Written Interview: Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl”)
From WGA.org:
When Elizabeth Meriwether was studying English and theater at Yale, she grew fairly accustomed to bleary-eyed all-nighters. Now that the 30-year-old screenwriter and playwright has her own WGA and Golden Globe Award-nominated TV show, Fox’s “adorkable” comedy New Girl, starring Zooey Deschanel, it seems little has changed.
“My showrunners [Dave Finkel and Brett Baer] gave me a chest of drawers filled with pajamas and slippers,” says Meriwether. “I now feel like I’ve moved into my office, which is pretty pathetic, but I guess also pretty lucky.”
Some excerpts:
You’re letting the show tell you where it’s going?
Yeah. Especially with a comedy, that’s one of the best things about writing; it’s such a collaborative effort. As I’m getting to know my writers, their ideas are informing my ideas and watching the actors work is informing everybody’s ideas.
I’m a really collaborative person, and I can’t imagine going into the year with a set idea of what everything is supposed to be.
Having said that, in a general sense, what were some key things about this show tonally or story wise that were important to you at the outset? Like, it’s important to me that it be smart or cute or against format, you know?
Definitely not cute. We went into the season wanting to be as emotionally real as possible. Every story having to feel like it was grounded in some emotional arc as opposed to going from the joke into the story.
You wanted to go from a legitimate emotional center to the joke.
Yeah, to the joke. That was always the goal. Sometimes someone is like, “Oh, there’s a turkey in the dryer!” And you’re working to that, but the stories never work until we find that emotional spine.
We’ve definitely tried to make stories work without an emotional spine, and they just never do. That was the one thing we knew going into it; that we wanted to keep that emotional center.
I love shows that don’t have an emotional spine. I love just comedy for comedy’s sake, but in terms of what I can write, I need that emotional center.
For the rest of the interview, go here.
A trailer for the series “New Girl”: