Innholdsfortegnelse for Emmy Special Issue 21A June 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

After serving as A head writers on Saturday Night Live in 2016-17, Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider are embracing the politics-free zone of their half-hour Comedy Central series, The Other Two. The scripted comedy tells the story of 30-something siblings, Brooke (Heléne York) and Cary Dubek (Drew Tarver), and how the overnight superstardom of their teenage brother — YouTube musician “ChaseDreams” (Case Walker) — affects their floundering lives and showbiz careers. Kelly and Schneider, both 35, who wrote on SNL for six seasons, spoke with THR about their transition from sketch writing to scripted comedy and the process of creating a fictional pop star and his accompanying music. What was the first kernel of the idea for this show? SARAH SCHNEIDER Chris and I had talked for a while about…

As the Emmy drama field wilted under pressure from the dragon-led behemoth that was the final season of Game of Thrones, the TV Academy could fill the comedy categories with excellence three or four times over. Another exceptional class of freshman half-hours — think Russian Doll, Ramy, The Kominsky Method or Kidding — is sure to attract attention from those lovers of the shiny and new, but here’s hoping voters remember the myriad departing comedies eligible for the last time. It’s hard to worry about HBO’s Veep, winner of three series Emmys, plus an almost mindboggling six for star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who added a triumph-from-health-adversity narrative that ought to make her unbeatable this year. Still, Anna Chlumsky has five nominations and zero wins, so will Amy’s transition into a magnificently…

VANESSA BAYER What We Do in the Shadows The former SNL star guested on the FX show as an emotional vampire who feeds off pity from the sad stories she tells. AIDY BRYANT Shrill Ahead of her eighth season on NBC’s stalwart, she recruited SNL boss Lorne Michaels as EP on her Hulu comedy. AMY POEHLER Russian Doll The Netflix series’ co-creator and EP (she also EP’d Comedy Central’s Broad City) directed Wine Country for the streamer. BEN STILLER Escape at Dannemora The onetime SNL castmember (and frequent guest) was an EP on the Showtime miniseries and directed all seven parts.…

During THR’s March 2018 visit to the set of Forever, creators Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard are toying with how much to divulge about their top-secret Amazon show. “OK, we’ll give up the ghost,” says Hubbard after a few minutes of back-and-forth. “Literally,” quips Yang. That’s just it about the pair’s half-hour dramedy: Stars Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen are (spoiler alert!) actually dead for most of it. It’s a crucial conceit that Yang and Hubbard are doing backflips to keep from leaking (they gave critics an exhaustive “Do Not Reveal” list for early reviews) in hopes that viewers would stumble on the surprise naturally when they tuned in to the eight-episode series, which debuted in September. Rudolph and Armisen play June and Oscar, a married couple who’ve built a…

Barry BILL HADER Executive producer Filling the room Hader and fellow EP Alec Berg brought five other writers onto their staff, everyone from a stand-up comic to a veteran TV drama writer, to have a variety of approaches to the stories. For instance, stand-up Emily Heller “is good at sniffing out stuff that’s trite,” Hader says. “I tried to pitch something about viral videos and she just said, ‘C’mon, Grandpa …’ ” Meanwhile, theater vet Jason Kim “really helps because he understands story so well.” A work in progress “I tend to, in our off-season, write down a ton of notes on what I want the new season to be,” explains Hader. “I’ll write them randomly in my phone or email them to myself. Before the room starts, I get…

Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle didn’t grow up together but, after meeting during their junior year at NYU, they bonded over their shared ambition to work in entertainment. After reuniting in Los Angeles, they found themselves hanging out with Erskine’s former middle school classmates (she went to the city’s glitzy Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences) and reflecting on their awkward teen selves. So naturally they decided to revisit this time in their lives with their Hulu show PEN15. Erskine and Konkle co-created and co-executive produce the series, along with starring as 13-year-old versions of themselves. Erskine, 32, spoke with THR about creating the show, casting her own mother and what she and Konkle hope to do next season. How did you go about writing the show? It was all…

The first thing David Milch, 74, wrote for television was a 1982 episode of Hill Street Blues. Before that, he’d primarily been an academic. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale, taught seminars on fiction and poetry, earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and worked on a two volume textbook anthology of American literature. This would all fit nicely on an up-and-coming English lit professor’s résumé, except he also got kicked out of Yale Law School for being arrested after, according to The New York Times, “he destroyed a police car’s roof lights with a shotgun blast.” (Some form of psychedelic, probably LSD, was involved.) Getting the Hill Street Blues script assignment was his exit visa from academia. “I knew that you don’t get a lot of chances,”…