John Early and Kate Berlant are standing in front of a bookcase in a quirkily painted (oranges, greens) top-floor, prewar apartment in the East Village, which Early has been renting for several months while he stars as an evil heterosexual in the Wallace Shawn play What We Did Before Our Moth Days. Early is trying to “just get a little bag together” before we depart; Berlant is studying the shelf intently, rattling off titles and asking for Early’s takes on the books, many of which he shipped from L.A. “Light Years?” she asks. “I read half of it a long time ago,” he says, searching for his laptop. “Remains of the Day?” she asks. “Never read it,” says Early, searching for his phone, his wallet, his keys. “Oh, you’ll die,” she says. “I want to reread.” She pauses. “I’m starting to read again tomorrow,” she declares. “Because I was good at the beginning of the year, and then I got back on Instagram, and it fucked my life.”
Little bag secured, Early checks the time and suggests the three of us walk across the street to a small park, where we position ourselves at a picnic table beneath a shady tree. “This is so Maddie,” says Early, delighted. He’s referring to the protagonist of his directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, which he wrote and stars in as the titular character, a food influencer on the rise at a Bon Appétit–style content farm. On the surface, Maddie has it all — a sweet and doting husband (Eric Rahill), a loyal lesbian best friend who may or may not be in love with her (Berlant), a killer Super Bowl recipe — but she’s hiding a raging case of bulimia that dates back to her traumatic childhood and threatens to derail her fledgling fame. The film, which hits theaters June 19, screened at Lincoln Center to raucous reception a few days before our park conversation. “That crowd was great, to be fair, but in L.A. it was like they were screaming every second. Which I find appropriate,” says Berlant. “There was a woman, at one point, who just from the back of the theater, screamed. It was amazing.”
Maddie’s Secret walks a high wire — it’s a comedy, and also a melodrama, and also a biting satire of millennial content culture, and also takes itself quite seriously, with a sincerity that extends to its cast of character actors and comedians (Vanessa Bayer, Conner O’Malley, Claudia O’Doherty, and Kristen Johnson, among others). Early wrote it quickly and intensely, inspired by Lifetime movies-of-the-week, Douglas Sirk films, the Shaft soundtrack, and John Waters’s Polyester. “I think it’s meant to be obviously a kind of midnight-y, reverse-engineered cult classic,” he says. “It’s very mercurial.” It also pulls together elements that Berlant and Early, best friends and comedic collaborators for 14 years, have been playing with for years: extended choreographed dance sequences, attempts by Berlant to seduce Early, the skewering of a certain subset of Los Angeles. At the park, the two were game to go all the way back to the beginning of their fruitful creative friendship, the inception of Maddie’s Secret, and their various failed TV projects.
You two met in New York and fell in love with each other right away, but can you tell me specifically what struck you first about each other?
KB: We actually met on Facebook. How I remember is that you messaged me and then I looked you up and saw Skindergarten and was like, “Oh, he’s really funny.”
JE: I had seen “Lampshade Susan.” I was really shocked by her videos, and then I was shocked to know that she had looked me up and seen one of my videos, which by the way, it was a short film I made in which I play a woman with a really nice lace-front wig.
Was that the first time you’d done that?
JE: Yes. I had taken the kind of Cheri Oteri approach, like a sketch comedy with more broad characters. I think Cheri Oteri contains multitudes. I want to be very clear. Depths I will never plumb. But Skindergarten was the first time where I totally wanted to make it more just intimate and cinematic and real. I was shocked that Kate would ever take me seriously, because she was so well-established already as a comedian. She was like the alt-comedy princess. This generation above her — or half a generation; the Eugene Mirmans, the Reggie Wattses — all these people loved Kate. I was fresh out of drama school with two suitcases and a dream, and I really was not that prolific.
Who friended whom on Facebook?
JE: I probably friended you.
KB: I think you friended me and messaged me. And then we met and we were like, “We should hang out or something.” Then we happened to be on the same lineup for Brooke Bundy’s show at Jimmy Number …
JE: Jimmy’s 43.
KB: I did a set, and I had to go to do another set — I was really pounding the pavement — and it was the thing where I felt someone grab my arm. I looked up, and it was John. I remember we had this moment where it was like, We’re going to do this, but I’m leaving right now.
JE: We knew there was something there.
What was there for you?
KB: Just already like, Okay, we thought each other was funny. Then very shortly after we’re in a short film together called The Greggs.
This is what, 2012?
KB: Yeah. I remember it so viscerally because there was a little room with the snacks, and John and I were in there, and we were immediately screaming-laughing, and just having so much fun. I remember only wanting to hang out with him, and other people would come in the room naturally to get snacks, and I’d be like, “Get the fuck out.”
JE: This quality has been perverted and exaggerated in Maddie’s Secret.
KB: Then we, that night, took the train. We’re going home to our respective apartments, and we were at Grand Central.
Very cinematic.
KB: It was like 2 a.m. or something. I remember getting on the train and going home. I remember John texting me, “I’ll kill myself if I don’t see you.” Then I’m not kidding, I think we hung out either the next day or the day after that.
JE: When have you ever said, “Let’s hang out,” and you mean immediately? You’re actually hoping the other person forgets it.
KB: It really was the falling-in-love thing of like, we were just inseparable. There wasn’t dating, there wasn’t any coitus. It was very lesbian. John quite literally would sleep over at my apartment. I had a roommate of course, and John would be sleeping in bed with me for many nights of the week.
What size bed?
KB: Full.
JE: It was not even a queen.
Were you cuddling?
JE: It was a full-size bed and then there was a foot of space around the bed to create the room.
KB: It was tiny. No, we did not cuddle. We had plenty of room. We would just talk ourselves to sleep. And we slept really well next to each other.
JE: You had these jersey sheets.
KB: I had cotton Target jersey sheets. We would do what we had to do in the day and we would just rejoin up at night. The iconic thing is that John would buy packs of Hanes underwear from CVS so he didn’t have to go home.
Was it instantly like, “Let’s make something together”? Or for a while were you just like, “We’re friends”?
KB: It was immediate.
JE: It was instant.
KB: The friendship was founded in this creative way, like, “Oh, we’re supposed to be together.”
JE: Within a month of being friends we went to North Carolina, Wilmington where they filmed Dawson’s Creek and Cape Fear and many other iconic IPs. We went there to visit the great—
KB: Sammy Birch.
JE: And Jackie Birch, her mother, who’s a brilliant casting director. She helped us cast the kids for “Family Dinner.” These local children in North Carolina.
“Family Dinner” was the first thing you made together.
JE: That was our first thing. We were like, “We want to improvise with children and pretend like we’re their parents.”
Those kids are incredible. How are they not in tears?
JB: They’re amazing.
KB: [Momentarily disengages from the interview and points to a child in the park.] There’s a child on the floor over there. I’m upset. I’m like, where’s their babysitter? Okay, she’s waving.
JE: Yeah. And she’s smiling.
KB: Sorry. It’s that maternal instinct. She has curly hair, so it was like …
So she’s yours, yeah.
KB: Yes.
JE: But yeah, I remember when we shot that short, we once again were treated to the same bed in our friend’s mom’s house, and got in bed together and were giddy. Do you remember?
KB: I do remember that.
JE: We were so excited. We were openly acknowledging to each other that we felt like it was huge. That we were tapping into something, that there was a real ease with both of us. Neither of us were hiding our lights under a bushel. We’re letting it shine.
KB: We were like, “See you on IFC.”
JE: We kept saying that. We thought that IFC was the holy grail.
KB: It was just like, “Naturally we’ll have a show.” And please let it be printed that we have not had a show. We made a gorgeous pilot. We were in preproduction for another pilot literally when COVID hit. But we’re not worried. Divine timing. We always knew we would take off in our 40s.
JE: Our collaboration takes on other forms as the culture changes. Like this movie, which I didn’t even intend.
You didn’t intend it to be for the two of you?
JE: When I was writing it I was obviously just like, “I want to make a movie.” I wasn’t thinking of it being a John-and-Kate vehicle.
KB: No. It doesn’t feel like that to me.
JE: I was so worried about it feeling oppressively me, because I’m in every single scene, and I was just like, “This is suffocating.” But actually watching it last night, I was like, “Oh, this is actually a great John-and-Kate movie!” Even though it is other things.
KB: Ensemble. It’s totally ensemble.
JE: It’s very populated with people. The Deena-Maddie thing very naturally — just because of our shared love of that psychosexual erotic-thriller style — is an energy we both find so pleasurable and fun to act.
Are you different around each other versus when you are both with other people?
JE: I often feel sort of brain-dead when we hang out, in a really relaxing way. Like when Kate’s driving and I’m in the front seat, I always find myself dancing unconsciously and just being like, Look at that. I feel like a stoner.
KB: We have a relaxed intimacy. We end up singing and making up rhymes, but unconsciously. It is very childlike. But we also are laughing so much.
JE: Yes. And quite earnest with each other. Obviously friendship should be a sacred space where you can be totally sincere, but I think people for some reason assume that we’re like …
KB: That we’re like fashion police and being like, “Ugh,” or whatever. And it’s like, no.
JE: We’re not doing bits.
Never?
JE: No. I mean, we make each other laugh all the time but it never feels—
KB: Front-facing.
JE: Yes, exactly. Sometimes you can be around in a green room with comedians and it can be kind of exhausting, the bits. It feels like a nervous habit, or a nervous response to social discomfort. I mean, I’m very prone to anxiety-fueled bit-making. I would say both of us are, if I may.
KB: Of course.
JE: But in our friendship, privately, the bits are actually … I hate saying “bits.”
KB: I know.
JE: We just make each other laugh. Then we slip into really—
KB: —full characters.
JE: We slip into, I’m really Laura Dern and enlightened.
What’s the longest-running character that you guys do when you’re alone, or the longest-running joke that you have?
JE: Well, we’ve memorialized this, and it’s kind of in the movie a little bit too, but Kate wanting to hook up with me. It’s not the longest-running, but it’s classic. When Kate’s like, “Let’s fool around.”
You do that privately? You’ll be like, “Let’s fool around.”
JE: Literally. Yeah. She’s like, “Come on. Trying to blow off some steam.”
KB: Where was that video? Was that like early Instagram?
JE: We were in a hotel.
It’s also in your special, Would It Kill You to Laugh? You really do say, “Let’s blow off some steam.”
JE: That came from something, when we were doing a show, I think in San Francisco.
KB: We were staying in a friend’s basement.
JE: We were killing time before a show and Kate’s like, “Let’s blow off some steam.” And it killed me. We also sometimes slip into a duo of that girl and her vacant gay best friend. Which is like, it is. I am in some ways, when I’m like, “Amazing.”
KB: We both look like normal girls. We both love being like normal girls.
So when you were writing Deena, you wrote it for Kate like, “I’m going to escalate further the ‘you wanting to fuck me’ joke”? How exactly did you pitch it?
JE: I think I texted you.
KB: I remember you telling me on your couch that you were going to write a movie. And I was like, “Great.” No, I think it was on the phone, because I remember I was walking the reservoir, either I was with you or I was on the phone.
JE: And I was listening to the Shaft album.
Why Shaft?
JE: I was really in a long period of just loving Isaac Hayes’s music. I was writing this movie as I was loving Isaac Hayes, and I was like, Oh, but this sound makes so much sense. This is already a kind of style that I often do with my fake bandmates. Michael Hesslein, who did the score, we love that sweaty kind of Burt Bacharach–y thing. I was like, Oh, that’s perfect. This is an exploitation film. This is like a ’70s women’s picture-slash-exploitation.
So I was listening to that a lot, and I didn’t have a role for Kate yet. The story wasn’t totally mapped out, but I knew there would have to be something. And there’s this one song called “Do Your Thing” from the Shaft album where it’s like 19 minutes, and it’s really dark and hypnotic, really sexy. And it birthed an entire other element of the movie, which was your character. I wanted to write this weird dance class where my innocent little fairy princess could get pulled into the dark—
KB: Underworld?
JE: Exactly. The queer underworld. I was just obviously imagining Kate as the person ushering me into that world.
You love to put a choreography moment into the stuff you do together. A lot of choreographed dance classes. What do you think that’s about?
JE: Well, I do love to dance. There’s something so fun and sleepover-y about learning choreography. It’s a slightly different joke, but I love Janet Jackson’s Pleasure Principle, where the pop star walks into a dark studio, turns on the lights and drinks water, and puts it back down. That’s always so funny to me. It’s in Showgirls, obviously, and it’s in Flashdance. When an ingénue is pulled into a dance class and has to learn the moves. I think there’s something very funny and vulnerable about not knowing the dance moves.
Which one of you takes longer to learn choreo?
KB: Me. I have, like, full spatial … I kind of shut down. It’s really hard for me.
JE: Kate is a real natural dancer—
KB: Thank you.
JE: —but there is kind of … I think that you have an idea about yourself.
KB: Yeah, you’re right. It’s more of an idea.
JE: I see the kind of math-class panic.
Could you guys do it right now, the dance from the movie? Is it in there forever?
KB: No.
Another trope that you guys return to a lot is one where you’re meeting up again after years of not speaking and you’re one-upping each other. Do you have any of that actual anxiety, like, Maybe someday, something would split us apart and that could be a future?
JE: I think it probably comes from a real place.
KB: The idea of us having some kind of breakup. Because we don’t fight. And it’s just funny to imagine, What could break us apart? Then there’s just a very funny idea of us being polite with each other. Because we are so obsessed with social nicety, the performance of social nicety. So, the idea of us actually having to do that with each other is really hard.
JE: I think that would be so heartbreaking. To actually go from an easy intimacy—
KB: To like, “How are you?” Oh my God.
JE: I think really it’s about seeing what that would feel like. But it’s also just, we both are in the entertainment industry. We have our collective ambition, and then we also have our individual ambitions and desires. So it’s funny to imagine one of us getting sucked up into the Marvel Universe and the other one is doing theater.
You said you don’t fight, but have you ever had a moment of feeling less close, or worrying you were growing apart?
KB: Early on we were like, “Before we would ever let an issue really happen, we go to therapy.” Because people do that. Like, creative partners.
JE: It’s more and more popular.
KB: So, we would do that before we would just be like, “Fuck you,” and end it.
JE: I agree. I promise.
KE: We have an anniversary. Cinco de Mayo. Why did we pick that again?
JE: No, that’s literally when it was. We looked up the day.
How have you seen each other change over time as performers?
KB: With Maddie’s Secret, it’s like John fully coming into fruition as a filmmaker, which he’s been doing forever. But this is the true debut in the formal sense.
JE: Obviously I was incredibly moved by her solo show, Kate, directed by Bo Burnham at the Connelly. We are of a generation where we were sold a bill of lies about short-form — that if you just made a bunch of short-form things and you just threw it out into the internet, it would catch you and carry you. Steven Soderbergh would go and create a movie around you. That doesn’t happen. That never happened. I think both of us really needed to do these longer-form things. And Kate was such a cathedral of this meta stuff that Kate is known for, but usually in kind of an improvisational way. It was so refined and it was totally chiseled and constructed. I just thought it was totally masterful, and it made me cry and it made me scream-laugh.
What about personally?
JE: Well, I think it’s very connected actually to the artistic, as it should not come as a shock. I think in these longer-form things, both of us are more focused on clarity, and generosity, and actually wanting to give the audience a tangible, legible gift. I think that’s only something that could happen for both of us respectively or together if there’s a desire in our personal lives to be more direct, sincere, and clear.
KB: It’s too much of a simplification to say grown up, but it is just kind of like …
JE: As you get older, it’s a little easier to just say what you mean. I think our work has reflected that. Our early stuff is sketchier, jazzier, kind of throwing paint at the wall, which is as we should have done.
Do you ever get jealous of each other’s other collaborators? In a Deena way?
KB: No, because it’s like we have our own thing. It’s also, even just selfishly, our collaborations are only bolstered by individual success. Us learning skills elsewhere and having other experiences only helps to nurture the stuff that we make together.
JE: We’re very poly in that way.
KB: It’s the only way that polyamory can work.
Have you guys ever watched the other one flop onstage, or do something that they weren’t proud of? And what do you say to the other one in that situation?
JE: I have. Yes.
KB: I feel like we’ve seen each other in different moments of everything.
JE: God, yeah. We’ve done enough shows together where we’re both on the same lineup and where we’ve …
KB: It’s just like—
JE: Quiet. I’ve seen both of us in those situations—
KB: —get hostile.
Hostile at the audience?
JE: Yeah.
KB: Kind of shut down and be like, “Fine.”
Are you honest with each other after? Like, “That sucked”?
KB: It’s never been a situation of one of us is crying and the other one has to talk them down. It’s just kind of like, “Ugh.”
JE: I think sometimes as Kate’s developed her stand-up, she’ll ask me what I think. You explicitly ask me, but we don’t have a thing where we naturally are like, “Do you mind if I try some new buttons on your …” Which some comedians do. I’ve had comedians suggest to me in green rooms like, “You know what would be a good tag for that?” I’m like, “I don’t care.” It’s not even out of pride. I’m just like, “I’m fine with my shit being bad. I’m fine with it being odd and misshapen.”
KB: This makes me sound bitter, but when I think about how many times I submitted to do Conan stand-up, and they’re always like, “No.” Like, “Here’s my seven minutes.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s just too weird.” That’s where those notes come from, from other people. “Make this more” —
JE: Accessible or traditional.
Do you ever think about or imagine what your careers might have been like, or your senses of humor might have been like, if you hadn’t met?
KB: I’ve never thought of it. I mean, the thing that John and I have, which is kind of surreal in a way, is that individually, not knowing each other, we had so much shared DNA. So, we always would have seen each other. But like, if I had become a housewife …
JE: Or if I had done Doctors Without Borders, which I almost did.
KB: Oh my God.
JE: No, I’m kidding.
KB: I just believe anything he tells me. No, but I think it was always just inevitable. We wouldn’t have not seen each other, or met.
JE: But in a world where we didn’t. In a freak world where we hadn’t met.
KB: I would be much sadder. I would be much more lonely.
To go back to Maddie’s Secret, how early were you showing pages to Kate?
KB: He wasn’t sending me pages or anything, I was just hearing about it. He’d be like, “Oh, I just wrote this really funny scene.”
JE: And then did you read it for the first time in the group when we read it at my house?
KB: Yeah.
Kate, you said John wrote this very fast. How fast?
KB: I would say really fast.
JE: Part of why I chose this genre or style — in other words, a lurid, tawdry, Showgirls-like tone where the language is really blunt — is really the word that’s always used to describe the Showgirls dialogue. I think it’s a great word: overripe. Tennessee Williams was also overripe.
Part of why I wanted to be in that mode is because I was like, “I want to write something that will actually benefit from me writing quickly.” I thought if I made something fast and outrageous that I would have a kind of blindness to it. There has to be some sort of blindness so that you can allow yourself as the person who’s pushing the fucking boulder up the hill to actually lose yourself in it and let your unconscious mind speak.
I guess what I’m saying too, is it’s like an adolescent style.
KB: Camp. But like, going to camp.
JE: Summer camp.
But also camp camp.
JE: I really missed the early days of making things with my friends. The sketches we made together.
KB: Early days, honey. It’s the only way. I looked at a 555 video the other day, and I was like, “This is amazing.”
JE: Oh my God.
KB: I’m like, “Hello?” I was watching the aliens one. It also has that spirit of very limited resources. We were writing scenes the night before we were shooting them. It just makes you commit. The hunger, the desire. There was a time where anyone could get a show. Except us. And now it’s like, those days are done. There has to be this return to the handmade personal stuff.
JE: Just making things for the hell of it. When I watched Polyester for the first time in my early 20s, I had a very intense emotional response to that movie. I’ve always dreamt of taking this sketch-comedy instinct in me but making it more cinematic and more emotional, and that’s what Polyester is. I have wanted to play an ingénue since my early 20s. I remember Kate, you had an idea about a flight attendant who is anorexic.
What other projects do you have that you’ve abandoned?
JE: I had an idea about a girl in high school who was cast in Steel Magnolias but she’s anorexic, and she’s cast as the Dolly Parton role, the brassiest one, but she’s so frail.
KB: That’s the part that I have played. Truvy. Do you remember? Also I wrote a movie for us, a script that I wrote that no one ever read, where John and I were Christian twins. We were like pro-life, very shut in, and we were making a plan to murder an abortion doctor. John was clearly gay and went to go get the guns, and falls in love with all the guys in the gun range. Then I go undercover to the hospital to get close to the doctor, but then I fall in love with him. And then at the end it’s like, we’re parked outside the house and of course we don’t go in.
Why didn’t it get made?
KB: No, no. I never let anyone read it.
Not even John?
KB: I never let a soul read it. I should find it.
Why not?
KB: Well, this is what I’m healing now. My fear that I’m not a writer.
JE: There’s part of me that still believes that this movie is an evasion of writing something more serious. It’s like I chose a kind of genre and a campy tone so that I didn’t have to. And yet, to me, that’s the beauty of the movie. It was almost consciously an evasion. I was actually trying to write something else when I abandoned ship and wrote this. And as I was writing it, literally by page 12 I was weeping.
What was making you cry?
JE: I just think I’m tapping into something. Like, Maddie is me.
KB: Because you were like, Oh, I’m writing about myself. And unexpectedly, particularly when you’re in this genre of standup, which is essentially this autobiographical revelatory thing, you’re liberated by the emotionality of it, and the wig or whatever. It’s not you, so you’re able to actually be yourself.
What aspect of Maddie feels personal to you?
JE: Being a good girl.
KB: It’s almost like 2-D. Because at first you look at Maddie and you’re like, “This isn’t a real person.” And then as the movie goes on you’re like, “Oh, this is a real person.” You are also kind of like, “Oh, funny gay guy, nice Nashville guy.” But then it’s like, no, you’re actually this complicated, emotional, brilliant person. And you’re angry.
JE: There’s this fantasy of self-destruction. Exactly. There’s a lot of rage in this movie, and there’s a lot of rage in Maddie that she has to bury, and then it comes out in these cagey ways. Her rage doesn’t get fully expressed in the movie, her rage actually comes out through the way she lies to her husband, and then with Deena.
That’s one thing I love about the movie actually, is that Maddie at the end is really not a saint. I love the end. I love the last scene with Jake, which I really struggled with writing because I was like, I know that I could boil this down to some pithy, perfect little bow, thematically. But I was really drawn to them having just two lines, basically.
What does the ending mean to both of you? What do you think happens?
JE: Well, I personally think that Maddie is telling the truth. That’s how I played it. I played it that she was telling the truth and that Maddie has actually grown up so much through this process of self-destruction.
And what happens to Deena?
KB: I think she becomes a therapist.
JE: Yeah, a queer therapist. A somatic therapist.
KB: She probably would have a very fruitful career.
JE: In Ridgewood.
There are a couple of really funny recurring background jokes in the movie that I want to talk about. People keep mentioning this therapy app.
JE: Oh yeah, BetterHelp.
Oh, is it supposed to be BetterHelp?
JE: Essentially, yeah.
And all of these millennial-coded things—
JE: Yeah, Fly by Jing.
Can you talk a little bit about coming up with what you were going to skewer, specifically, about millennial culture?
JE: I needed there to be some sort of chatter for when she was in the bathroom waiting for them to leave. And it just really made me laugh, the idea of the thing that we overhear is two people talking about a therapy app, especially because I wanted the end of the movie to have this old-school, hysterical ’50s melodrama, Freudian, Marnie thing. There’s a literal scene in Marnie where Sean Connery is yelling words at Tippi Hedren, and she’s free-associating. He says, “Red.” And she’s like, “Ahh!” I wanted there to be in some ways this representation of a deeper, more costly, intense version of therapy as we used to see it in the movies, up against this like paper-thin app-based, total Ponzi-scheme therapy. Just empty, hollow bullshit.
KB: Well, it’s also genius that in a meta way it sounds like an ad in the movie.
JE: That’s actually something that I hilariously did not notice till last night.
KB: We’re so used to product placement like, “You know what’s really amazing if you have a sore throat?” Anyway, don’t put that in the article obviously. It’s me speaking off the cuff. I don’t have a sore throat. [She sprays her throat with a sore-throat spray from her purse.]
JE: That is what modern life feels like. Advertising has gotten so insidious. It’s not on a billboard. You’re suddenly like, “Yeah, I love Fly by Jing!” You’re like, “What am I doing? I’m hawking Fly by Jing for no reason.”
And then you have this very specific Hulu, FX, Condé Nast — it’s not even shade, just making fun of these corporations specifically. How did you decide what you were going to hit sideways instead of head-on?
JE: Some things I did change the names of, like The Boar instead of the Bear. Some things just sounded funnier when you made it up, and then something sounded funnier when they were the real name. When I was trying to make up a name for Condé Nast, I was like, “But Condé Nast got a laugh last night.” And FX, that’s one of Kate’s oldest jokes — “I’m premiering on FX tonight.”
KB: It was hardly a joke.
JE: It’s not, but some things just sound funny in the mouth.
Speaking of how you haven’t had a show, especially on any of these networks, there’s another layer there, which is really funny. You’ve kind of gone around that system.
KB: Thank God. Chews you up, throws you out!
What is the next thing that you guys are going to do together? Do you have something you’re working on already?
JE: We have ambitions, I would say, in the theater space. I would say there’s a movie idea, and a theater idea.
KB:. We were going down the line on the TV idea not too long ago, but quite frankly it just wasn’t … This moment is so weird.
Is it harder now to make a TV show than when you started out?
KB: Oh, there’s no comparison. Now you can’t get a show made.
JE: I really wanted to in my early 20s because it seemed like that’s where the hot young things went. Because you had the Girls, you had the Broad City. We’ve gotten older, and so our desires don’t necessarily align in the same way with the culture maybe.
No more TV?
JE: Maybe one day.
KB: No, don’t say that we don’t want a TV show!
