{"id":20116,"date":"2024-02-06T08:50:32","date_gmt":"2024-02-06T13:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/worldscreen.com\/"},"modified":"2024-02-07T09:32:31","modified_gmt":"2024-02-07T14:32:31","slug":"death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/","title":{"rendered":"Death and Other Details\u2019 Mike Weiss & Heidi Cole McAdams"},"content":{"rendered":"

An international cruise liner. A murder mystery. A backstory murder mystery. An abundance of family secrets. Death and Other Details<\/em>, now streaming on Hulu, is an Agatha Christie-esque whodunit created and executive produced by Mike Weiss and Heidi Cole McAdams. Featuring a sprawling cast of characters, the show is rooted in the relationship between Rufus Cotesworth, one-time \u201cworld\u2019s greatest detective,\u201d played by Mandy Patinkin, and Imogene Scott (Violett Beane), the young woman he teams up with to solve said cruise-liner murder mystery when she becomes the prime suspect\u2014and its connection to the still-cold case of who killed her mother. Weiss and Cole McAdams tell\u00a0TV Drama Weekly<\/em>\u00a0about how they came to work together on the show, its distinctive look and what viewers can expect from the second half of the ten-episode season.<\/p>\n

\"***Image***\"TV DRAMA:<\/strong>\u00a0Take us back to the beginning. How did you come together to work on\u00a0Death and Other Details<\/em>?
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0The two of us are not a writing team. We have been friends for about a decade. We\u2019d never written anything together before. We had spent some time in writers\u2019 rooms on other people\u2019s shows\u2014enough time to know it\u2019s really fun to work together. We\u2019d been looking for something to do, and we had a meeting with [director] Marc Webb, who we\u2019d never met before. He said he was thinking about doing a detective series set on a ship, and that happened to become the Venn diagram of the things that I\u2019m excited about and the things that excite Mike. We have a wide variety of tastes, but we both love detective fiction. We started working on it that week. It turned out to be the smoothest development experience of my career so far.
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0For me, too. Sometimes, when you\u2019re working with great people and have a simple, clean idea and don\u2019t get in your own way, it can be smooth and shockingly pleasant. We kept on moving the ball forward. We would turn to each other and say, Here\u2019s the notes call or the Zoom or something where this gets tricky, and it never did. We put together a long pitch. Usually, when we pitch shows, we both like to do it with 15 minutes of actual talking. In this pitch, there are a lot of characters, a lot of dynamics that you need to set up and a lot of housekeeping that goes into establishing all of the players in this game, so it was more like 25 minutes.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0I think it was exactly 23.
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s because we were talking fast. We got to the big twist, which was probably 21 minutes in\u2014if you ever speak for 21 minutes nonstop, it is an out-of-body, hallucinatory experience.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0It helps when there are two of us.
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0It helps. By the time we got to minute 21 and we revealed the big twist, the head of Hulu, who was on the Zoom, gasped in surprise. We sold it. We went away and wrote it. And they did something a little bit old-fashioned: They ordered a pilot. We\u2019re so glad that they did. Heidi and I have broken tons of stories on other people\u2019s shows. The pilot was fairly large in scale. We were on the Queen Mary. We had an elaborate wardrobe. It was just a lot to manage.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0We learned a ton about what was working and what wasn\u2019t. It\u2019s a weird tone, so what to lean into and what to lean away from, how to establish all the players and feel like you understand enough of the bones of the murder mystery from the beginning while keeping the audience engaged. Things about the pilot, particularly the relationship between Imogene and Rufus, jumped out immediately. That\u2019s a TV show\u2014I want to spend time with those two people working together and solving crimes. Other things worked well on the page but didn\u2019t work as well in production. We were so fortunate that we weren\u2019t ordered to series and already down the line shooting the next episodes. It gave us time to sit back and say, What\u2019s working, what\u2019s not, what do we need to reshoot? What do we need to reimagine as we move forward and make the next nine episodes?
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0When they ordered the pilot, at first, we were like, Well, this is ridiculous. We\u2019re amazing; the script is flawless; what are we discussing here? Why aren\u2019t they just giving us all the money and the resources? Why don\u2019t we go and make the series? We were so wrong. We were so deeply lucky to get to change some things up, to go from the pilot to the series. There were little speed bumps here and there, as there always are. Production is hard. You\u2019re going to war, and the enemy is the script that you wrote. But it was incredibly smooth, considering. And we had amazing collaborators to bring the show to life.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s such an unusual and distinctive look. Tell us about the thought process behind crafting the show\u2019s visual aesthetic.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0We wanted the show to be transportive from the beginning. We wanted to entertain people and take them away from the world that we are living in every day. Even though it\u2019s a contemporary show, we wanted to create a world that felt like it could potentially be a piece of our world but heightened and a little bit outside of what we\u2019re living in every day. We drew a lot of inspiration from the \u201930s, \u201940s and \u201950s as we were building what the ship looks like and the costume design. So many detective series and novels of that era gave us inspiration for the story, so we felt it was an organic inspiration for the ship, the clothes and the world.
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0We wanted the show to feel classical without ever being capital R retro. That was one of our overriding goals.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong>\u00a0You said you\u2019d never been writing partners before. How did you approach dividing up the responsibilities?
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0Differently every single day. We worked on all of it together and separately. Maybe there\u2019s a scene that a writer from our writers\u2019 room wrote, and then we looked at it together and changed a line of dialog here or there. Maybe there\u2019s a scene that Mike wrote, and then I rewrote. There\u2019s a scene that I wrote, and he rewrote. Many [moments] were me pacing the office and him sitting at a keyboard, talking out the scene. It worked. We\u2019d never written anything together, but neither of us is very precious, and we can both take criticism well. We can criticize each other. Television, in general, is an exercise in constantly rewriting yourself. You\u2019re rewriting through the whole script process but also through production and post. Both of us are not tired by that. We\u2019re energized by it. And so that made it easier to collaborate.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:\u00a0<\/strong>What can viewers expect from the back half of the season?
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0They\u2019re trapped on the boat. There are certain scenes where we give you relief and take you off the ship for various reasons\u2014flashbacks, character backstories, etc. But mostly, these characters are trapped on the boat, and the tension will rise throughout the season. One big murder took place in the pilot. It\u2019s a murder mystery. No spoilers there. It\u2019s not the only body that\u2019s going to drop. People can expect that inside the genre we\u2019re in. Hopefully, people are falling in love with certain characters. Hopefully, people are hating certain characters. Any kind of real emotional response is great for the creators. Not all of those characters are safe. Good things are going to happen to people. Mostly bad things are going to happen to people. We are going to answer the question of who killed Keith Trubitsky and why. And we\u2019re going to explain to the audience how it connects to the murder of Imogene\u2019s mother way back when. We\u2019re going to give you all the answers that you crave and hopefully tease you for a different type of murder mystery in [a potential] season two.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0The episodes that are coming down the pike are different from each other. Each one has its own identity, feeling and pace. I hope that we keep the viewers on their toes and excited by how we, in our writers\u2019 room, decided to tell the story.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong>\u00a0What was the approach to plot development and pacing? Does every episode need a big plot twist or cliffhanger?
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0You don\u2019t want the audience to get too comfortable. You don\u2019t want them to think, Okay, the writers and the actors have set up a twist, and it\u2019s got to come in the second to last scene in every episode. You want to syncopate it. You want to catch people off guard and surprise them. That\u2019s one thing I think we did well in the back half of the season: create tension but also moments of comfort\u2014which we jar you out of with hopefully surprising twists every episode. Every episode has a twist in it. I\u2019d say every episode has a cliffhanger to it.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0Some version of a surprise.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong>\u00a0You mentioned that audiences are taken off the ship through flashbacks and backstories. Was the ship itself ever creatively constraining?
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0I think we constrained ourselves with that conceit. We were excited about the conceit of putting these characters on a ship. When the tension gets harder and harder, that forces secrets out. And there\u2019s a lot of fun to be had because it was containing. Do you get into the writers\u2019 room, and you\u2019re in the middle of a story in episode six or eight, saying, If they could just get off the ship! That happens momentarily. But I do think, overall, it served the story and didn\u2019t hinder it.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong>\u00a0We know the challenges in the media economy right now and the slowdown in scripted orders. As creatives, how do you see the state of the market?
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0The industry has decided that they want old-fashioned television. That doesn\u2019t mean repetitive. It doesn\u2019t mean carbon copies. It just means that they want stuff that feels like meat-and-potatoes television that is understandable and recognizable to an audience.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0And repeatable. For years, every time you would pitch a television show, you would not be thinking just about what the pilot episode looks like or what the first season looks like but what episode 100 looks like. There was a period in which TV seemed to be moving away from that need. Now we\u2019re in a place where these shows with legs, which can make those 100- and 200-episode marks, are in higher demand.
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0Writers think they don\u2019t want constraints and gripe about not wanting them. But having some rules and areas to stay away from is helpful for writers to operate efficiently.
\nCOLE MCADAMS:<\/strong>\u00a0And creatively.
\nWEISS:<\/strong>\u00a0There\u2019s something thrilling about staring at a blank page; your fingers could take you anywhere. But there is also something paralyzing about that. Being given some rules is helpful just to get started. Sometimes, that first sentence is the hardest thing to come up with. After you\u2019ve got that, you\u2019re rolling. I\u2019m not scared about the moment we\u2019re in creatively; I think it\u2019s a little bit easier to figure out what that first sentence wants to be right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The creators and executive producers on how they came to work together on the show and its distinctive look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":20117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,70],"tags":[8491,8490,8489],"class_list":["post-20116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","category-top-stories","tag-death-and-other-details","tag-heidi-cole-mcadams","tag-mike-weiss","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nDeath and Other Details\u2019 Mike Weiss & Heidi Cole McAdams - TVDRAMA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Death and Other Details\u2019 Mike Weiss & Heidi Cole McAdams - TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The creators and executive producers on how they came to work together on the show and its distinctive look.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-02-06T13:50:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-02-07T14:32:31+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2017\/07\/MikeWeissHeidiColeMcAdams-224.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"640\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"394\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/\",\"name\":\"Death and Other Details\u2019 Mike Weiss & Heidi Cole McAdams - TVDRAMA\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2024-02-06T13:50:32+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-02-07T14:32:31+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/death-and-other-details-mike-weiss-heidi-cole-mcadams\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Death and Other Details\u2019 Mike Weiss & Heidi Cole McAdams\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\",\"name\":\"TVDRAMA\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\",\"name\":\"Mansha Daswani\",\"description\":\"Mansha Daswani is the editor-in-chief and associate publisher of World Screen. 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