I really appreciated that decision. Tell me about bringing that Beatrix Hasp storyline back for the final two episodes.
Yeah. Well, we knew that we weren’t going to have Hasp and her goons chasing after Charlie, but we did want it to wrap up some way. So really, the Alex story, the Patti Harrison story, that to us was like, “Okay, that’s the season 2 [big idea],” even though it’s introduced later. It started with that. With, like, “Okay, we want to introduce this character.” We knew from early on once Laura Deeley, one of our writers, came up with the idea of this character. So it just seemed a natural way of like, “Well, why would this Alex character, this great assassin, the Iguana, target Charlie?” “Well, to get Hasp.” So then there was a way of, okay, we seem to resolve Hasp early, and we do, but then we kind have that in the back pocket to come back in later.
And structurally, it was almost like a [have your cake and eat it too scenario]. Then we could have this middle portion where Charlie’s on the road, kind of this existential road trip, she’s trying to settle down, and then this element that we thought we put to bed early into the season arises in a different form than maybe people are anticipating.
Absolutely. So when was the decision made to increase the episode count this season, to go from 10 to 12?
Before I came on.
Okay. So was that something that you were excited about, or nervous about, or … how did feel about that?
Scared. Yeah. It’s, weirdly, it’s a significantly different — like, the previous show I was on, “Longmire,” we always did 10 episode seasons, but one season we did 13 and it almost broke the show. I don’t know how network shows do those 20-plus orders. They’re superheroes to me, to be able to pull that off. So I mean, the challenge on this show, it maybe would be less daunting, but every single episode is its own pilot, its own mini-movie. We literally, until the very, very end and the Good Buddy apartment, any set we build, we tear it down after 10 days. We lose all the cast and we have to recast the whole show. That means we have to get costumes for every new character, new props, new locations, new everything. So, it’s two more spins on that very daunting hamster wheel.
Is it a really expensive show because of all those things that you just mentioned? It seems like it would be from the outside.
It’s not as expensive, I don’t think, as an HBO show. We stick to a 10 day schedule. But I would say we’re … I mean, it’s a larger budget than any show I’ve been on, but I haven’t been on big budget stuff. So I think we’re probably kind of somewhere in the middle.
