Hello, everyone. This is And Just Like That, the writer's room, the official companion podcast from HBO Max and Pineapple Street Studios.

I'm Michael Patrick King, executive producer, writer, and director of, and just like that.

And I'm joined by executive producer and writer Elisa Zeritsky.

Hello, everyone.

Executive producer and writer Julie Rottenberg.

Hi.

And co-producer, writer, and comedian, author, Samantha Irby.

Hey, Sam. Hi. How are you? I'm good. I miss you guys. I'm good.

We're good to see each other sort of cyberly every day. And hi, Julie, how are you? I'm good. How are you?

Great. Alisa? Superb. We're at episode nine. No strings attached. If you have not watched it yet, stop right now what you're doing and go watch this episode. It'll be much more enjoyable, trust me.

Now the great Holy Grail of the series for me in the writing room, from the very beginning,

when we started to lay out all these different characters

and they all started to be on sort of different runways charlotte had l t w miranda had naya

kerry had chay chay was the bridge to chay carrie chay miranda um and then seema had carry as well

kerry had sema my my great hope and we kept talking about, it's not a success unless they're all in the same place.

That's really the goal for me was to get them all meeting across storylines.

And it was sort of the story idea of complete fusion to me. It was like

everything has to come together in some episode. And it's rare to think about how to get all these

disparate people together. We got a couple of people together. We got Seema with the ladies having

drinks. We had LTW way back in

episode one with the three of them at lunch. But what we haven't had is an actual meeting of the

characters that are new meeting each other as well as the characters that are familiar meeting

...