Ben Blacker’s a writer’s writer. An interest in the craft and a genuine community builder. A storyteller first and a screenwriter (or comics writer, or podcaster) second. Opinionated but consummately fair (except about Hook).
Ben’s career stretches from comics to radio play-style stage shows to film and television (c.f. his episode of Supernatural in which a silverware-bending mentalist gets skewered by his own cutlery). He’s been a teacher and remains a Survivor stan.
But, if you’re a writer—and if you’re reading this, you probably are—then you most likely know Ben from his absolutely essential podcast The Writers Panel, which has been around now for over ten years, and on which Ben has interviewed several thousand writers.
In what is without doubt the longest interview to date here on Short Disturbances, Ben and I talk about everything from The Writers Panel to his other phenomenal (though now irregular) stage show/radio play/podcast The Thrilling Adventure Hour. We talk about his trajectory, which leads from Massachusetts to Los Angeles—twice—and just how to write across media without losing your way. Not to mention the importance of Paul Reiser to a young writer’s career.
We even get into a bit of an argument over the quality of Stephen Spielberg’s 1991 classic, four-quadrant, visually and emotionally compelling (let’s not forget Oscar-nominated) epic Hook.
I cannot recommend enough that you follow Ben’s excellent Substack, Re:Writing. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from it. And, as he would be the first to tell you, give him a click over on Letterboxd.
And now please enjoy this interview with Ben Blacker.
(Also—Ben Blacker’s writing partner is named Ben Acker. Which, I don’t know how that happens. But it’s important for you to know so you aren’t just hopelessly confused later in the interview.)
The following interview has been edited for clarity and, if you can believe it, concision.
Noah Lloyd: You started your college career at Syracuse University. What brought you out there, and what subsequently took you to Emerson?
Ben Blacker: I think Syracuse was on my radar because we had family there, so we had visited, and my grandmother was from there.
And then a girl I liked was applying to Syracuse. So I was like, “Okay, me too.” And then I got in and she didn’t go. [Laughter.]
But I liked Syracuse a lot. I took some great classes there. And I have Syracuse to thank for both of my marriages—both to my wife and to my writing partner. I met both of them at Syracuse.
But ultimately [Syracuse] didn’t have the sort of writing and literature stuff that I was looking for, for underclassmen anyway, so I transferred to Emerson so I could take those writing and literature classes, presuming that I would be teaching that stuff at some point.
NL: Which you are now.
BB: In some capacity, yeah, I am occasionally. It’s always been part of what I do. And, you know, I love teaching because, when it’s at its best, it feels like you’re in a writer’s room, and you’re having that collaborative give and take.
I started my career over twenty-five years ago, when I was first an adult, teaching high school. And it was great. I loved it. I taught in Newton and Brookline [Massachusetts], and then I taught again when I moved out to Los Angeles, which was in 2004. And then I came back to teaching off and on over the years in various ways.
NL: What was teaching English like for you? Was it a logical next step?
I guess the question I’m asking is, how apparent to you was the trajectory you were hoping for? Were you thinking about teaching English permanently, maybe being a professor someday? Or was it a stopgap while trying to get into TV writing or similar?
BB: I think the former was always what I presumed I would do. You know, write books and teach either high school or hopefully college. Then, when I got to Emerson, one of the first classes I took was a TV writing class, because I was interested in film and television, and I had taken some film classes at Syracuse.
So I took this TV writing class with a woman who had been a writer on Roseanne. I think, had I known at the time how many people were writers on Roseanne, that wouldn’t have [seemed] as impressive—or maybe it would have been. But [the instructor] was great. She basically treated the class like a writer’s room, where we were each working on our own scripts, but it was highly collaborative, and it was so much fun.
I’ve always loved TV. I think I internalized the rhythms of television—this was in 1999, way before TV became what it is now. I grew up on network television.
So in that class, I wrote a Mad About You script. We were writing specs of existing shows, which is what you did around that time. [And gosh do I wish that was still the case.–NL]
I’ve always loved TV. I think I internalized the rhythms of television…
So I wrote this Mad About You script. I really loved the process, and she really liked it, too. And she reached out to Paul Reiser! It was this weird thing, where like my aunt knew Paul Reiser’s cousin, and then this teacher knew Paul Reiser. Anyway, the script got into his hands, and I got a really lovely note [from Paul Reiser] saying, like, “This is a terrific script. We already have a babysitter episode this season, but keep at it, and good luck.”
That was all I needed. “Wow, I want to do this. I think I can do this.” That little bit of someone saying this—this is embarrassing—set me on a path. [Ben] Acker, who I had been friends with at Syracuse, had graduated, and he’d moved to L.A. and become a P.A. on Will & Grace. He was an office P.A.
And the agent for the creators of that show [Max Mutchnick and David Kohan] knew that he wanted to write television. So when that agent would come to the office, he’d corner Ben and say, “Where’s your script? Where’s your script?” And Ben didn’t have one.
[A little reminder that Ben isn’t just talking about himself in the third person here, but about his writing partner Ben Acker!]
So he called me up and said, “This guy keeps asking for a script. How do I do it? I know you took this class…” And because I loved it so much, I also wrote a Dharma & Greg script. But thanks to that show—
NL: I watched so many Dharma & Greg reruns.
BB: It was really fun. I haven’t dug up that script, but I did dig up my Mad About You script recently, and it’s not embarrassing. It’s a little long.
But anyway, Acker’s like, “How do I write TV?” I said, “I just took these classes. I’ll show you.” He came out to Boston for a week, and we had the best time writing together. We wrote two Buffy specs, which was our favorite show at the time. They were what you would call fanfic now. We were filling in the gaps in skills that each other had. And so within the next year, I moved out to L.A.
I’ve moved out twice, so that was the first time. We were 20 years old and didn’t know how to do anything. But we wrote a lot of specs, and we liked working together, and we had a lot of meetings with people who had no jobs for us. But it was a really cool experience.
And then I left [Los Angeles], and then came back in 2004.
We were 20 years old and didn’t know how to do anything. But we wrote a lot of specs…
NL: What prompted the leaving and coming back out again?
BB: That agent—who was the agent of the creators of Will & Grace—was like an old-school Coen brothers character, who you would imagine chomping a cigar. He took Ben and me on, which was ridiculous. We had written a few specs, and he said, “The only show I’ve ever seen is Will & Grace, write me Will & Grace.”
“Okay, we’ll do that.” He set us up in meetings all over town, and we never understood how to have a meeting. So we would show up and be like, “Well, you read our scripts. You must like us. Where are the jobs?”
It was a weird time in Hollywood, especially in television, in that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Survivor had just started. Everyone was very afraid of unscripted TV. And there was a looming writers strike, so there were no jobs.
So we show up to these meetings, and executives would be like, “You guys seem nice. I took this meeting because I’m scared of your agent. We don’t have anything for you.” We did that for a year, and we met everybody.
It was bananas and it was fun and, again, we were just dumb kids who didn’t know how to get out of our own way. I’m sure that didn’t help. After a year, I took a job in the development office of a nonprofit—fundraising. I did that for about a year.
And I [thought], “I could do this anywhere. I don’t have to be in L.A.” So I went back to Boston, where I ran into the woman who is now my wife—we had dated in college and hadn’t seen each other in five years. [When] we ran into each other in Boston, we started hanging out again, started dating, and then she was going to grad school.
She got into B.U., who gave her a full ride, and she got into UCLA.
We got snowed into my apartment one night, one weekend in Boston. She went out on Monday morning to uncover her car and shoveled off the snow… and it wasn’t her car.
She was like, “Let’s go to California.”
So we moved back in 2004 for her to go to school. In the meantime, Acker and I had started working together again, writing a feature spec, and that got us going again.
NL: To continue on the trajectory path—when you and Acker started writing together, was there a particular piece of writing that finally broke through, started getting some attention and some forward momentum?
BB: Yeah, the magic script, right?
NL: Exactly.
BB: There was, but it wasn’t that early on. It was within the first few years of us being [in L.A.]. When I moved back in 2004, we had written a feature script called Sparks Nevada: Marshal on Mars—
NL: I know where this is going. [And so do you, if you’re at all a fan of Thrilling Adventure Hour—which you should be!]
…we walked away going, “God, that was a blast. There must be a way to show people this kind of thing.”
BB: —who was a space cowboy. And we did a little table read in my living room. Like my furniture hadn’t even arrived yet. But we did this reading, and it was a lot of fun. And while I was away for that year or two, Acker had gone through the Second City sketch writing program, so he had met a lot of great comedy people, and he’d also started working on Paul F. Tompkins’ variety show. And so he’d met great people at Largo, the night club.
We had Paul, and we had Mark Gagliardi from Second City, Dave Gruber Allen from Paul’s show, just great actors. And the reading was so much fun—but the script wasn’t quite as good as the reading.
But we walked away going, “God, that was a blast. There must be a way to show people this kind of thing.” Ben knew live shows from doing Paul’s show, and I had been to Paul’s show and other Largo shows at the time, and we were like, “I bet we can put something up on its feet and have great actors read scripts. And we don’t want to ask them to memorize, because we want to keep it easy for everyone, and we want to do it on a monthly basis.
That’s how we started The Thrilling Adventure Hour, which was a stage show in the style of old time radio. The [concept of] old time radio was just because [the actors] were holding scripts in their hands and everyone dressed very nicely. [Laughter.]
We started doing that show monthly in 2005, and we did it for the next decade, every month. We went from a hundred-seat supper club, for those first five years, to Largo at the Coronet, which was two hundred and sixty seats. It became the thing we did, for a long time.
All of which is a long way to say, while Ben was at Second City, he wrote a sketch about people’s worst day. One of them was about a guy who wakes up in a bathtub and has found that his kidneys have been stolen—and they shot a short of this. Our friend Toby Wilkins directed a short, which was so good, and it starred Paul and Paget Brewster, who were doing Thrilling Adventure at the time.
And Paget called Ben and said, “That was so much fun. You guys should write a series about this.” And Ben was like, “Someone gets their kidneys stolen every week? That seems crazy.”
“No, about the doctor and the seductress”—who Paul and she played—“and their friendship, and why they do what they do.” Sort of a crime comedy show.
So we wrote the script—I think it was in 2007—and that was our magic script. It was called Kidney Thieves, then went on to be called Cut and Run. And it really—we wrote it for Paul and Paget.
I think Ben still has this message on his voicemail of Paget calling him after reading the script. We were together, and we listened to it in his car. I’ll never forget it. I heard her going, “I love it, I love it, I love it. This is the best thing I’ve ever read. I can’t wait to do this. Let’s take it out.”
And so we called her, and she was like, “I just have two auditions before I go, before we take this out. I’m never going to get them. Don’t worry about it. This is what my life is like. Nobody wants to hire me. I want to do [Cut and Run], I just have two auditions.”
I forget what the first one was, but the other one was Criminal Minds. And so she went off to do Criminal Minds for a decade. But, in the meantime, that script became our calling card, because it was not like anything else that was around at the time. It was dark and it was funny. The stakes were real, the relationships were real, and it was serialized.
This was a big turning point in TV. The only thing that was sort of vaguely like it was Weeds, which was a great show. People were looking for something like that. So it was the thing that got us into meetings, that got us jobs, got us staffed on shows.
You know, we spent a long time going to meetings in which someone would say, “I love this script. How do we make this script—but not this script?” And we’d be like, “All right, what’s your version of it?”
USA was a great example. In 2014, I want to say, they read Cut and Run. They loved it. They asked, “What’s the USA version of that?” So we sold them an hour-long show that was not about kidney thieves, but had a lot similar to it.
…that script became our calling card, because it was not like anything else that was around at the time.
So that became the thing. People would remember it every few years. A bold executive would be like, “I’m going to get this made,” and it always went nowhere. We did ultimately get to make it as a series for Audible, which came out in January 2020. It was all because an exec, who went from Fox Comedy to working at an audio place, remembered the script and was like, “I want to make it.” He let us hire a writers room and run it. We wrote six scripts that told the complete story.
And then he left, and that [deal] changed, but Audible eventually got their hands on it through Janet Varney, who does Thrilling Adventure Hour with us.
We said, you know, we’ve done Thrilling Adventure Hour now for 15 years on and off, and we want to do something different. So [Cut and Run] doesn’t star Paul and Paget, but it does star Sam Richardson—newly minted Emmy winner Sam Richardson—and D’Arcy Carden, who is fantastic and who we loved on The Good Place. We just tried to work with different people, but people who would bring their comedy chops to it. People who got our stuff.
Ed Begley, Jr. is in it. Meg Ryan is the narrator. It’s bananas. It’s a lot of fun. It’s over on Audible. And the nice thing is, now we can try to make it into a TV show again, because there’s IP.
NL: It’s like writing a comic book, which started as a pilot, became a comic book and now you can actually make the pilot because you have IP.
BB: Exactly.
NL: Kidney Thieves is a great title—I’ll hold that name in my heart.
You’ve gestured to this already, but you’ve worked in a bunch of different media, from comics to podcasts to television, for the past twenty years. What is your approach to working across so many different media?
BB: I never really thought of myself as a screenwriter or a comics writer or an audio writer. I’ve always just been a writer, you know? Any opportunity to tell stories, I’m going to take. Sometimes the medium tells you what the story should be. Ben and I have pitches that are better as feature screenplays, and we have stories that are better as comic books. But all of it’s just storytelling, you know?
If you learn the language for each of these media, then you can adapt them to cross media [lines] if you need to, or you can lean into the medium for which you’re writing. It’s always been, like, who’s going to pay me to tell a story? [Laughter.]
If it’s going to be comic books right now, great, I’m going to write comic books. If it’s going to be a movie, great, I’m going to write a movie. And I’ll get interested in different things. But at this point, in my mid-forties, I’m happy to write for all of it.
I just want to tell the stories.
Any opportunity to tell stories, I’m going to take.
NL: I think a lot of people reading this interview would identify with that.
BB: Well, it’s also hard, you know? Never mind the writing itself, which is personal to each person. But just getting anything off the ground is so hard, and a constant hustle. The more you can diversify the opportunities to tell your stories, the better you’re going to do. Hopefully.
NL: The way you and other Ben started Thrilling Adventure Hour and Kidney Thieves—I’m always going to call it Kidney Thieves—there’s something to the DIYness of the work you’ve done, which I think has led to more work.
BB: Look, a lot of the self-made stuff was just practical. We started doing Thrilling Adventure Hour in part because no one was paying us to write for television. If we’d gotten TV jobs, we never would have done it.
NL: You wouldn’t have had the time.
BB: We were staffed a few times while we were doing [Thrilling Adventure], and for sure, it was a grind, it was a lot. It was a job on top of our job. We did it because we loved doing it.
The more you can diversify the opportunities to tell your stories, the better you’re going to do. Hopefully.
But so much of it was like, “We can’t afford to shoot things. We’re writers, we can’t make shorts.” We couldn’t make movies ourselves at that time.
“Okay, what can we do? We can put a stage show up because, ideally, people will buy tickets to it, and it pays for itself.”
And that was kind of the case with Thrilling for a decade. We never lost money on it, but we always broke even. It was just practical. A way to get our writing in front of people.
NL: You’ve said in an interview about Hex Wives that you’re a writer because you’re not a very good actor. What does that mean to you? Especially at this juncture, where you’ve talked publicly now about also wanting to direct.
BB: To me, acting’s the most mysterious one. And part of it is like, I love working with actors. I love that they can do a thing that I can’t do. They tell a story in a different and personal way that I can’t do in writing or directing, they do it physically.
But I remember saying it about Hex Wives, and I’ve talked about it [in relation to] writing in general. There’s a point that comes in the writing where you are inhabiting the characters. You’ve got a draft down, and now you’re doing your character passes, and those characters are speaking through you, and you are feeling the emotions that they are feeling. That’s the acting part. You’re internalizing all this character stuff.
I can’t then turn it around and present it to people, but I can put it on the page, and I know how to get it through actors on the camera. So, you know, writing and directing feel very similar to me. Directing also feels like teaching to me, it hits a lot of those same skills and presses a lot of the same buttons that teaching—or hosting The Writers Panel—does.
I think I have learned how to direct by doing those things, as well as writing with my partner and in writers rooms. But yeah—I like all the parts of acting except the acting part. And all the parts of acting that are not acting are writing and directing.
[A bit of “the closer we are to danger, the farther we are from harm,” no?]
You’ve got a draft down, and now you’re doing your character passes, and those characters are speaking through you, and you are feeling the emotions that they are feeling. That’s the acting part.
NL: I always thought when I was teaching that I was just playing a roleplaying game. I was trying to catch what the students were putting out and lobbing it back at them.
BB: It has that feeling of—you’re running something. Everyone’s running in a direction together, ideally, and you’re helping to move them from post to post, whether it’s as a teacher or whether it’s as a host, whether it’s as a director—those all feel the same.
NL: Whether it’s as a dungeon master.
BB: That I haven’t done.
NL: You should try it. I think you would recognize some similarities.
BB: Someone made a roleplaying game for Thrilling Adventure Hour. This was years ago. Someone made a Sparks Nevada: Marshal on Mars roleplaying game. We were like, “Oh, this would be fun. We should play it with some of our cast and put it on film and have it as a little bonus video.”
I had never played a roleplaying game, and I was like, “This is great. How do you win?” And you do not win in a roleplaying game. They explained it to me very gently, “No, no, we all tell a story.”
I was like, “Well, I get paid for that.”
NL: “I’m not going to do this in my downtime.”
BB: Exactly. I could be watching a movie right now.
NL: I would love to talk about The Writers Panel a little bit. You’ve interviewed thousands of writers. Can you name one or two lessons that have been the most impactful to you, or that you’ve applied to your own work?
BB: So I started recording The Writers Panel in 2011, then started putting them out in 2012. I was, you know, in my early thirties, and I’d been in the business for a couple of years. But if you listen to those podcasts in order, all nine hundred of them or whatever it is, you can hear my progression as a TV writer. I’m asking, like, what kind of samples should I write? How do I find an agent?
And then it’s like, how do I have a meeting? How do I behave in a writer’s room? What do I do when I get fired? What is development like?
The advice that came up so often, especially in those first hundred episodes from established TV writers, was you have to love what you write. You have to put yourself in it.
The advice that came up so often, especially in those first hundred episodes from established TV writers, was you have to love what you write. You have to put yourself in it.
Ben and I always thought of ourselves as woodworkers, as craftsmen. We knew how to put together a story, and we knew how to write characters, but I think for a long time we were not in our stories, you know? And I think it showed.
It took me a good fifteen years to understand what those writers were saying, about having a passion for your story. And part of it is, as I touched on before—it is so hard, and you have to love the thing that you are out trying to sell, right? Because you’re going to have to talk about it over and over again, or you’re going to have to rewrite it over and over again. You’re going to take notes on it and figure out how those work with the vision that you have. So you better have a vision.
That’s a really big one. Writing yourself, and writing a thing that you care about. It’s something [I’ve started] trying to do only as of a few years ago, but [which] I’m trying to do all the time now.
NL: This is kind of a practical pitching question: How do you maintain that energy—when you’ve written a script that you love, you’ve revised it, you’ve revised it ten times—and you have to go to your fourteenth pitch and still come with the excitement of that first draft?
BB: I’ll say first off—it helps to have a partner. You two can carry each other, and you can entertain each other. We are okay in a room as far as pitching. People tend to like us. They don’t always like the project, but they tend to like us, which is nice.
I’ll never forget a piece of advice—I think this came from Damon Lindelof, in one of the earliest [Writers] Panels. But he said, “When you’re pitching, you want to pitch as if you just saw this great movie, and can’t wait to tell your friends about it.” Which means you wind up just pitching the fun parts, right? You’re not worrying about every single little thing.
I think that that’s some great pitching advice. The other one is just about keeping it simple. Our pitches over the years have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter—and I hate it more and more the older I get, because I just want to be writing or making something. That whole in-between part is so tedious.
But keeping it simple is, I think, the most important thing. This came from Hart Hanson on one of the panels—I will always remember this—Hart was one of the guests, and I think Jose Molina, who worked on Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur show [Terra Nova].
But Hart said he imagines, when he’s pitching or even writing something, that he’s pitching to this little old woman who lives in a trailer in Saskatchewan. She has to understand and get excited about it.
So his example was like, “I’m pitching a show about a lady who solves crimes by looking at bones.” That is easy. That is simple. And there’s all this other stuff that Hart makes it, but that’s the basis for the show.
…keeping it simple is, I think, the most important thing.
And then he points to Jose, who’s working on this dinosaur show, and was like, “This is a show about a family who travels back in time… because of an ecological disaster… to go live on the land… in prehistoric dinosaur time?
“No, no, no, no. I want to watch the show about the old the woman who solves mysteries by looking at bones. That’s comforting to me. That’s easy.”
I’ve definitely been keeping that top of mind for a decade at least. How can how can you keep it simple?
NL: Out of those hundreds of interviews you’ve done, do you have one you would consider the most memorable? Or even just the interviewee you were most excited to interview?
BB: I started this newsletter last year on Substack, and the basis for all of my newsletter entries are transcripts from these interviews, [but] I only have really good transcripts of the first, like, hundred and fifty episodes. So those are the ones I keep going back to.
There’s a lot of Hart Hanson and there’s a lot of Josh Friedman, a lot of Liz Meriwether. They have great advice, but those were also from a decade ago.
[My favorite episode is] disappointing for a lot of people. My favorite episode—this was in 2016, I was still recording in a studio, over at Meltdown Comics. At that point, I started booking a lot of these [interviews] through publicists, and CBS reached out and said, “Do you want to have Jeff Probst on? We’re doing a new season of Survivor.”
I was deeply into Survivor and I was like, “Oh my God, I definitely want to talk to Jeff Probst.” He had a middle grade novel out at the time, so we talked about that for a while, but then I was like, “Oh no, Jeff Probst, you are going to stay here for ninety minutes and talk to me about Survivor, because I have so many questions about how this show is made.”
He was so nice. He sat in that room with me and talked about showrunning Survivor, and creating the stories, and finding the stories, and how that show was built. It was so fascinating, because that stuff wasn’t out there yet. There’s now a great Survivor podcast, which I listen to religiously, which has all of those things in it, but to get that opportunity to talk to this person who made a thing I loved was so exciting.
And that’s been true of—especially when you look at like the first five or six years of The Writers Panel—I’m chasing down the folks who made the stuff I love. So there were a ton of Buffy writers on it. There were a ton of Friends writers on it, New Girl, West Wing, all the stuff that was formative to me and important to me as both a writer and a TV viewer. I wanted to know how they made that stuff.
…especially when you look at like the first five or six years of The Writers Panel—I’m chasing down the folks who made the stuff I love.
NL: Is there one one lesson that us aspiring TV writers can take away from Jeff Probst?
BB: I think there are two actually. One is great characters. When they’re casting Survivor, they are looking for great characters. That doesn’t mean outlandish characters. That doesn’t mean huge characters, but it means people who have a great story, you know? And I think every character you are writing needs to have a great story, even if you’re not writing their story.
Ben and I—we learned this from watching Coen brothers movies, where it feels like even the tertiary characters have these whole stories going on, we just don’t get to see them. I think that’s what Survivor does, they cast these people with great stories who become great characters.
The other thing is—and I don’t think I really thought about this until talking to Probst—but the story isn’t told until the very end. They may enter a season thinking they know how a story ends. You may enter your script thinking you know how a story ends. But until it’s shot, you don’t know. And really, until it’s edited, you don’t know. They find their seasons in editing for the most part, or they refine them anyway.
And that’s going to be the same with anything we write. You have to keep working on it and working on it until it’s on the air. That’s the only time it’s done. It’s a constant state of discovery. You get on set and an actor delivers a line in a way that you didn’t expect, or you’re looking at him from an angle you didn’t expect. That can tell you so much about the world and the characters. Tells you something you didn’t expect.
That’s something you can start to bring out either in the moment or later in post-production, theoretically. If you’re on a series, you can start writing your scripts towards that.
NL: Well I think we just found the title of the interview: “a constant state of discovery.”
BB: I think that’s accurate to my career.
NL: I want to ask kind of a technical question. When you sit down to write, what are the tools that you employ? Do you card things out, use Scrivener, etc.?
BB: We’ve [Blacker and Acker] hit on a process that I think really works for us the past few years. We’ve been at this for a while, and we’re both finding different stories that we want to tell and have ownership over. So the way we do it is, we will sit down a few times, one of us will come in with a big idea or a pitch, like, “I think there’s a movie in this,” and we’ll just start batting ideas around.
What do we want to see in this movie? What is this movie about? What kind of characters are interesting in this kind of story? And we’ll take notes. Over the course of those—usually three—discussions over coffee somewhere, the good stuff will start to rise to the top and we’ll find setpieces, we’ll find character pieces, we’ll find moments that excite us.
And then one of us will sit down and outline the story. I’ll usually do it in a word document with numbered scenes, and I’ll put down the stuff we’ve talked about first. Like, I know this is where we’re headed, I know this is how it opens, and then just sort of put in the connective tissue as I go.
…every character you are writing needs to have a great story, even if you’re not writing their story.
I’ll then send that to him or our other collaborators. Lately we’ve been working with friends on stuff, which has been a lot of fun. So we’ll send it to them, get together on a zoom probably, and give each other notes. They’ll tell me, “This needs to be bolstered, I’m missing this beat. How do I get to this character realization?” [Then] usually do another pass on the outline at that point, and then one of us will just start writing. We write in Final Draft.
I’m usually doing a few projects at a time. Right now we have a feature that we sold to a network, and we’re also writing a couple pilots on spec, and we’re writing a feature on spec. So I’m dividing my day between that pilot and that feature while Ben handles the paying gig right now.
We pass everything around [between us], mostly to get notes. We don’t really rewrite each other a ton anymore. We mostly give notes to the person who is sort of driving the project.
NL: I want to be respectful of your time, so—
BB: I have all the time in the world to talk about myself. Nobody ever asks. [Laughter.]
NL: Well that’s the thing about being an interviewer!
BB: I always end The Writers Panel by asking what people are watching, and if they want to recommend anything. And I’ve been thrown a few times where the person answers, “What are you watching?” Oh God, no! I have to answer a question!
NL: I binged a few episodes recently to prepare for this, so I don’t remember who this was, but every question you asked, she turned it around on you.
It was great because it turned into a discussion, but at the very beginning I could tell that you were like, “Wait, what’s happening?”
BB: [Laughter.] Yeah, I think it was Riki [Lindhome], who is a friend of mine. When we got on, we had been catching up for a half hour before we even started, so it felt like a conversation.
“Oh, now we have to start making this about you. Right.”
It was enjoyable for me, honestly. That is one [episode] I keep going back to because I took so much from it. She was so excited to talk about scheduling. It was so helpful to me. She recommended the Pomodoro method, where you’re doing a set amount of time [and then a short break]. I’ve been doing it since around the time we talked, and it’s been great.
NL: I was writing my thesis in 2020, and then the pandemic hit. It was suddenly like “I can’t work anymore, it doesn’t matter.” The only way that I could get myself to work again was the Pomodoro method. Turn on that timer. Just sit there and work for a little bit.
You know that the break is coming. It’s incredibly helpful.
BB: Absolutely. I have been so productive since I started using it.
NL: That’s great to hear, I’m glad it’s working for you.
Okay, let’s see… Back to Thrilling Adventure Hour for a minute. That show is so confident in what it is—two minutes into the episode I listened to there was a joke about “what evil lurks in the heart of the men,” and I immediately got what the show is.
How do you approach writing something that is at once so confident in what it’s doing, aware of its own history, but which also never feels alienating to a new listener—and is funny?
Part of this is probably just the fear a dramatic writer feels when peeking over the wall at what those comedy writers are doing.
BB: Honestly, with Thrilling Adventure Hour, I think it is just part of us at this point. We don’t think about the comedy—which maybe is clear to many people—but we don’t think, “Is the audience going to laugh at this?”
We did the show every month from 2005 to 2015, at which point it tried to kill me. We were writing a new eighty-page script every month for a decade. It is certainly how we learned to write.
It’s how I learned to produce. All of my friends are through that show. But after a decade it was enough. I said to Ben, “We need to stop and we need to focus on other things.” So we stopped doing the monthly show. We still did six shows the next year, but then, by 2017, we stopped doing the show.
When the pandemic hit, we brought it back and did a bunch of Zoom [shows] for charity, and it was great. It was so great to work with the actors again, it was so great to be writing these characters again.
We started working with other writers, so we were basically showrunning the show. Now we’ve done a show or two every year since then, the past couple of years. And I think it’s second nature at this point.
It’s a hard thing to explain to anyone. We did a show in December, and we put together a writers room in, like, October with some writers that we love. Some of them were very familiar with the show, and some of them were not. But for them to pitch ideas and for us to be able to say, “I don’t know that that’s a Sparks idea, I don’t know that that’s a Beyond Belief idea. Here’s the version that is.”
What makes the show both good and bad is it’s so wholly us that it’s hard for other people to wrap their heads around it—unless they’ve been in it for the same nineteen years that we have.
So the comedy is: how do we make each other laugh? How do we make Paul and Paget and Marc Evan Jackson and the cast laugh, because honestly, we’re just writing it for them at this point. They love doing it. We love writing for them. We have a cast of twelve regulars who can deliver anything and make it great. We are so spoiled in that way.
And then we’ve been so lucky to find collaborators—both the guest stars, who will come back time and time again—but also in other writers and our director, Aaron Ginsburg, who understands what makes this show this show.
So there’s no way to explain this. And that’s part of what makes it a hard sell to people. It’s weird and it’s funny, but the characters are very endearing, and they’re allowed to be jerks. But you also love them even when they are, because they’re not doing it out of any hostility or hatred, they’re just…
We were writing a new eighty-page script every month for a decade. It is certainly how we learned to write.
I think the best way to explain it is this—I should have realized this earlier, but I had to talk all the way around it to get to this. Acker used to explain the show—but also most of the writing that we do—as well-intentioned people who are good at what they do, but they’re bad at emotions. And I think that’s what Thrilling Adventure Hour is, especially Sparks Nevada, which is a little more serialized. We’ve gotten to grow that character.
And Marc Jackson has embodied Sparks in a way that we never expected. It became so much fun to write for this guy who was learning about the world. We looked at The West Wing for that, where it was about these people who are great at their jobs but bad at being people. They’re not in touch with their emotions. And that’s what Thrilling is.
I think that’s what all of our writing is. It’s frequently high concept, but it’s character based and it has a big heart.
NL: I think there’s something so valuable in the volume of writing you’re talking about, from a “learning your craft” perspective. Writing an eighty-page script every month, you are going to hit all the potholes and run into all of the brick walls and carry those lessons forward.
BB: We really got our reps in. In writing an eighty-page script made up of three segments each—each of those segments told the complete story in twenty-five pages or less. We had to learn structure real fast. We had to learn how to make a character, make an impression, really fast.
NL: Before the lightning round—which can also be kind of a lazy river round—we have to hit The Writers Panel classic, “What have you been watching lately that’s getting you inspired?”
BB: Oh boy. I’m watching a lot of movies—I wrote this on the newsletter over on Substack, I think I titled it “I Like Movies Now,” because I had forgotten how movies are great, and they’re funny too! But I loved all the movies that everybody loved this year, and I loved a lot of the movies that nobody saw this year.
NL: We need the specifics!
BB: Honestly, listen, follow me on Letterboxd. It’s my favorite social media. I love it so much.
Barbie is probably the best thing I saw this year. Bottoms is the best comedy I’ve seen in a long, long time. [I think the guy with double-B initials just likes movies starting with B.]
Spider-Verse is great. I don’t know.
I’ve always had an aversion to Oscar movies. I don’t really care about dramas, and I don’t care about Christopher Nolan, but Oppenheimer really impressed me—it wasn’t what I expected. It is still, like, emotionally empty, but you’re really along for the ride.
In television though, after being told by so many people who were on The Writers Panel that I had to watch Slow Horses, I finally started watching Slow Horses, which, like, if you want me to watch, don’t put “slow” in your title! Come on guys.
But it is not slow. It’s so great, so fun. Gary Oldman—the whole cast is so amazing. We’ve watched the first two seasons and we’re about to start season three. I’m so excited for it.
We’re watching the new season of Fargo, which is great. We’re finishing up a lot of stuff that we missed last year. The Other Two is so funny.
There’s a show on Netflix, which a friend of ours turned us onto, called Fisk. Have you seen this program? It is so funny. Two seasons, I want to say six episodes each season. It’s an Australian show written and created by the star [Kitty Flanagan], and it’s just an office comedy, kind of a middle-aged comedy. It’s so funny in the way that Australia only is—she is a great actor, and as much as I want her to keep going, I want her to do everything.
NL: The only thing I’ll say about Oppenheimer, since you gestured toward the soullessness some people find in Nolan movies [I can feel the internet bros coming for me now]—I was kind of unwilling to see Oppenheimer in theaters, and then over Christmas my mother said, “You know, I’ve been hearing about this movie. Have you heard of it?”
So we watched Oppenheimer on Christmas Day.
BB: You know, it kills a lot of the day!
I loved Inception when I first saw it, and then I don’t think I’ve seen any of [Nolan’s] movies since. But [recently] my wife and I were like, “Inception can’t be as good as when we first saw it,” so we rewatched it a few months ago—Inception is great! It is legitimately a great movie.
I just don’t like biopics, I don’t like drama. Oppenheimer—it’s over 3 hours. It had everything going against it, but I really enjoyed it. He’s just such a cold filmmaker, and I can’t help but think that, like, if he had had someone to write the script with him, it might have been a warmer movie.
Because it’s the same structure as The Social Network, which is an incredibly warm movie, and also as fascinating.
I also watched all of Steven Spielberg’s movies in 2023, so I’m coming off of, you know, like fifty of the warmest, most human experiences in film that I’ve ever had. And then putting on Oppenheimer like—[Puts up “okay, I’ll admit it” hands] it left me a little cold.
NL: I was going to ask this after the interview was over, but since you’ve brought up Spielberg—and this is a totally self-serving question—what do you have against Hook?
BB: [Laughter.] Have you seen it as an adult?
[What a question.]
NL: Oh, I sure have.
BB: It’s a mess!
[I mean—]
BB: Did you watch it as a child?
NL: Oh, religiously.
BB: There you go. You have nostalgia for it?
[Sure but—]
It is unfounded. It is not Steven Spielberg’s worst movie—I think there are few that are worse [Ouch.]—but for a movie that is so beloved by people of a certain generation, it is such a fucking mess.
NL: So this is a genuine question, and I know that I have rose-colored coke bottles on the front of my face when it comes to this movie, but what is it that’s such a mess to you?
BB: I’ll give you the high points.
I think the script is absolutely a mess. It doesn’t know what it is, whether it’s a kid’s movie about an adult’s realization—which kids don’t give a shit about.
[I beg to differ! I was a kid and I lov—]
Like that’s a fine arc, but make your movie for grownups. And I think if this movie had been made for grown ups, it would have been great, because Dustin Hoffman is in that movie and he is legitimately great in Hook. He’s chewing the scenery like a maniac, he’s insatiable, he’s giving it his all, as he always does.
I think the first hour is interminable.
[But what abou—]
He does not go to Neverland for about forty-five minutes, and everything in that forty-five minutes could have been accomplished in seven minutes. It is tedious.
Also, in the middle of this movie, you get a Peter Pan origin story. That’s a whole other movie!
[But it’s necessary for Williams’—]
Also, it feels like Spielberg doesn’t know why he was making the movie. And listen, I know not liking Hook is one thing, but not liking The Shining is somewhat blasphemous. I’m not a big fan of The Shining. I think the biggest problem for me is that, when you meet Jack Nicholson, he already seems crazy—because he’s Jack Nicholson.
So while on paper, Steven Spielberg and Robin Williams making a Peter Pan movie seems perfect–
[It is.]
—they are actually probably the wrong people to make this movie, because Robin Williams, he’s so warm and you love him from the time you see him—
[Now THAT’S not tru—]
—even when he’s being an asshole. If that had been Richard Gere, it would be a different story. I don’t think he could pull it off, but there are plenty of actors around at that time who could have. If it had been Richard Dreyfuss even. That’s a guy who is very warm, but he can also play prickly, which Robin Williams cannot.
Spielberg, who is coming off of The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun in the ‘80s—those were the wrong movies for him. You get why he made them. He was looking for legitimacy. He wanted to be a grown up. And then he made Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which is fucking great. It’s a five-star movie. It’s as good as Raiders. It’s phenomenal. It works every scene, it’s a great script, it has great performances, perfect casting.
[This we can agree on.]
And it felt like that helped remind Spielberg who he is. So then he leaned into that too far. He’s like, “All right, I’m the guy who makes E.T. I should make this Peter Pan movie.” He didn’t have a good reason for doing it, other than he felt like he was the person who should be doing it.
A lot of the interviews—and I’ve spent the last three weeks reading interviews and these big books [on Spielberg]—and a lot of that turns out to be true. He didn’t know why he was making this movie.
He had to reset so that he could enter the ‘90s and make Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan and Amistad—which is way better than anyone remembers—and a whole bunch of movies up until the early 2000s, when he forgot who he was again. [Laughter again, somewhat maniacal perhaps, having buried one of the pillars of my childhood.]
You’re welcome and I’m sorry.
NL: I mean, I’m sitting here disagreeing with you on a lot of points, but that’s okay.
We don’t have to get into this much more, but like, when I started screenwriting, one of the exercises I did was sit down and reverse engineer scenes into screenplay format. That’s what I fucking did with Hook.
BB: [More laughter. ] You’re learning the wrong lessons!
NL: Well that’s what I’m saying! Maybe that’s why I’m still in Boston.
But let’s jump into the lightning round here. Favorite cocktail, mocktail, or other beverage?
BB: We drank a lot of cocktails during lockdown, as I know many did. And first of all, I love making them—it is almost more fun to me than drinking them—but a friend of ours runs a restaurant here. We were out to dinner with her, and I ordered a Manhattan—I’m a whiskey and rye, bourbon drinker—and she was like, “No, no, get a Black Manhattan. You’re going to love this.”
And she was right. I cannot get enough of a Black Manhattan.
NL: What is a Black Manhattan? What are the specs?
BB: A Black Manhattan is very simple. It’s rye or bourbon—I like to use rye because I like a little bit of pepper—and then half as much amaro. So instead of using a lighter bitters, you’re using this very dark bitters, and then you can add a couple of dashes of orange bitters if you want to throw that in too.
But that’s it. Stir with ice and then strain. And garnish with a cherry. It’s so good.
Although I like it with an ice cube, because then I can have two or three.
[This is what I always hoped we’d get from this question—a full recipe!]
NL: That sounds great.
Okay. Alien or Aliens?
BB: I saw that you asked this, and I think it’s a great question. I think Aliens is a great movie. It’s probably one I rewatch more often, but I think Alien is a better movie.
NL: See, this is why I ask this! I cannot tell you how many horror writers I’ve interviewed who say Aliens.
BB: Really?
NL: Yes! I think their answer usually comes down to, “well, it’s more fun.”
BB: It’s just a more rewatchable movie, I agree with that. It’s an action movie. Alien is a slow-burn horror movie.
But the thing I love about Alien is the same thing that makes Jaws my favorite movie, which is that it’s so lived in. I love the scenes when they’re in the mess, and they’re just talking to each other and like dicking around. I love that.
I think Alien does that better than any other movie. Like, the only thing that comes close is The Big Chill. It’s just so good at that lived-in feel. I watched Alien at a young age, which in part is why I love horror. It’s also why I love the first forty minutes of any horror movie, before the horror stuff starts.
I just want to watch people hanging out.
NL: I’ve done a bunch of sound design stuff [shameless plug], and I totally, completely credit Alien with my interest in that field.
I’ve never been able to find interviews or anything with the people who worked on the sound in that movie, but it is just incredible and so distinctive. You can hear a half second of that film and know exactly what movie it’s from.
I love that you picked Alien. I was totally expecting Aliens—I’m so glad I was wrong.
BB: I love Alien. It is for sure a top-ten movie for me. If there was any playground that I could get to play in, Alien is top three.
NL: Yeah, same. When I heard that Noah Hawley was doing his Alien show I immediately wrote a new sc-fi spec. [Laughter.] Just putting that out into the world.
BB: Honestly, if anyone else were doing it, I’d be so wary of that show. But he’s so good. He made Fargo a [television] show, which should not be possible.
NL: Have you read the Fargo pilot?
BB: I haven’t.
NL: I so recommend reading the film script and then reading the TV show script. It is just a magic trick that Hawley pulls off. He sounds like he’s the third Coen brother.
If someone told you that you had to memorize an entire novel word for word, what book would you pick?
BB: I take issue with that, because—listen—for a writer, I have a bad imagination. I’m not a fan of “what if” questions or suppositions like this one. Because why would this ever happen? Why would I have to memorize a novel, you know? I mean, look, it’s a funny question. I have a terrible memory.
Misery, maybe. I could do Misery.
NL: I ask this question because… memorizing an entire book, word for word, could take a lifetime, right? Whether it’s a novel or a piece of nonfiction. So if you were going to commit something like that to your brain, to store that knowledge, what is the thing that would make you say, “This is actually worthwhile enough to spend the time on”?
I love the first forty minutes of any horror movie, before the horror stuff starts. I just want to watch people hanging out.
BB: …That makes sense. I’m still going with Misery.
NL: Misery is a great pick.
Most underrated or sadly forgotten TV show.
BB: Oh man. That’s a great one.
There was a great show on Amazon, maybe two years ago, called High School, which is based on Tegan and Sara’s memoir. And it is so well-made. The casting is so good. The feel of it is so good.
I grew up in Boston and they grew up in Canada. And the feeling of growing up in a cold winter, when the sun never comes out, but finding the thing you love—for these girls, it’s music. So it’s about how they start a band together, how they start playing together while also dealing with all the sister stuff and family stuff and school stuff and being gay and all of the stuff—it’s so well made. I would urge people to go find High School before Amazon takes it down.
Fisk is another one I mentioned earlier. It’s a great, underseen show. The other one that I don’t think is forgotten or underseen, but I think is not talked about enough, is Picket Fences, which was a David E. Kelley show. It’s from the mid-90s, and it came up recently with a couple of writers I was talking to.
It was such an interesting show for the time. It was a doctor show and a cop show, but the doctor and the cop were married, and they had a family, and it was really about life in this small town where weird things happen all the time.
Not like X-Files is weird, but it was around the same time. It’s excellent. Big moral questions were raised in every show, and you’d see them through all of the characters, with this family at the center of it.
It was a beautifully written show. These characters pop. Tom Skerritt was the sheriff in it, he was the head of the family. Kathy Baker was his wife and the doctor, and they had a family. And they didn’t always agree. They didn’t always get along. They would find themselves on opposite sides of issues. But the town was populated by these big fun characters.
I feel like that’s the thing I’ve been chasing my whole career—populating a town with characters who have entire stories of their own.
But you only see a piece of it week to week, or in the show or in the movie that you’re doing. So I think Picket Fences was a keystone for a lot of TV writers of my age who are working right now. And it rewatches, you know? It definitely feels dated, but there’s such great stuff in the show that it’s worth checking out.
NL: When you said “populated by big fun characters,” my brain immediately went to Twin Peaks. Was that a show you ever connected with?
I feel like that’s the thing I’ve been chasing my whole career—populating a town with characters who have entire stories of their own.
BB: Twin Peaks was huge for me. I was in junior high, and it [aired] on a weeknight before moving to the weekend. I remember my dad and I sitting in a dark room watching Twin Peaks and getting so excited by how weird and new and nonsensical it was.
It’s a show that was so formative for me, which was on at the same time as Northern Exposure, which also had that stuff and pushes a lot of similar buttons, but is obviously much more accessible.
Twin Peaks was formative for me for sure, but I can’t stand anything with dream logic in it. It’s like I took that in as a kid and then rejected it outright. One of my favorite Writers Panels was with Mark Frost. It was such a great conversation. Him and Steven Canals [creator of Pose], and another Twin Peaks writer [Harley Peyton].
It was fascinating hearing Frost talk about the show and how it was put together.
NL: Final question for the day [it’s not]. Tell us about one thing we haven’t talked about yet that lives rent free in your brain.
BB: It’s a good question. Well, we haven’t talked at all about music, but I think all of the stuff I love about TV and film also applies to music. It’s a big part of my life.
I don’t play music. I can’t sing. But when I was a teenager—and up to and including last week—I loved making mixtapes and playlists and soundtracking moments, and finding the story in a playlist.
This friend of ours who runs this restaurant a few years ago was like, “I’m sick of all the music we have in our restaurant. Can you just make me a six-hour playlist?”
I was like, “Jessica, I’ve been waiting for this since I was 14 years old.” And not only did I make a six-hour playlist, but I made ten six-hour playlists.
NL: My god.
BB: I make playlists for the projects we’re working on, you know? And I send them to Ben and our other collaborators. It helps me get into the mood for the thing. Even as I’m writing and start to tune [the music] out—just hearing the beginnings of these playlists get me into the mood. I think if I had known that music supervisor was a job when I started, I would have chased that so hard.
Right now, part of the reason I want to direct is because I love music and music cues and how sound creates an experience, and I can’t wait for post-production so I can play with that stuff.
NL: So what’s your take on needle drops in screenplays?
BB: I’m totally fine with it. I resisted [using needle drops] a long time, but I’ve started doing it too, because I think people get it. Readers are not stupid.
We know that, yes, you’re creating a mood by mentioning this song, especially one that people know. And if we can’t get that song, fine. We’ll find something that also does that job. I think as long as people aren’t dogmatic or dictatorial about it, then yeah, why not do it? If it helps to create the mood.
NL: I like that answer more than “no needle drops ever.”
BB: That’s silly. It’s part of life. We listen to music, so put it in.
I wrote a ‘90s-themed thing a few years ago, and I absolutely sent the playlist along with the script to any execs I sent it to.
NL: One of my favorite moments in screen reading is near the end of the Ted Lasso pilot. They have a note to the effect of, “we know you might not be able to get this track, but please try very hard, and listen to it while you read the next section, if you can.”
And finishing a read of that screenplay with that song playing created a genuinely touching experience at the end of this otherwise often silly script.
BB: Yeah, I’m all for it. This comes back to some of the stuff we touched on earlier.
Writing—especially a TV pilot or a screenplay—that’s just the first step, and anything you can do to engage people, to make it easy for them to understand what you are getting across—whether that’s putting needle drops into a script or whether it’s writing a thing that you don’t own the rights to but you feel passionately about—go ahead and do it.
If nothing else, people are going to remember it. And maybe it becomes your magic script.
NL: Ben, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun.
BB: This was really fun. Thank you.
NL: And thank you for The Writers Panel. It is it is such an asset to folks who are trying to break into screenwriting. It’s an institution at this point.
BB: It’s still fun for me. You know, I learn something every time. I get inspired every time.
Writing—especially a TV pilot or a screenplay—that’s just the first step, and anything you can do to engage people… go ahead and do it.
Noah Lloyd 