Interview (Written): Aline Brosh McKenna
A conversation with the showrunner of the CW series ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’.
A Creative Screenwriting interview with Aline Brosh McKenna about her involvement in the CW TV series ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ starring Rachel Bloom. McKenna’s movie credits include The Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses, and Annie.
The series was designed to be four seasons — is it a blessing or a curse to have a predetermined number of episodes? Was there any flexibility to that decision?
As a screenwriter, I would never write a movie without knowing what the third act was. One of the reasons I had not done television was that, in the comedy space, television has for many years been made up of shows that spit out copies of themselves — there isn’t a lot of forward progression. Which I love! But I was more interested in telling a long-form story. Rachel was too, even though her background was more in sketches and animation. Her mind really went to the big picture — and still does.
We had this beginning, middle and an end, and it’s a rather slender premise. Basically, the way we saw it was as a rotating Rubik’s Cube — the different modalities of being a crazy ex. I think it’s something where if you vamped on the concept for a long time, it would become very tedious because it’s about a person’s progression through this phase of her life. These romantic obsessions have a shape to them, almost a narrative shape. That really is what the series is — the highs and lows of when you’re obsessed with somebody. Obviously, it’s heightened because her character has a mental illness; but essentially it’s about the progression of a romantic obsession.
I think we had in our minds four seasons of 12 episodes each, and we will end up having done more than we intended. But because it’s on the CW, it’s a little bit more of an ensemble piece than it would have been on Showtime. With Showtime, it would have been focused on just Rebecca’s character. So we’ve been able to find more stories because of that ensemble.
Tell me about the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend writers’ room.
It’s pretty glorious. Rachel and I wrote the first episode and two other sample episodes for Showtime on our own. Getting picked up so late meant we had to scramble to put our writers’ room together. Rachel had to go to New York quickly and we both read tons of submissions. The woman who was my assistant — and is now one of our writers and a co-producer on the show — also read a bunch of samples. We had about 10–12 people whose samples we liked and I met with them and reported to Rachel.
I had never staffed a writers’ room before and pretty much went on instinct. I would say that even though I didn’t have experience putting together a writers’ room, I have been in the business a long time and have met a lot of people. I had questions to ask that were, to my mind, very illuminating. We ended up with a staff of 10 people, plus Rachel’s husband and writing partner who had been on ‘How I Met Your Mother’ for five years — they were consultants the first three seasons.
We have a pretty big room! It’s completely intact — we have exactly the same people (except for one writer who left this year), and we’ve promoted two others. We’re a very cohesive group, and what’s great about it is that it’s a room that has incredible institutional memory. Everybody who’s there has been there since the first minute, so we have an incredible fossil record of what’s happened on the show. Everyone in there has tracked all of the progression of the characters.
In my mind, it’s an all-star room — everybody there has different and complementary strengths. Rachel is in the room for the first eight weeks or so and then is on set for the rest of the writing period. So I really rely on the writers’ room tremendously to get the script out, and it became obvious that it was going to be my responsibility to get the stories broken, outlined, written and out the door. As the showrunner, I supervise all of the elements — but the writers’ room is the engine room of the show. The scripts are the heart of the show and the architecture on which the rest of it is built. One of my jobs is to loop Rachel in over the course of the season so that she can give feedback on all of the scripts. She and I connect during the day or at night or on the weekend so that she is fully co-creating with me.
It’s an intense feat when you’re also in production. I went from writing a couple of screenplays a year — so a few hundred pages a year — to getting 900 pages out the door my first season. That was a transition.
I would say the next thing that most resembles writing is the editing process. Being in charge of the edit has been one of the joys of this experience. Having the ability to determine the finished product is an opportunity that a screenwriter never gets — you don’t get anything close to that. I see the editorial staff as an extension of the writers’ room, in some respects.
For the rest of the interview, go here.
Twitter: @CreativeScreen, @alinebmckenna.
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