Photos: Stephen Falk; Autumn De Wilde / FXX
You're The Worst Creator Stephen Falk On The Advantages Of Cable, The Appeal Of LaCroix Water, And More!
What gets him called 'Sorkin' on set? Read on and find out!
Since I first knew him as a Television Without Pity recapper (credits include: Road Rules, The $treet, Chains Of Love, and many other early '00s relics), Stephen Falk has gone on to success writing shows for others to recap, including Weeds and Orange Is The New Black. Last night, the show he created -- You're The Worst -- returned for its second season, on which occasion Falk was kind enough to talk to me about what kind of writer's room he runs, how sexual tension drives story, and what it's really like to drink Trash Juice.
Our Players
The Talk
How are you? Were you flying back to L.A. or you're somewhere else now?
I was visiting my mom before I can't travel anymore for a while. We had our premiere last night so I had to fly home for that.
How was the premiere?
It was a lot of fun. It was a good time. You get to invite a lot of crew and stuff for these things. It's nice for them to get a nice night, but we wrapped a little while ago and we had our group party, and we had a TCA event, which just feels like we're having endless events. I don't actually like events that much, so it's been a little tedious, but very nice of them to spend money on us.
It looks like, judging from the pictures on your Instagram, they're very supportive of the show, with the Trash Juice cups and so on.
Yeah. The PR department is really doing a nice job and it's a weird fine line between feeling like you're selling out and then also trying to help them market the show -- so, not that we tried to do things like Trash Juice or anything that you can see as a purposeful tie-in, but it helped for them.
Yeah, that's fun. Let's start with my most important question. Explain LaCroix to me. How is it such a phenomenon?
LaCroix [pronouncing it 'La Kroy'].
Is that how you pronounce it? Okay.
What is LaCroix? You're asking what it is?
I know what it is. I saw, during the writing process, you put up a lot of pictures of your hoard of it, and now I'm seeing it from every other TV writer that I follow on social media. What is the appeal?
It's a very flavorful beverage for being non-caloric and non-diet, if that makes any sense. I know to your and Dave's tastebuds, it's weak and wimpy.
It's not that. It's that I don't drink mineral water. That's what it tastes like to me. I don't taste the fruit part of it at all. To me it just tastes like change, like coins in water.
Yeah, I know. It's like when you're a heroin addict and you try switching to a mild opiate, it's not going to work for you.
Fair enough.
Whereas the Diet Coke, the stuff that you guys drink or whatever, whatever's going on over there, that's the full heroin. I get it. I get you don't get it, but look, when you're sitting around all day, trapped in a room with a whole lot of people, trying to create story, sometimes all you have is another beverage to open and consume. I think if you drank only hard sugar soda or that much aspartame, it would have a lot of detrimental effects, so for us it's very exciting. So we wouldn't have to leave the writers' room, I even bought a little fridge on Amazon and put it in the writers' room, and then our PA would stock it every day with LaCroix. I love a good actual diet soda, but LaCroix is a nice fake thing to get you through the day.
I guess you also don't want to be too jacked up on caffeine in the writers' room because you have that crash.
And let's face it: water's as boring as shit. This is a way to gussy up water.
Since we're already in the writers' room, let's talk about that. Prior to running your own show, you were a producer on Weeds and on Orange Is The New Black. What were some of the lessons that you learned, being in those rooms, about how to run a room yourself?
Both of them had Jenji Kohan as the showrunner. Jenji runs a room in a very loosey-goosey, egalitarian fun way where you're hanging out with people who are a good hang. It was important to her to have great people in the room, and also, you spend a lot of time talking about your personal life. She's incredibly nosy. I'm really nosy too. Not that we did this formally in the Weeds room, but the way I start every day-- First of all, I'm very strict. She wasn't, in a lot of ways, but I close the door, and if someone's not there, it's not that they're locked out, but they do have to open the door and slink in. People are late a couple times near the beginning and I'm like, "Guys, this is a fucking easy job. Your one job is to always be here and always be here on time." And I spend every day going around the room, grilling everyone on what they did that night, and then we make fun of them for their dating choices or how boring their lives are or whatever. It sometimes went to story.
It also had the side benefit of making the writers lead more interesting lives, because they knew that if they just sat watching Bravo all night and eating leftovers, they would have a fucking boring story the next day. That caused people to go out and do things. One of the greatest things was that one of our writers broke up with his girlfriend after the first season, and he's a horrible dater, so we just got the most fantastical Tinder stories every Monday morning. Everyone else partnered up, so that was great.
Back to past experiences: I learned a lot of techniques for building story, just even the way you write things up. A lot of people use note cards -- Breaking Bad used note cards -- which I find impossible. I have to write up there and then rewrite and cross shit out. If you're having to use another note card and everything out again, it's just really annoying.
I learned, sort of, everything I know, and then modified it after the NBC show Next Caller. That was my first time running a room, and then I sort of perfected it here, to the extent that it is perfected. It works for me. We have four writers and one script supervisor and then me.
Just to back up for a second: is making people show up on time considered strict?
You and I are very rules-y. I think a lot of people aren't. There is some sort of change of the guard in comedy, working in writers' rooms in the last five years. A lot of the guys and ladies who were writing in the go-go '90s had the experience where, if you're a producer on your show or even an executive story editor, you get $2 million studio deal just to maybe come up with an idea that year. There's a lot of those guys. The kids are moving out of the house and they're still hanging around on these multi-cams and they're starting to...not actually die off, but their generation is sort of starting to leave. That seemed -- to generalize -- a generation that was a lot more sexist and sort of mean with their hazing of new writers, and would also just walk out whenever they wanted. Or everyone's wives would just call and an assistant would come in and say, "Hey, your wife's on the line," and the person would leave for twenty minutes. After that happened, I would fire them immediately. I don't know if it's rare now, but I think it may be rare in the continuum of comedy rooms.
That seems crazy to me, but I guess, when you see a picture of a "typical" writers' room, there aren't five or six people in it like you just described; maybe if there were twenty people on a staff, it didn't matter if three of them were in the bathroom for five hours or something.
Exactly. There's still a lot of really big rooms right now. Sometimes there's two rooms. They'll break rooms up: one will be a joke room. I know I've listened to [Community creator] Dan Harmon talk about this, where they'll just write a draft and just say, "Joke here," and then they'll send writers off to go. A lot of rooms do this to come up with thirty alts for that one joke, and then whoever is running the room will pick the best.
Often, the showrunner's not in the room at all and someone else is running it. Rooms function differently; I just like to have a very small, very cohesive room. I'm all about efficiency. I want to go home. A lot of rooms, that's what you'll always hear: "Don't go on to a show where the showrunner doesn't like their family." It used to be "Doesn't like their wife," and now, thank God, we're having a lot more female showrunners. But that's just because if they don't like their family, they'll just want to stay at work; it's the better alternative to reading to their kids. You would sit around and sexually harass the female writer's assistant and make everyone order steaks and drink until 11 and come home after their wife's asleep and jerk off in the bathroom. One of the things you'll encounter sometimes is when someone leaves the room for a while, particularly the person in charge: you'll work on breaking the story or rerunning a script or whatever. You'll go down a road for, like, two hours. That person will come back: "Okay, what have you guys been doing?" The second-in-command will explain it to them, and they'll go, "Oh no, I don't like that." Then you just wasted two hours.
If I'm in the room and everyone's in the room, then there's not going to be any surprises. I have a writing team who are co-producers, which is, like, mid-level, but they're not higher-level writers; if they weren't there and then they come back and you explain it to them and they don't get it, they're not on board. It's not that they could derail it, but the story's going to be tainted, and I'm going to start to second-guess it. It's just good to have everyone there, and I like to have a small room because I write majority of the scripts anyway. I find it functions better.
Talk about the adjustment from writing on those two shows -- where anything goes, from a content perspective -- to being on a regular cable network. What was hardest about it?
Not being able to say "fuck." That's really it. In terms of freedom, we have way more freedom than we did on Showtime to go a little over in terms of the time if you want to. Not that I can get ten extra minutes but I'll get thirty seconds here, a minute here. I think my finale was four minutes over in the first season, whereas at Showtime, I remember having to fight for two seconds. That's really a big change, but not in terms of restriction. It's the other way around.
It would be nice to be able to show nudity, but the problem with nudity is that the amount of skin you show is inversely proportional to the talent of the actor, for the most part. The more seasoned an actor becomes -- I think the Game Of Thrones fans will see that -- the more advanced they get in their career, the less they want to show understandably unless you're Kate Winslet.
Generally speaking, if you're going to have nudity, it's going to be mostly a guest star or just a functionary -- someone blowing Al Swearengen while he monologues, not he who monologues. While I would love to have boobs on You're The Worst, I don't know if I would use it that often, because it would just feel gratuitous because it would be a guest star.
But it also feels like, especially that series premiere, you have shown everything except a nipple, pretty much. It seemed like you really got away with a lot.
Yeah we did, absolutely. It was shocking to a lot of people, I think, what we got away with, but that was just reflecting the heat of a hook-up, and I think generally, once two people are in a relationship, it kind of cools down, so even if the actors were game to do that again and again and again, and they probably would be, it's just not really necessary.
Right. In terms of "fuck" though, I feel like this summer Mr. Robot really broke new ground in terms of how often you can just do a ducked-out "fuck" in a cable show. Is that something that you want to see if you can get away with this season, or you've adjusted to not writing it?
I didn't finish Mr. Robot so I didn't really see that in play too much, but I find it distracting. I find "frick"s distracting. I find bleeps distracting. It's probably just better not to do it. We do it a little bit -- there's a little bit of bleeping -- but it's in context. Like, there's a scene where the rapper characters are at a radio station and one of the characters started saying "fuck" a lot and so you see the DJ frantically trying to hit the dump button. But just to do it out of context like Arrested Development does would just bug me on an OCD level. Like, who's beeping that? It doesn't make any sense.
Other than getting to go over time, what were some pleasant surprises about making the switch to cable from pay cable and streaming?
Nothing really in terms of the form. Going from Orange Is The New Black to this -- and I think most writers would agree with me -- that the "dump it all at one time" is really a letdown to the writing process. It's really kind of a bummer because you don't have the feeling of "Oh, my episode's coming up this week." It all just dumped. I think the conversation dies a lot quicker, particularly now, when there are 400 scripted shows. It's really hard to dump an entire season and then expect to get any real traction with the television journalist. As a journalist yourself, you know it's much easier to time a piece to the release of a certain episode, let's say. For me, it was really nice to go back to that experience, getting to show my wares twenty-two minutes at a time with a week in between. It's also a lot of fun to see ads for our show from FXX -- I've been seeing a lot on Comedy Central and stuff like that -- and we didn't really get that with Showtime.
Let's get into Season 2. What I've seen of this so far -- just the first two episodes -- as we rejoin Jimmy and Gretchen, new cohabitants, they're working very hard not to let themselves become a couple cliché. The show is partly about how each of them sort of changes the other in ways that neither of them would have foreseen, but are there any unbreakable rules for them -- something that you think we'll never see them do, or that you never want to see them do?
Going into a Season 2 where it's about sudden domesticity, we in the writers' room saw a lot of pitfalls, particularly because we were writing at a time when four or five network rom-coms had just begun to air and were probably reaching their fifth or sixth episodes. When we started this season, we worked really hard immediately to avoid tackling moving-in stories in a way that Selfie or...
A to Z?
No, what was the one that lasted like one episode? New York Story?
Manhattan Love Story. That was awful. I'll say it so you don't have to.
That was horrible. We were immediately just very cognizant of making sure that we weren't telling any stories that those shows could have, or frankly, that Everybody Loves Raymond already did. We're not the same type of show. Hopefully, we're not going to do a lot of arguments over who's washing the dishes. I think that's probably something that we can avoid, but I think that Jimmy and Gretchen's reluctance paints it in a way that is obvious to the audience that it's pretty silly, living one's life constantly as a reaction against some imagined label. That's a really dumb way to live a life. That's exhausting and pointless, but it's something I think a lot of people do and probably leads to a lot of disillusioned relationships and affairs and stuff like that. While Gretchen and Jimmy are paddling really hard against the waters of domesticity, I think that they're always going to be, inexorably, kind of dragged toward it and hopefully it's clear in tone that we don't really support them. We think it's a dumb and, in the end, a pointless battle they're fighting, but hopefully one that's fun enough to watch.
Definitely. On your panel at the ATX Festival in June, I can't remember exactly how you phrased it, but something along the lines of: holding off the payoff for sexual tension is bad fuel for your story because once you use it, then it's spent. But now, the meet-cute couple in Season 2 is sort of Edgar and Lindsay. How has your thinking evolved on that, or has it?
I don't think so. Without giving too much away, I don't know if, at least in the short term, Edgar and Lindsay have much of a future. I think they would make for a horrific pair, but we tried very hard, and a lot of what we do -- out of my pet peeves as a voracious television consumer -- is try very hard to, once we introduce something, pay it off, not just drop it. It's just a pet peeve of mine. We see it a lot -- you know, the writer broke a story, it didn't really get a lot of traction, wasn't that fun to shoot, wasn't fun to edit, the network didn't really like it, the message boards didn't care for it, and then it just falls away, like, "Oh no, forget about that." I think that, again, my desire is always to sort of pay stuff off. That said, we'll follow though with the attraction that Edgar has for Lindsay, but hopefully in a slightly unexpected way.
I'm no trying to make you give spoilers, just speaking in general terms. Edgar is the show's moral center, the one character that any viewer can root for, unreservedly. Is it hard not to give Edgar what he wants because he's such a sweetie?
Yes, I think it is, but I have just as much fun if not more watching Jimmy and Gretchen being mean to him, blowing off his war stories. For some reason, I'm just tickled by that. I think I can get on a soapbox and say that it's very much mirroring, in a humorous way, the fact that in American society, we don't want to hear about that. It's messy and gross and we all know it's unfair that military service should be put on those from lower socio-economic homes, but yeah, we don't really want to hear about this. Like, "Yes, hey, thank you for your service. Please don't tell me more about what happened to your buddy Rodriguez." For me, not only do I think it's funny but I also think there's maybe some value to it. Edgar is going o get what he wants this season, I think, in a way that he never has before, and part of it has to do with falling into the world of improv comedy, which is really funny because we were just watching BoJack Horseman and BoJack's roommate gets to improv comedy. I know [Bojack creator] Raphael [Bob-Waksberg] a little bit and told him, "Oops, we're both doing the same story," but we're doing it in a different way.
I'm fascinated by improv. I actually really, really hate improv, but in an effort not to be dogmatic and easy, we get to see some of the shows, and they're not horrible. They're fine. It's just a baffling world to me. It's mostly that I have a problem with improv when used as substitute for writing good dialogue.
In the second episode, we see how Edgar's relationship with Gretchen is evolving already; they get that high-five after driving Jimmy out of the room with their fake dumb trivia answers. That was my favorite tiny touch of the second episode -- as you can imagine, it resonated with me personally, as the Jimmy of that scene. Was Trash Juice something that TV's Todd [Robert Anderson, who plays Vernon] really made or still makes?
No, Todd is a pretty high-class drinker. He likes good scotch. Trash Juice is really something that we would make in high school and everyone would have one horrible experience with it. It's really disgusting. It's really pouring water out of a garden hose and vodka and a bunch of rotten fruit and Kool-Aid and then stirring it up with a paddle and then it sits there and it gets warm and yellowjackets die in it and you drink it and invariably get horribly sick. It would just be chemicals and vodka.
And trace amounts of garbage, probably, too, since it's made in a garbage can.
There has to be.
Were there any stories that were on your Season 1 wish list that you got to do in Season 2?
Yeah. I really wanted to do an episode that started off with characters that weren't in our show, and that evolved in the "Sunday Funday" episode last season. It wasn't the exact same story, but this year, Episode 209, I ended up writing an episode for Justin Kirk who's on Weeds, for whom I loved writing. You follow his story for the first big chunk of the episode without really delving into the rest of our characters.
What's the most memorable or crazy or weird or hilarious thing a fan has asked or told you since the show premiered?
Oh my God. There were last year a lot of Twitter creepers every week who would just say, "Loved the episode. Need more naked boobs." "Love you Kether, we need more of you naked. You butt was not big enough." There's some really creepy dudes out there. I feel very bad for Kether [Donohue, who plays Lindsay] and Aya [Cash, who plays Gretchen], but people have generally been not super-weird. I think the show doesn't tend to attract dummies. I think smarter people like our show, which is why the ratings aren't great. If we did appeal to the dummies, we'd probably be better off, but yeah, luckily, most everyone who watches us is pretty intelligent.
Although...not that they're not intelligent, but I heard that the show is very, very big in prison because it is on regular television. It's on basic cable, so they're allowed to watch, but it features more nudity than most basic cable shows they're allowed to watch so they're very excited about it, so I like the idea that a lot of prisoners are masturbating to our show.
There's the pull-quote. How much have you talked to Aya Cash about her time on The Newsroom?
I've talked to her about it enough. I'm very rigorous about my dialogue, so whenever I come up and I'm like, "Hey, you missed the 'uh,' it's actually 'their' instead of 'his' in that line," she's like, "Okay, Sorkin," but all right, I'll take that. We talk quite a fair bit because she and a lot of people genuinely like the show. I hate-like the show and I love watching his stuff whether I actually like it or don't like it, which is a credit to him. I would rather re-watch Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip every single day for the rest of my life than many, many really good shows. In fact last season, during lunch every day, I made my writing staff watch Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. I brought the DVDs in.
How many people quit?
No one quit. It is such a watchable show.
I guess that's true. The Newsroom, I hate-liked it too, but it's fascinating. If they made a hundred seasons, I would watch them all. I could never quit that show.
What I love about Studio 60 is the sheer audacity, in the first season of a show about comedy, to have a four-part episode about Iraq.
I have a question from Dave, who would like to know, what lessons did you learn from Chains Of Love that you have applied to You're the Worst?
Probably more from Temptation Island. I actually just read about a studio head roundtable where they were asked, "What show would you like to bring back?" One of them said, "I think we can crack Temptation Island and do it right this time."
Two final questions and then I'll let you go. What is your favourite show? It can be your all-time favourite or just something that you're really loving now.
I'm trying to think if I love anything right now. I'm very into Treehouse Masters. They make treehouses, although it has some cheesy elements, cheesy interstitials that bug me. I'm really enjoying Review. I like that very much. It's such a simple idea and just very reined-in and controlled, which I like a lot. I'm really liking Island Hunters. I'm really liking Rick And Morty. It's kind of all over the place, but really entertaining. And I do enjoy Veep.
Good choices. We'll conclude on what is the most formative show of your TV watching and writing career?
Probably M*A*S*H. My parents made me watch that as a kid and I didn't know what the fuck it was. Not only was it about war, but it was about two idiots who made gin in their tent, a really bad actor who played a priest, blood and dismemberment, but then it also had a laugh track. From that, I got the idea that a show could be all those things -- it didn't have to be pigeonholed -- and I think that kind of blew my mind in a way I didn't really understand until I was making my own television. This was a big deal, since I was watching M*A*S*H around the time that I was watching Growing Pains and Diff'rent Strokes and Laverne & Shirley and these shows that were very silly and very much one thing, except for Family Ties's "A My Name Is Alex,", where his best friend died and it was done live on a stage as a play. But yeah, I think M*A*S*H really opened me up to the possibilities. And then Monty Python. My parents were anglophiles and Monty Python was just so silly -- I think that, along with Benny Hill, is I where I got a lot of my love of dumb humor. I don't think I could write something like The Leftovers because I would just have to have a lot of really stupid stuff happen to the people standing around and smoking.