Fletcher, with Kathryn Hahn in the lead role.
In a conversation facilitated by and exclusive to EW, the two authors chatted about their media moves.
Read the full discussion below.
Credit: Ben King/Courtesy HBO; JEAN-PHILIPPE BALTEL/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock
As a TV show,The Leftoversbecame an entirely different thing from the novel.
What was that process like?
We had to really work out what that meant.
Little, Brown and Company; Scribner
But that was the interesting part.
It was a collaboration, and an ongoing discussion about what, exactly,TheLeftoverswas.
Where is this going?
Ben King/HBO
What kind of limits do I put on this?
What kind of surprises am I open to?
Those things are embodied by other people.
Paul Schiraldi/HBO
Because we do have our own limits, and it is nice to break through them.
You have to keep defending your choices.
You dont do that in publishing.
Your agent does it for you.
[Laughs]
OnThe Deuce, the writers room gets like group therapy.
Its so the opposite of the quietness of the novelists life.
Do you ever think about that?
The stuff you do intuitively as a novelist, and it just happens you dont think about it.
Its like peering into your own brain.
Youre angry because you didnt have it.
All this stuff is happening in our heads when were writing novels.
ABBOTT:Have you thought about how, withMrs.
Fletcher, youll run that room?
How itd be informed by your past experiences?
PERROTTA:Thats something Im just beginning to ponder.
Shes really smart and much more experienced than I am.
Im leaning on her.
And Im thinking about what was great aboutThe Leftovers.
Im curious to see how its different.
I think a little bit like a class, the showrunner does get to define the tone.
But in some other way, you want to create the space for other people to be as free-thinking.
ABBOTT:With comedy and the half-hour format, theres a precision required, like a short story.
Theres a rhythm to the way that comedys structured.
Is that part of what made you drawn to the idea of having it as a half-hour show?
PERROTTA:You know what drew me?
InThe Leftovers, we burned through the book in a year.
An HBO hour is a hard 60 minutes.
Its a lot of story to do week by week.
Having those episodes almost like one-act plays.
ABBOTT:I think of the story ofMrs.
Were both in some ways in different environments.
Post-election, and all the #MeToo movement.
Ive heard it a lot.
PERROTTA:When I started writingMrs.
So Im surrounded by women on this show.
Jessi Klein has been a writing partner and collaborator.
Nicole Holofcener is directing.
Sarah Kondon is an executive producer.
Often, its me and a bunch of women discussingMrs.
It never was that.
Why it would even be a drama!
I remember that was one of the arguments.
That dramatically changed in the last year.
I didnt even have to make the case anymore.
It felt like almost overnight.
With TV, theres more diversity because there are more places for shows to be.
ABBOTT:All these female directors are in demand, too.
Ive always been interested in that idea of these smaller narrative arcs within a larger narrative arc.
It really filtered into my novel writing.
ABBOTT:In a similar way, its more structural than anything else.
My first draft is tighter now because Im aware of structure and pacing.
I usually carve that out in the second draft; Id create the pace in revisions, before.
But now Im really hyperaware of it because you have so little space in a script.
Everything has to count.
Id start to pare away stuff much more quickly.
You get more comfortable with cutting and being really unprecious with your stuff.
Its made me really venture to keep this narrative drive, which suits crime novels anyway.
That kind of breathless storytelling.
Sometimes we admire something in another medium, but it connects with something weve been doing anyway.
Youre saying youre now conscious of it at a different part of the process.
It wasnt like you suddenly woke up and found you were writing these slow novels.
Is there a special challenge to turning a mystery into an ongoing drama?
ABBOTT:There is!
Maybe in a different economic climate: As we know.
its very hard to get movies made now.
Theyre so limited, and you couldnt maintain that for TV.
You have to have more characters, you have to have a larger world.
It makes me surrender that quality of the book.
PERROTTA:That to me was a huge difference between TV and feature films.
Its so interesting to think of TV as a place to supplement the novel and build on the novel.
Whats going on with her?
I thinkAtlanta, in many ways, had a consistency of tone throughout.
You just never knew what you were going to watch from one week to the next.
That was the aesthetic principle: You werent following a story, just visiting this world.
It feels like breaking rules is almost a given now on TV.
I bet thats something youve thought about withMrs.
Im hoping as it moves on that there will be more space for those sorts of surprises.
ABBOTT:Its also ideological.
I remember when I was working onThe Deuce: David Simon has a real ideology.
He wants to tell these stories because of his fervently-held political beliefs.
ABBOTT:It was certainly terrifying.
There were no stages to it.
But now Im so glad it was that way.
It was a noisy, loud, funny room tackling a very dark subject matter.
I so admired seeing him keep the integrity of the living organism, as you put it.
It seemed exhausting and daunting, but also quite extraordinary.
PERROTTA:Now that Im in charge ofMrs.
Fletcher,I often hear myself saying things that Damon said, just because thats the example I know.
[Laughs] Its a good example.
You realize how were so dependent on our teachers.
I do think a show is a conversation among the writers.
In TV, there are so many more relationships, and theyre all so critical.
Part of it, Im sure is, Is this a person I want to be hanging out with?
[Laughs] You want people to feel comfortable.
You want them to take chances.
But its so much.
Sometimes, it does make me want to climb back into my little cave and write novels all day.
