Italian
Limited series writers have one big advantage over scribes working on recurring series: They can build to a big, flashy ending without worrying about what to do next season.
“Limited gives us that opportunity to just be like — leave them wanting more. We’re out. Mic drop, we’re done,” said Marco Ramirez, executive producer and showrunner of the upcoming Hulu limited series “La Maquina,” set in the world of boxing in Mexico.
Ramirez was one of five writer-producers who gathered Thursday night at the London Hotel in West Hollywood for a lively conversation that was part of Variety’s A Night in the Writers Room: Awards Season Edition event.
The scribes discussed the idiosyncracies of working in the format. Shaye Ogbonna, creator, executive producer and showrunner of Peacock’s “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist,” said the rising demand for limited series during the height of the Peak TV period had been the catalyst for drawing out untold stories from around the world, including his hometown of Atlanta. “Fight Night” tells the story of a famous armed robbery pulled off in 1970 on the night of Muhammad Ali’s famous comeback fight.
“A lot of these localized stories that are lore and mythology, specifically in marginalized communities — they tend to be told orally. You’re not going to find it in a book,” Ogbanna said. “You’re not going to find it generally in a movie or TV. It’s these stories and there’s a million of them. They’re passed down. So for me, I am from that community. I knew about the fight. I knew nothing about the robbery.”
When the “Fight Night” project came his way, Ogbonna said he was surprised to learn that his family members knew about from local lore. So did “Fight Night” star Samuel L. Jackson, as Ogbonna learned.
“When this comes on my radar, I go home and I’m talking to my aunts and my uncles and the people that are in the generation above me, and every one of them knew about the robbery and knew people who were there,” he said during the panel moderated by Jazz Tangcay, Variety’s senior Artisans editor. “Sam Jackson was at Morehouse — he knew somebody at the robbery.”
Ogbonna added that the oral tradition of storytelling that surrounded him as a kid influenced his professional life. “I grew up hearing those stories and that’s probably what led me here was my grandma telling me some story, or my auntie, or my uncle,” Ogbonna said, adding that “Fight Night” is “a love letter and a testament obviously to Atlanta, but to those stories.”
Joshua Zetumer, creator, executive produer and showrunner of FX’s “Say Nothing,” described his learning curve “as a boy from California” to adapting Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the civil war in Ireland in the 1960s and ‘70s. “I was a total outsider trying to write this insanely ambitious Irish story,” Zetumer said. He noted that there was an Irish revolutionary theme to his very first paid gig as a writer, when he developed a film about the IRA for Leonardo DiCaprio’s banner. “I was very, very fortunate the film never got made,” he joked.
Lauren LeFranc, executive producer and showrunner of HBO’s “The Penguin,” explained her challenge of breathing new dimensions into a character that is well known but still mysterious to viewers. That task was made easier by the power that star Colin Farrell brings to the role and the larger arc for the Batman universe that has been plotted out by DC Entertainment.
“I knew this was a rise to power story, and I knew that by the end, Oz needed to achieve a level of power,” LeFranc said. “Knowing that it was my mission to lead him into the second film, I wanted to make sure that it came at a cost. And I really wanted this to be a psychological study of who this man is.”
Laura Eason, executive producer and showrunner of Starz’s “Three Women,” told the crowd of industry insiders that her background in theater made her love the process of working with a large group to bring authenticity to the backdrop. “Three Women” chronicles the lives of very different women, one in Indiana, one in Martha’s Vineyard and one in North Carolina. The team took great care to ensure that each character’s surroundings and wardrobe reinforced their emotional state at any given point.
“Collaboration is really at the dead center of what I came up doing. I love and the ethos,” Eason said. “To be able to sit at this table and look at this thing that we all are making together and to really trust people’s expertise that because that is where they live and breathe 24/7 — they’re going to have ideas about costume, about set, about props.” Eason gave a special shout-out to Diana Burton, who headed props for “Three Women.” “Just a genius,” she enthused.
Ramirez observed that he also had a steep learning curve about the rich history of boxing in Mexico in order to deliver Hulu’s first-ever Spanish-language original drama, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna.
“Boxing is kind of a perfect distillation of drama in a way. Every boxing match is perfect drama,” he said. “Two people are coming in, somebody’s winning, somebody’s not. But specifically the culture of Mexican boxing and the importance of boxing to a very specific generation of Mexicans — that was a deep dive. A lot of really smart people taught me a lot about boxing and specifically what the Mexican style of boxing meant.”
Ramirez got one of the night’s biggest laughs by dishing on Luna’s enthusiasm for the prosthetic butt that he used in the series.
“Gael knew he wanted this boxer to come from a very specific place and to be a very specific kind of boxer,” Ramirez said. “Diego knew he would have a bunch of bad [plastic surgery] work done. ‘I even want ass implants, man. I want a good ass’ was his thing. So he sat in the chair for many hours to get all the bad work done every morning. But the thing that he talked about more on set was always like, ‘Look at this butt, dude, look at this. Check this spot.’”
Tangcay asked the panel about the process of settling on the ending for a limited series — the final punch, as it were. Ogbonna was quick to say that “I’m a penultimate episode-type person.” Zetumer said he uses a yardstick that is part emotional and part physical.
“If you are having an emotional reaction to your own material at the end of the show, if you are writing the last page of your last episode and you feel that thing on the back of your neck, that really is the reason you write,” Zetumer said. “You’re chasing this feeling all day when you write. As any writer knows, you’re chasing a physiological response where your hair’s standing up, or you’re getting misty-eyed, or something is happening inside you, and that’s the reason you write. It’s like a drug in a way. It’s an emotional drug. If you have that sort of feeling of catharsis in a big way, it means you’re done — just shut your computer, put down your pen.”
