Liz Meriwether

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2012 issue of World Screen.

 

The premise of New Girl is simple: after a bad breakup with her boyfriend, naïve and ever-optimistic Jess (Zooey Deschanel) needs a new place to stay. She finds an apartment online and moves in with three men she doesn’t know. The ensuing shenanigans, embarrassing moments and Jess’s “adorkable” behavior made the show, created by Liz Meriwether, one of the breakout comedies of last season. 

 

WS: How would you describe your style of comedy?

MERIWETHER: I write about relationships and people trying to connect with each other but failing. The funniest stuff that comes out of the show is about two people trying to find some kind of connection and reaching out and failing and trying again.

 

WS: What served as inspiration for the characters in the show?

MERIWETHER: I definitely looked at my life when I was making the pilot and thought about my friends who are guys and some of the silly things I had done and continue to do! Network television is so hard because there are so many episodes to do, you have to write from a place of personal experience or you will hit a wall at some point. You have to come up with 24 stories a year and you have to know the characters inside and out to generate that many stories. It’s a really big deal to us that the show feels real and honest and the characters feel like real people. I am always encouraging the writers to write from their own life and to think first if they could imagine a real person doing this before we put it in the show.

 

WS: New Girl deals with sex quite openly; you push the envelope a lot. How do you manage to get approval from the network?

MERIWETHER: We’ve had amazing support from the network and I don’t know why! They should not have trusted us! If the characters are getting into a situation that is a little racy, we’re not just trying to go for shock value. We are trying to look at these characters as real people and put them through real problems, and sometimes that lands you in a really crazy place. As long as you are [approaching a situation] from a real place you can get away with more because people understand where the character is coming from.

 

There have definitely been some hilarious moments negotiating orgasm noises, how many funny groans we could have in a five-minute window. It has resulted in some very funny e-mails. There is nothing funnier than trying to be professional and bureaucratic about sexual situations. When making network TV there are some downsides in not being able to fully go there, but on the other hand it’s often ended up making us be more creative or find another way around something that has led us to something funnier. It’s always a push and pull about how much you can do and how much you end up wanting to do.

 

WS: Any examples?

MERIWETHER: The woman from Standards and Practices, who is amazing, will show up on set and sit there quietly and then say, “Well, that towel is going to be a little bit higher up.” And we say, “OK, yeah.” They are very aware of our process and don’t want to get in the way.

 

WS: Do a lot of the crazy things that happen in the show come from personal situations, things you or the writers have seen or done?

MERIWETHER: Up to a point, sure. There are really funny things happening all the time. If it’s not the actual thing that happened, then it’s something that is from real life. In some shows the joke comes first and in our show the characters always come first. We wouldn’t make a character do something funny just because it’s funny. We figure out what their situation is and how they would really react. All of our writers do stupid things all the time! And they talk about them and we’re always using their experiences. I don’t think anyone has actually put a turkey in a dryer or did any Jimmy Stewart [impressions during] sex play! We always start from a real place and let it build.

 

WS: Even the bizarre lingerie that Jess wore in a scene when she wanted to have sex?

MERIWETHER: No comment on that!

 

WS: How can the writers and actors feel comfortable enough to come up with and perform crazy material?

MERIWETHER: That is a huge part of what I believe in on set and even in the writers’ room—everyone needs to feel safe to say something wrong, to fail. You are never going to get to the right [idea] unless you get through five, even ten ideas that aren’t working at all. The only thing that comes up against that is time. It’s such a crazy schedule making network television—you don’t have all the time in the world to fail. We’re constantly coming up with terrible ideas, and that is part of the process. You have to feel safe and the actors have to know that we have their back as writers, and in the editing room we’re going to choose their best stuff. It’s about trust. I’ve heard about some writers’ rooms where everyone gets made fun of for terrible pitches. I don’t think you get your best stuff that way. Everyone has to feel like they are valued and that you are interested in their mind enough and see where their mind wants to go even if it’s really weird and wrong.

 

WS: When you’re shooting a scene, do you stay with it until you get it right, or do you enhance it in the editing process?

MERIWETHER: Our philosophy is, Nothing matters until we all agree that something is working and it’s funny. We’re able to always throw out the scene or throw out the line if it’s not working, as opposed to sticking to the script or to the story that we had. The only thing that matters is if it’s funny. We have a really open set. There is improv. We go down to the set with a huge packet of jokes and we [deal] them out to the actors and they incorporate them in what they are doing and then the actors will change some things. Once we’ve shot the scene, there is a lot of rearranging in the editing room. It does feel like a rewriting process in the editing room. I’ve always seen the set as more of a laboratory: you are testing things out and trying to get as many options as you can so that you have a ton of material for the editing room. That is really where the show comes together.

 

WS: You trained as an actor. Does that help you write better?

MERIWETHER: Every writer who does plays or TV or film should try to do some acting or take an improv class. I find actors so inspiring and I love working with them. If you don’t you should really write a book or a poem or something! It’s helpful to have acting experience to know what it feels like to get up there and feel vulnerable and to have to say words and make sense of them or make sense of a scene and a character. [If you understand what an actor goes through, then] when you sit down to write you are thinking like an actor, you are thinking, What are the tools that I need to make this work? You have to be able to do that to write.