'Yellowjackets' creators on collaborating to make their hit Showtime series

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson are co-creators and co-executive producers of the series “Yellowjackets” on Showtime. The married team say they bonded over a revision class and have been collaborating ever since, but they write the series from the retreat of their own spaces. “We definitely cannot be in the same room when we're working,” Lyle quips. Writing this complex show is a joint effort where they pick a different starting point, and repeatedly review each other’s work. But their thinking is not always fully aligned, so Nickerson explains that with the back and forth process, “we kind of find a shared point of view.” With Yellowjackets’ seven Emmys nominators, the duo is now working on season two of the hit series. They join The Business to discuss the show’s conceptualization, their hit-and-miss pitches, and how Showtime proved to be the right home for their vision. First, Kim Masters and Matt Belloni, founding partner of Puck News, delve into the latest decisions Warner Bros. Discovery CEO Zaslav has made, and how the industry is responding.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.
0:05.6	Yellow Jackets co-creators, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson,
0:09.0	wanted an unusual amount of time to pitch the series to prospective buyers,
0:13.5	and they pitched it at a lot of places.
0:15.8	I do feel bad for all the people who were not interested in it
0:18.8	and had to sit through our 35-minute pitch.
0:20.9	And those are sometimes heartbreaking because you can kind of tell within the first five minutes
0:26.3	if somebody is interested or not and you're like, well, I guess we're doing this.
0:30.1	Buckle up because you have 30 more minutes coming your way.
0:33.3	Luckily, Showtime said yes and now the series has seven Emmy nominations.
0:41.8	Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson talk about how they work together as a married couple and why they think the premise of Yellow Jackets isn't that weird.
0:45.6	But first, we banter.
0:46.8	Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.
0:51.4	I am joined by my colleague in banter. Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt.
0:54.9	Hi there.
0:55.9	So, as you well recall, David Zaslov went on a big tour of Hollywood in the months building up to his taking over what is now Warner Brothers Discovery.
1:04.9	He met with everybody. He asked a lot of people for their opinions. He's still asking people for opinions.
1:10.7	He's an outsider.
1:11.7	He comes from the cable world. He doesn't come from like a prestige cable channel.
1:16.0	Hollywood would normally frown on that kind of person running the legacy studio of Warner's,
1:20.6	but in this case, the community was so desperate to get rid of the AT&T management that it was like,
1:26.9	please rescue us,
	...

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