To me the key for writing John and also talking to Eric about John is that villains don't think they're villains.

I'm talking to Alexandra Cunningham, the showrunner on the new Bravo series Dirty John.

The Eric she's talking about is Eric Banna who plays the title character, who she wanted for the show and fought to get.

I definitely think that John developed some kind of superiority complex in conjunction with a sort of persecution complex like that no one's as smart as I am and also everyone's out to get me and so therefore anything I do to sort of save myself and get what I need is justified.

From the Los Angeles Times and Wundery, I'm Chris Gofford and this is a special bonus episode of Dirty John. For those of you unfamiliar with the term the showrunner is not just the head

rider but the arbiter of a thousand production details large and small from

casting to costumes basically the CEO of a corporation that forms for a few

hurried months and then dissolves. Cunningham's first job in the role was the

American version of Prime Suspect.

One of the things I loved about the Dirty John material was it was actually an opportunity to write a lot of the different kinds of stuff that I've written in my career.

There were, there's procedural stuff in there,

law enforcement procedural stuff.

There's, you know, obviously the emotional twisted fairy tale version of it which you know I mean I always

Soap seems to be kind of a dirty word in our business, but I actually think any story that has emotional stakes is a soap.

Like, I-Claudeus is a soap.

Saving Private Ryan is a soap.

Cunningham spent six years writing for Desperate Housewives

and she sees parallels with Dirty John.

When Desperate Housewives was good, it had a lot in common with this story even though the

story really happened in the sense that you know here's these women and they're on an emotional roller coaster tightrope

and it's about love and it's about fear and all the things that this story is about except this really happened, the core of the sopranos, the greatest show ever, is love and family and

murder and fear and all the things that this story has.

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