236 | Liz Feldman (Dead To Me, No Good Deed): Writing is Self-Destruction, Self-Reflection, and Self-Correction

What sounds harder? Writing a pilot alone at your desk, or running your own TV show with 300 folks trying to execute your vision? For Liz Feldman, it's the former, which affirms what we often say on this show: writing is really, really hard. Despite that, Liz has almost 30 years of TV writing experience under her belt, including two hits for Netflix that she created and showran: DEAD TO ME and NO GOOD DEED. Join us as she unpacks her creative process.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Lorien: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Lorien McKenna, and today I am thrilled to talk to Liz Feldman, who has a very impressive career as a writer, showrunner, director, and actor. Yes?

Liz: Yes, sure!

Lorien: You're an actor too? Okay, great!

Liz: Comedian? Kind of? Sure. It's all sort of in retirement anyway.

Lorien: So, Liz created and ran "Dead To Me", as well as the new Netflix show "No Good Deed", which follows a couple looking to sell their house, the competitive buyers hoping to get it, and the secrets that tie them all together. Welcome to the show, Liz.

Liz: Thank you so much, Lorien. Really appreciate it.

Lorien: Yay. So before we get into the part where I ask you all the questions, we're gonna do what we like to call Adventures in Screenwriting, where we talk about our week.

So I will start. So, I delivered a script on Sunday, which I was very excited about.

Liz: Well, that's huge. Congrats.

Lorien: I got notes this morning, which I haven't looked at yet.

Liz: So, that's pretty good for, that's a pretty fast turnaround actually.

Lorien: Reps. It's reps notes.

Liz: Oh, it's reps. Yeah. They sort of have to do that.

Lorien: But, even so it was big to send. And of course, then I read the first page and guess what I found? A typo.

Liz: Oh, God. Oh, cue, cue me not sleeping for at least like three nights.

Lorien: Yeah. And it was like one of those their, there are there.

Liz: Oh, come on. So it was like. I almost can forgive those because so much of that is just sort of like some conscious stream of thought.

Your hands and your brain not kind of lining up in the same grammatical correctness.

Lorien: Well, I'm writing this with a partner. So I just, it's his fault.

Liz: Yeah. I mean, the fuck is up with him?

Lorien: I don't know I'll have to to call him. You're the reason. So, it's a fun project because we wrote it as a pitch.

We were going to take it out right before the strike. And then that didn't happen. So then we thought....

Liz: Ah, good timing.

Lorien: Yeah. We'll just write the pilot because it's fun and we love it and it helped us a lot with the pitch as well and That's where I am right now on this other idea I have this idea and I started to write the pilot and I got -- It's a half hour Dark hard genre hard comedy and I was like I could get to page 15 and I couldn't get past it.

And I realized it's because it's an idea. It's not a concept. And so I've been really struggling with it. And so I tried it. What if it's this? What if it's that? What if it's this? And then again, this is an idea, not a concept. I have producers interested in it. I like, so I was like, I'm going to write the pitch, because that will help me figure out what the show is.

Cause right now I don't have a clear engine. And, of course, that made me feel like shit, and I beat, I beat, beaded, bet, beaded myself, I beat myself up.

Liz: Beted, I think you beted yourself up.

Lorien: I beted myself up for a while, and shame, and I'm trash, and I'm never going to come up with another good idea.

Liz: Why do we do that to ourselves, and why am I, why can I relate so hard to that?

Lorien: I don't know, I just I yeah, I don't like it. It's the shame hole, right? Yeah, so then I took a break and then my husband, of course, was like, Hey, we need to talk about this terrible thing happening in our life. And I was like, I don't want to.

And I refused to talk about this thing. And my excuse is. I have all these other smaller things to do, right? My daughter is sick. The dog is sick. I have a broken toe. Like, all these little doctor's appointments, all the little minutia of being alive. And I thought, huh, I wonder if my inability to have a clear engine in my life around this big, high stakes situation is exploding all of my... exploding all over my writing and my writing process.

Liz: Oh, I'm sure they're related.

Lorien: God, I have to confront this icky thing that I figure if I just don't look at it'll go away, right? Which is not the truth. So.

Liz: That's the truth. And I think even a successful writer as yourself I think it's honest and I think helpful to share that we all go through those times.

Lorien: Yeah.

Liz: It's even, when you're You have some sense of job security. It's still scary because okay, well, that's right now. That's this month. That's next month. Okay. Maybe it's this year, but yeah. What about the next 10 years? And it is an existential question at all times.

You have to do this because you love to do it and you literally can't do anything else. And I always say, if you can do anything else, do it.

Lorien: So I. I'm going to make this plan. I'm working on this plan, and I'm hoping that will give me some semblance of control, calmness in my personal life so that, even just making the plan or thinking about the plan, so that I can pay attention to what my character's plan is, what their stakes are, when their actual plot ends and what the show is.

Cause right now all of my insecurity and messiness is just bleeding right over into her journey. And so it's, it's that literal "I am having pain about this, I will write about this." when that's not how it works. You have to, translate all that stuff. And it made me feel more powerful and engaged and excited and sort of reminded like, what an amazingly hard and wonderful thing it is to be a writer and a human at the same time.

Liz: I know. You wish you could sort of, take time off from one or the other, but they kind of go in tandem, unfortunately.

Lorien: So it's all messy. And look, this happens. Every time I write anything, and every time it catches me off guard. Wait, what? My experience affects my writing? Somehow it's shocking, but, here I am.

So, how is your week?

Liz: I think we must just be in a very existentially challenging time. I think we all know that we are. I don't know how quickly this will air, but, we in Los Angeles have just had a real doozy of a three weeks in that we just went through the fires, literally, and, as of even last week, a fire popped up very close to our home and we were about to evacuate for the second time.

And, it's extremely ground shifting when you are displaced, even mentally, from your home, and we are one of the two of the three of the lucky ones, my family and I, our home is here. I'm in it right now. So many people can't say that so many dear friends of ours can't go back to their homes.

And it's so big. It's such a cataclysmic event that has taken over our city that my answer to that, and my, you know, the way I can absolutely relate to you needing a semblance of control is that a few mornings ago, I woke up in an absolute tizzy and said to my wife, we're going to go to New York for three, at least three months, we're going to New York.

Perfect. We're going to find an apartment. I'm going to find a school for our daughter. And I just I was like, I didn't realize in the moment but I was essentially in a full panic spiral, just because I was like, I got to get out of here this. It's so heavy. I mean, literally, the air is heavy. And it's hard for that not to just affect everything and make everything else feel secondary and less important.

A lot of my week has been colored, by the aftermath of the tragedy that we have gone through as a city, as a community. I have to say, I had a moment yesterday where I was digging into a a new idea. And I just was like, would it feel good to just write something down? Like I, I'm the kind of creator that I like to stay in my head for as long as possible before I put something down on the page.

I love to swim in the idea and get lost in it and let it just kind of percolate. That's kind of my favorite part of the process, is the before writing, is the letting it be anything it wants to be in my imagination and going out into the world and having, interactions and experiences that I go, "oh, I'm going to just pluck that little thing and use a flavor of that for this", or, "this could be part of this character."

I love the incubation period, and I'm in one right now. So that's fun. But yesterday I actually sat and I typed and I, it was for the first time in a really long time because I just had a show come out, I'm not like immediately back in a writer's room. And I've decided that I want that show to be a one season show because I had an idea for how to continue it, but it had very much to do with Los Angeles real estate.

Lorien: Ah.

Liz: And given what has happened in these last three weeks, my heart is telling me there's another story that probably needs to be told that might be more important than sort of a more fun romp about buying a new place in LA. It feels very colored by the true need that people have right now to find shelter, it does not ring of a comedy to me in my mind.

It feels more like almost like a really dark thriller, which is not exactly my genre. So anyway.

Lorien: Not yet.

Liz: That's right. You never know. I'm percolating on something new. I went to type just sort of like a rough outline of a pilot story yesterday and it felt really good.

Lorien: Oh cool.

Liz: It felt really good, which was surprising to me because I'm one of the kind of writers that hates writing but loves having written. You mean a writer?

Lorien: Yes. I was gonna say, wait, what?

Liz: Yeah, I mean, I find the process to be completely torturous. And that's why I like the incubation. I like the before writing because it's not writing. It's just imagining. It's conceptualizing, which I really enjoy doing. It's just living in your imagination.

But then once it gets to the mechanics of it. It just feels like a chore and I go through all of that same mishegas of "I don't know what I'm doing" and "what am I saying" and "is this important" and "who cares" and all that stuff every time. And I've been with the same therapist long enough for her to be able to remind me, you do this every time you do this every time.

So thank you, Donna.

Lorien: So here's how I use my therapist. The last couple minutes of every session we have, I'll pitch her one of my characters and she diagnoses her.

Liz: Oh, that's great.

Lorien: And then I can go look at like the symptoms of that.

Liz: That's great.

Lorien: Take like the nurture, if it's personality disorder and then what the bad, how they grew up and where, and then mush it all together.

So it's not just like a. What's it called?

Liz: Yeah. It's not like a trope. It's not, it's archetype. Yeah.

Lorien: It's not an archetype. It is like a human being, but that's always fun for me because then I know for sure. I can check that off of something I probably don't have.

Liz: Well, there, well, first of all, that's, it's always great to know that you're not a malignant narcissist.

Lorien: Yes. I am pretty clear on that one.

Liz: Yeah. Pretty clear on that. Me too. Yeah. I'm really super happy when my therapist said I wasn't a narcissist, I was, whew. Okay. And so, but that's really brilliant actually to be able to have that reference to say. Here's what I'm thinking as a sketch of a person and then she's like oh,, that sounds like borderline personality disorder.

Lorien: Yes. Yeah. It's actually, it helps. It's validating that I'm on the right track if it's so clear that she can diagnose.

So when you're in your conceptualizing and in your brain, how are you picking? Because I find when I get in that sort of dream place that sticks in my head, I just go all over the place, but it isn't until I put it on the page and I sort of talk it through and see how it plays there that I can really decide, or glean what it is.

Liz: Yeah, I mean, I think what I've learned to do to focus myself because I certainly would have the ADHD tendency to want to do too much and have it be about more than is possible to really write about in a short period of time, which I've certainly been guilty of, but I like to really immediately understand why I want to tell the story.

Like, where is it coming from in me that makes this the thing that I have to be doing right now? And so I really try to birth it from an emotional place. And then often I find like a, I try to organically find a premise that is "hooky" within that, and so, you know, with, for example, with ""No Good Deed"", I was going through the process of buying and selling a house and I couldn't believe what a monster it was turning me into.

Lorien: Ah.

Liz: And I was watching also my wife, who I like to describe as entirely too decent. I was watching her morals sort of get a little bendy. And I thought, this is really interesting, if a process like this can compromise the morality of a really good person, that might be worth writing about.

Lorien: So I immediately was like, okay, who is she in the show? Trying to come out.

Liz: Just like you're saying.

Lorien: I know she's not literally doing it.

Liz: It's not literal.

Lorien: Yes, of course.

Liz: There's a lesbian couple in the show, played by Abbi Jacobson and Poppy Liu, named Leslie and Sarah. And they are loosely based on my wife and I, however, in some ways, in some way, I mean, Leslie is based loosely on me, Sarah based loosely on Rachel, but what I always end up doing is taking some emotional fabric from myself and putting it in every character so that I can really write it.

You need a way in. You have an entry point. I think most writers want that. And I want that for every character. So people always go, okay, which one's you? And then I always step back when I'm done with a project and I look and I kind of go, everybody's me.

There's a little bit of, there's a little bit of me in O-T Fagbenle's character, who's the writer, who's having to follow up his first book with something, there's a little bit of me in in Lydia, who is a person who is going through, grief and is punishing herself. There's a little bit of me in Paul, who's a pragmatist, so, I really like to identify with everybody or else I just don't feel like I can write them authentically, right. And if I really feel like I'm not totally sure I will 100 percent hire somebody or multiple people in a room who can step into that skin in a way that I know I can't. I know I'm, I can pretty much relate to most middle aged women at this point, but when I knew I was writing this, older man who is going through the stuff that he's going through because he's a man, because he's expected to be the protector and the breadwinner and all of that I really wanted to hire a writer that I felt could really channel that for us.

And so luckily Bruce Eric Kaplan agreed to join our room, and so much of Paul, was really shaped by his sensibility and his point of view because who knows that better than him? Not me.

Lorien: And the show was so brilliantly cast.

Liz: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you to Sherry Thomas and Russell Scott because they're absolute visionaries when it comes to that stuff.

Lorien: What I really loved is, I've seen most of these people before in different roles and this felt like it was like down their path, but slightly different because I could never quite figure out, am I rooting for this person?

Right? And well, if Paul did do it, do I want him to get caught? There was this constant thing, which for me felt like what being in a marriage is. Are you the bad guy? Am I the bad guy? That sort of what are we dealing with right now? Like every single relationship felt like that. The show felt like being in a marriage too, right?

Like just the tone and the style of it, like it's really intense argument and then just walking away and then coming back, like you just. Right. It just felt like marriage to me.

Liz: I love that. That's a good takeaway. I love it. It's not exactly what we were striving for, but it is what I always sort of aim for, which is it to feel familiar and not to, even though the situation is very heightened, that there's some sort of emotional through line that is identifiable and relatable.

Lorien: I like that you say "that's not exactly what we were going for".

Liz: But that's the brilliant, truly like that is. Why in some ways it's a gift to be able to write because I could, I put in things that nobody talked about that nobody picked up on that. I thought this is really about this.

Nobody cared. People just end up imbuing.

Lorien: Yes.

Liz: Stories with their own story, and whatever is going on for you. And that's to me, then we did a, we did something, if you were able to find something that we didn't even know was in there, like that's, I love that.

Lorien: Well, yeah. I mean, I've been married for 25 years this year, so, marriage is on my mind. Right?

Liz: Yes. I get it. I get it. I'm married for 12 and partnered for 16. So, it's a, I totally understand. And I was interested, obviously, in exploring, the shadow side of a good relationship, people who obviously love each other, but you can't, you can't expect everybody to have the same reaction to every, pain and every slight and every trauma, like people grieve differently.

And I think when you're married, you learn that on a nearly daily basis

Lorien: Over and over again. Yeah. Yep. Speaking of the shadow relationship you talk about so much of it is in there. The relationship between the women who are married.

Liz: Leslie and Sarah.

Lorien: So there is, they have A lovely relationship, right?

There's secrets and lies and stuff, but they're, they are playful and fun and, little wish fulfillment y, right? There's still physical affection, they're still listening to each other, they do want, they're going in the same direction together, even if they take different paths.

Liz: Yes.

Lorien: And then you have, The brilliant Linda Cardellini, and she's in a very destructive lesbian relationship, right?

And so I was raised by two moms, in the 70s and 80s, very big lesbian and gay community, but a very small town, and it was very dangerous, so we couldn't tell anyone, it was a lot of shame, right? One of my moms worked for the school district, if anyone found out, right? So it was a very challenging way to grow up.

Now, when you talk about, two women having, being married and having kids. It's different. The vibe, right? Yeah, but I loved about it is, so when I tell people about it, it's like this expectation that it was great and that my mom's were great. But then what I love about the show showing the nuance of the different kinds of lesbian relationships that can exist. The different kinds of gay and lesbian parents that can exist in the same way. Being gay doesn't automatically make you good at marriage.

Liz: It doesn't automatically make you good.

Lorien: Right. And so I really appreciated that. That view and that that I want to watch the whole show again, because there was a lot of those things going on in there for me where it was like, there's the good side and the dark side.

It's not the bad side. So for me, it was I don't know, really powerful. So thank you for that.

Liz: Oh, thank you for seeing that.

Lorien: Because I felt seen in a way, even though it's not the child of a lesbian couple, it was the sort of, let's talk about the reality of. Not everyone's good at everything, but sexual orientation or gender doesn't mean anything.

You're not assigning some value, you're just people, which I loved. So, thank you.

Liz: Thank you. I mean, it was important for me to finally take the opportunity to show the multifaceted person who is a queer person. I think in the past I've felt a lot of pressure to canonize or to, idealize the gay or queer person, because It's my chance to show the world that we're not bad people and that we're not sinners and that there's no reason to inherently dislike or discount somebody because of their sexuality.

But then I feel like I did that a couple of times and I thought it'd be fun to show in the same world dualities exist, and, I'm glad that you picked up that the couple at the center of the show which is Leslie and Sarah, like they do have a good relationship and that is modeled on my relationship with my wife.

Like we inherently have a good relationship. We like each other. We want to get along, but there's going to be stuff, especially when you throw in the stress of trying to have a baby. So, so that stuff was, inspired by our very long journey, trying to make our daughter and, it's interesting because a lot of people in the sort of last month or so that the show has been out, they kind of single out that couple and I think, oh, that's interesting because they are the ones based most in reality for me.

And so that's pretty, but also Linda's character, Linda Cardellini plays Margo, and we wrote that character for her. So I, she told me she wanted to play a bad ass bitch when we were shooting the last season of "Dead To Me". And I thought what would that look like? And she was a hundred percent the muse for that character.

I didn't know she was going to end up actually playing it. Our schedules were going to align, but I'm so glad that they did.

Lorien: Because she is delicious in the show is just delicious. Yep. And she has one of the best entrances of a TV show I've seen recently where it's just that shot of those unreasonably high. I think they're red shoes, right?

Liz: Yes. I think they're like Gucci or something. Maybe yeah, I think they're Gucci.

Lorien: Yeah I have no idea. I was just like, yum. And then you meet her and then, gosh, character name, Phoebe... what Lisa Kudrow says, Lydia, if she buys this house, I'll burn it to the ground.

So I loved so much about the pilot and all the intros of the characters, right? You see, she says, I'll burn it to the ground and then. Of course, the, her house, Margo's house is burnt around at the end. And I'm always like, well, who did it exactly? Right? Who, who was that? And then, but with Margo's character intro with the shoes and the later, before the epilogue of six months later, you have her wall, her museum of shoes.

And then you have, Paul and Lydia sitting on the bed in their son's room. At the beginning and at the end again showing character, relationship and character growth. I really loved these, the beginnings and the endings, right? The opening image and the closing image. Is this something you knew going in that you were going to do that?

Liz: Yeah, yes, somewhat. I mean, I... like all writers, I look at the process of writing as like it's ironing, and so, we, the sort of gift of being able to do a show that is streaming on Netflix is that they want the majority of the episodes written before you start shooting. And I like to have them all written except for the finale.

So I usually pretty much have always had every episode written right up to the finale because then as we shoot. Inevitably, things come up that I want to add to the finale, and then inevitably things come up that we end up going back to the beginning, ironing out and adding little details along the way.

One of also the great gifts of making ""No Good Deed"" was that I got to make it with a producing director named Silvertree. So I got the outside perspective from the beginning of a director, of a visionary eye to say, wouldn't it be cool if this, wouldn't it be, what if we did it like that?

And we would, I would call her, kind of, on the way home pretty much every day, and from the writer's room, and I'd say here's what we talked about. So she was very much a part of that. process. And I'm also a director. So I do think in pictures whenever possible. And I'm it's, only a writer would pick up on that stuff.

And I'm so glad that you did. It's validating.

Lorien: Well, this morning I woke up and I, well, my daughter came in to tell me she was still sick and wasn't going to school. But then after I was already awake, I was thinking about the scarf. When Vanessa Bayer's character comes in at the very opening and Lydia says, I'm not into an inside scarf when you see the daughter come in the house and the end when the big reveal happens and she's wearing that scarf inside.

And then that's the. That's the evidence, and really so I, these things keep popping up in my head that are so beautiful, and so now I'm like, oh, how obvious, but how you're laying all that stuff in, and so I'm really curious, secrets and lies and shame.

Where is that line? Like, how do you know how much to reveal in each episode? And how do you make sure that every couple gets the right amount of screen time? The mechanics of putting a show together versus, how different was it on the page than it was on the screen? Versus, shooting it versus edit, I guess is what I'm really asking.

Liz: I mean, look, it was challenging.

It was really challenging to do a half hour show with that many characters. It was an experiment because I hadn't ever really done an ensemble before in this format. I've written on, multi camera ensembles, but that's so different. It kind of doesn't translate at all. So having gone from a two hander, which "Dead To Me" really is.

Two characters. One of them is in every, one or the other, or both are in every scene of the show. It's not A story, B story, it's just not a classic, structure. Right? I wanted to do something that could challenge me as a writer to try to serve more characters. For the opportunity to be able to tell more stories in this exact format, because we're talking about the buying and selling of a house.

There's so many different stories that can be told through this vessel. And I maybe was selfish and tried to tell too many, but I couldn't, once I sort of developed these characters and started weaving them together I couldn't kind of get rid of any of them. So instead, what we learned to do was take a couple out per episode to be able to balance out the screen time, the literal real estate.

To be able to spend time with them and get to know them and invest in them. And, it was really tricky, but it's, it took a lot of layering. It's a lot of, it's hopefully like a really good haircut. You keep going back in and correcting and evening things out and making sure that it has just the right wave.

And I think a lot of the tonality of it is something that I feel it's an instinctual thing. It's, it is a specific tone, and it is very much how I sort of see life. I'm, I'm a pragmatist and I'm an idealist. I'm dark and I'm light. I have had the craziest weeks where you can't believe the amount of ups and downs that have befallen a person. As we all have, I think.

I just maybe pay a different kind of attention to it because I'm a writer. So I'm always looking at everything from a weird distance, which I think probably helps me stay sane, but also helps me really kind of clock the human experience in a different way. And, I think we're often taught as writers, I've done so many workshops and the classic stuff that people have done. I've done some other weird stuff that people haven't done, but generally....

Lorien: Is it ayahuasca? Is that what you do?

Liz: Oh no, I'm too scared. I don't like throwing up. I can't do it. Don't make me do it. I mean, I certainly know people who have, but it's not, that's not, I don't feel the call, so I'm not going to do that, but I'm talking about like classes, Robert McKee's "Story", I did that workshop, and I think there's a lot of value to that.

But I think what happens is people learn to tell stories the same way and stories start to feel very predictable because we all understand the rhythm that is about to happen, just like sometimes you can almost know what the next melody is in a song because there's a certain rhythm that you're kind of falling into.

And I think we all learned, or at least our generation learned a storytelling that was something good happens, something bad happens. There's a positive charge. There's a negative charge. And I, that's how I started writing in the first place, but I found that it really didn't lend itself to dynamic television.

I think it maybe works better for a screenplay. There's so many more scenes. But what I found is actually, what's more true is something bad happens and then something worse happens.

Lorien: Yep. And then you do something worse, right?

Liz: And then it brings out the worst in you. Yes. And then you've just made your problem worse.

Yes. And so I kind of, at a certain point I heard this quote, and I don't want to misappropriate the quote, so I can't, don't remember exactly who said it, but it was a, a very storied television writer and he said, create characters you love and torture them. And I think that's pretty apt.

And so that's sort of what I like to do. And obviously you need moments of lightness, you, you just, you need to break the tension with levity and you also need to give an audience a little bit of hope and a little bit of a break from the tension and the stress. And I just think if I'm in this scene and I'm this person, I'd probably be cracking a joke about now because I can't handle the stress and the tension.

And so it's, I kind of go from like that. It's like a feeling thing. I, you just sort of know, okay, it's too dark. Now we've got to lighten it up. But sometimes also it's such a gift to be able to write a scene and not worry about being funny at all. I come from a comedy writing background, capital C, and there was such a demand, three jokes per page and every scene has to end on a joke and life doesn't work like that.

So I prefer to write life like I experienced it.

Lorien: I think that's so smart. You're talking about, sounds like, learning, doing all the things, learning everything and then integrating it into yourself and then trusting your instincts.

Liz: Yes.

Lorien: Right. Not letting self doubt take you down into the shame hole.

Liz: I mean, listen it's probably going to be a challenge until the day I die, not to let self doubt suck me down into a shame hole. But I do think that there's a thin line between self doubt and self correction. I have

Lorien: So self destruction, self correction.

Liz: Yeah. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. I think that there's, too much ego is not good as a writer.

I really try not to ever fall in love with what I'm doing, or what, or how I'm doing it. And I always say to the writers in the rooms that I work in, I don't need to be right for it to be good. I would much rather the best idea win, and I might say no at first because it's a knee jerk reaction because I don't totally understand it.

Lorien: That's scary.

Liz: It's scary. Sometimes it's scary, but I will always go where the energy is. I don't go, I don't need to swim against the tide just because it's, the way I like to swim. And I've worked for certainly many showrunners who need to be right. And I've seen the shows suffer because of that.

So, yeah, I had a my therapist, Donna, here we go back to Donna. Everything goes back to Donna. She said that there was a study done, I think it was in Sweden, and they looked at the sort of a through line of the personality traits of the most successful people and they're, they had two things in common across the board in any field.

And it was one was they worked harder than their counterparts. And two was they were always willing to, to self reflect and to self correct. And I think that's key. And so... and that's a lot of why I keep going back and layering and ironing out, because I don't presume I was right the first time.

And, I'm always willing to look at something I've done and go, okay, how can I do that better? And, in "Dead To Me" I, doing a two hander was so fun, but my god, that's really hard on two actors. It's really hard. We're talking 15 hours a day and they don't get a break ever. And I thought as a reaction to that, emotionally, I was like, I want to spread out the love and I want to give more actors more parts so that we're not just always relying on two people. It's so much pressure on them.

And then if one of them is sick, you're kind of fucked, right? And it's inevitable, life happens. So that was the inspiration originally for wanting to do an ensemble, now that I've done an ensemble, I go, okay, I'm going to be willing to self reflect and self correct and I think there were a lot of characters I was trying to service and next time if I want to do an ensemble, I might pare it down a little bit so I can spend more time and help you invest even, more in, in the characters.

Lorien: Well, I love the show. I thought it was...

Liz: oh, thanks. I wouldn't change a thing.

Lorien: I wouldn't change a thing. No, I mean, I, no notes.

Liz: I appreciate that. No notes.

Lorien: It was one of the shows where after it finished, I was like, ah, fuck, I wish I'd written that.

Liz: Oh, that's the nicest compliment. Thank you.

Lorien: Yeah, and then I fell into the shame hole for a while, and then I picked myself back up and confronted my own existential crisis.

But it's fine. Everything's fine. Don't look over here. We're fine. We're fine.

Liz: I mean, I'm not fine, so you don't have to be fine.

Lorien: I'm so not fine right now. I'm un fine.

Liz: I'm un fine. Absolutely.

Lorien: Jeff had a question for you. Our producer Jeff.

Jeff: I was gonna, if it's okay Liz, jump back to Linda Cardellini, who I think is not only amazing in "Dead To Me", but also amazing in this.

Like you mentioned, it's such a turn for her. She's so sweet and kind of demure in "Dead To Me", and she's kind of a monster in "No Good Deed", which I loved.

But I was rooting for her, still. I found her to be compelling. To me, she's sort of the villain of the show. Obviously all the characters sort of have a spectrum of moral depravity, but I feel like to me, she's the worst.

And I don't know. Okay. How do you write a character with such like a low moral fabric, but who's still interesting and who we still want to watch and was that something you were thinking about on the page as you were drawing her?

Liz: Yes, I we knew by design you needed to love to hate her, but that you wanted her to get back on the screen.

And truthfully the, answer to that is: cast Linda Cardellini. Because when you have an actor who's just inherently likable which she is because she is a good person in real life and she is an approachable, real, very emotionally available person in real life and she can also do anything so it was a real sort of boon to be able to even think of her in the process and think "oh god she might even do this which is great".

And it gave us license to really create a character that could do anything to anybody. And speaking of, understanding her diagnosis, like, we knew this was a sociopath. It's a crazy like sort of place to write a character from because it can really get off the rails and become sort of not really a real person, but I wanted to make sure in the process of sort of carving her out that there was a reason why she was the way she was, even if it's never explicitly said that we understood it.

And so, we understood that she came from very little, we understood that she was just one of those people who knew she didn't belong there and wanted something else. We understood that she watched soap operas with her grandmother, and fell in love with this actor, and came up with a plan, and that a lot of her motives and actions are literally inspired by the soap opera because that's her frame of reference for the world.

Now, is that a little heightened? Yes. Are there sociopaths in the world? Yes. Are there social climbing, opportunist, terrible people in Los Angeles? A few. A few. And, so we sort of, we put that all sort of in, in this stew of, we wanted her to feel like a person you would really meet in Los Angeles and not be shocked, but still be shocked by some of the moves that she made.

Jeff: That's great.

Lorien: She was brilliant. I thought what I love what you're talking about. We kind of know where she comes from, but we don't know quote, what the trauma is, like what the thing is that drove her, which I thought was brilliant. You don't, because you're showing the symptoms of it, which is what is interesting, not the actual burdened by the, Oh, that bad thing happened.

I, she was wonderful. And the hair was everything. I mean, I mean, come on.

Liz: The hair and the makeup and her wardrobe, which was brilliantly curated by Tracy Field, who's my longtime costume designer who did Judy for "Dead To Me" as well, did all of "Dead To Me" that was a real collaboration of figuring out who this woman is.

And Linda is so wonderful because, we've been collaborating for so many years that those conversations started so early, started long before we even finished, the, all the scripts because at a certain point we knew she was going to be able to do it. And she knew what she wanted to look like and I kind of had an idea and we sort of mix those ideas together and, it's just there's nothing more fun than that, it's like adult Barbie.

I was a big like dolls and Barbie kind of kid growing up. I love playing with my Barbies, mostly playing with Ken. I had four Barbies and 12 Ken's kind of wanted to be more like Ken than Barbie, but but that's what it just felt like we were kids in a sandbox truly. And it's, as I have threatened to Linda, I'll take her with me everywhere I go.

I I would work with her again and again, and I really hope I get to.

Lorien: I love that you have so many longtime collaborators and you're working with this, that clearly you're someone who people respect and like to work with again and again. If you had to sit in a room right now by yourself and not reach out to anyone no Barbie with a friend or other writers would you be able to do it in the same way?

I cause I'm like, writing a pilot by yourself and writing a pilot with a room of actor or writing a TV show is so different.

Liz: It is. I like writing pilots. I've been doing it for a long time and I think I can write, I mean, I think I've proven to myself I can

Lorien: I mean, of course you can.

I guess the question is, how painful would it be?

Liz: Oh, it's horribly painful. It's, there's, I reach a moment every time I'm writing a pilot, like, why do I do this to myself? And I start to sort of go through my entire personality and go, is there anything else I could do?

Could I sell cars? Could I, is it too late to go back to school? It's torture. It's absolute torture to make something out of nothing. But it's, and I'm not, I'm a terribly disorganized person. I'm not I'm very like type A and hardworking and I can sort of look at a macro really well and do a big picture thing really well.

I'm much more comfortable running a show with 250 people than sitting by myself, writing a pilot, but it's, it's like painful. And it's like an exorcism. It's like an emotional exorcism. I could do it. I could do it.

Lorien: Of course you can. You have. It's do you want to? And that, I think for so many emerging writers, it's go write a pilot by yourself.

The expectation is you're going to get staffed in a room. Where you're writing it with a group of people.

Liz: Right. It's a, I think it's important to do it. It's an important exercise to complete over and over again because it's how you carve out your voice. And I always tell writers, when I'm hiring writers for a room, I can tell within five pages if you really understand your own voice.

And I'm not interested in people who can just ape mine and can just sort of mimic my style. I want to know your style because I'm interested in evolving, right, and making things feel a little different. I, a lot of the "Dead To Me" writers came over to "No Good Deed", but it was only a few. It wasn't everyone because I wanted there to be a freshness to the voice of the show.

And it's, it's really important to do that. You learn how to be a writer by forcing yourself to do it alone. And not that's always going to be what you're doing, probably, 10 percent of your career will really be by yourself, alone, with no one to bounce off of. But it certainly made me a better writer.

And, I will say, I wanted to ask you actually, so you're saying you're writing a pilot, and you said you got to page 15, and then it kind of, did you, I'm assuming you were working from an outline.

Lorien: No.

Liz: Well, there's your problem.

Lorien: Yes, because I was like, I'll just write and see what happens. And what happened was pages and pages of hilarious, dark, weird, uncomfortable dialogue that I was loving, but it didn't have a beginning or an end.

Right. So by the time I got to what should be the midpoint, I was like, well, nothing's happened yet. How can there be a midpoint? So I was having this struggle and the resistance to write an outline was because there's no stakes in the show yet. I don't know what the plan is, right?

Liz: Yeah. I think if you have resistance to writing an outline, you know you have a problem.

Lorien: Oh, yeah. No, I'm very clear what the problem is here. I have to be more disciplined here, especially for this project because it is complicated.

Liz: Yeah. I mean, the outlining process, though, probably more painful than the script writing process is so imperative. And I hate it. I say that, hating it. I don't like doing it.

And I do it in my own way, but I have, because I'm not an organized thinker, I have to organize it for myself ahead of the script. I have to know. And what I was saying earlier was, yes, I sort of figure out what I want to say and why I want to say it now and where it's coming from inside of me.

But then I immediately have to come up with the engine because, especially as sort of my style being propulsive and, cliffhanger-ey and all of that I have to know the plot. And which is why I start emotion first, so that it feels like it's really coming from a place.

And then I dive into what does this person want? What are the, what is, what does she want from her? What does she want, and it's so easy to forget that because it's so simple, and it's well, obviously she wants something, especially for television. If you don't have an engine, you don't have a show. There's no show.

Lorien: This is me. Avoiding the work, being self destructive, not doing what I need to do because I'm scared, or, it's how I'm avoiding, it's how I'm avoiding something. Yes. So, this is why I was like, okay, what am I avoiding in my own life? Shit, I've got work to do. Yeah. If I can handle my own life, perhaps I can write a script this week, so, again, self reflection, self correction, going back 15 years to what I was doing then is not helping me right now. So it's, elevating my craft yet again okay, get out of my own way, do the work. So, yeah, so this has been fun. I always have these " ah, fuck, I got caught" moments on the show where I'm like, damn it, they see me. No, you're totally right.

Liz: I see it because I'm looking in a mirror, baby.

Lorien: It's because I don't like doing outlines because I feel it's just...

Liz: I've been a television writer for almost 30 years. I've written so many episodes or been a part of so many episodes of television that I've sort of learned to detach a little bit from the, the heat that each little point of the process can bring you.

And I always say, pitch the show you can sell, and then worry about writing it. Pitch the show you can sell. And then I would say, outline the show you can make, and then I would say, write the show you can shoot. And that, what I mean is I often write things in an outline that I know are going to change.

Lorien: I mean, that's been my experience when I've created and sold a show. And they're like, write the outline. I'm like, okay. And then they give us notes and then we sit down to write the, I sit down to write the pilot. And I'm like, well, that changed, right? It's the, when I'm trying to write something new by myself where I get stuck.

Yeah. Right? I love writing pitches. I write a pitch. So, I, yeah.

Liz: I had to be less precious. Even I'm talking about when I'm coming up with a new thing or whatever you have to just take the heat off of each thing. Like it's not, lower the stakes of each step because it becomes overwhelming if you're like, well, if I put that in the outline, I, and then I'm going to have to change it.

Like just already know you're going to have to change everything and you're going to have to change everything 20 times. And if you can accept that it makes every step along the way a little bit easier.

Lorien: Here's the brilliant thing about what you're saying is this is literally advice I give to other writers.

You're going to write many projects. Stop working on this one for 10 years, right? Just make a decision. Go for it. See it.

Liz: We're better at, we're better at cutting through other people's Michigas than our own.

Lorien: Totally. So much Michigas. Do you have a couple more minutes? Because we have three questions we always ask everybody at the show.

Okay. So the first question is What brings you the most joy when it comes to your writing?

Liz: I think when I am experiencing what feels like a channel and I'm in a scene and I'm writing it and it feels like it's coming through me rather than I'm coming through it or forcing my way through it. I think that brings me the most joy in terms of the actual writing process.

And then, of course, I love having written.

Lorien: Okay, so what pisses you off about writing?

Liz: [Laughing]

Lorien: I think that was our answer. Okay, we're done. On to the next one.

Liz: I mean, it's maddening. It's a maddening process. Being in the muck, being in a kind of, I mean, I've been where you are so many times where you're like, I really thought this was going to work. And I don't really know what's going, you know what, I actually was just talking yesterday with my friend, Jesse Klein, who we do our podcast together, but she was a writer on "Dead To Me". And we have this thing called the twin palms moment, which is I had come in with this idea at the beginning of season two of "Dead To Me" that if I even started to explain, it would seem so silly. Let's just say we called it the twin palms. The Twin Palms story.

And I was forcing this thing, trying to force this story for weeks and weeks, and it just wasn't lining up, and one, one morning I just had this epiphany of it's Twin Palms, that's what's getting in our way, and I let it go. And once I did, everything fell into place, and I had this old idea that I think it might I was hanging on to for some stupid reason.

And I needed to get to the place where I was able to let it go and I called it the twin palms moment and so we were just laughing yesterday about, now every time I'm sort of in a situation that feels like I'm stuck, I'm like, "maybe this is a twin palms moment, maybe you need to just let it go". And that drives me insane to think "oh I've just wasted all this time thinking I was going to do this one idea because I Like the concept of it, but it doesn't actually fit into the story."

That drives me crazy.

Lorien: That's not relatable at all, I have to tell you. Like zero. That never happened to me. All right, and our third question And the last question is if you could have a coffee with your younger self, what advice would you give her?

Liz: That's a really good question. I mean, I feel like I'm almost continually in conversation with my younger self. Cause I really try to remember who I am before all the stuff, before all the good stuff and the hard stuff. And I think probably what I would say is take a deep breath. There was really good advice given to me along the way, which is that to "make it", I'll put that in quotes, but to make it in quotes in this business, you need these buckets of gifts. One bucket is talent. One bucket is hard work and one bucket is goodwill. And I was taught that many years ago. And I find that to be true. You need all of those buckets to be full. Some of you have more control of than others. But I would then add a fourth bucket, which is time.

And so I would probably tell my younger self, it's going to take so much longer than you think. And just because you want it, and just because you're hungry, and you're hardworking, and you're willing to throw your entire self into something, it doesn't mean that it's going to work. And I would also tell my younger self that every failure is a gift.

And as painful as they can be, they'll set you up for the next thing.

Lorien: Thank you for that.

Liz: Sure.

Lorien: I feel like you're speaking to myself now as well as my younger self.

Liz: I mean, I'm speaking to myself as well because it's, there's no there's no graph that represents any part of life that's just up with no downs. It's just not what life is like. You, you don't just continually win and succeed and experience happiness.

It would be boring. It'd be less stressful, but it would be boring.

Lorien: It could be useful with a nice stretch of it though.

Liz: It's nice to have a stretch. It's nice to have a stretch. And when you're in a stretch, you should realize you're in the stretch. Because you probably have had a stretch, but not realized it until it was too late.

Lorien: Yes. When you can look back at it and be like, that was so great, but was it? I don't know. Is there anything else you want to say to our audience, or to me, I'm open to advice.

Liz: I mean, yeah, I just, I think I really believe in saying something that only you can say, I forget, again, I don't want to misattribute but, everything, I think actually it was maybe David Lynch who said, yeah, everything's been said, but not by you. And I really believe that because if you can be true to yourself and your experience and not try to write like somebody else and not try to please an executive or deliver something that you think an audience wants, but if you can really find something inside yourself that needs to be said, more than likely it needs to be heard.

Lorien: Yeah, I. When Transparent came out, I was like, oh, so many of these stories are my stories. So I don't, it was this, oh, it was a gift at the time. I don't have to write any of that stuff. Right?

And now I'm realizing my version of that and all that, like the Women's Festival is so different. Right? Because it's from a little kid's perspective.

It's just now I'm realizing that was, again, me letting myself off the hook. What am I doing these days? Oh my. Yeah. So, Yes, I agree with you.

Liz: Have you read Elizabeth Gilbert "Big Magic?"

Lorien: Yes.

Liz: There's a, there's an excellent, incredible, mind blowing story that she tells, which essentially boils down to an idea when it comes to you and it knocks on your door.

If you don't answer, it'll go to another door, it'll knock on somebody else's door. And so, and I've experienced this over and over again where I've had a thought and I go, okay, Ooh, that's good, but I don't know, I'm going to think about it. And then six months later it gets sold. And I had nothing to do with it, so don't assume that your story isn't worth telling.

Lorien: God, I'm so mad now. I have stuff to think about. Thanks a lot Liz for coming over here and blowing up my day.

Liz: Sorry.

Lorien: No really, thank you so much for being on the show and your show is wonderful and I think everybody should watch it and I'm gonna watch it again because now I'm so interested in tracking all the, the scarf moment is what really hit me this morning. I was like, ah! I found another one, right?

Liz: I really appreciate that. And it's when another talented writer looks at what you do and sees it for, all the stuff that it is trying to be. It's a very validating thing. So thank you.

Lorien: Thanks so much to Liz Feldman for joining us on today's show. "No Good Deed" is streaming on Netflix now.

Jeff: And for more support, be sure to check out and join our Facebook group. There's a lot going on over there.

Lorien: And we have a membership site called the Screenwriting Life Workshops that you can check out if you go to our website, screenwritinglife.com and remember, you are not alone and keep writing.