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I have to send that to her.
Oh my God, shes gonna lose her mind.
So the riots were in your heads as you wrote the show?Absolutely.
Were all living in a graveyard.
I definitely walk around that area and almost expect to run into my 19-year-old self.
Because I feel like she is still here somewhere, I just dont know where.
Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler had been developing the show for a few years before you joined the project.
When she would talk to me about them, I saw them much more as totems of her mind.
Tash and I met up every few weeks and we would work.
Really what I brought to it was, Im a taskmaster.
But I learned so much by osmosis of being around [Lyonne] and her brain.
I think this is how we might be able to structure that.
If we do our job right, no one should even realize that it came in a gel cap.
The gel cap is really important!
You also directed four episodes ofRussian Doll, including the first one.
Thats more than being a gel cap, right?Yeah, I guess so.
We were like, We would love to haveThe Long Goodbyebut with a female protagonist.
Those tough-guy 70s movies, why dont they have any lady main characters?
So it really is a testament to the clarity Natasha came to the project with.
Not to mentionall the stuntsdone by Becca G.T.
Then our hair person had to make a perfect wig.
I kept saying, The thing that will sell this is if her wig is perfect.
That wig is very persuasive.
Speaking of it, I loved the shot inthe last episodewhere two Nadias walk past Natasha during the parade.
That was also the wig, right?Oh, yes.
We dressed two other actresses like Nadia and then walked them toward her.
Can you tell me the idea behind that moment?
I mean, I can definitely speak to the fact that a lot of different endings were pitched.
note: Bread & Puppet Theater.]
Theres something Fellini-esque about an ending like that, where were acknowledging the artisanship of the show.
Youre not breaking the fourth wall, exactly.
But this is how I feel when I watch the ending of8 12and the ending ofLa Dolce Vita.
And the audience has to sit with it.
Its not about you.
I was like,Oh yeah, its a curtain call.
But not even being coy, no one expected this season to become quite what it was.
It went places that were even more unexpected and exciting than we initially had planned.
I dont know if it necessarily means we would go with that original plan.
Or maybe we would I dont know, we havent talked about it yet.
Im just so shocked that people really personally relate with this.
Art being personal to the people who made it almost always manages to communicate something universal.
The show does that really well.Thank you.
Im not trying to be cute, its just that I cant really say.
I have to ask you about a very different topic:Terriers.
I loved that show.
It was your first TV staff writing credit, right?Yeah.
It was my first job, honey!
It was my first fucking job.
I will never forget that day.
And I was like, What!?
I even joked to him, You know Ive never done this before, right?
I was like, Oh, Im a writer.
Terriersis so different from the projects youve done recently.
Is there still appeal for you in a show like that?Oh my God, yeah.
On the surface, its not very much like my stuff, but I really related with Hanks alcoholism.
Addiction is a theme that I always come back to.
I think Im always gonna be attracted to stories like that, whether theyre male protagonists or female.
What did you learn fromTerriers?It was fucking rad.
I love Tim Minear, hes basically one of the greatest writers living and working.
He taught me so many things.
He also was the first good boss Ive ever had.
You know what I mean?
He was hard on me in the right way.
Tim was the right amount of, you better do better, but that doesnt mean that youre failing.
He made you want to be a better writer.
You wanted to be like, How do I impress Tim?
How do I make Tim laugh?
But not in this scary, fearful way that I had been used to.
What do you think about that?
Thats certainly not my feeling about it.
Its more that I would be more interested in a female playwrights take on this, number one.
It was basically, Why would we wanna watchDevil Wears Pradawithout Meryl Streep?
Of course, physically as well.
That was just my feeling on that particular play.
Im certainly not trying to drum up interest in that show.
They wanted me to put him onstage.
They wanted me to say all these things that I couldnt legally say.
Do what you gotta do, guys.
I also wanted to ask about one of my favorite lines of dialogue fromRussian Doll.
Another guy goes, Yeah, dont you have a coke guy?
And he says, I am a coke guy.
It was so perfect.Oh my God, I love that.
I dont even remember that.
Is there something that you wanna put your own spin on?
One of my favorite jokes is an ADR joke: Remember littering?
We were in an Uber and Natasha was like, Remember littering?
I just died laughing.
My coffee just went everywhere.
If you lived in New York in the mid-90s, you were just throwing shit everywhere.
I remember doing that.
Id finish a beer on the street and just throw it at a car.
We were just fucking crazy.
That New York is gone now, right?Yeah, but is it?
Its still lurking among us.
