Complicated, Nuanced, and Layered Characters: A Conversation with ‘Ginny & Georgia’ Showrunner Debra J. Fisher
Showrunner Debra J. Fisher shares with Script her connection to Sarah Lampert’s pilot script, her writing journey, the three significant buzzwords in the writers’ room, the importance of mentorship, bringing women up the ranks in the industry, and so much more.
How do you live with the knowledge that your mother is a murderer? That's what Ginny is going to have to figure out. Burdened with the new understanding that Kenny - her step-dad - didn't die of natural causes, now Ginny must deal with the fact that Georgia not only killed, she killed to protect Ginny. Georgia on the other hand would much prefer that the past be left in the past, after all, she's got a wedding to plan! But the funny thing about Georgia's past is that it never stays buried for long...
Plot twists, character revelations, and whimsy galore are all nestled in the Season Two of Netflix's Ginny & Georgia. Be prepared to have your heartstrings twisted and pulled each and every way. The creatives behind this show have carried their well-oiled machine of storytelling from the first season to the next (and hopefully more to come).
Creator Sarah Lampert and showrunner Debra J. Fisher leave no stone unturned when tackling these messy and complicated titular characters and their unwavering relationship built off love and earnest trust. It's the bond between mother and daughter that is unspeakable, unquestionable, and remarkably surprising. These layers carry over into the supporting characters, asking real questions and giving honest answers about first heartbreaks, first falling out, first reconnections, mental health, and more. The Second Season cliffhanger keeps you eagerly on the edge of your seat, because quite frankly, all you want to do is binge the third season - I guess we'll just have to wait and rewatch the first and second season...again.
I recently had the absolute pleasure and honor of speaking with showrunner Debra J. Fisher about her connection to Sarah Lampert's pilot script, her writing journey, the three significant buzzwords in the writers' room, the importance of mentorship, bringing women up the ranks in the industry, and so much more.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Sadie Dean: How did you initially get involved with this series? And what was it about the material that you immediately connected to either personally or as a writer or maybe both?
Debra J. Fisher: Great question. The script came to me by way of how it usually does. [laughs] Netflix had sent the script of Ginny & Georgia to my reps, and it was the perfect time, I was really wanting to jump back into something very female-forward and something very character driven. I read it and I was like, 'Yes, I want to meet on this. Please, please!' And all I knew was that it was written by Sarah Lampert, and she was an assistant at the time working in reality TV.
What she read of mine, I had written this spec a few years ago called Roll the Bones and we joke about it - we say that my Roll the Bones is like a distant cousin of Ginny & Georgia - it's about a mom and her two kids that leaves her gambling husband and goes off and she shoots her husband and it's this really fun, fun, fun thing. And so, we were like 'Wow, it's kind of like a cousin of Ginny & Georgia.' [laughs]
One of the things I really loved about Sarah's pilot is just this beautiful tone of it. It was really a lovely balance of light and dark. And something that we continue to try to do all throughout our series. And basically, just this idea about this mother-daughter relationship where at its core, there's a mother that doesn't understand her daughter is so relatable, and so something that I think I respond to, and a lot of people in some ways do respond to that. And everything about their relationship is what the show revolves around.
So, Sarah and I, the first time we met, spent two hours just talking about the pilot and all the characters. And everything that I sparked to, and I had so many questions, and our brains seemed to be really creatively aligned to where I thought possibly the show could be going or where she wanted the show to be going. So, we had a two-hour meeting after that, which was kind of the longest of my career. [laughs] And we really just had a mind meld together. And she met with a lot of other showrunners, and she picked me! The two of us went in together - Netflix had obviously read her script and was very excited about it, and she had met with them - and then she and I went back in together and formulated a little more detailed longer pitch and pitched more seasons of the show, and then they bought it.
Sadie: Wow, I love that story. It was meant to be for the two of you to link up with two similar stories. When fleshing out these characters in Season One and now carrying that over into Season Two, I assume that Sarah did a lot of the groundwork in fleshing out that mother-daughter relationship initially. However, when you came on board, with your background and experience working on some very character-driven material, how much did you have a hand in furthering the character development?
Debra: In the pilot, they were incredibly fleshed out. And I think where my expertise, being a writer-producer for over 20 years came in, because Sarah had shared a lot of ideas about, especially in season one about where things were going. I think, for me, where I was helpful is I was able to build on a lot of things that she had already had, you know, just further deepening those characters. But what I'm also good at is just laying out and seeing the big picture and that just comes with part of the job - doing this for so long and being in writers’ rooms, because Sarah, as I said, she was an assistant right before this. So, this is her first time in a writers’ room.
Sadie: And coming from reality, it's so different.
Debra: Yeah, totally. It is so different. No one knows what to expect. And I'm a first-time showrunner. And she's a first-time creator, her very first job ever. And I'd been in 11 plus rooms by this time, so I really got to educate everyone in the room, because we had a lot of firsts on our show. I also hired a couple of writers who were writer’s assistants and promoted them. So, this was like, their first big thing in the room.
But how I learned it, I took everything from the best showrunners that I have worked for, in terms of breaking story. We always would spend the first two weeks talking about long-term story and just the old-fashioned way on the board would go down with all of our main characters, and we were doing 10 episodes, we would have deep in depth conversations about where we would go in terms of tent poles with these characters, and we had a lot of ideas, Sarah had a lot of ideas, I was able to build on a lot of things. And then when you bring in this, you know, our mind meld of our writers’ room. We have all these boards and cards of ideas - trying to organize everything in those first two weeks of long-term story and those tent poles - where do we know where we want to end up? Because we didn't know where we wanted to end up right from the beginning. And that's, I think, crucial to storytelling - know where you're starting and you know where you're going. And then you can have so much fun along the way. With those tent poles in long-term story of, ‘OK, let's put this here. Let's put this here.’
As we go in breaking in each specific episode, we just kind of do the same thing with episode two, where we lay all the characters out, ‘Well, here's where we want to start this episode. Here's where we want to end this episode.’ And for me, it always comes from character. If the room is working, and I'm on a bunch of showrunner calls dealing with budgets and hiring, and I come back in, I will always ask the question when I sit down, I want to know if you're going to talk to me about Ginny or Georgia first, where did we leave them off emotionally last? Last time we saw them where were they emotionally? And I ask that with every character. So, I become like a broken record - it's like everybody should be prepared for that [laughs] in any way. And that's where we always start. Where were they the last time we saw them emotionally? And physically?
Sadie: Because character is everything. There's a book that recently came out written by Scott Myers called The Protagonist’s Journey.
Debra: I love him.
Sadie: Yeah, me too! And he writes in there “characters are complicated.” I think that just allows you as a writer to give yourself permission to really dig deep in your character work. And with this show, especially Season Two, we see that in every single character. They all have a purpose and story worth telling and exploring. Especially Ginny’s group of high school girlfriends, that girl group is so real! As I was watching their dynamic I kept thinking, ‘Oh, my God, this is like high school again, they're so real.’ [laughs]
Debra: [laughs] I know. I know, it is true. It is. And that was such our goal, that literally “complicated and nuanced, and layered,” are our three buzzwords in everything that we do in terms of character and story. Because we are humans, right, our characters make mistakes. They’re teenagers, but also we have a 30-year-old mom - they say the wrong thing. They sometimes do the wrong thing, just like in real life. And I think that's why people relate to the show, in some ways, because we do have complicated, nuanced, messy characters.
Sadie: As the showrunner, you're hiring a lot of department heads and the creatives behind the scenes. What were you looking for in terms of voice and vision for both your writers’ room and the directors who are carrying this tone visually?
Debra: We have an amazing group of writers in Season One and Season Two. And first and foremost, we really wanted to hire people that were racially diverse and had this lived experience. And I really think one of the reasons that the show works so well without feeling one-dimensional is because we do have a room filled with people with this lived experience. And always our goal was really, we want to give voice to this variety of experiences that we see on TV. And we really want to allow people that don't always see themselves on TV to have these conversations around that so that they're literally the audience seeing people that represent them on television. And I think that starts with hiring people that do have different backgrounds and lived experiences.
This was my first showrunning gig, and I had been writing and producing TV for over 20 years. And I have gone out for many, many, many, many showrunning gigs, but it was always given to somebody with more experience, obviously, it's an enormous job. I'm the CEO of a television show. I'm in charge of the creative as well as the business side of this.
Being a part of this business and getting this opportunity from Netflix, it was very important for me to have all female directors, because we were shooting blocks and Netflix was 100% supportive of that. We had Anya Adams, who directed our pilot. So, when I talk about first, Anya is biracial, she very much identified with Ginny's character, and she had started out as a first AD, and worked her way up and directing. She had directed many things, but this is her first pilot. So, for Anya, her first pilot, Sarah, her very first show [laughs] creating a TV show, and my first showrunning experience, so we had so many firsts.
We had five directors lined up, all female, and one had to fall out because she was about to film an indie movie that she's been trying to get off the ground for years. And so, in figuring that out, we ended up hiring a man Sudz Sutherland, African American director who had three daughters close to Ginny's age, and he just so was so wonderful in Season One, he was amazing. It was amazing to have him and with his wife and his three girls, he could identify so much with this show. And he's such an experienced great director. And in Season Two, we were trying to do the same thing, but we ended up hiring a directing producer, James Genn, he is biracial and the rest are four women. It was just a great way to give women an opportunity to direct the show who also had that lived experience and just to help bring women up, bring up the numbers with female directors.
Sadie: I love that you're consciously and proactively doing that. I know you've done a lot of mentorships throughout your career, but I’m curious, are you seeing a progressive shift in those in a similar position as you continue on with mentorships and carrying them over from job to job?
Debra: Yeah, I do. I do feel like I hear on social media about people being mentored. It was really important for me to do as I had mentioned, there was a staff writer that we had promoted, and it was his first staff writing job Mike Gauyo.
I don't think I ever really sought out a formal quote-unquote mentor - I have people that I have worked with over the years that are showrunning that I do call when I have questions. I'm like, ‘Hey, I need to ask you about this.’ But it's so important now with, there's so many outlets like when I started working, we had three networks. And an almost fourth, like, that's how long ago I started. [laughs] And now with the burst of cable and streaming, there's so many TV shows. I talk about this a lot with my creative team at Netflix, and something that's concerning for me and it's I think it's concerning for everybody in the industry is because, you know, we film in Toronto, a lot of places don't film in LA anymore. And there's not an opportunity for these young writers coming up the ranks in the writers’ room to be on set as well. And so, most of the people we end up with, our very tight budget, we weren't able to have more than just an exec producer to come up to set with Sarah and I in Toronto. And if we do get a Season Three pickup - we'll see after the numbers --
Sadie: Crossing fingers.
Debra: Crossing fingers - that is one of the things that we really want to do is to have the writers come up and be on set because I was so fortunate enough the showrunner that did that for me Ed Bernero on Criminal Minds, he literally threw us into the deep end. You wrote an episode, and then he's like, ‘OK, now you are prepping it.’ And that is how I learned being tossed into the 12-foot-deep side of the pool. [laughs] But it was such an imperative learning experience for me. So not just in the writing room, but because we are not just writers, we are producers as we move up the ranks - like after four years, you should be a quote, unquote, co-producer.
So, I'm super supportive of that, but also just in general on the Second Season, I had my assistant and the script coordinator co-write an episode - I think it's very important to continue to have people that are in those positions have an opportunity to write. And also, I mentor two young writers outside the show that I try to mentor them with their ideas. I can't tell you how important it is. And I see a lot of people talk about it on like Twitter and things like that. There are a lot of showrunners out there that know the importance of it. So, I think people are talking about that more. And that makes me really happy because we have to do it.
Sadie: You can only learn by doing. I know a lot of writers who've never set foot on set before and it's frightening. I get it.
Debra: [laughs] Yeah, Sarah had never been in a room and on set. Like she was literally thrown into the deep end of the pool. But you know, she had me there with her along the way.
Sadie: Glad you’re there to be their guide! What inspired you to become a storyteller?
Debra: Oh, I think unlike the Steven Spielbergs of the world, I wasn't born with a camera in my hand or a computer. I was always storytelling when I was younger, like drawing or being in the class play, things like that. I had a very artistic side to me, but it wasn't till I got to college, and I was taking so many different kinds of classes - I was taking art history, design, marketing, and architectural design - I took everything and it wasn't until I had a friend who was in what they called Radio/Television/Film, I started taking those classes. And that was it. We did everything. I went to the University of Maryland back East. And we made radio spots – we had the head radio guy in all of DC teaching us this class. It was so fun. We were making music videos. We were still back then editing on, Super 8 - I was making short films on Super 8. And I loved it. I loved every single bit of it. And because it wasn't super specific, like out here in LA with USC and UCLA, it's either you’re directing, or screenwriting - when I went to school, we did everything. And I was like, ‘I don't know exactly what I want to do. I'm doing it all.’ [laughs]
After college, a year later, I moved out to LA. I actually started working in TV animation as a writer's assistant/script coordinator. So, I'd get to sit in the writers’ room with all of them, and I was like, ‘Wait, this is your job? You're sitting in a room all day and you're breaking story?’ I was like, ‘Hell yes!’ [laughs] This is exactly what I want to be doing. And my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite show at the time was a show that had just come out called Party of Five. I was absolutely obsessed with it. And I met someone who got me an interview with the showrunners Chris Keyser and Amy Lippman. And I had no assistant experience really, I mean, I was just like a writer's assistant and a script coordinator, I had no showrunners assistant experience. It was on the Sony lot meeting with the two of them, and my interview was just a completely heartfelt obsession about everything I loved about their show. And at that point, being in the room, I was writing, this is what I want to do. I want to be a writer. So, I just was like, ‘I want to be the two of you.’ And I was driving home, the assistant at the time he called me, ‘Deb, they've canceled all their other interviews. You got the job.’ I will never forget that feeling of getting that job to work with them. And it was such a great tutorial. We filmed on the Sony lot. The writers’ room was in the building over where we edited - it was such a tutorial on how to make television.
There was another assistant down the hall, Erica Messer, we became writing partners for like eight years, I think mimicking Chris and Amy. We were working all day, writing at night. We worked on a couple of spec scripts and it got the attention of JJ Abrams and our very first showrunning meeting we met with JJ he had the room fully staffed for Alias. And we got the staff writer job.
Sadie: Wow. That's incredible.
Debra: Yeah, talk about an amazing first job working with JJ Abrams and that whole crew on Alias. It was really extraordinary. So since then, I think I have a bit of an unusual career. I'm very fortunate. I have been able to maneuver like in the first half of my career, Alias, The OC, the original Charmed, and then Criminal Minds. I've been able to go back and forth between procedural and character-driven one-hour dramas, which not a lot of people have been able to do. And then after four years of Criminal Minds, I didn't want to write about serial killers anymore. I love that show so much. I love every one of the actors, everyone, but it wasn't fulfilling my creative heart. And I wanted to get back into working on female-driven and character-driven shows.
Eventually, I got there. I've worked on so many great shows, with a few female showrunners along the way. And that's truly where my heart is. And right before I met Sarah on Ginny & Georgia, I was meeting with my reps and I was like, ‘This is what I want.’ And literally, I went on vacation and came back and then Ginny & Georgia was in my inbox. It is like my dream show - the tone, everything about it. I love every single aspect about our show. I love it. Love it. Love it. Love it.
Sadie: That's such an incredible journey.
Debra: Yeah, and it's not been hard. [laughs] There's been hard times - not selling things and not getting the job you want and getting fired from the job you wanted to stay at. It's a huge learning experience. But yeah, it all brought me to this right place at the right time, my first showrunning gig and it couldn't have been more fortuitous. And I truly do believe meant to be, yeah for sure.
Sadie: And just from speaking with you briefly, I can tell you’re a humble and genuine person. That sells in a room and certainly goes a long way in this industry.
Debra: Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. I do try to be as honest and genuine as I can be. And I think that's super helpful, because it allows people to open up in the room and so everyone can be super authentic.
Sadie: Especially with this kind of show and the stories you’re telling and the character work you’re doing.
Debra: It's deeply personal to everyone. I think that's what translates, because everybody has an opportunity to bring themselves into these characters.
Ginny & Georgia Season Two is now streaming on Netflix.
Sadie Dean is the Editor of Script Magazine and writes the screenwriting column, Take Two, for Writer’s Digest print magazine. She is also the co-host of the Reckless Creatives podcast. Sadie is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, and received her Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from The American Film Institute. She has been serving the screenwriting community for nearly a decade by providing resources, contests, consulting, events, and education for writers across the globe. Sadie is an accomplished writer herself, in which she has been optioned, written on spec, and has had her work produced. Additionally, she was a 2nd rounder in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and has been nominated for The Humanitas Prize for a TV spec with her writing partner. Sadie has also served as a Script Supervisor on projects for WB, TBS and AwesomenessTV, as well as many independent productions. She has also produced music videos, short films and a feature documentary. Sadie is also a proud member of Women in Film.
Follow Sadie and her musings on Twitter @SadieKDean
