Darci Interviews TV Writers

Home Town: West Hartford, Connecticut Current Town: Santa Monica, California What are you working on now?: I’m currently writing a feature animation project for DreamWorks, a half hour series for Netflix, and actually starting a new animated feature for an independent studio. For tv writers/showrunners, my wife and I have been doing a lot of feature work during the pandemic. And a lot of animation! Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person: I’ve always been a bit of a con artist looking for loopholes to beat the system. In high school history class we had weekly quizzes where we had to do ten short (one paragraph) answers and I quickly realized the teacher counted *down* from 100, marking ten points off for every wrong answer, but she didn’t care what order you answered the questions in. So if I only knew 8 or 9 of them, I’d just put them in random order to disguise the fact that I hadn’t done all ten. She’d see everything

Home Town: Alexandria, Louisiana  Current Town: Santa Monica, CA What are you working on now?: I’m working on an adult animated sci-fi drama for HBOMax that… hasn’t been announced yet! Story from childhood that explains who I am as a writer?: My mother claims that as a toddler I once sat in a mound of red fire-ants and let them sting me because I thought they were interesting. This may be a good metaphor for my love of probing the dark and scary in my writing. If I could change one thing about TV?: I would love a return to bigger episode orders! Who are/were my television heroes?: Jane Espenson, Damon Lindelof, Glen Mazzara (why was Damien cancelled?!), Sera Gamble, Akela Cooper, Javi Grillo-Marxuach, Jose Molina, and like a squillion friends who are keeping it real on writing staffs all over town. What kind of television excites me?: I love anything that scratches that itch of humans behaving badly without realizing why. We the audience can see it’s because of their past traumas,

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA What are you working on now?: A story about murder. And chicken. But not chicken murder.  Tell me, if you will, a story that explains who you are as a writer or as a person: I was living in NYC, and one night, an old friend invited me to join her at a theater I’d never heard of. I walked into the dark basement of a Gristedes grocery store, which housed the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre, saw an improv show (I think it was an ASSSCAT 3000, with some of the 30 Rock cast) and I fell in love with the form. I needed to do that; improvisational comedy. I took every class I could, wrote sketches, made musical parodies and put them on YouTube. I was trying to leave a legal career, unsure how or what to do instead, but being silly with a group of strangers for three hours a week completely saved me. My “ah ha!” moment was watching a show featuring a sketch I wrote and hearing the laughs from my words that the actors so magically brought to life. It was such a

Home Town: Arlington, VA Current Town: Los Angeles, CA What are you working on now?: Star Trek: Picard on Paramount + Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person:  I grew up in the DC area, so always had a lot of friends from other countries. Some were from financially struggling immigrant families, some were ambassadors' kids who were used to a certainly worldly privilege. But I remember a million little culture clash moments where I realized my American way of doing things didn't have to be the "norm." Some people eat dinner at 10pm. Some people take siestas. Socialism can be great. We don't have to buy so much stuff. A lot of people speak more than two languages. Work isn't everything. Old people are valuable. True "freedom" is never really what society tells you it is. All of these little moments opened my mind and heart to a bigger world out there I was dying to see. It made me feel so