Presenting: The New Yorker Presents

My takeaway really is to understand the power of yes, because a lot of times, no matter who you are, creative, producing, logistics, the knee trick reaction to say no can't be done is just so common. And I think when we, as a team, were able to sit down and say, okay, so you wanted to do this, we're gonna figure it out. Welcome to Produce by I'm your host, Kevin Fairchild. And this morning I'm joined by many of the producers on the team of The New Yorker Presents.

And I'm just gonna go ahead and introduce everyone and have you tell us a little bit about what your responsibility was on the project, what your role was. So, to my left, Jack, let's start with you. Alright, Jack Lechner, I was a professional producer on the show. Perfect, and Dana?

Dana, because that's golf, I was the line producer. Kay Rothman, I was the story producer, and I produced one of the segments. And I'm Kahani Cooperman, I am the show runner and is that good producer? Perfect, so Kahani, let's sort of start with you in defining what being a show runner on this particular project meant to you and how that sort of started.

The New Yorker Presents was by design an incredibly sort of complex and piece of machinery that needed to be built to produce a huge number of small pieces. It was a million moving parts, literally. And so, initially as show runner, one of the things I had to do when I was interviewing for the job was sort of give them my thoughts for how this could get done, like how we could create this number of short films. It's a series comprised of all short films based on the New Yorker content.

So, I needed to give my thoughts about how to do this. And my idea was, I actually took my cues from The Daily Show with John Stewart, where I had been for more than 18 years and I grew out of the field department there in the field department. They were responsible for producing the short three to five minute segments that are a signature part of the show. And there were always many going on in different phases of production.

So, I saw this as like that, but on steroids with many, many more players. So, but I took my initial cue from that and I thought if we had in-house teams producing a certain amount of the content along with outside filmmakers and potentially their teams as well, producing those, then we could, you know, and we had the right infrastructure. We could build a machine that was capable of handling all these different productions at once, each one at a different phase of production, and also each one getting multiple notes from many, many entities that were involved in this production. It wasn't just, you know, us in-house.

It was also Alex Gibney's company, Jigsaw, it was Condi Nast Entertainment. It was David Rundick and the staff at the New Yorkers and the editors, and it was Amazon and the filmmakers. And he wanted to do Justice of the New Yorker writers. And also there was me and my other creative partners in this and our vision for what this show could be.

So, at any given time, there was an incredible juggle of many, many different opinions and feelings and passions and, and, and as showrunner, I think one of my jobs was filtering all of those and always keeping my eye on the bigger picture of what all of these small pieces were going to be like together to create this bigger show. You know, the challenge was that you have all of these separate pieces on different subjects, done in different styles by different filmmakers, yet they all had a feel that they were from the same universe and shared this DNA. The DNA was the New Yorker, so I came up with the concept that I thought could kind of help be the connected tissue between everything and create a show that, even though it was made up of small parts, felt like you were having one full experience, like you would potentially reading the magazine. If you were to read it, start to finish, which not many people are able to.

We should say we already had the pilot, which had been done almost a year earlier by Dave Snyder and Jigsaw, which sort of started to lay out a template. But I think where Connie then took it was to add the idea of the interstitials, these little snapshots of the Panoply of Life in New York. And then the other thing we just really tried to do from the start was live up to the standards set by the New Yorker. We knew we were always very conscious.

The New Yorker had the ultimate say on everything we did. And we've got this insane wealth of content that was just a joy to be able to plunder, although as we quickly found out, plundering it was actually a lot more complicated than anyone had budgeted for or scheduled for, because at most magazines they own their content, even most other content as magazines. But the New Yorker's practice from the very beginning was the writer's own everything. And at the New Yorker that extends even to movie reviews, to basically the writer's own everything except the listings and the work that is written, that is commissioned for the website, which meant that we had to individually license every piece from the writer, which nobody had budgeted or scheduled for.

So, so, what was that like, budgetarily then? How you put together a budget for a show like this? When we started, we were given, here's a figure, here's a figure, and then the supervising producer over at Jigsaw, Isaac Bolton, who's got all of this in his head, he's a mastermind with this, he created what he thought was a template of, I think we're going to spend $10 on music, I think we're going to spend $8 here. So, he created this template, and then when we got into a room and saw what we had, we just took that number and said, okay, let's really do it this way.

So, what we tried to do was give each segment a figure. And primarily it worked. The out-of-house producers, which were this delicious collection of really, really talented people, they knew they had, whatever the number was, they had X amount of dollars to spend on a project, on a piece, and it ran between seven and 11 minutes each out of it. They were, I think, 11 to 15, or 13 to 15.

So, 13 to 15 minutes, they were considered centerpieces? No, I'm making that up. The centerpieces were the dots, right? One narrative centerpiece.

So, we knew what we gave them a figure to work with, and the out-of-house producers were great producers, and there was no, I'm going to come back and ask for more, or can we do it this way? They knew, all right, they gave us $10, let's see how we can make that work. And for the most part, they did, and that really helped us. And then we had four teams of in-house producers, and they each, Jack gave them, sorry, Jack and Connie gave them, here's a choice, which one do you want, and then they went away and they tried to tell us what they thought they would need to spend.

So, they weren't locked into one particular figure, although we gave them a guide a little, but they came back, and they were all very respectful of the process, and nobody went, well, I want, you know, gazillion dollars to do this seven-minute piece. They were like, I really think we need this. And then we sat and we looked at it, and in some cases, we said, no, I think you need a little more. And in other cases, we worked with them.

And it was great. I think it worked really well. It was a hybrid of narrative and nonfiction and music, and it was a very interesting collection because you can't assign a dollar figure. You can go to any episodic show, and know you're going to spend $12 an episode.

It didn't work that way, because we didn't know what our episodes were until Connie saw all of the pieces and then put them, curated them. So we didn't know what our episodes were going to be. We really had to look at it segment by segment. So, that's actually an interesting question.

Did you guys know what stories were going to go with, what, or was it just, you picked 60 stories from The New Yorker and said, these are the ones we're going with? Yeah. I mean, you know, we did a lot of curating. Jack is also encyclopedic New Yorker knowledge, which was a huge help.

Not the only reason he was hired, but it was a huge help. And so the idea was, let's come up with a menu of stories that we can kind of present this menu to filmmakers, be them outside filmmakers or in-house producer directors, and let people choose things that move them as they're passionate about. So to get to arrive at that menu was no small feat because, you know, there's a lot of people weighing in on this, you need to make sure that you have a real range of topics. You want to make sure there's lots of voices represented in what you're choosing.

And there's also just the practical matters. Like, some stories were already options for things. Some had legal issues. Some had this, that.

So it took us a while to really get like a workable menu. But we got this incredible menu of stories, and it was always a really exciting moment to present that to our outside filmmakers or in-house teams, because you could see them looking through reading, calling you back and saying, like, oh my God, this is a story I have to do. Or none of these are really singing to me. And that was fine too, because if that was the case, we would say, here's some more.

Or have you read anything lately that you loved or that you were not even lately? And we'll try to make that happen for you. So it was really exciting. I mean, the idea was that you wanted people making things that they were personally really excited about and compelled by because that's going to be reflected in the films that get made.

And I also think, you know, what Dana was talking about with how kind of each segment had a ticket on it in terms of numbers. You know, when I came into it, Jigsaw had already decided that, and I think, why is this, so that they would use this kind of most favored nation's situation. And I think it worked out really well. It felt like a really democratic process in that way.

You know, the only difference would be if there was an international shoot, which two of ours and our piece, Doc's Hat, there was a very small increase in the amount that they got relative to their other filmmakers, but it was minimal, as any of the filmmakers could tell. Well, that was the approved over-which part because when you go internationally, you have other expenses that we didn't count on. And our in-house guys, our in-house team, they were also going to Alaska. It's like, wow, we can, you know, we sat down and said, okay, can we make this work?

And, you know, if you steal from Peter to pay Paul, is that the expression? We did that. And we were also efficient about it. While Blaire Foster was in Alaska, she also got material for two other segments.

And her other piece was, you know, one of her other pieces was up in Harlem. So it didn't cost it. Right, exactly. You know, somewhere fair.

And I imagine bringing in both experience and non-experience filmmakers and sort of giving them that budget is a separate challenge for each of them, right? You have your experience filmmakers who are sort of saying, you want me to do what, for what? And then you have someone who's sort of coming up who has maybe never had a budget like that. You're like, looks great.

You're going to give me what? So, okay, when did you sort of come in as the story producer and how did you work with all this material? I came in after most of the stories were already chosen, at least in terms of these are the ones we're going to do. Well, let me go back.

Story producers early on in reality were really junior positions that related to reality TV programming, what I would say is bottom theater programming. And it was really the person that dealt with 400 hours of unfocused footage with cameras in an apartment building with eight characters and how do we craft a story from it? And a pretty junior thing. And what's happened in recent years, because this has happened on subsequent series as well, is the budgets are still pretty low considering what we're accomplishing.

And so, Connie and Jack rightly brought on two story producers, Barry Perlman, who comes from a feature indie background and me, who comes from a TV and online background, to do whatever we needed to do as producers to deliver the stories. Because our instinct as producers, and we Barry and I both been producers many times, was to take a story from beginning, research, assignment, all the way through to final edit. And we had too much going on with this series. The field teams, the producers who were also generally directors, often writers as well, were on the road a lot.

Or if they were in edit, they had four or five different pieces in various stages of edit. There was no way a person could do all of that. So, Barry and I arrived and we sort of perched ourselves looking for who needs what, what's the deer in the headlights. And depending on the team, what they needed was different, which is why our being producers was really helpful.

Some people needed help scripting ideal sound bites or beats to go out to a shoot because they just didn't have the time to think about whatever it was. Other production teams had it all buttoned up and what all we did was when notes came back, that Connie, thank God, filtered for us so that we knew what the people needed to do. Sometimes it was something as simple as a rough cut was delivered and the archival that they wanted was $40,000, which was silly. So, I go to Dan and say, how much do I actually have to spend on archival for this piece?

And then Barry or I would look at the piece that the producer had delivered and try to see what he or she was trying to achieve with that archival, find alternatives that were less expensive, and sit with the producer in the room and say, okay, this shot is of times square, and it seems like you're looking for times square to look like a heart and the traffic flowing is like arteries. And so here are three shots that we can't afford that solve that. And generally the producers were grateful that we did that. So as story producers, what we did was whatever needed to get done because the producers on those segments just couldn't do that all.

And the other piece of it is that after we had done a few pieces, Barry and I got to understand what the DNA of the series was. Even though each vision for each story was quite different in tone so that we could help support the producer and the editor to say, yes, you can go this far, don't be afraid. We've gotten three stories through and approved where they did go that far, or we had this with the earlier one, let me hedge it off, let's make a different kind of choice. And so it was really a good partnership because it was that kind of show.

So if you were going to step across that threshold and say, I am this person and this is my task and this is the only thing I'm going to do, you weren't going to be part of the team because we had such a schedule. And a little bit of self-imposed, a lot of it has to do with the availabilities. And we knew that you're going to be out there shooting for two days, you're going to come back in, you're going to deliver one quick rough cut, then you're going to shoot again. This rough cut is going to be then mastered by the story producers and Kahani and Jack.

And then come back, if notes on that while you're doing the rough cut on that. So we had this incredible rotating schedule that would not have worked if we didn't have great story producers and the eyes of everybody. It really was, it truly collaborative. The real challenge of story producing, if you're going to do it right, is if you're a good story producer, you're a producer.

But your job is to create the best version of what you believe the vision of that original producer is and was. So it's not for me to go into an edit and remake it into something completely foreign to the person that researched it. So it's a very particular balance to make it the best that it can be that has the best shot of getting approved because you have that experience of getting many stories through the pipeline. But really still honor and support whatever the original storyteller was trying to do.

And I think that was the hardest part for the production teams to believe at first. You know, because all these producers that were in the field, they're used to doing from beginning to end in short form and in long form. And they're strong storytellers. That's why they were on the show.

And it was very hard for them. I know that Kahani said at the interviews, now you understand you're going to give up this story and move on at the edit. And they clung onto it like rot-wilers. And even our outside producers were so gracious and they're like, let me take a crack at those notes.

We'll do that. And what was wonderful to see was as this progressed almost without exception, the producers started to understand that we were on their side from top to bottom. Kahani, Jack, Dana, tried to get them the money they would need for whatever and certainly bury in me. So they started to come to us and say, could you look at this footage that's coming in that's raw?

Here are the beats that I had thought of. Tell me if they're there before, because they were out in Alaska or wherever they were. So it really became, I was very gratified that they saw we were working with them for them. This great trust developed.

So from a logistical produce-orial standpoint, from a creative standpoint, because I will never forget day one for me, one of the producers and the associate producer walked in with their call sheep for the next day. And I looked at it and said, this is impossible. This is an 18-hour day. We don't do that.

And their response was, guess me do. No, no, no, no, no. We don't work 18 hours. It's illegal.

But they just- Oh, details. I know. The veil that was on the eye opening experience. So I remember she said, wait, really?

And she got it. When we said no, and this is how you're going to do it, and we all got involved and figured it out and it can be done, they had such a trust to develop because they weren't alone. A lot of these producers are used to going out in the field, working nonstop until they get it, coming back and they had to work in like sleep means nothing, food means nothing. And then all of a sudden we were like, no, no, no, no, we're a team here and you can do it this way.

And it was nice. I thought it was really nice because you saw the trust develop. There were so many notes coming in from so many different entities and part of my job was to filter those. And the lucky thing is, I was given a lot of trust by all the entities involved.

Like from it, I mean really the whole show was a trust exercise in so many ways. And who was giving you those notes? Was it coming from the New Yorker, Amazon? Executive, at Jigsaw, including Alex Giveme, multiple executives, Don Ostroff and Michael Klein at CondiNest Entertainment.

David Remnick, Henry Fender, Pam McCarthy at the New Yorker. Several executives, Ryan Andelina and Joe Lewis at Amazon. And in-house ourselves, the film, you know, my vision, the filmmakers, we also had to like be respectful of, you know, I was always thinking about what was the writer's original intent. Not that that was an ongoing conversation with writers, but I was so aware of living up to the standards of the New Yorker.

And also everything had to go through multiple legal channels, including legal and fact checking at the New Yorker, which is a very precision oriented. Which is how the whole series opens, right? Yeah, yeah, that was great too. I got it like, you know what your world is.

And you know, I think that it was a real challenge because the show, the series was, Like the Magazine, a collection of very different kinds of stories and topics. And not everyone was going to be drawn to every piece in the same way. And so one of the things that we would do is Connie would put all the notes together, collect them all, and then once a week or whenever it was appropriate, we would sit in the room, Jack, bury me, whoever it was. And we would play the game, who's noticed this?

And it wasn't disrespectful. It was just to remind us that some pieces were pieces that you want to just be with for a while. And not a lot happens, but it's about the quiet in between the moments. And we knew that those would be particular favorites of certain people.

And there were other pieces that were edgy and fast and quick and got in and got out and you're like, Whoa, what just happened? And so we needed to be careful to love and honor all the people who were giving notes for the stories that they like, but not try to make each story a favorite to everyone, just like each piece of the New Yorker magazine would not be a favorite to every reader. But that Connie had this big board on her wall that always changed. And I really felt like she was a festival programmer.

And she would look at it like each piece was awesome. But then when we had enough pieces coming in, she and Jack would often sit and look at it and say, Well, what's the best thing? And say, Well, what's the ride for this half hour? And there would be times where there was a piece and it was about a child being killed.

And we're like, That has to be the last piece because you can't go to a joke or a cartoon or something after, you know, there's no way to do that. How do you make each half hour feel like a whole piece? And a lot of things got moved around to do that. I think that was one of the hardest things that you two had to do was really be mindful of we've got 10 or 11 if you include the pilot pieces that have to be complete experiences from start to finish.

It's not like a playlist online. And each story within it is also its own gym. That was one of my favorite parts actually because, I mean, you could have pre-programmed episodes based on what you were reading on paper. But I felt like that was doing a disservice potentially to the entire series.

So instead, let's see how these pieces come in and create this bank of all these pieces. And then once we see them and we know how they make us feel emotionally, it was emotional programming to be honest. It was really looking at the journey that an entire episode would take you on emotionally based on all these little pieces. And so it was really amazing once we really had them all in and at a point where you could tell what appearance, the journey that each piece would bring you on, that you could see how if you combine them in certain ways, it would equal this bigger whole.

Just like magazine. We read the whole magazine. David Remnick called this, that's actually how he puts together the magazine every week. Can you talk a little bit about just working with the New Yorker in Amazon and what that experience was like?

Again, it's a little bit of a different type of collaborative. It was. It was really a joy. I mean, especially dealing with the New Yorker who are just the most remarkable group of very smart people.

And just, first of all, I think before we even got there, David Remnick had already put together sort of a greatest hits list of pieces that he thought would translate well to the show. And we actually ended up using a lot of those pieces. And then beyond that, talking to the individual editors, we're also making recommendations. And we developed a couple of strategies along the way.

One thing that we did that worked really well was before our outside filmmakers would go off and do one of the centerpiece documentaries. We would set up a conference call with the writer of the original piece and the editor of the original piece, which was fantastically useful to the filmmakers because the writer was able to say, don't bother talking to this person. They never kind of talk to you. This person who I didn't really get to talk to would now talk because they like the piece and they'll tell you all this stuff.

It was just, it saved a tremendous amount of time. It was also creatively and unbelievably exciting moment for me. That phone call because you saw the transfer of vision, like you could hear it happening because you had the writer who originated this piece and some of these pieces, it was like 15 years ago or more. And then the filmmaker who has already started to wrap their head around this piece and you just saw this kind of beautiful, even if it was kind of fleeting collaboration happen, but it was the moment where it all came together in a tangible way, what we were actually doing.

And I just loved it. And it didn't even get to happen on every single one due to schedules and everything else. But when it did it was such a highlight? I think it's kind of fascinating that you're taking something, the New Yorker, which is almost completely safe for the cartoons, almost entirely word text based and getting these incredible visuals out of it.

I mean, these pieces are really remarkably visually striking and just that transfer is so amazing and so beautiful and brings an additional life to the world. That was the challenge. But also we had a lot of other challenges. For instance, as we went through all those New Yorker pieces, we started to realize there are a lot of New Yorker pieces that would not translate because they were about things that had already happened.

So there was nothing to film unless we could get archived. There were about things that were totally contemporary and topical at the time they were written that now are old news. They were about things where the article did such a savage takedown of the subject that the subject would never participate with us now. There were really legal issues.

Yeah, legal issues, exactly. And as Connie said, things that had already been optioned. So to some degree, as much amazing kind of as there was, it was actually a much smaller pool of things that would really work for the show. The things they had in common though, the pieces that we did end up doing all had a very strong point of view.

Or maybe point of view is not the right word vision for what the experience of that story was going to be. And because the producers and Connie and Jack had such a keen sense of story that was able to translate into the tools that a visual producer could use because the original material had such a strong sense of story, whatever that meant for that piece. The other thing that informed these pieces, these short films was that we were given the blessing and actually the push to not just recreate these pieces as they were written. Like the filmmakers and all of us had the option to find one slice of a story that could be something and go with that or a line, a mention of a character, whatever it is and go with that.

We were never expected to just fully create an individual form, the exact article that was written in the New Yorker. So not only were you getting filmmakers who were excited about the subject matter, they were getting excited about the subject matter within the subject matter and then making a film about that. It was really fantastic. Good example of that is Jesse Moss's piece, which was about based on an article by Rachel Levy called Your Child is Deceased about the Albuquerque, New Mexico, right?

Albuquerque and New Mexico Police Department, which had this insane record of shooting and killing civilians. And the article was about the killings that had just happened in Albuquerque, but between the time the article happened and when Jesse did the piece for New York represents, a lot of other things that happened in Albuquerque. Jesse was able to really sort of pick up the story from where the article left off and talk about what was going on right then. And sometimes it crossed stories.

So the piece that I produced that Jed Rothstein directed was a piece, it was really an essay about gun control. And as we were towards the end of our post-production phase, we all realized we really needed to do something about that. And Adam Gopnik had been a powerful voice at the New Yorker for years about this issue and because Jed had already established a good relationship with Adam on earlier pieces in our series with Adam, Adam actually said to Jed, use lines from any of the art that he had done. And then it comes from any of the articles that I've written on this because the truth is that it's one continuous thought for me across the years on this topic.

And Jed skillfully took Adam's words that he had written on this across published issues and created a new essay that Adam approved of. We didn't just do it in a vacuum. To create a new piece that was a culmination of a lot of what Adam had been talking about and struggling with in the writing. That wasn't even a specific original piece.

It was just a growth from the wonderful relationship that Jed had developed with Adam. And Adam's trusting our series to do him right. One other interesting thing about that particular gun control piece is that it's not a piece we originally planned for. And I think it's a real testament to the nimbleness of our production and everyone involved in it that, you know, not that gun control wasn't a huge pressing issue, but I think during our production, San Bernardino happened.

And suddenly it was like we cannot have our first season of this show out there without some sort of acknowledgement of this problem in the country. It just didn't seem that it would be one, something the New Yorker would ever ignore, and we didn't want our series to ignore. So we actually in a very, very late late in production got this piece together, got the blessing of everyone. Amazon was important to Amazon too to have something in there.

And so I was really proud of the work that everyone did, and like everyone came together. And we got all the approvals and the production, everything. It was an amazing thing. And I was really glad that in our series, at least in one episode in this one six-ish minute piece, we were able to have some sort of dialogue and commentary about the gun control issue.

And I think that, you know, moving forward, we dream of a way of doing the show where there is a way to get more instantaneously topical with the show. And with the apparatus that Amazon had at the time, it was very, we needed to really deliver way ahead of time for them to technically prepare it for streaming. But the gun control piece was an example of sort of the agility of everyone to just sort of come together at this last minute. You know, we did have to move something around on the, this is me moving around the board.

We did have to shift things around and replace one piece. We didn't have room for it, so we had to take one piece down. The piece with my daughter in it. Yeah, sorry, Maude.

You were awesome. And it was a very charming piece, but we had to move it and put the gun control on in. What was the schedule? Let's get a little producer nerdy here.

What was the schedule, like from sort of beginning of Real Serious Free Pro through Delivery? It was insane, but we had craft services at the office. So we lived on those. I guess we were working actively in production from about May to what?

November of 2015. But we were still editing and doing notes after that. And then preparing for Sundance, which was a whole other adventure. So let's talk about Sundance.

So who reached out to who there was it? Was it submitted to Sundance or did Sundance find out about it and say, Hey, we'd like to say the festival. I think the initial conversation was between Amazon and Trevor Groth at Sundance. But Sundance was definitely aware there were so many filmmakers who have had films at Sundance who were involved in the series.

So people were aware that this was even that year. Yeah, that, yeah. And Julie won for Best Produce or was awarded Best Produce. Julie Goldman, who was with and Roger Ross Williams won for Best Director for Life Animated or Life Animated one for Best.

So it was even in that year there were a lot of people there. Yeah, so I had also had a short film at Sundance and I had been on a jury there. So I had some connections there too. So they didn't, I wasn't, they were aware of who I was, not that I was the big sell or anything because believe me I wasn't.

But when you have an Alex Gibney executive produce show that involves all of these filmmakers, they're at the very least curious to hear more. And so we sent them, started sending them samples of what it was and we were beyond thrilled when they said that they wanted to premiere our show two episodes as a special event there. And it was really, really, I think, a great moment for the entire staff who had worked so hard to get that kind of acknowledgement out of the gate. I remember having a staff meeting saying like, this doesn't happen really.

This is incredible and it's a testament to everyone's work here and our outside filmmakers as well that, you know, basically, the second we're done, it's going to be shown to people at Sundance and, you know, it was very, very exciting and gratifying moment for everyone, very celebratory. And it's also an interesting reflection of the acknowledgement of online programming, not just TV because we were not traditionally broadcast. We were created specifically for online viewing and I think as producers, it is good for us to acknowledge that quality programming is happening online now that not only do we and our peers acknowledge, but the traditionally slower to reflect the trends groups are saying, we need to pay attention to this because great work, great innovative work is happening in this sphere. So as producers, as we develop new programs to really think about online as not being a backup, but a really great place to be brave and to do good episodic work too.

And I mean, was the fact that it is online, did that impact the production in terms of thinking about screen space? So, you know, you're not going to be, you know, this isn't going to be watched on a 47 inch television chances are it's going to be on a computer or on a mobile device. Did that influence? We have to think so much about the size of the screen, especially because we also knew something from watching it on their enormous, but it did impact just what we thought about content.

For instance, you know, we did a piece on Tom of Finland, the notorious gay pornographer of the 60s and 70s. And we certainly, well, that's what we had to really argue how many erect penises you could do on this show. That's a company that had a disco ball mirrored surface behind the interview. You go by the edit rooms and the doors would be open and you start to not see that behind your editor is this enormous mirrored phallus.

And you don't even see it anymore. And also as a story producer being so used to being constrained to TV coats, I would keep going back to Jack saying, are we allowed to say that? And some of the notes, we would have to say this group of people, they are not generally crass out there people in that negative way. We're all very respectful and we try to use words that actually express our thoughts, not just explode out of us.

And we would have discussions about, well, are we allowed to show the sodomy, how much sodomy? And we're having these conversations and I'm thinking none of us would say these words. But here we are, I think you're forgetting I worked at the Daily Show. Okay, but my experience is it was never too much.

Okay, okay, but I certainly had never had these conversations at PBS or Nat Geo, and the only topless people we saw generally had war paint on them as well. I called my mother. I told my mother. I told my mother.

I told my mother, I worked at work. It was crazy. It was really crazy. And the answer generally was, if it serves the piece, then we go for it and see what the higher ups said.

And because we did that more often than not, it was approved because they recognized that it served the piece. We weren't just showing the discopiness because it was shocking. Although definitely the New Yorkers' comfort level with the number of images was, you know, it was out of their comfort zone. And so I had to have discussions about the number of things we were seeing and the nature of it.

And, you know, out of our deep respect for the New Yorker, I think that Amazon, frankly, would have been a game to have more of these images. But out of respect for the New Yorker, I really think we reduced the number to what we needed to get the point across. And it's a wonderful piece produced by Gillian Gunther. It's fun.

It's lighthearted and it's really fascinating. He was an amazing artist, Thomas Finland. And I'm really proud of the piece. And, yeah, we did, I definitely felt myself fighting for more of these images.

And then I pulled back a lot of it, I think Jack also said, like, you know, we got to make- We can find a balance because I was always also conscious that, you know, who reads the New Yorker? Well, among other people, my mother. Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, specifically with Tom and Finland too, there is, you know, kind of a diversity of the images that he drew too, right? And so paying sort of respect to Tom and Finland and just showing the most sexually explicit images of his isn't necessarily, you know- That's exactly what he does. He doesn't necessarily do justice too. You know, it's like that, the one photo of Maple Thorps that's always out there, right?

You know, but that he had a whole body of work that dealt with different issues. And remember, that story was really a discussion that has happened for centuries. Is it art? Or is it, you know, smudgy?

And you could say that about the nude statues at the Metropolitan Museum in the age that they were made too. Is it- And so I think it was a valid question and a really interesting thing to explore. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've left a great discussion.

I think we drew the line though with office art. There was only so many pieces we would allow people to hang out with office. Right, the calendar. That's really where you have to draw the line.

There's only so many squares I can look at. And by the way, I think that's true of other things too. Like how much violence do you show? And do you show the faces of people who are victims of violence?

And what does that serve? Is it just voyeuristic? Or is it really- Are there- one of the thing- I think it was on Jed's piece about gun control. I think it was him, but forgive me if it's not, we worked on a lot of pieces.

There was a conversation about showing it was about the school shootings. And it was much more disturbing to see the images that were not so graphic. Either the moments just before or the moments after the violence, but not the violence itself because the lots of blood, the people lying on the ground, were almost desens- you can't draw into it. But if you're looking at a picture of a crying child being led away from the scene by a teacher, and there isn't so much gore to turn you off, you really look at that child's face.

It hits you in a way- sadly we're used to seeing a lot of collateral damage from violence right now in TV. So stepping back from that, let's in the viewer more sometimes than not. So let's go ahead and let's wrap up. And the last question I wanted to ask each of you is what did you take out of this project that you'll carry with you moving forward as producers?

Something you learned or something that really you thought about and kind of stuck with you in terms of your work in the future? So let's go around the table the opposite direction. So Connie, if you want to start? I mean, for me, when I think about the experience of producing the New Yorker Presents, first of all, the trust that was put in me by all of the entities involved is something that's just unbelievably meaningful to me, and I hope that I lived up to that trust.

But also, in all honesty, and this is going to sound cheesy, the team we had was amazing and so passionate. And the really great thing, I think, is that everyone really cared about this. And I think that when your starting point is the New Yorker magazine, which everyone who walks through the door, no matter what the title was, had a respect for that magazine. And we were starting out in this incredible place, and people were just, the excitement was visceral.

And that is what, that is my takeaway. I feel like we maintained it. It was hard, and there were moments, of course, but overall, the passion of everyone. For this, the excitement, the idea of being connected to the New Yorker, to have frankly like very nice creative support from Amazon, from Jigsaw, from Condi Nast Entertainment, they were great to work with.

And the trust of the New Yorker to do justice to their brand and their name, it was like, you know, really, I could go on and on, but it was a very unusual in terms of the level of passion that I think just everyone felt for what we were creating. That's my takeaway, is that the passion for it that everyone had. Okay. Totally agree.

I agree with that. As a producer, one of the things that I loved about this working on the series was, I don't usually get to work with a lot of people who do what I do. On a show, on usually the only one. Or if there are more of me, we're all in charge of one of the hours, and we're off with our team of APs and editors.

And we try to talk to each other to make sure we're delivering one series, but we're pretty much insulated. And this was an opportunity to work very closely across stories, across genres, with really smart, capable people to see, well, what's their approach? How do they get this story subject to talk to them? To watch the raw footage of the people out in the field, to see how different people interview.

I know how I interview, but how do they do that? And so there's not one takeaway. It was just really a wonderful opportunity to see how other really smart people do what they do really well. Dana.

I have a problem because I agree with both of them so, you know, that's why we love you. I'll just copy and paste their answers. That's why. You know, at the end of this experience, and it was a lot, we were together for a very long time.

We did really well. At the end of this entire experience, we did reach out to a lot of our key players and say, give us a little wrap up. Give us a little, what would you do differently, or what did you like. And I think that brought me to a place, because I read some really great interesting comments, but my takeaway really is to understand the power of yes, because a lot of times, no matter who you are, creative, producing, logistics, the knee jerk reaction to say, no, can't be done, is just so common.

And I think when we, as a team, were able to sit down and say, okay, so you want to do this, we're going to figure it out. Just build that trust that Kahani is talking about, because we had a lot of good yeses. And I love that. And I really try to take that everywhere I go.

And, Jack? I have to say it all starts from the top. I mean, in this case, started from David Remnick, having a clear vision of what he wanted the show to be and not be. Jigsaw, you know, starting to communicate that in the pilot, and most of all Kahani, just having a sense of, this is our show, this is how we're doing the show, this is the level of respect we're going to have for each member of the team and for the outside people that we're dealing with.

And it was just, a tone was set at the beginning. This is a show made by grown-ups in a grown-up way for grown-ups. And that doesn't happen very often in television. Thanks.

Well, thank you all so very much for being on the podcast, and hopefully we'll have you back again. Great. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Produced by.

For more information about the Producers Guild, find us on the web at www.producersgill.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at ProducersGill. In the meantime, help us out by subscribing, commenting, and sharing wherever you get your podcast. It helps other people find us, and lets us know how we're doing.

Until next time, I'm your host, Kevin Fairchild.