auguste White.
During a conversation and award presentation at Vulture Festival at Tribeca Festival earlier this month, Carlock, Means, and most of the show’s writers’ room were joined by Reggie Dinkins himself, Tracy Morgan, to talk about what goes into assembling a productive writers’ room, turning bad ideas into good jokes, and the collaboration cheat code that is a free Zoom account.
Sam, to start, could you tell the story of how this show came to be?
Sam Means: Tracy came to us a couple years ago now — seems like forever — and talked about getting the band back together. Of course we were immediately on board because we love working with this guy and we love working with Tina and Robert. Robert and I’d been watching a lot of sports documentaries. It was post-strike; we’d had some time on our hands.
Robert Carlock: After The Last Dance, there was just this rush.
S.M.: Like Beckham …
R.C.: Yeah, and Pete Rose had one. We thought the narrative of a guy who made a big mistake and is trying to use and control this narrative to fix everything seemed really interesting.
S.M.: Yeah, and I’m not sure everyone knows this, but Tracy was an athlete back in high school.
R.C.: You can tell.
Tracy Morgan: Big ups to Pete Rose.
S.M.: So we just loved the idea of Tracy in that armchair in that big empty mansion like Michael Jordan in The Last Dance.
As you were filling out the cast of characters — because we have a pretty hefty ensemble here — how did you think about that balance?
R.C.: Do you remember what you said, Tray, when we told you we were writing Arthur Tobin, the director character, for Daniel Radcliffe? You said, “We’re opposites.”
T.M.: How do you get a street guy from Brooklyn and a dude from the U.K. together? This is Tina, Robert, and Sam on their walk of life meeting people and saying, “Well, we could put him with him.” Arthur Tobin is my guy, I love it.
S.M.: I was filling out the cast around that incredible odd couple, and we’d never worked with Erika Alexander before, but we were in awe of her — the emotional grounding but also the slightly unhinged layer just under the surface she brings. And then Bobby is just a cheat code for comedy writers. He comes in and blows away a scene and you’re good.
You have both worked on streaming and network TV shows. I’m curious how the development process differs for those things.
R.C.: One of the things that was different from the last mini-generation of streaming was that this was a proper pilot process. Often you’re getting these orders from streamers trying to box each other out where they’re committing to a season or multiple episodes. Doing a pilot was actually really refreshing, getting to cast something and see it and shoot it and learn from that instead of just immediately being on the treadmill of making eight, ten, 13 episodes. We went back and reshot some things because we learned so much. Once you have your cast and everything, you’re constantly thinking.
T.M.: The cast, as soon as we got on set, we all fell right into place. The day before we shot the pilot, we had dinner at my home because food brings us all together and we wanted to really hit the ground running. So we really got into talking and getting to know each other. By the time we got to the set, we knew exactly where we were. It was incredible. We had a good time, and we all hit the ground running. I mean the cast, the writers, we all ate together. So we are not a team; we are a family. You can believe that we are a family. That’s how we move.
R.C.: Dad, I need to borrow some money.
T.M.: Wait a minute!
How do you think about putting together a writers’ room? What do you need for this show to be successful? Who do you bring in?
S.M.: I feel like Tina kind of described it perfectly in her book, Bossypants. It’s kind of this alchemy of energy and perspective and you need the nerds. Robert and I might cover that, but you need so many different points of view and so many different perspectives and life backgrounds. And we always appreciate people who are willing to share their own life stories and their own backgrounds with us.
R.C.: And yet you want all of that to meet in the middle. Every one of these guys, it was immediately like, “Oh, you’re funny. You hit the ball back.” We have a similar frame of reference there in the middle, even if we’re coming at things from a very different place, which is exactly what you want.
Phil, you’ve worked on other people’s shows; you’ve worked on your own show, Grand Crew. From your perspective, what is the environment that a writers’ room needs to be maximally productive?
Phil Augusta Jackson: When I’m in the leadership position, I think managing expectations really, really helps. “This is the goal of what we’re trying to accomplish on any given day.” Also, letting people know that anything they pitch or share is valuable. I think I often talk about pitching in a writers’ room, and it’s like in baseball, if someone bats .300, they’re really good. I don’t know. That’s good, right?
Why are you looking at me?
P.A.J.: The point is to swing. It’s not to find the perfect pitch. Creating a dynamic and an atmosphere where people feel comfortable speaking, saying what’s on their minds, is the most vital part of a writers’ room. I’m going to say something: This shit’s not always going to work. But sometimes the thing that doesn’t work leads to another thing that doesn’t work that leads to something that ends up working really, really well.
How do you know when something doesn’t work initially? How do you know that it’s still something worth pursuing?
P.A.J.: You don’t, sometimes.
R.C.: It’s usually someone else picking it up.
P.A.J.: As long as it’s on topic in some fashion, it is valuable. But sometimes we’ll be talking about something and then we’ll be like, “Oh, let’s talk about snacks and stuff.” You need to talk about snacks sometimes, too, because snacks are important in a writers’ room. You know what I mean? I’m still on topic right now. I’m doing it right. See, we’re doing it right now.
Does anyone have an example of something that started as a “bad idea” that ended up making it into the show?
Mamoudou N’Diaye: Basmati. That’s a great idea.
R.C.: Just the name, Jerry Basmati? Reggie’s nemesis, played by Craig Robinson, is named Jerry Basmati for that reason. And that was come up with when I was out of the room.
Does anyone want to take credit for Jerry Basmati?
Grace Edwards: [Raises hand.]
R.C.: Great name, if you don’t think about it at all.
P.A.J.: We had a long discussion in the room because neither Robert nor Sam were in there when we came up with the name. So we can’t act like we’re too excited about the name Jerry Basmati. So I’m going to pitch and be like, “Right now, he’s Jerry Basmati.” He was supposed to be Jerry Basmati from Rice University but then I think Robert, smartly, was like, “Let’s not go too fucking crazy.”
R.C.: I feel like you underplayed it so much, Phil, that my mind was like, Oh yeah, the name Basmati. Sure. Okay. For a couple seconds.
G.E.: But there were some ones that didn’t make it, like François Pourquoi. That was another Phil special.
Meredith Scardino: There’s a thing that certainly I do a lot, which I call “mouth brain,” where your mouth says stuff and you do not ever check with your brain first. And some of the stuff that gets in is a little bit of mouth brain.
Grace, you wrote episode four, “Save the Cat.” I wonder if you could walk us through how you get assigned that episode and how you approached it?
G.E.: We start, just like every writers’ room, in a place of sort of blue sky. We’re kind of tossing around ideas about different things. When we start nailing down some of the themes or the arcs the characters are going through at that point, we board it and then Robert and Sam sit together and they figure out who would be best for the episode. For this particular one, there was the cat stuff, but also there was the Monica dating stuff, which is very much based on my horrific experiences, sorry to say. Auntie’s still dating!
It was a fun episode to do. There was some stuff with the cat on set. We were told the cat could sit there, the cat could not sit there — because it’s a cat. We were in the woods with Daniel Radcliffe and Tracy at night. We talked about where we wanted to take Reggie and Monica — getting Reggie on the road to figure out how he’s going to be active in his quest for the Hall of Fame. This cat was part of that. And then also we wanted to explore romance in middle age with Monica.
T.M.: Monica dated a guy with a Cybertruck.
G.E.: And his thumb got cut off.
S.M.: The value of a writers’ room like this is that Grace wrote a great outline and then a great draft, but every single episode gets rewritten in the room multiple times. Everyone’s voices and everyone’s jokes are included and then we have a table read and we read it again after. Everyone really has their fingerprints on every single episode.
Grace and Phil, were you both on the same season of Insecure?
G.E.: Yes. We started at the same time, and yeah, we did seasons four and five together.
Even though it’s a very different show tonally, does that relationship help you when you get into this writers’ room?
G.E.: Definitely, and I’ve been blessed to work with multiple people here. Meredith was with me on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve worked with Phil — this is our fourth season of television together. I knew what he was capable of, and it’s a fun, quicker way of getting into the weeds. We had a shared language. There was a very particular way that we did things on Insecure that I think sort of inspired both of our leadership styles.
Can you describe what that is?
G.E.: I remember this was back in the day when, with HBO, we had money and stuff. So we started out at the Ritz Carlton in Palm Springs. I was sitting at the bar by myself, and then [Insecure showrunner] Prentice [Penny] comes up to me, and he’s like, “Grace, I just want you to know as a showrunner, I’m a painter. So Issa [Rae] is yellow. I already got yellow. I don’t need yellow from you; you’re blue. My job is to take all the colors and mix them together and make a painting.” I always remember that, especially when I have the privilege to run a room. Thinking about everybody’s strengths and encouraging people to pitch from where they are. Everybody has such different experiences, so I’m encouraging people to pitch from their own life experience because that was an early lesson that was taught to me.
T.M.: I think that’s awesome, to write from where you’re at.
That kind of feels like it’s also true for the cast, right?
T.M.: Do you, I’m doing me, Arthur’s doing him. And that makes it easier for the writers too. You expose yourself; you’re out there so they know what to write. You have to, and I learned that from SNL. They got to be able to make fun of your flaws.
Meredith, you’ve worked on Girls5eva, which you created. On many of your shows, the joke rate is really high. How do you get the joke rate really high while still moving the story forward?
M.S.: I think working with Robert and Sam and Tina on Kimmy Schmidt, I feel they were the ones who really taught me how to not just hit joke, joke, joke, joke but also move the story along. It’s definitely a balance. It’s kind of like accessorizing. You’re like, Oh, is there too much? I know sometimes I would be in an edit on Girls5eva and Tina would be in there with me and she’d be like, “Okay … what’s this story about?” It’s a balance of making sure you know what the characters want and that your jokes are all filtering through there. It’s also something a lot of us honed in working late-night TV. I worked for Steven Colbert at The Colbert Report for many years, always writing for a character who had a point of view that you were trying to communicate while also hanging bits or a satirical premise on it. You always want to lock in to characters’ motivations and what they want without feeling like it’s just a random bang, bang, bang, bang.
S.M.: What Meredith is describing is a high degree of difficulty in the writing, but it also requires a cast like this one to be able to hit the joke and also tell the story and then pivot to another joke while still telling the story and selling the emotion in the space of two seconds.
M.S.: One other thing I feel like I learned from Robert and Tina was to make sure your characters are so specific so that the jokes are kind of just so imbued with their character. There’s this test you can give yourself if you’re writing something — if you took all of the character names off of your script, can you still tell who’s speaking? If you can’t, your characters aren’t specific enough. With this cast of opposites and super-talented people, it makes it easy to tell stories with comedy throughout the whole thing.
What is the secret to a good sitcom setup on an episode basis? How do you know “This one is going to work for an A plot, this is a B plot, this is a C plot”? How do you figure that out?
M.S.: You find something juicy. There’s little zinger jokes here and there that can lie in the background but then sometimes you find a story that feels juicy, like, Oh, this is going to challenge our characters to change. This is going to push people out of their comfort zones. I was thinking about a pinball game or something where all these lights kind of pop on, and you can also feel it palpably in the room when everyone gets really excited. There’s just an electricity, and you can tell you have a good story that you want to pursue.
R.C.: The other day, we were working on an episode for the upcoming season and inadvertently both stories ended up being about money. We haven’t had these people really talk about this divisive and difficult subject. I can’t wait for them to start having those conversations.
P.A.J.: With sitcoms, have a really simple emotional story between the characters. It’s such an obvious thing, but get them a little closer to each other — just an inch closer to each other — each episode in a sitcom. When it’s done well, the audience doesn’t realize that’s what’s happening; this story is super-silly and the characters actually just got a little bit closer. It’s a subconscious thing that happens on top of whatever silliness is going on. When you have the silly and the fun and you have a little splash of that heart, it helps make for some of the best stories that we have.
T.M.: It’s like Arthur Tobin and the family, right? Because at one point he says, “I’m part of the family.” Mission accomplished.
G.E.: Just a quick thing to add is the arc of the season too. There are certain things that are just sort of great fun for the episode, but also, we talk about where we want to end the characters. A good story, especially when you have a shorter ten-episode order, is taking us toward where we want to end at the end of the season as well.
I’m curious how you guys think about sentimentality. The famous sitcom thing from Seinfeld was “no hugging, no learning,” and there’s not a ton of hugging here, but there is some learning. How do you think about that mix of things?
S.M.: We think heart is the heart of the show. That’s the pillow we have in the writers’ room. With comedy, you don’t want people to learn too much. The characters have to be the characters. But at the same time, to tell a story that people can connect with and have them connect with these characters, they have to be feeling real feelings. You can tell what a family this cast of actors became, and that makes it easy to tell these stories about them growing to love each other but also allows you to have real conflict on top of that, knowing that they love each other.
Do you guys think about it the same way, or does anyone have an aversion to sentimentality when writing?
M.S.: It is funny. Just the other day, we were in the writers’ room and some of us were working on a story and it ended with one character literally going to another character to apologize. And somebody in the room was like, “In my family, it’s more of a ‘You figure out this non-apology’ apology. Maybe a gesture like, I brought you food, or I am just literally here with you and not storming out.” So there’s always ways to undercut it, take the Hallmark off of it with things that feel a little bit more true to reality.
R.C.: Was that your mom, Auguste, that you were talking about with us?
Auguste White: My grandmother actually has come around to apologizing, but beforehand we talked about how she’d just say, “I’m going to the store, you coming?” instead of actually saying she’s sorry about something. Other writers were also piling on and saying, “I can’t remember one time that I just got a straight-up ‘Hey, I’m sorry.’” We complicated it. We wanted it to be a happy and hopeful resolution but just a little bit of acidity in there, too.
Bradley Lewis: Tracy and I are both big fans of The Honeymooners, and The Honeymooners was incredibly funny, but at the end of every Honeymooners episode, there’s some little sweet thing. Having those small sweet moments allows the characters to be really open in other parts of the show, and that’s where you find very unexpected funny things. And we have an actor who leads this show who is the king of unexpected funny.
P.A.J.: In real life, when you’re resolving conflict, there’s not string music playing. In real life, if you’re arguing with a friend, you kind of get through it and you’re like, “Are you hungry? I’m hungry. Let’s get some food.” Then you’ll joke with each other. That is real life. You can prevent oversentimentality by just honoring what actually happens in real life.
A.W.: The thing that makes a sitcom a sitcom is the funny ways a person is causing problems for themselves, but there’s also a lot of humor in how a person tries to fix it. That’s where I feel like a lot of the heart comes in our show. It’s not just from sappy or saccharine apologies or thank-yous, it’s also just the earnest effort to make things right, even if you do it in a bit of a wacky way. And I think that’s where the sweetness can come but not kind of overwhelm or disappoint the audience.
When you’re writing on a show with a wide variety of characters, how do you put yourself in the mind-set of every single person in a full group scene?
M.N.: I normally am just like, All right, let’s turn off my Rusty Brain and put on Monica Brain. What’s Monica going to say in this sort of situation? Not everyone’s going to talk in the same pattern, but when you’re putting them in different situations, it’s a testament to how clear the characters are. We know how each of these people are going to act in a different way. If there’s someone running away from bees, it’s going to be Rusty running at bees. “I’m going to protect the family. I’m going to do it.” It’s going to be Arthur going, “All right, I did a documentary about this, so we’re supposed to do this.” And then it’s wrong because they’re American bees, not British bees.
We have all had so many different conversations and have so many different perspectives about things that we all deal with. We approach it very differently. You apply that lesson — like, “Monica reminds me of this person,” or “Something that Auguste said a while ago is going to really inform the way we’re going to approach this.” That’s the fun part about this room. Everyone knows, “Oh, that’s a Grace joke, and that’s going to be fun for Monica to say.”
S.M.: That’s really hard on a first-season show, and it’s a real testament to this writers’ room that we hit the ground running with all these characters and all these writers.
T.M.: I’m really, really happy my writers know me and my voice. I’m really happy about that.
How do you make sure that is the case? How do you talk with writers?
T.M.: Honesty. Just be yourself around them so they know who you are. I did. I’m me. I mean, I can’t be nothing else. I didn’t graduate from Harvard. I didn’t do none of that. I dropped out in 11th grade. Thank the Lord I’m here around all these beautiful people.
R.C.: Earlier, Tracy was talking about being willing to expose your foibles as an actor and to let these people who don’t have to put their faces on-camera use them. I mean, on 30 Rock, we eventually did stuff about you having diabetes. You wanted a wheel for a foot. You were just like, “If it’s funny, let’s do it.” That openness communicates itself to the rest of the cast, and it communicates to the staff. That’s a quiet leadership thing that is really important creatively.
T.M.: I’m not here to hide nothing from nobody.
I was curious if any of the writers found themselves connecting to a character that they didn’t expect to when they were writing an episode.
M.N.: I feel spiritual like Brina sometimes. I like that she claps back at everything. I love that she just has this energy and has a lot of unexpected qualities to her. There were lines that Precious [Way] would say, and the way she said it, I was like, Damn, you’re cool as hell.”
S.M.: I wish I identified with Brina.
R.C.: Sadly, Bobby’s character Rusty, who literally lives in the basement of his best friend’s house. The days you’re writing Rusty and like, Oh, why is Rusty flowing so well? Don’t feel good about myself, but I could use some basement time right about now.
S.M.: I’m Tobin morning and night.
G.E.: Yeah, I was going to say Tobin as well, because of film school and always trying to get closer to perfect while being earnest but not annoying. That’s something I struggle with. And then also Brina too, because I like fashion.
A.W.: I was going to say the Basmatis. It was so fun writing for bad, mean people. Just being in the room and coming up with these really mean-spirited insults and the kind of backstabbing that those performers played so brilliantly and just elevated with every choice.
P.A.J.: I was going to say Monica, but more from a fandom. I grew up watching Living Single, and writing jokes for Erika Alexander is so cool. I’m thankful to be able to write for the whole cast, but that show has a very special place in my heart, so writing jokes for her is always so cool.
T.M.: I’m calling her the Black Carol Burnett.
M.S.: She’s one of those actors that can ground any scenario, no matter how hyperbolic it gets, and it feels from a real place. It’s really cool to write for her. I mean, it is a dream cast to write for, but I also really enjoy writing for Monica. I’m always sort of protective of middle-aged-lady stories. I really like pitching things like bunions and whatever but getting to the heart of what they mean.
This kind of conversation that happens between the actors and the writers, where you can pick up on what someone is naturally good at and that’s added into the script and you are working together on that. How do you do that in a way that still feels grounded in the character that you wrote and allows for that natural growth?
T.M.: I used to do that on 30 Rock. I would go on Video Village with my stories and then they would end up in the script.
S.M.: We don’t have a lot of time for improv on this show, but the stuff he says between scenes goes in the next episode.
Is there a secret to doing that productively? Is there a way to do it where you’re not just cribbing from someone’s life but also kind of being like, “No, this is you and you will perform this well?”
S.M.: It’s an ongoing conversation, and I think Tracy having us all at his house before filming started that conversation in a great way for everyone. But it is a back and forth, and that’s one of the joys of making TV.
G.E.: Also, you’ve taken into account the talents of the cast. For example, Precious Way. She was doing music before this, so obviously it’s wonderful to have that to build into Brina’s character as well.
S.M.: We didn’t know she was going to sing the theme song. That was just a joke at the top of the show and then, “Oh, okay, she did. Let’s use that.”
Neda Jebelli: There’s also something wonderful about shooting while we’re writing. That’s something that maybe is happening less now, but it’s really great going to the table where you’ve been seeing what lines are popping and then adjusting the stories around those lines. It’s been a real blessing to be able to write and shoot and be able to adjust the stories that are in the future to what we’re seeing happen in real time and what’s popping off the screen in real time.
Neda and Bradley, when you guys got paired up to write together on episode eight, “The Loyalty Swamp,” what did that kind of collaborative process look like?
N.J.: Well, I feel like I lucked out. I got to write with Brad, which is amazing. We didn’t pay for Zoom. I feel like that’s the biggest thing about our collaboration.
S.M.: It was all 45 minutes at a time?
B.L.: It was the craziest process in the world. I’m like, “We can pay for Zoom,” and Neda was like, “Not today, Bradley. Not ever, Bradley.” It kind of made it better: Okay, let’s get real busy here.
N.J.: I was morally against paying for Zoom.
You don’t want to give the Zoom corporation more money?
N.J.: I just think it should be free. Why are we paying for this thing? It ended up being very helpful because after 40 minutes you go make a little snack. The thoughts are going in your head and you’re able to walk and think. We would come back with better ideas. So I feel like it actually helped our writing process a lot.
R.C.: That was an especially tricky episode, right? Because it was basically everything at the house, and the stories were all interconnected. When we sent you off, it was kind of, “Well, I guess they’ll figure this out.” Often you have two parallel stories with some interaction, but this was really everything intermingled.
N.J.: It was really fun to have both of the stories happening at the same time. Brad and I had a fun time trying to figure that out. But again, there was collaboration with the room. Like the Ex Peninsula story was born from a mini-room. I think Phil, Auguste, and some other people were in there. It was a good excuse for all of us to watch a lot of Love Island. Sam and Robert pretend they’re not fans, but I know that we converted them.
S.M.: I tried, man. I could not understand a word that was being said.
G.E.: Honestly, that is how I got addicted to Love Island. I said I would take one for the team, and now it’s Nicolandria 4L.
S.M.: But just to be clear, to address your original question, the writers collaborate when they go off to write it together, but generally one will take the lead on one story and one will take the lead on the other story if we have an A and B story and then we’ll work together to combine it.
In that episode, there is a very direct conversation about tropes and specifically the crazy-ex-girlfriend trope regarding Arthur’s ex, Narcissa, played by Anna Camp. When you have those kinds of archetypes that we’ve seen play out before, how do you keep them feeling fresh?
N.J.: That was a tricky needle to thread because we want her to be embodying these things but we don’t want to fall into the trope ourselves. That was a tightrope that I definitely had help with to write the draft — bring it back to the room, see how it’s reading, listen at a table read. “Okay, is he being too mean? Is she being too crazy?” That kind of dialing in and out happened even when we were on set.
B.L.: The other, more experienced writers in the room really gave us the confidence. Especially Meredith in that instance, when we were talking about the tropes. Meredith is a super-fun person. If you ever get a chance to write a comedy show, writing one with Meredith is incredibly fun because —
M.L.: I paid him to say all this.
B.L.: No! It’s the best because if you say something funny, she’ll go, “YES!” Or she’ll hit you, and that’s when it’s really funny. We were talking about the whole trope thing, and she paused for a minute, and she goes, “Yes.” And I was like, Okay, we’re onto something here, because she has so much experience. This is something we need to explore.
P.A.J.: So something in this room that I am going to steal moving forward, that Robert says a lot, is “How do we zag?” How do we start from a familiar place that is going to seem obvious but then go left and make it and earn that crazy space? Episode eight is a great example of that. These guys are always pushing the room to take something that starts from a grounded place and then figuring out what that gag is. That’s how we kind of achieve what you’re asking about. How do you take that spin of the crazy ex-girlfriend, but also comment on it, but also make it a story that still has an emotional ending to it that is satisfying but not too schmaltzy? That push is in every story that we break in this show.
S.M.: One of the insane things the writers do is — the book Narcissa was reading, The Trad Bitch Diet, we wrote everything. Not the whole book, but the entire back cover, the entire front cover, the quotes, the summary. Every time there’s a prop or a newspaper, we make ourselves crazy by having to write a hundred jokes that no one will ever see.
M.S.: People do pause, so sometimes they’ll catch an article we took too long writing that was fun for us.
M.N.: It’s fun to watch on social media. People figure out that by going on sub-Reddits and on Threads going, “Oh my God, I didn’t get this joke until episode seven.” I’ve never been on a show that’s had that sort of deep joke you have to dig into to get.
M.S.: It works with second-screen viewing as long as your second screen is also the show.
Speaking of Narcissa, I’m curious how you approach adding a character like that. You want to have these people come in, drive the plot along, be funny. How do you create the secondary characters?
R.C.: Carefully. On the page or in your mind, they can seem so much more appealing because it’s a new point of view, but our core cast is our core cast. They have to be driving story, and it has to be for them and about them. It is very easy to suddenly realize, Oh, wait, we’re introducing three people. So you try to do it carefully and you try to think of actors who can pull it off, like Anna. We have 22 minutes, and we have these amazing people, and yet you want the world to be bigger than just those people where conflict and everything comes from.
P.A.J.: The ones that stick and break through are the ones that help us learn more about our core guys. So Jerry Basmati, this is a rivalry that helps us learn more about Reggie’s past. Tobin as a documentarian, we don’t really get to see his personal life and his dating life, so Narcissa comes in — all of a sudden, he’s forced to confront that. They are instruments for us to learn more about our core cast of characters.
Auguste, you wrote on SNL. Did any of the skills that you developed there, with the sketch-writing and the pace, come into play here? Are you learning new skills on the job as you’re working on a sitcom?
A.W.: Definitely both. I’m learning so much from being here. I remember when I was first starting up at Dinkins and I had a conversation with Lorne Michaels: “I’m going to get to be around Tina and Sam and Robert.” And he said, “Not only are they the best comedy writers, they’re also the best teachers you’ll ever meet. You’ll go in there and become 20 times the writer that you started as.” That’s exactly what it has been. I’ve learned so, so much.
To the earlier question about what constraints produce in a writer, I think sketch is an amazing example of that. If you only have four minutes to introduce a story, introduce a character, get people on board, and get out of there, SNL is an amazing opportunity to learn how to do that. The writers and the cast members at SNL all share offices, so I was walking out of the building with these cast members at four o’clock in the morning with our delirious ramblings, getting to know each other. Those sketches and my three seasons there were based on “What’s that funny thing you said to me the other day when we were in the elevator?” and using that to deepen and enrich the stories that we also otherwise want to tell.
M.S.: SNL or places like it, where there are these very hard deadlines, make you a very solutions-oriented person, which is a great skill because things go wrong all the time. You could just constantly be complaining about random things. You have to be like, Okay, how do we work with other people to try to figure it out? Your skills really were honed there to try to fix things.
A.W.: It’s something that’s going away a little bit in our industry — getting experience on set and learning how to make a physical show where you have five people who need to cross in front of a camera and all fit in that frame. SNL does something really cool, which is everybody gets to be on set. And even if you’re just there observing, you learn what a DP does, you learn what a first AD does, what a second AD does, and you learn the physical part of getting something on its feet. That scale is so precious. I’m also lucky to be in another room now where we get to be on set, where we’re encouraged to be on set and to ask questions. It builds that problem-solving skill. Hopefully when you’re watching the show, you get a seamless experience. The scenes aren’t super-cutty and choppy because we had to start over a million times; you’re starting out with a plan, and you’re anticipating problems, and you have people who are helping you learn how to fix them.
S.M.: Yeah, I think SNL, like other late-night shows, provides something that some people hit on with the batting-average thing. You have to produce so much, and so little actually goes on the air, and you have to be okay with that.
A.W.: Oh, yeah. Slaughter your darlings. Another thing about being on set is you get there and you see what works and what doesn’t. Between dress and air, sometimes you only have 30 minutes to fix whatever the problem was when the show was at dress rehearsal. When it’s going to be live to 4.5 million people, that means, “Okay, this whole page — we’re just going to rip it out of the packet.” Not being super-precious and knowing where the real story is and knowing where the gold is helps you condense it and make it lean and strong and able to grip an audience really quickly.
How are you approaching the narrative arc for season two?
R.C.: One of the things that you’ve all probably experienced, if only as consumers of the product, is that these short seasons mean we’re really starting on day one saying, “Where do we want to end?” It’s an interesting conversation to have. Only ten episodes has benefits. If you get it right, you’re telling this story over the ten episodes. There is part of me creatively that misses doing 22. Not work-life-balance-wise, but that’s sort of one of the ways that imposes itself.
S.M.: I was just going to say for season two, it’s cool that we know when we’re airing this season. We’re going to be on in the fall, and we get to write a Thanksgiving episode.
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