I'm right in the middle of a seven-day period bracketed by unpleasant anniversaries. And yet, right in between those is the oasis that is the five-year anniversary of the Zoom live read of my script CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS. CRISIS might be the personal project I'm most proud of, and definitely was my favorite experience in terms of seeing an audience react to my work.
It was an idea that first arose out of the boredom of the pandemic. It's strange how that period of time feels so fresh and so distant at the same time. We were just a few months in, positive COVID cases were rising, and no end was in sight. Freezer trucks were outside of hospitals because it was the only way to deal with all the bodies and a good portion of the country was trapped at home. The lucky ones were able to work via Zoom. The unlucky ones saw their savings dwindle.
I can't say it's a time most of us care to revisit. And even then, a lot of us were getting through it by binging old TV shows. I was no exception, and on a day in May, my recent binge led me to a stray quips about two characters who shared the same name. I joked on Twitter that there needed to be a CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS in order to iron out some connections between those shows. I should have expected, but didn't, this would provoke people to tweet at me, "you should write it!"
I wasn't serious about it, but I figured I could write a page or two, just to continue the joke.
An hour later, I'd written the first four pages, just as an exercise. At that link, you can see where I've collected some of the Twitter responses to that first blast. It was the pandemic and dopamine was in low supply so I chased that rush again the following night with four more pages. These pages - involving the GILMORE GIRLS - got an even BETTER response.
Truth be told, I don't know if I ever have gotten such immediate positive reinforcement. And so I dropped another four pages the next night, and six more the night after that. Somewhere in there I got a message from Ben Blacker, who said that whenever this was done, he had a platform for doing Zoom live reads and he'd love to host CRISIS.
I was like, "Ben, this was just a fun exercise. I don't have a complete script, or even know what the full story would be!"
"Then write it," was Ben's simple response. As if it was that easy.
There are a lot of reasons a script comes into being. The best and most noble is when the writer has a story they're burning to tell and it's the right story for that moment.
But a close second is when you have an audience that is telling you they WANT more of what you're doing. When that sincerity is backed up by them telling other people they should read what you're putting out there... it gets a lot easier to face the blank page.
Suffice to say, about a week later, I finished my full draft. There was some turmoil in the world at that exact moment, so I held onto it for an extra week or so before unleashing it publicly. And that started the process of casting this live read. I knew that if possible, I wanted to get as many teen drama actors reprising their roles as I could... and the start of making that happen was with reaching out to my boss on SUPERMAN & LOIS, Greg Berlanti.
Greg had been a showrunner or an executive producer on a few shows depicted in my script, DAWSON'S CREEK, RIVERDALE and KATY KEENE. The better argument for bringing him into the loop was that the show that was his baby, EVERWOOD, was pretty pivotal to the story and those were the returning actors I wanted to get the most. I have a whole post devoted to Greg's involvement, so I'll merely direct you there and sum up that he got me my white whales of Gregory Smith reprising Ephram Brown and Emily VanCamp returning as Amy Abbott.
I'm not sure what was a bigger boost to my ego - the first conversation where Greg Smith told me that he thought I nailed Ephram's voice, or several weeks later when we were recording it. I was watching Greg and Emily become those roles again and got lost in how seamlessly they fell back into character. It felt like a real episode of EVERWOOD - so much so that for a moment, I kinda forgot I had written those words! And then when that was done hitting me, I remember allowing myself to accept that "Wow, it really works. You totally imitated the voice of the show and of those characters."
That was a feeling I got several times during the live-read recording. We ended up with an amazing cast. The very first actor to speak was my friend Mark Gagliardi, who was playing the adult Kevin from THE WONDER YEARS. I'd written a narration that felt very in the style of that show, but as we were slotting in actors, we let them know they had the freedom to interpret the parts however they wanted. They didn't have to feel like they were locked into imitating the actual actors. It gave this wonderful suspense to the recording because - yes, we did in fact get EVERYONE on the same Zoom and record them together - whenever a new character popped up, you were eager to see how they'd be played.
Anyway, Mark came right out of the gate with a pitch-perfect Daniel Stern imitation, right down to the cadence he used. I was staring at something like 15 or 20 people in Zoom boxes with expressions of amazement and delight. They all kinda went, "Holy shit! So that's how it's gonna be!" The 90 minutes or so that followed was some of the most pure joy I've ever experienced in a creative setting. I can't speak for anyone else who was a part of it, but for me it was one of those experiences that reminded me why I wanted to be a writer.
I was not prepared for Melissa Fumero to absolutely own the role of Lorelei Gilmore. I was a massive fan of BROOKLYN NINE-NINE, so just getting her was a coup, but to actually HEAR Lauren Graham in her voice was astounding. On the other end of the spectrum, I wasn't all that familiar with Isabella Gomez but I became a fan for life with how she brought Rory Gilmore to life. And then we had people like Jamie Moyer as Sue Sylvester and Matt Lauria as Dawson Leery, two people who I wasn't terribly familiar with and who played their parts WAY outside the original interpretations.... and still killed it!
My friend Nick Wechlser did double-duty as Archie Andrews and Lucas Scott, going his own way on both and just meshed so well with the hilarious Vella Lovell as Veronica Lodge. Vella really threw herself into the musical number, as did Emmy Raver-Lampman, Lindsay Blackwell, and Carloine Ward.
Did I bury the lede? Yes, Paul and Storm put together a Zoom musical number using the GLEE arrangement of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." When I wrote it, I knew it was the most audacious thing I could put in a live read. I doubted we could pull it off, so that's why it was so gratifying to see the tweet reactions roll in, "Holy shit! They did a MUSICAL NUMBER!"
I saved every one of those reactions, by the way. They all got linked in the reaction post here, and the nice thing about embedding tweets is that even when the original account gets deleted, you can still see the text of what was said. I can't tell you how much I needed those positive vibes that week.
Well, I guess I should. I don't like that it's part of this story, but fate had other plans.
See, just a couple days before this live read dropped, my dad was put on a ventilator. He'd been hospitalized for about two weeks with COVID and that was when he took a heavy turn for the worse. In a segment following the show, I dedicated the production to him, saying that "He'll see it when he wakes up."
He never did. The show premiered on Friday night and he died in the early hours of Monday morning.
The joy of seeing everyone react to CRISIS and telling me what it meant to them was a necessary interruption of the stress and sorrow of that week. I needed this show to be an intrusion on that horror, but that also meant that any time in the last five years this came to mind, the grief would intrude on the accomplishment. It really sucks to have this particular moment of victory forever tied to one of the worst things in my life. And I think that's all the acknowledgment I want to give that.
In that spirit, I was blown away by how many reactions, tweets, and texts I got AS SOON as the show ended. You could watch it at any point for eight days, so I was very moved by the people who HAD to see it as soon as it was released. I could tell a lot of them were people who had grown up on these shows like I had.
That nostalgic connection to more innocent times was something we really needed then. I think that's backed up by how many nostalgia podcasts for those shows have launched in the time since - THE OC, GOSSIP GIRL, SMALLVILLE, and ONE TREE HILL all have or had recent podcasts hosted by cast members taking a look back.
My favorite of those is the ONE TREE HILL podcast, called Drama Queens. Sadly it's on the verge of finishing its run after another couple of episodes, but it launched in Summer 2021 with Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton Morgan and Bethany Joy Lenz as hosts, giving us their perspective on the show episode-by-episode. There's a lot of backstory connected to this, as the women of OTH had come forward a few years earlier about how their showrunner was a sexually harassing, abusive, misogynistic asshole. The podcast was a way for three of the shows stars to reclaim the experience for themselves. When necessary, they cued us in to what was really going on behind the scenes at various points in the series, including how the showrunner would stoke conflict among the women to keep them fighting each other and not himself.
Hilarie left the show after season 6, when her character departed, and since then Robert Buckley has filled the third chair. No matter the configuration, I've always enjoyed hearing the actors perspectives, especially when they're so different from what a fan's viewpoint might be. It was a privilege to experience them reliving their early adulthood, and in the show's better moments, we could see the women taking something more profound from the entire experience.
There's a recent exchange between Joy and Sophia that to me sums up not only their journey with their podcast, but also the emotions we get out of reliving these touchstone shows. It happens in Episode 822, covering the finale of the penultimate season. It's a little more than 42 minutes in.
Joy: I'm so grateful for our show. I'm also you know, there are everybody has life experiences where it's packed full of things that you're so grateful for, and then you also realized you've learned so many lessons from because there were a lot of bad things in it too. But you know, overall, I'm so grateful that we got to have the experience that we did.
Sophia: ...The cool thing about the rewatch and the time we get to spend - and I don't just mean us as hosts, I mean all of us - like going to our conventions and doing this podcast together and having all the friends on it all the time... it just it gives you something back... You go through you can go through a hard thing and you kind of lose certain memories. Like when you've been through a trauma or whatever, that thing becomes the biggest thing in your rearview mirror in certain ways in your brain.
And what I've loved about this journey is that it's kind of right size to that stuff. It's shrunken it down to only take up the amount of space, you know, the least amount of space it should... less space than it did at the time, And it feels like it's increased. It feels like it's blown up the balloons of all our good memories to be bigger. Yeah, and I don't know that we would have had that otherwise.
"Then write it."
