Comedians and hosts discuss WGA staff and describe Los Angeles – Variety

The WGA writers and Los Angeles on-screen were two of the most discussed topics on the comedy committee Variety'S' A night in the writers' room.

Earlier in the evening, the panel of drama specialists deepened the struggle that new writers must face as a result of the WGA-ATA deadlock, but the gathering of well-known writers and comedians has shared positive stories resulting from the #WGAstaffingboost initiative, the social media initiative. designed to make less experienced writers more visible to exhibitors hiring in the stalemate.

Tanya Saracho, creator of "Vida", said she felt it was her job to help strengthen the workforce and reach aspiring writers, often unrepresented, on social media. She received a mountain of scripts in response, but happily revealed that she had found a person that she wanted to hire for season 3.

"I met five people and I employ one of Twitter," Saracho said. "Usually I do not get a lot of comedy writers, but she's a comedy writer and she's weird and she's great."

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Later, the conversation shifted to an on-screen performance, where Saracho said the industry was making "small steps", but it was still too early to "congratulate".

Saracho's and Prentice Penny's show, one of the lead authors of "Insecure," help portray their characters and the Los Angeles neighborhoods in which they live in authentic ways.

"I grew up in Los Angeles … and I felt like I never saw anything south of 10, especially with people of color, it's like being in this generic neighborhood "Perfect Strangers," said Penny. "When you film in your neighborhoods, you do not just see yourself on screen, you also see a kid who goes to Audubon Junior High and who says to himself:" They were shooting a TV show on HBO at the corner of my street, I saw Issa Rae, I saw black filmmakers and writers in my neighborhood … that's a lot, showing their LA on the screen is important to many reasons. "

Two of the shows featured in the comedy panel, namely "Atypical" and "Pen15", have brought their creators to immerse themselves in the mind of a teenager. For Robia Rashid, the presenter of "Atypical", it was like a chance to make her younger characters less perfect than the ones she'd seen on TV when she was their age.

"We can make our characters stupid now and it's really nice, especially when we look at teenagers.When I was a teenager, it was very alienating to watch teenagers behave perfectly, to behave perfectly," she said. she declared.

While for Maya Erskine, co-creator of "Pen15", things were just as personal, since she not only wrote, but also plays her 13-year-old character in a unique twist.

Erskine invited her mother to play herself in the series and, although she was pleasantly surprised by her performance, she told an anecdote about the fact that having her role on the set could sometimes make things emotionally difficult.

Her mother was on the set one day in a scene in which her character is "belittled" by some other college girls because she wants to be Posh Spice of the Spice Girls. The girls say she can only be Scary Spice because she is "darker".

"It was a scene that had happened when I was a kid," Erskine said. "My mother was there with her niece and their two daughters and they are both Asian, and I was trying to explain what this scene was like and I collapsed on the set. By doing this and explaining to two girls who were wondering why are they mean to you? Why are not you the popular girl? "

Alan Yang, the co-creator of "Master of None," also discussed the turning points of his recent show on Amazon, "Forever."

"It's hard to find actors who feel authentic. We put Aziz's parents as his parents in "Master of None" and that's honestly, because if you're that old and you're an immigrant, why would you become an actor, you have no role to play? Yang said.

Earlier, the panel began by discussing how comedy writers balance light and dark, as many of this year's biggest comedies, including Netflix's "Dead to Me," death and sorrow.

"It started almost unconsciously for me, that's how I realized life. I was going through a dark time when I had the idea of ​​"Dead to Me", I was coming from the death of a very close family member, I was trying to get pregnant for fifth year in a row, and nothing Creative designer Liz Feldman said, "Maybe because I'm an actor or I look at life differently, sometimes there's too much darkness and you have to find something to laugh at," 39, is a mechanism of human adaptation. "

For Sarah Schnieder and Chris Kelly, who co-created "The Other Two" of Comedy Central and were formerly the main authors of "SNL" during the election year, their show was equipped with a coping mechanism different.

After a tumultuous and endless 2016 on politics and Trump, Mr. Schneider said it was a relief to be able to evade these problems.

"Last year was so crazy and singular and it was very cool to be able to do it," added Kelly. "But we decided early on that there was no specific chairman in our show and that we would never make a joke that should have told Trump because we were like Ugh, no. & # 39; We liked being able to do social things, pop culture and other things – it interested us and we did not care about it, but not the administration.

The panel also included two writers from Abbi Jacobson and Steve Holland, who spent two years on their broadcasts, "Broad City" and "The Big Bang Theory" respectively, and finished them this season.

Jacobson said that she and her co-creator, Ilana Glazer, had managed to achieve a "rare thing": end their show in their own way.

"We finished in March, we chose to end the series and I love the way we did it." It was such a meta-me experience to end this show on which Ilana and I have been working for 10 years, "said Jacobson. "It was so parallel that it was confusing and helpful because it was about coping with growth and changing relationships as we get older."

In Holland, he and his fellow writers felt immense pressure at the closing of their show, both because it represented a landmark in pop culture and also because they did not want to disappoint their numerous fans.

"That ruined season 12, if it had been a regular season, everything would have gone well, but realizing that it was the last one, it was the episode we thought most about us. worry, "said Holland. "At one point, we just had to put aside what people were waiting or wanted to see and try to think of us as the first line of fans of these characters to find what we thought was good for ending it."