[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi.
I'm BJ Novak.
This is my house.
And thanks for joining me.
I'm just going to take you a little behind the scenes
and tell you what it was like to create this TV show.
Here we are inside my house, my crib.
I really like the institutional architecture style.
Come into my kitchen now.
This is kind of like my--
I don't know.
I use it as a ballroom, as a cafeteria.
Sometimes I have photo-shoots here.
It's a lot of different things.
This show has everything.
It has comedy.
We cut to some comedy.
Drama.
Cut to somebody crying.
Action.
Now cut to something blowing up.
But it is a show about everything,
the way Seinfeld was a show about nothing.
And I like that because it's a way
of not describing the show which is really hard to describe.
I think the closest thing is it's a half hour
anthology show of comedies.
So the formula in the show is really
to take the most outrageous premise that could possibly
maybe happen in today's world, and then play it
out as honestly as could possibly be done,
and find the comedy.
Do you know what would be of interest to me?
A butt plug.
BJ NOVAK: So that means the premise could be something
like "Social Justice Sex Tape," in which a white woke
Brooklynite discovers that there is
serious police misconduct evidence in the deep background
of his sex tape.
And it's about the lawyers who need
to convince him to actually bring that to trial.
I'm sorry.
Is that a lower back tattoo?
Mm-hmm.
And what does that say?
Fat.
It says fate.
Oh, that's nice.
Thanks.
BJ NOVAK: I wrote that with Josie
Duffy Rice, who's this amazing essayist and lawyer.
It's a comedy premise for sure, but it's
also a really dramatic one that could only happen today.
[INAUDIBLE] sitting right here.
It's like-- - Well, that's the punchline.
Yeah.
I mean, that's funny.
But I think the audience should kind of get lost in it too.
[INAUDIBLE]
BJ NOVAK: A really exciting thing for me on this project
was to work with this incredible generation of collaborators.
That includes directors and co-writers, as well as actors.
Telling new stories in a new tone about a new time,
you want to do it with new talent.
Kitao Sakurai, who directed "Bad Trip."
He is so incredible with comedy, with humanity,
and with multiple perspectives.
And when I met with him about this episode,
he really had a plan for how to inter-cut,
how to play those scenes, not only with the humor,
but with the stakes.
And action.
What you see will shock you.
It will disgust you.
But if you are truly brave enough
to look really carefully, you will see
something equally upsetting--
injustice.
Equally?
There's one episode called "The Commenter"
in which Lola Kirke plays a woman who has a great life,
and a great partner, and a great job,
and she gets one anonymous comment on her Instagram
that starts to unravel her whole life.
And I took this to Jia Tolentino,
who's this amazing essayist.
She and I wrote this draft and put it
in the hands of Lola Kirke, and Soko, and our
incredible director Darya Zhuk.
Darya had such a grand and specific aesthetic vision
for this episode, especially when
she started working with her director of photography
and her costume designer.
And I would show up on set and try to give a note with a line,
and she would shoo me away.
And I loved it because it just showed that this was
in someone else's hands now.
And action.
What I'm most excited for people to see in the show
are moments, individual moments.
That's why I wanted to make these compact stories.
So whether it's Jon Bernthal showing up
at his job at the National Gun Lobby,
everyone on pins and needles about what he's going to do.
Or Kaitlyn Dever triumphantly telling off her high school
in her valedictory speech.
These are the kinds of things that people talk about,
and text about, and tweet about, but not
the things that you see three dimensional stories about.
What does it take to actually be an ally
versus to say you are one?
What is the difference between social justice and social media
justice?
What's the difference between a meme and a movie?
We are that bridge, hopefully.
[MUSIC PLAYING]