Episode 102: Sharon Horgan, “Bad Sisters”

By: Alison Herman

Host Alison Herman talks to Sharon Horgan about how she kept her stories straight when writing across two timelines, her tips for pitching a project, the universal ideas at the heart of a story about four sisters failing spectacularly at attempting murder, and more.

Sharon Horgan is an acclaimed writer, actress, producer, and director, best known for her multiple award-winning sitcom CATASTROPHE, which she co-wrote and starred in with Rob Delaney.

As an actress, Sharon is known for her roles in feature films like GAME NIGHT, DATING AMBER, THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT, among many others. Her other writing credits include the BBC comedy series PULLING, the comedy series SHINING VALE, and the BBC sitcom MOTHERLAND.

Her latest project is BAD SISTERS, which she co-created, wrote, and stars in. The ten-part comedy thriller follows a group of five sisters (the Garveys) and the promise they make to always protect each other after their parents’ premature death.

The Writers Guild Award-nominated series premiered in the US in August 2022 and is available to stream on Apple TV+

Alison Herman is a staff writer for The Ringer, where she writes about culture in general and television in specific. When not fighting a losing battle against Peak TV, she tweets at @aherman2006.

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Thanks for listening. Write on.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Hello, you’re listen to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writer’s Guild of America East. In each episode, you’ll hear from the writers of your favorite films and television series. They’ll take you behind the scenes, go deep into the writing and production process and explain how they got their project from the page to the screen.

Alison Herman: Hi everyone. I’m Allison Herman. I’m a guild member and a writer for The Ringer, as well as a host of OnWriting. And today I’m so thrilled to be speaking with Sharon Horgan, who is the co-creator, writer, producer, and star of the Apple TV+ Series Bad Sisters. A Dark Comedy and Thriller Bad Sisters follows the lives of the Garvey sisters who are bound together by the premature death of their parents and a promise to always protect one another. Sharon’s other writing and acting credits include the Comedy series Pulling and Catastrophe, and she created the HBO Comedy Series Divorce. We certainly have a lot to cover. Sharon, thank you so much for joining us.

Sharon Horgan: Thank you for having me.

Alison Herman: Of course. I was hoping actually to maybe start with the conclusion of your previous series Catastrophe, because I was wondering what it must have felt like to come to the end of such a personal and long running project and how you were feeling at the time about what may or may not be next for you.

Sharon Horgan: Well, it’s just that, it was very emotional. I had stopped watching shows I’ve been involved in, go out on the TV years ago. Years ago I used to get loads of people round at my house and it was one of those things, but I’ve just gotten more paranoid over the years and I just don’t watch it go out, especially because you spend so long in the edit with it. But with the last episode, I thought I’m going to watch because I feel like I need to mark the occasion. And I was getting ready to feel extremely sad. And then I started getting messages from people and then they just kept coming and people started talking about the end, how we finished it and what it sort of meant to them or what they took from it. Because we left it fairly ambiguous, so it was a bit of a write your own ending kind of set up.

And I just felt, oh no, it’s okay because it’ll continue, which TV does now and films, they have their own life and people keep finding them and talking about them. So there was that sort of emotional response. And then as a writer, from a career perspective, I was like, oh God, what now? Because you write something like that, that you actually love for that long, with the inclusion of the writing the very first pilot script right through to the last episode, I think it was six years of our lives. Rob and I worked really closely and like you said, it was very personal. And so I was thinking, what am I going to replace that with? And the answer was nothing really, because I didn’t want to rush into anything, I wanted to wait until the right thing found me.

So I just went and did a bunch of films. I just did a bunch of acting because normally I don’t, normally I just do my own thing and it ends up taking up all your time. Because writing is a slog and you set 6 months to 12 months aside to write a series. But now I just did some films and then I was just about to get going on the next thing which I’d kind of figured out. And then Jay Hunt from Apple said, do you want to go for lunch, and said, what do you want to do next? And I was like, well, I’m thinking about… She’s like, no, this is what you’re going to do next. And she gave me a link for Clan, and I watched one episode and I just thought, oh no, she’s right. This is what I want to do next. Which is strange because I’d never adopted anything, never written a drama, I’d never written [inaudible 00:04:27]

Alison Herman: So despite all of those first for you, what made you so certain that adapting Clan was the next thing you wanted to do?

Sharon Horgan: Genuinely I do think you got to push yourself out of your comfort zone, otherwise how do you keep learning. I think I’d gotten into a comfortable little niche of six UK half hours, which I loved. Or with Divorce it was 10 half hours and actually Shining Veil is 8 half hours. But in general it felt like I was writing domestic ideas in a hopefully universal way, but I kind of gotten into a groove. I make a show called Motherland as well, and it’s about being a mother and it’s a relationship based thing, friendship based thing. And so I thought I should pushed myself. So that was one of the reasons, but then I guess also I just watched it and I thought, oh, I think that could really get people talking. Not just the premise, well hopefully everyone watched it there, but I don’t know what episodes they watched, but four sisters trying to kill a man, being spectacularly bad at murder and trying and failing across the course of the season. I just thought it was such a funny premise, but I felt like if it was done right people could really get behind it.

And secondly, I just loved writing about a big family. I come from a big family, big Irish family, two brothers, two sisters. So there’s five of us and we are a big five headed monster when we need to be and look out for each other and we’d do anything for each other. And I felt like I knew how to capture the essence of that or the fun of it. I felt like it would be quite intoxicating to be around on screen, if you got it right.

Alison Herman: Yeah. I mean in addition to all the novelties within your filmography that you mentioned, I believe Bad Sisters is the first show you’ve made that’s set in Ireland, where obviously you were from. And I wanted to ask if you always knew you wanted that to be the setting and why that was the case and what drew you to going back to Ireland?

Sharon Horgan: That is the case. I’ve made Frank of Ireland with the Gleeson Brothers, Domhnall and Brian Gleason, but that was their show. It was just a Merman produced show, but I’d never made anything myself, you’re right. And it was a very, very specific choice. I don’t know what… Initially it was just, I watched the Belgium one and I just thought there was something geographically about it that kind of put me in mind a little of where I grew up. And then I started thinking more ambitiously and in terms of story and what it could bring to the story. I wanted religion to play a part in it because I wanted our villain, John Paul, to be a religious hypocrite really. And I thought Ireland’s a good place for that. Maybe not so much now, but it certainly used to be.

I wanted water to play a big part in it. And Ireland’s a very small island and the idea of this swim that happens, I mean people cold water swim all the time, but it’s quite a big thing on Christmas Day, you go to this place, the 40 Foot which is in Dublin Bay and Swim to wash away your hangover, shock it out of you. And I kind of thought that this swim would be a beautiful bookend ending. To start on it and for the Swim to be the thing that Grace… They’ve lost her, that’s their first realization and that would be a beautiful place to plot the murders, begin to decide that they want to kill them and a beautiful place to end up when she’s free.

So yeah, I wanted to shoot there for personal and emotional reasons. I wanted to spend more time there because I left quite young and I’ve never really worked there so much. But also I just felt it would bring so much to the story and to the look of the place. I know there’s a lot of great Irish actors because I auditioned a lot of them for Catastrophe and never really got a chance to work with too many of them anyway because there wasn’t that many Irish parts in Catastrophe. So I knew they were there and I just found that really exciting to showcase all that talent.

Alison Herman: For those who may not be familiar with the original Belgian show, it’s totally quite different from Bad Sisters and I was wondering if you could talk about both those differences and why you chose to make the adjustments that you did in the adaptation.

Sharon Horgan: Yeah. Well I should say that it’s great, I wouldn’t have taken it on if I hadn’t have found it really entertaining and saw the potential of an updated new version of it. But yeah, it was totally very, very different. We do some pretty silly things in my one as well, but it was pretty wild, there was a murder attempt every episode and there was a hitman and bodies ended up in dog food processing factories and there was Chinese mafia. And just the humor was extremely heightened as well. And I think what I found tricky with that was the balance of the domestic abuse storyline and what we learned happened to Eva in episode 10. I’m not going to say it just in case, I don’t know what people have seen, but it felt like in order to deal with those subjects as carefully and mindfully as they deserved, I needed to just be very cautious with the tone of it.

And also I just like to really believe things. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a horror or if it’s sci-fi or whatever, if you really believe the dialogue that’s coming out of those characters mouths, if you recognize them as people that are in your lives or you met along the way, it will really ground it and root it and then I think you can do what you want. So yeah, I really wanted to take all the amazing ingredients that Malin had and just find a way to tell it in a way that allowed people to go on this journey and to feel incredibly invested in this story of four sisters trying to repeatedly kill someone.

Alison Herman: I remember reading an interview with Jenji Kohan, the creator of Orange Is the New Black among other shows a while back where she argued that the great distinction in writing TVs and necessarily between comedy and drama, because there’s obviously a lot of overlap between the two, it’s between half hour and hour. And as someone who just made the switch between those two mediums, I was wondering what was most challenging and most exciting about making that switch?

Sharon Horgan: Well I didn’t find it as challenging as I thought I would because I’ve always written… I mean Rob Delaney will say the same thing. We would write first drafts of Catastrophe and they’d be like 56 pages and then we just hone them and get them down to length. But we always completely overshot because our script’s always way too long and we always run out of time and we’re always cutting things out in the edit. So that wasn’t the challenging thing really, I think. I found it much more challenging to write in two timelines, for example, I found that really tricky and I also found writing multiple stories for an ensemble cast and keeping them of equal weight, enjoyment and stakes so that when you cut away from one storyline and going to another, your audience isn’t going, come on, wanting to get back to the juicy bit.

So keeping everything juicy along the way was the thing that… For an hour, the half hour hour thing kind of winds me up a bit because that thing of like if it’s a half hour, it’s a comedy, if it’s an hour, it’s a drama. And I feel like that changed quite a lot because the half hour drama is quite prevalent now and hour long shows that have a lot of humor in them are… You see that quite a lot. So I feel like those lines are blurred, I think that that’s a good thing. I think the challenge is always just keeping a script really streamlined and interesting and keeping that forward motion, whatever the engine is, just keeping it going. So I guess it is a bit harder over an hour, but at the same time it can be really fun to have that extra time to play with I think.

Alison Herman: Sure. The two timeline structure you mentioned even watching the show, I think you could tell it might be tricky to balance those two. So just organizationally, how did you keep track of the reveals and the character beats that you had to parcel out or maybe restrain yourself from between those two timelines?

Sharon Horgan: Yeah, just a lot of talking and a lot of work and a lot of putting stuff up on boards and Post-it’s and… I think Malin had said that she’d worked out her one in the chronological timeline and I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea, just start at the beginning and then get to the end. But I could not get my head around that at all. I had to think about it in terms of TV. I had to think about it in terms of entertainment I suppose, and how people would be watching. So yeah, I think it was just working out which character we focused on in each episode, that changed things a lot. Whether it be focused on Eva in episode two and Ursula in episode three, Becka in four, Bibi in five, it meant that you could use their point of view to get you to the past and then back to the present.

And then once you were in any of those timelines, you could just go for it. But you had this sort of clock in your head going, what about the present? Keep that storyline moving because sometimes you would just find you’re enjoying the villainy of John Paul or the murder attempts and you thought, oh no, it’s been a while since we’ve been involved with the coffins and the hunt of it, the cat and mouse. And the romance, the sort of Romeo and Juliet. And so I think what we weren’t really able to do until the very end was get our bird’s eye view. We were able to look at all the episodes in the edit as much as possible and work out what our balance was and kind of shift things around. Sometimes we moved whole sequences and scenes into later eps or we went backwards. So I guess that’s the great thing about writing, it starts with the germ of an idea and it doesn’t really end until it’s on the telly, you get to keep having all these cracks at the whip. Yeah, [inaudible 00:16:30]

Alison Herman: On and off the screen Catastrophe was clearly so much the product of a collaboration between you and Rob Delaney, but you also co-created Bad Sisters with Dave Finkle and Brett Baer and clearly worked with a team of amazing writers in getting it to the screen. And since TV’s so collaborative, I did want to ask you what some of the fruits of that collaboration were, how it worked for you and what some of the benefits were to the final product of the show.

Sharon Horgan: I think just the benefits are having a hive brain. Especially with something like this. We also had the creator of the original, Malin in the writer’s room. We had a small writer’s room for the pilot and then when it came to series pickup we had another writer’s room and then everyone gets their script to write and then it all gets another look then where you kind of go over it all. But still, it doesn’t mean that you’re taking them all back and just completely rewriting them yourself, you’re still involving the writers in conversation beyond that. If there was an issue with someone else’s script, we would get another writer involved. And it was a really great way to work actually, especially for something like this, it felt super collaborative.

Because it’s your face on it, you feel like the buck rests with you a little bit. It always felt like there was a lot of really smart people to call on. Even now working on season two, got all the ideas now and I’m kind of working them into these outlines, but I can email everyone and just go, I’m stuck on this before the scripts actually go back out to be written by the group. I don’t know, I’m always amazed and thrilled at how brilliant writers are in that writing room because it’s not something that we do as much in the UK or Ireland, it’s definitely being used a lot more now. I remember when I was doing Divorce, that was the first time I’d ever been in this situation and I was kind of looking around at everyone and going, these guys are amazing, why aren’t they writing their own shows?

And an actual fact, not everyone wants to work that way. Not everyone wants to write up their own idea. A lot of people want to work in that group situation and also are working on their own ideas outside of that. But it just took a lot for me to understand. I just felt really lucky, that’s how I felt. I felt like all these amazing brains are here for this show and they all care so much about how it turns out. And yeah, it’s something I try and do a lot more in the UK now because it’s just such a great way of working and it’s much less lonely. It can be so lonely when you’re writing on your own, just the idea of being in a room and laughing… It’s a really fun thing to sit there and laugh while you’re figuring stuff out.

Alison Herman: Yeah, I mean speaking of your face being on it, in addition to your duties as writer and showrunner, you’re also a member of the ensemble cast you’re writing for, and I was wondering if you always knew you wanted to play Eva among the Garvey sisters, and if so, what drew you to that character as a performer in addition to a writer.

Sharon Horgan: I didn’t always know I was going to play her Jay Hunt at Apple, was convinced I should have an eye patch. She was like, you have to play Bibi. But I just knew I wasn’t Bibi, I just knew it. And also that bunch of Garvey’s was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to get it right just in terms of the ages and just getting the personalities in the right order. And the more I thought about Eva, the more I knew that she was the one I wanted to play. Because even though I’ve loved my characters in the past, I really feel like Eva’s a really good person and I often play selfish bitches. And I love that and it’s great fun, but she’s all about her family and she’s also of an age where if things hadn’t worked out for her in terms of having a family and stuff, she wasn’t really in a position to do a huge amount about it, but at the same time she was felt like a really hopeful character.

She was still putting herself out there, still looking for love, still being the matriarch within her own family. And I just thought it was a good message and I felt it was really positive and I quite liked the idea of representing that. Also, I thought a lot about my own sister as I was playing her. My older sister, she’s not older than me by much actually, but she didn’t have a kid until she was in her early forties. She’s someone who absolutely should have been a mother and it looked at one point it wasn’t going to happen for her. And how she felt about that and how she dealt with it… She’s the oldest of all the five kids in my family and she’s just a really good person. And I thought if I can just add a little sprinkle of her and the idea of her, if she hadn’t had kids, that’s who Eva is. She’s kind of like my sister if my sister hadn’t had her girl.

Alison Herman: This is a little bit more of a general question, but we ask it a lot of multi hyphenates on the show. As someone who is both a writer and an actor, I was curious how those two roles interact for you. Do they feel connected? Do they feel separate? How do they inform each other in your mind?

Sharon Horgan: The real truth is I don’t really think about the acting thing until it’s way too late to make any changes. And that’s tripped me up a bunch of times where I’m suddenly in bed with someone, I’m like, no! Or a freezing cold [inaudible 00:22:41] but I don’t really think about it, honest to God. The odd time it comes into my head, it’s in a stupid way. I’m more set to think about other characters, is everyone being serviced, that’s my sort of thing. I think about the other actors and I think when they open this up are they’re going to be like, great! Whereas when I open it up, I kind of know what’s in there, so I don’t really have to please me. I always want to have something that pushes me as an actor, but I always know it’s going to be the case because of the things we write about and the subject matter we choose, it’s always going to be interesting.

But no, I think I would be so disabled by that if I was thinking about myself as I write. I think that would be a big mistake. With Rob and I, we would end up literally standing across from each other in our costumes going, do you know the lines? He’s like, I’ve just looked at them this morning because right up until the last minute… I mean you know it yourself, the writing is everything and all these things come along that mean you have to make last minute changes and or someone drops out or bloody COVID the last few years, you’re just constantly rewriting. And so really I’ve often found myself in a position where I’m on set and I haven’t really properly thought things through.

Alison Herman: You’ve mentioned working with Jay Hunt a few times and we often ask guests on the show about their experience with notes and working with the studio, but you’re in an interesting position of you’ve worked consistently with one executive in the last two, very excellent, very acclaimed shows. So I did want to ask a little bit about that relationship and why it’s been so productive and fruitful for both of you.

Sharon Horgan: Great. I can slag her off now on a public platform. Yeah, I just got really lucky. She loved Catastrophe, Jay really loved it and sort of championed it from the off and I think really just always pushed us. Loved the show, but wanted it to be its best throughout. And then with Bad Sisters, she just pushed me with that as well. And I think lots of writers will give you different answers about the whole notes process or working with the executives. I’ve had experiences that haven’t been wonderful over the years, there’s always some numb skull telling you something that just… You’re like shut up. But for the most part I’ve had really good experiences and Rob would say the same thing. We were in a position at Channel four where they really pushed us to make it better and same for me at Apple.

There’s huge ambition for it, and also just making sure there’s clarity of story, which kind of annoys me, but sometimes you get so into it, you become cocooned and you’re not really thinking about it as a outsider. And if an exec has really good skills, they’re able to step aside and see what an audience is going to see as well as I wanted to keep the artist, what do you call it, their… I’ve forgotten the word. How they originally set out, how they originally wanted it to be. So yeah, I just got lucky with Jay and kind of delighted that she went to Apple because it kind of… I knew I wanted to work with her again, but being there, being at one of the biggest streamers I suppose, it just gives you an opportunity to be ambitious. And I’d never gotten to make anything of this scale before, not really. Which is terrifying as well by the way, because you’re like, whoa, what if I drop it and it smashes and I’ve wasted someone else’s money. I don’t know if I answered your question, it’s a lot of going around the houses.

Alison Herman: I think you did great. We do have some audience questions that I want to get to in a few minutes, but my final question before we transition into those is all the Garvey sisters are so fully realized and really come into their own over the course of the season, but the one that seemed, at least as an outsider, to perhaps be the most difficult to write was Grace, who I think can be a passive character, but you also have to believe what she does at the end of the season. And obviously she’s really the crux of the action in so many ways. And I just wanted to ask about how you conceive that character and how you wanted to manage her development throughout the 10 episodes we’ve seen.

Sharon Horgan: Oh, it was really, really hard and it was a lot of work and conversation with Anne-Marie Duff as well who played her because it didn’t matter what was happening. At that point in time in any of those earlier episodes we constantly had to have that in our minds, what she had done. We show the audience in the first scene, she says sorry to him in the first scene, that’s kind of like a little something we thought an audience might notice second time round. It had to constantly be there and we kind of had to hide it. I feel like she made such a difference to that character because she gave her a lot of joy and love and she found joy in her daughter and her sisters when she was with them and the moments with him when he allowed her to just be herself and not to just focus on her being this downtrodden abused woman because it just wouldn’t have worked.

It had to be this constant juggle the whole time. She had to be very unaware of what was going on with the sisters and she had to have this steeliness, which we were able to bring out here and there in later episodes, but you had to not really see it in the beginning. She couldn’t seem too woman on the edge or you would immediately go, she’s going to kill him. It was just something we had to manage, again, in the writing and in the performance with our directors and with Anne-Marie and then finally in the edit, because there’s a lot you can do there if you feel like you’ve exposed yourself too much or you’ve given something away, you can pull back. It was really difficult, but I love that character and I love the life that Ann-Marie injected into her and I love what happens in that final episode. As shocking as it was, its a moment that makes you hopefully punch the air. Maybe not immediately, maybe you’re just a bit too shocked, but when she jumps into the 40 foot at the end, I think hopefully that makes you punch the air.

Alison Herman: Yeah, it’s a beautiful note. I’m going to start with a question from the audience that I was wondering too, so I’m selfishly going to put it at the front of the line, which is from Lauren Baker, who asked, who was the stylist for the show? The fashion was incredible and so perfect for each character.

Sharon Horgan: It just goes to show it’s all about the team. Her name is Camille Benda, she’s an American lady and she came over and worked with us on this and we were just absolutely thrilled to have her. She did a real mixture of basically looking through flea markets and discount stores and vintage and then mixing it all up. We spent a long time talking, we spent a long time talking about each of the sisters. There was small things like, that Becka would always have something of Eva’s in her wardrobe because she’s got no money, she’d always steal from the elder sister, little things like that that just made such a difference. Getting the right uniform for Eva to work and making sure that was different from how she dresses when she’s at home. It was the most enormous fun, but it was a big old job because there was a lot of girls, a lot of girls to dress.

Alison Herman: Our next question comes from Sarah Caldwell who asked Bad Sisters, has an unskippable opening credit sequence and a great song that gets more fun as you see more reveals. How much input did you have in it and how did you feel seeing it come together for the first time?

Sharon Horgan: Oh man, it was the most glorious thing. We had input in that we were offered up five or six different ideas for the opening sequence. My light bulb, which I have to take full credit for, was the idea of having Who by Fire covered. Because I just thought it was the most perfect song that signaled what this series was about. And having it covered by a female singer and having PJ Harvey do that, made it. They showed us about five different ideas for title sequence and as soon as we all saw the track, we all just jumped on it. And then it was just like… It went on for months and months actually, it was a huge undertaking. It was all done in camera, there’s no trickery there at all. And so it all had to be built and put together.

Alison Herman: Laura Cosan asks, do you have any advice for those putting a series pitch together and trying to stand out? What to you really jumps out about a pitch?

Sharon Horgan: What do I think about when putting together a pitch? Okay, so first of all, it’s really hard to pitch now because it’s all on Zoom and it seems to just have completely changed. And in some ways I kind of like it because I feel like it’s honed down the whole process, but in other ways it feels like you have to have everything so succinct in such a short period of time, encapsulate the whole thing. I think it’s about making people feel something. Rather than telling them what the show is going to be, make them feel it. So I think it has to be as… It doesn’t need visuals, you can put in visuals, but you need to make it as visual as possible. I think you need to set the scene, I think you need to be really clear about your characters without using up huge amounts of time because people lose the thread very easily.

So it’s about being as clean and as clear cut with your story. If you’re telling them how the pilot is going to go, if you’re giving a series overview, when you’re telling them about the tone, when you’re telling them about the why now of it, I think it’s really important to overly practice, keep doing it, do it in front of a friend, do it in front of your studio exec, do it in front of your friend again. It’s kind of ridiculous because it is a bit of a dog and pony show kind of thing. But at the same time, I think it’s about pitching in a way that’s as close to the writing processes, to the actual creation of the show as possible, it’s being as creative as you possibly can. When it’s a comedy, I always throw in little bits of dialogue that a character might say in order to get the tone of the comedy across. And when it’s a drama, I really try and make those sort of moments, those cliff hanger-y moments really feel something. So I think it’s not about telling, it’s about creating a feeling. And I hope that’s not too obscure an answer.

Alison Herman: No, I’m sure it’s super helpful. We have a couple iterations of the same million dollar question that I think also makes for a good note to end on. So Jillian Wilson asks how you’re approaching season two of this show that has such a definitive ending. And I was also wondering just where you’re at, obviously with no spoilers, but how you’re thinking about continuing the story?

Sharon Horgan: Well, as it turns out, season one gave us all a little presence that when we came to putting together the first couple sessions we did for the writers room for season two have proved to be really helpful. I know the things that worked in the first season, and that’s the sisters and their relationship and how they are together, it’s having a sort of thriller engine, it’s keeping the caper. So those three things are the things that I was constantly overseeing in the room. We need to make sure whatever replaces John Paul, whatever replaces the murder attempts, has to have the same stakes, has to have the same level of fun and caper and the same putting the sisters in situations that takes them out of their comfort zone. And it’s really hard, by the way. It’s really, really hard, but it’s great fun. As soon as I stepped back into my five headed sister suit, I was like, oh, this is great.

Alison Herman: Was there a moment when making season one where you kind of had the light bulb of like, oh, I definitely think I have more in this story. And was that before or after when Apple came to you and said, we might be interested in more?

Sharon Horgan: Yeah, we talked about it, you can’t help talk about it. When it’s going okay you kind of think, oh this is fun, are we going to do this again, I don’t know. And then I had an idea very, very early doors, before we started making the first season that I would just sort of [inaudible 00:37:19] about. And then you do 10 months of filming nonstop during COVID and you’re like, well, I’m never going to do that again. And then you make it goes out and people like it and you go, well… And then I kind of thought, well, I’ll do it if I have a good enough idea. And so yeah, there was this little idea floating around that became a bigger idea and I guess we’ll see.

Alison Herman: Yeah, I think if we go any further, we’re going to be pushing you into revealing your hands.

Sharon Horgan: I can tell you who made the title sequence, its the Peter Anderson studio and I can’t believe that went out my head, but they did such a beautiful job I wanted to find it for you there.

Alison Herman: Well, we’ve shouted it out at the end. I think we have used up our time and we don’t want to overstay our welcome, but thank you so much for joining us and answering everyone’s questions.

Sharon Horgan: Oh, you’re welcome. I hope I did an okay job. Thanks for your time.

Alison Herman: You did a wonderful job. All right, thank you.

Sharon Horgan: Bye.

Alison Herman: Bye.

Speaker 1: OnWriting is a production of the Writer’s Guild of America East. This series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Our associate producer and designer is Molly Beer. Tech production and original music by Taylor Bradshaw and Stock Boy Creative. You can learn more about the Writer’s Guild of America East online at wgaeast.org. You can follow the Guild on all social media platforms @WGAEast. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. Thank you for listening and right on.