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Ripped from the headlines: How the showrunners of ‘Monsters,' ‘Apple Cider Vinegar' and ‘Good American Family' mined truth for drama
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction — which makes true crime incredibly fertile ground for generating compelling ideas for TV series. But it also brings its own set of complications, where showrunners have to toe a careful line when dealing with real-life characters.
Here, the executive producers behind three of the season's news-inspired series — Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story's Ian Brennan, Good American Family's Katie Robbins, and Apple Cider Vinegar's Samantha Strauss — reveal how they navigated those landmines to critical and commercial success.
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Gold Derby: What made you want to take on these complex projects?
Ian Brennan: I wasn't actually convinced at first. We were trying to follow Dahmer, and those are big shoes to fill. And my level of detail about the Menendez brothers was really minimal. I remember them being caricatured on Saturday Night Live for crying on the witness stand. It was not articulated at the time what they were crying about. That's how low our cultural resolution was at the time, to keep two thoughts in our head, that boys could be victims of sexual violence and also murderers — that was just too hard for that era of pop culture. But just getting into the case, I was like, "Oh no, this contains multitudes, this is really deep." It was in fact, a lot to take in. It's not this was like a new case or anything. It's become now a new case, which is f--king wild. I expect that the boys will get paroled based on this 'new' evidence that was not new at all. We just pointed those out again, and it shows the power of television for sure.
Samantha Strauss: Our show is about a woman who faked brain cancer and built a wellness empire on her lie. There was a 60 Minutes exposé, which was a trainwreck of an interview, and it really captured the imagination here in Australia. She wore a very interesting pink turtleneck and just was unable to tell the truth. The rise and the fall of Belle Gibson might just feel like a scammer story we've seen before, but the journalists who actually broke the story on Belle wrote this beautiful book about her, and they had incredible sources, they also painted the picture of wellness culture. They followed other cancer scammers across history and other wellness influencers, and what I just loved was that it was a tapestry and an opportunity to have a conversation about wellness culture, about social media, about our need for approval.
Katie Robbins: Hulu came to me back in 2020 with the idea of turning this story about Natalia Grace and the Barnetts into a narrative limited. Back then, the story was out in the world, but not as pervasive as it is now. And so I had to do my own deep dive into it. I had never done true crime, nor had I been like looking to do true crime, necessarily, but I was so struck by the experience of reading about these stories in that I would read one article and just be like, "Oh my gosh, this is the truth." And then I'd go and watch an interview with one of the other parties involved, and I'd be like, "Oh my gosh, no, I was wrong." That feeling of whiplash and not knowing which way was up, I thought was really interesting. The more I learned about the story, the more important and insidious that became because at the end of the story, there is some empirical, biological evidence. And that evidence didn't end up mattering in the court of law or the court of public opinion. I thought was really fascinating and really troubling, and something that feels every day more troubling because we're seeing it writ large across this country. And so I came up with the idea of using perspective as the way of telling the story — starting the story in the perspective of the Barnetts in this heightened, slightly campy, kind of tone, and then at a certain point that being upended and switching perspectives, and us having to question everything that we've been we've seen so far, and also question why we believed what we saw so far.
Do you feel like you were able to get at some "truth"?
Brennan: For our show, we knew from the beginning that truth was going to be tricky, because four people know the truth of the story. Two are in prison. Two are dead. There's not some piece of evidence that hasn't been looked at, it's been so combed over, and everybody's sticking to their story. So we knew we had to tell it like, like Rashomon, that we had to keep telling the story over and over again from different perspectives. You have to allow yourself to be making a painting, not a photograph, and you try to get as close as you can.
Robbins: The 'truth' is it's complicated and hard to hold onto in our story, and yet there was some empirical fact at the end of it. And so the way that we went about doing it was to really draw from allegations that the two sides have made about each other, and that we use the perspective-driven storytelling as a way of saying, "OK, we're telling this person's version of events, and now we're telling this person's version of events, and then finally we end with some sense of empirical fact." We had a treasure trove of research. I often thought about we were doing as the way a sculptor works with a big piece of granite. You've got the form, and now we have to chisel away at that and figure out what is the story that we're telling with this boulder of research that we have. As long as your North Star is an emotional truth for the people that you're telling stories about, then I think it gives you a little bit of license to be able to play and to tell a story that feels dramatically engaging and emotionally true.
Strauss: I really grapple with this telling a true story. The effect can be a pile on. Our Belle is a real person. She's out there, and she's got a family. I had to keep going back to the idea of entertainment first and foremost. It's the conversation around those decisions of trying not to sensationalize the story, not glorify her behavior. Because as a writer, I love an antihero. You just want to get in there and get into the marrow, and you put all your own sh-t into her sh-t and your needs and deep wounds into her deep wounds. It was always important to get right to the edge of empathy for her, because she's the baddie, but it's the culture that's enabled her, the social media culture in particular, and how that cannibalizes our intense need for approval and for love. There were grown-ups in the room that were really enabling her behavior. Every time we in the writers room felt too much sympathy for her, we would then walk it back and have to remember the people who were so negatively affected by her, and that was why it was important to to juxtapose her with someone who really did have cancer and who desperately wanted to save herself, and who was lying to herself about how her alternative treatment was making her well.
Did you reach out to the real people involved, or did the legal teams say to you, actually, you're better off not talking to them at all.
Strauss: That was our legal advice, but also the creative advice. Our character of Belle, played by Kaitlyn Dever, she became our version, not the real version. Some things are condensed and all of those things, but hopefully, the profound truth is at the center
Brennan: We didn't [contact the Menendez brothers], but that was by design. I don't even think at the beginning they would have wanted to speak to us, but we didn't reach out again. There's nothing more to learn. Their story has remained the same. And I think you don't want to be seen as being in the tank for anybody. We didn't get any worried phone calls from legal. I think the Menendez brothers have reached a threshold of fame that's almost public domain by virtue of how everybody knows it. I think that's just where you try to do as much research internally as you can and trust a moral North Star.
Robbins: It was very important to try to do justice to Natalia's story and to get that story out there, and to use the structure of it to shine a light on these themes around bias and disability and the fact that the truth doesn't matter sometimes, if the person who's telling it is telling it in a way that is captivating and convincing, we stop asking questions and then we cease to move through the world with empathy and curiosity. So that was really important. We really got to tell the story that we wanted to tell, and the story that felt like it was doing justice in the way that we'd hoped.
Have you heard from the real people involved?
Strauss: I haven't. I really expected Belle to storm the launch, but for someone who really did crave the spotlight, she has been surprisingly AWOL, which is great. I mean, it might have been good for the publicity. [Laughs.]
Brennan: No. The person who's out there still is Leslie Abramson, their lawyer, who I thought we'd hear from, just by virtue of being a lawyer on TV. I think we portrayed her in a way that she would love. But I was wondering if she was going to come knocking but she never did at all.
Robbins: Nothing from the Barnetts.
What do you want people to take away from your projects?
Strauss: I read every negative thing that anyone ever writes, but in between, is the positives, which is the people who feel hurt, who are chronically ill or have cancer, who are bullied by their friends online. They're told to literally drink apple cider vinegar and you'll cure yourself. What is heartbreaking is the, hundreds, thousands [of dollars] that you might spend to go to a quack center and put your health in the hands of someone who's not necessarily a scientist, who hasn't been to medical school. It was important for us to show that doctors aren't always right. You do have to advocate for yourself. We get so polarized. and social media loves pushing us into down our rabbit holes, and creating an us and them. I love the sentiment of listening to each other and balance.
Robbins: At the end of the day, the great horror of it is that there was empirical fact about Natalia's age, and that didn't matter, and in the state of Indiana, that hasn't made a difference in her birth certificate. That's terrifying to me, that there can be scientific evidence and that doesn't mean anything. That becomes more and more of something that I think we need to be aware of, and we need to have media literacy and ask questions. This wouldn't have happened had Natalia been of average stature, if she hadn't been born into the body that she was born into. If our show can help people ask more questions and move through the world with a little bit more empathy and curiosity, that's the great takeaway.
Brennan: That abuse, sexual or otherwise, is almost like you actually abuse multiple generations of people. It almost destroys someone's DNA and it becomes this heritable thing that then they pass on generation after generation. I think there is rarely sexual abuse that happens in a vacuum. I'm sure it does happen, but it's almost always abused, sexually abused, abusive people were themselves sexually abused. It's learned behavior — these cycles of abuse, how toxic and how permanent they become, and become almost a sort of family member that everyone's forced to live with.
Why do you think audiences are looking for these kinds of stories now more than ever?
Brennan: Dahmer was a real eye opener for everybody, including Netflix. That's a challenging show. That's a hard watch, but I think we live in dark times, and people need a little bit of affirmation that they're not alone in seeing horrors around them.
Robbins: It certainly seems that there is an appetite for this kind of storytelling, and I am always wondering what that's about. Why are we so interested in it? There's a little bit of a desire to dissect what is happening in the world, and holding a mirror up to ourselves. And these are stories that are larger than life in a lot of ways, and don't feel necessarily reflective of each of our individual experiences. And yet, these are real people, and so there is something almost Shakespearean about the scale at which these stories are being told, and yet, what they're born out of are things that are very true to each of us, Nobody sets out every day to say, I want to be a villain, I want to go off and do bad things and torment people. They are trying to lead their lives in the way that feels like true to them. And yet these things happen. And so I'm trying to understand why these things are happening within our society, and what that says about our society, What I like about doing this kind of work, having now done it once, is that it does feel like a chance to write an op-ed a little bit. I think an important thing to be able to do as an artist is to look at the world around you and try to make sense of it. That's what we're doing. We're meaning makers.
Strauss: They are easy to sell, or they have been lately, because there's already a built in audience and a conversation. Our show sort of sits in the scammer microcosm. I have thought a lot about that, why we like scammers. Part of it is the audacity. How can someone do that? How can they break the system? Oh, maybe I can break the system. But then I think we do like to see the fall from grace and justice served sat a deeper level. I wonder if it's because we often feel like we're being scammed by people in our lives, or we're being gaslit by people in our lives.
Brennan: It's also that it was a true story, you couldn't write it. It's ruined writers' rooms for me, because if it was a scripted story, you'd get the note: "That's too on the nose." Because humans are super weird. The third season of Monsters is about a grave-digging necrophiliac — really, really dark stuff. And it doesn't faze me at all. It's just fascinating. That is what human beings are capable of.
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