JamesG
06-13-2015, 03:25 AM
Jessica St. Clair
One of my favorite things Lennon and I have written hasn’t even aired yet!
Without giving too much away, in the first episode of the second season of "Playing House", our characters, Maggie and Emma, get caught breaking into Mark (Keegan Michael Key) and Tina, aka Bird Bones’ (Lindsay Sloane) house and they almost have sex on top of us.
Weirdly enough, we were inspired by the scene in The Great Muppet Caper when a ragtag bunch of muppets break in to steal back the Baseball Diamond. I’m Miss Piggy to Lennon’s Kermit.
We improvise all the parts in order to write our first draft of the script and watching Lennon improvise as Keegan is one of my greatest joys in life. When we’re breaking episodes, we often start by coming up with scenes that we want to see, what would make us laugh, and go from there.
Often, it’s a physical comedy bit, with the girls getting into a real scrape and then we ground it in the real emotions that the characters are going through. Something I love about this show and this scene specifically is that no matter what insane things they may go through, at the end of the day, these are people that truly love each other.
Oh, and we had to teach a dog how to hump a puppet. Which, weirdly enough, was NOT inspired by The Great Muppet Caper. So, there’s that…
Lennon Parham
In the first season of "Playing House", Maggie gives birth to her daughter, Charlotte. Having recently given birth to a baby girl myself, I discovered as Jessica [St. Clair] and I were writing it, that it was really important to me to portray birth in a real, messy, unfiltered way; the same way I had just experienced it.
And when it came time to write the scene where Maggie is pushing and she doesn’t think she can do it anymore, that she’s just not strong enough — which is a moment many women face during labor — we didn’t want to shy away from the intensity of the moment.
Maggie’s best friend, Emma, steps in to remind her that she’s stronger than she knows and that she can indeed do this, in what is probably the most emotional moment in any of our shows.
I was really proud to be able to balance the drama of this scene with the comedy. Everything came full circle when, in real life, Jessica also gave birth to a beautiful baby girl — in an eerily similar way to the TV birth we had just written.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/the-write-stuff#.mfgXNnGBY
One of my favorite things Lennon and I have written hasn’t even aired yet!
Without giving too much away, in the first episode of the second season of "Playing House", our characters, Maggie and Emma, get caught breaking into Mark (Keegan Michael Key) and Tina, aka Bird Bones’ (Lindsay Sloane) house and they almost have sex on top of us.
Weirdly enough, we were inspired by the scene in The Great Muppet Caper when a ragtag bunch of muppets break in to steal back the Baseball Diamond. I’m Miss Piggy to Lennon’s Kermit.
We improvise all the parts in order to write our first draft of the script and watching Lennon improvise as Keegan is one of my greatest joys in life. When we’re breaking episodes, we often start by coming up with scenes that we want to see, what would make us laugh, and go from there.
Often, it’s a physical comedy bit, with the girls getting into a real scrape and then we ground it in the real emotions that the characters are going through. Something I love about this show and this scene specifically is that no matter what insane things they may go through, at the end of the day, these are people that truly love each other.
Oh, and we had to teach a dog how to hump a puppet. Which, weirdly enough, was NOT inspired by The Great Muppet Caper. So, there’s that…
Lennon Parham
In the first season of "Playing House", Maggie gives birth to her daughter, Charlotte. Having recently given birth to a baby girl myself, I discovered as Jessica [St. Clair] and I were writing it, that it was really important to me to portray birth in a real, messy, unfiltered way; the same way I had just experienced it.
And when it came time to write the scene where Maggie is pushing and she doesn’t think she can do it anymore, that she’s just not strong enough — which is a moment many women face during labor — we didn’t want to shy away from the intensity of the moment.
Maggie’s best friend, Emma, steps in to remind her that she’s stronger than she knows and that she can indeed do this, in what is probably the most emotional moment in any of our shows.
I was really proud to be able to balance the drama of this scene with the comedy. Everything came full circle when, in real life, Jessica also gave birth to a beautiful baby girl — in an eerily similar way to the TV birth we had just written.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/the-write-stuff#.mfgXNnGBY