Making the Soup with ‘Abbott Elementary’ and ‘Harley Quinn’ Co-Creators Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern

Steadfast perseverance, patience, and respect will go a long within this industry, and these traits have served both Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern well. Oh, and being naturally charismatic and funny bodes well in the world of comedy. Over the course of their careers, they've forged their own paths knowing what they want and learned how they would and wouldn't run their own shows. 

Their experiences of going through the trenches have now brought them to a new height in their writing careers, having co-created the Emmy-winning series Abbott Elementary alongside Quinta Brunson, and the animated HBO Max hit, Harley Quinn. 

Patrick and Justin recently spoke with Script about how they became creative collaborators, how they learned to divide and conquer as showrunners, the importance of respecting people's time, rewriting in the room and getting feedback, and so much more. 

I must note, per Patrick's request, that Patrick was taking this video interview from a dark corner of a room outside of their shared office, with the camera angle askew. It was a horrifying and possibly tense event for Patrick (shaky cam and all), yet an entertaining spectacle for Justin and myself - and I'm happy to report that he safely escaped and is fine now...

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: When was the moment that it clicked that you two should be creative collaborators?

Patrick Schumacker: It was 21 and a half years ago. [laughs] We interned together in college out in LA, Justin went to San Diego State, I went to Texas - went to those respective schools but interned out in LA the summer of 2001 at this company called A Band Apart, Quentin Tarantino’s production company, but we worked in the commercials and music videos division. I kind of had aspirations to become a music video director, commercial director; Justin always wanted to be a TV writer. And kind of toward the end of the summer, I think, we realized that we were living like, five blocks away from each other in Westwood over by UCLA. And Justin was living in basically a condemned frat house, he was not affiliated with the frat, but that house, not kidding, looked like the house in Fight Club. And he just got a really good deal on a room there. [laughs]

Justin Halpern: I needed to pay my rent for three months, and I only had $750 to do it. And so, this house that was a condemned fraternity, some of the frat guys still lived in it and hated me. That's where I was.

Patrick: Yeah, it was nasty. There was like a hole kicked in the wall to Justin's room. It was wild. Anyways. So, we realized that we lived very close to each other and also, Justin wanted to escape his hell of living accommodations. And so, we'd used to just go to the movies kind of every night during the week. And I believe the first movie that we saw together was Pootie Tang over at a theater that is now defunct in Westwood. [laughs] I think it's a Trader Joe's now. And we kind of bonded over that because I think that's a movie that brings, I don't know, weird comedy people together.

And so an alliance was forged and we went back to our respective universities in Austin and San Diego and stayed in touch. And we're like, ‘let's keep doing stuff together.’ I graduated in '02, Justin was '03 -his professor at SDSU for his thesis project, which was a short film allowed me - I graduated from an entirely different university - allowed me to co-write and co-direct with Justin, Justin's thesis film. And we ended up doing this really terrible, but ambitious, musical comedy about a kid who gets genital warts, it's awful. But we shot it on Super 35-millimeter film, had like a 30 foot jib arm, two panaflex cameras, a choreographer, a 10-piece orchestra - we went all out. I think we had a really good working experience together. [laughs]

I think it's fair to say and despite that, the first couple of products that we put out, being pretty, pretty subpar [laughs] is probably putting it lightly, we really liked working together. And so then when Justin moved up here, we kind of, in our spare time, I was a director's assistant, Justin was working at a restaurant in Pasadena, and in our spare time, we wrote scripts, wrote specs, did the typical thing of trying to get into fellowship writing programs at the Disney fellowship, we got a little traction there, we never won it. We just kind of kept doing it over and over and over again for like, seven years.

And then in 2009, Justin started the “$#*! My Dad Says” Twitter account kind of on a lark, kind of against his will. He was really against it. And then a friend of ours, who was very social media savvy was like, ‘you should definitely put this on Twitter.’ And Justin kind of reluctantly did and then within three weeks, it was just, I would say, I think sensation is the word I would use for it. [laughs]

Sadie: And as they say, the rest is history. What was it about TV and that TV collaboration that just clicked for the two of you?

Justin: I think it took us a little bit to figure out how we were going to work best. For the first show we ran, we did everything together; we'd go down on set together, watched rehearsals, we'd go to editing together, we did absolutely everything together. And that drove everyone fucking insane. It was like the writers had to stop working on whatever they were working on. I realized I hate leaving the writers’ room. I don't like it. I love the writers’ room. I love working in the writers’ room. I love breaking story. I love writing dialogue. I love working with other writers. I hate being on set. [laughs] And I don't love the editing room. I'm OK with it. And Pat is the opposite. Not the opposite. He likes the writers’ room too I would say, but he loves --

Patrick: I don't like it as much as Justin does, I will say that. [laughs]

Justin: Yeah, he doesn't like as much as I do. And so, we started after 2014, we ran this show called Surviving Jack, which we created. And I think it was the next show we ran that by necessity we had to split up because we were so underwater. And then we realized we caught back up very, very quickly once we did that. And then we sort of also realized, ‘Oh, well these are the two things that we like doing that we don't have to do them all together.’ And so Pat kind of was in the writers’ room a lot but also on set a lot, and I was in the writers’ room full time, breaking story, making sure the trains are all running.

And it became a really easy collaborating thing for the both of us because we felt very comfortable. And also, it's like for me, in the writers’ room, I knew that if Pat's on set, this is all gonna get executed in the way that it needs to be executed. And Pat, I think, knew that if I'm in the writers’ room, the stories are gonna get broken in a way that he's good with that makes sense that are executable. So, I think that sort of delineation and what we like to do helped us figure out how to run. I don't know how one person runs the show ever. It feels insane.

Patrick: Yeah. It is an insane amount of work. And I think, well, it's efficiency, right? Like, it's what Justin was talking about before, especially if one person is running a show, it's oftentimes not nearly as efficient. And it just becomes a lot more hours that are required for everyone involved, because you're just waiting for that sort of final say to weigh in on stuff.

Justin: That's the biggest thing that I think we've both learned, certainly, the biggest thing that I've learned is people will forgive a lot. People will forgive you for not being that talented, people will forgive you for making mistakes, but people won't forgive you for fucking with their time. [laughs] And it is so true that when you disrespect someone else's time, that is a real tough hump to get over. So for us, any show we do, or if we're producing a show, we're hiring another showrunner to do it, the first thing we talked about is the hours on the show are as important as anything else. We work 10-4 on Abbott Elementary, when we were on Harley [Quinn], it was 10-4, that is our day.

Patrick: Whether it's Zoom or in person --

Justin: Doesn't matter.

Patrick: And Abbott is pretty much exclusively in person, early on, it was a Zoom because COVID rules and whatnot, but it was only for like six weeks. And then we were in person for the long haul. But it still was 10-4. Some people may be like, ‘Well, that's just either laziness or whatever.’ But I think it begets better material, because the writers are well rested, they're able to live their lives. Same goes for the crew on Abbott as well. And we have pretty great production hours as well, which is a huge testament to Randall Einhorn, who's our producing director, and other executive producer, and he's sort of in charge of everything on set and in post.

Justin: There was this whole movement in the 90s that was like if you weren't staying till 3am, we're in a comedy room, like what were you doing? And we worked for those people. We worked on shows where we'd be there two to three in the morning a lot of nights. We were in our 20s at the time, but I remember thinking in my 20s, ‘This motherfucker is just pissing away our time.’ We're watching YouTube videos. We're like bullshitting about things, he's hemming and hawing about what decisions we're gonna make. And I'm like, 'He doesn't give a fuck about the rest of our lives. And I hate him for that.' So, I always carried that with me. I was just being like, I don't want to sit down in this writers’ room and look at the crew look around and see these people being like, ‘this guy doesn't give a fuck about us.’

Patrick: ‘I haven't seen my kids.’ Yeah, it's a bummer. I think that for me, it was sort of like, I mean, it was numerous kind of “aha” moments. But one of the big ones was, I was reading Phil Rosenthal's memoir, and he talked about how they did it on Raymond, where after it was a success, and they were virtually guaranteed subsequent seasons, they just kind of stayed and kept working on the show, even in the offseason, essentially, but they just kept their hours amazing. And he was like, ‘being able to do that, just allowed everyone to live their lives, which made for more realistic material for the show,’ obviously, that being a family show. 

But with Abbott too, we tried in the second season to start as early as possible. Get the writers’ room up and going as early as possible and that was a kind of a twofold function. One was yes, the earlier we start, the better everyone's lives will be, the better our hours will be, but two, we also got Quinta [Brunson] in the room longer before production started, because then once production starts, we don't lose her entirely in the room, we're able to kind of have her occasionally, and she's weighing in on everything. But it's so valuable to have her in the room, especially early on to put her stamp on everything. And so yeah, that's something we will hopefully be able to do for season three as well. We got so ahead of it. I think we were able to bank seven…Justin?

Justin: Yeah, seven scripts done.

Patrick: Before we got into production, they were done and dusted before we got into production, and that saved us. We had to do 22 episodes. And I think, you know [laughs] it was also a function of us panicking, because we had never done 22 before. Closest we ever got was 18 and it was a multi-cam, which is a totally different production experience. But this was 22 single camera episodes. And we were like [laughs] freaked out at first, ‘How are we going to do this?’ Oh, it was actually a 13 episode order, but we felt pretty good about getting that back. But now going into season three, it's 22.

Sadie: As it should be! I do love that you guys talk about that work life balance because there are writers, especially those that are starting out that truly believe that they have to live and breathe writing at their computer 24/7 or else they're not going to make it. But you need to live your life and have experiences to feed those stories. Same goes with Quinta being on the show, being in writers’ room, she needs some reprieve as well. I think it’s a big deal that you guys are fully aware of that.

Justin: I think there's a famous saying in Hollywood, which is ‘don't work for a showrunner that hates their family.’ And we have before - not hating our families - we've worked for a showrunner that's hated their family. And it's miserable, because you're just hostage there. And I think we both love our families and want to see our families and we want other people to see their families. And so, I think that's what we try to institute.

Sadie: Yeah, absolutely. Are there specific stories, characters or themes that you’re interested in either exploring or tackling through your work?

Patrick: Yeah, like on paper I think Harley Quinn and Abbott Elementary couldn't be more different. But I think at the end of the day, the thing that kind of unites them, and it's the thing that is interesting for me, in that sort of overlap in the Venn diagram is just the underdog. I think we love exploring underdog characters. I think they're fun for most writers.

Justin: For me, I think self-discovery, identity, where I fit in the world, and what the world actually looks like, and is there a place for me? I think those are the things that are most interesting to me. Generally, if I'm left to my own devices, I can go a little darker than probably America wants. [laughs] But I think that idea of how do I fit in this world? And what is the world telling me? Those are two things that I just always find really, really interesting.

Sadie: When putting together the writers’ room for both Abbott Elementary and Harley Quinn, what were you guys looking for in terms of a writer's voice to just shape out both of those worlds?

Justin: I think the biggest thing was to have a voice different from ours. Immediately, the best writers’ rooms I think are writers’ rooms that have everybody around the table is all coming from a different perspective. They're bringing their experiences that you don't have, their voice that you don't have.

When we started out, we were on a show, it had 15 writers on it, we were on staff - it was 14 white dudes and one woman - and that was the staff. And aside from that being a terrible staff that led to a terrible show that it wasn't because it was nobody could do their best work in that like nobody is pitching something that somebody else hasn't heard. And if they are, like imagine being that one woman in that room, it's like, do you feel comfortable…is anybody gonna connect with your experience to be able to say, ‘Hey, this is a thing…’ So, I think for us just making sure it's different from ours, getting writers who aren't afraid to say no, to say you're wrong, to pitch things that are sometimes diametrically opposed to what the showrunner might pitch. We try to have a room where people are just saying how they honestly feel about things.

And also, it's comedy. So, we need people who are conversationally funny. When we're taking writer meetings, if somebody comes in with a story idea, great, that's awesome. But that's not what we're really looking for. We're looking for somebody who's coming in, and in their conversation with us, they are naturally funny, they're naturally interesting. They can naturally tell a story from their own life just about something that happened that day and engage us with it. Because that's how we run our writers’ rooms, they're just a large conversation that's continually ongoing. So, I'm less concerned about like, can you go off and come up with four ideas in the room - that I am just like, hey, I want you to be conversationally funny and interesting.

Patrick: Yeah, can you ‘Yes, and…’ everybody? And I also think, part of it too, and maybe this is a cliche, but I think it's true is that you want to hire a bunch of people that you want to spend a lot of time with, because you're together at least eight hours a day, five days a week. And just in terms of energy resources and things like that.

I would say specifically with Harley, we tried to get kind of a breadth of perspectives, because it was a genre show, because it was a genre show based on existing - and I would say, beloved, sometimes to a fault - IP. [laughs] We felt like we needed to respect that intellectual property, but also take it into new places and focus on a comedic voice for that particular property that maybe the tone of which had not existed quite in the way we wanted it to. So it was important to get your comic book nerds, but it was also important to get comedy nerds. We're just going to make it funny and find unique takes on this preexisting canon of Gotham City, that maybe someone who was like slavish to the canon wouldn't dare poke fun at, we wanted people to challenge that canon and find sort of weaknesses in it in the logic or whatever, so that we could kind of poke fun at it. And fortunately, we had partners in DC that were, you know, very open...well, eventually very open to us [laughs] and being able to do that.

And then also just trying to find writers who you're like, ‘Oh, that particular person would nail the voice of one of our series regulars,’ you will become the voice of this character on the show, we can kind of just see it. So, all those things kind of go into the soup.

Sadie: Right, I also love that you brought up the comedy improv thinking of ‘Yes, and…’ which is so essential in comedy. I feel like a lot of writers who want to explore being a comedy writer are usually the most defensive because they don't understand how to utilize the ‘Yes, and…’ especially in terms of just getting feedback on their material. How do you guys deal with that within your rooms or just even on what you’re writing together?

Justin: Well, he and I think know each other so well, and working with each other for so long that it's not really an issue between he and I - I know if I write a line when we're working together, I could tell if he likes it or doesn't like it. If he doesn't like it, he rarely even has to say I don't really love it because I'll have erased it and will be pitching on something else, and I think vice versa.

But in terms of this, this is a big part of comedy writing - I'm glad you asked this question. Nobody's ever asked this question before. Is that this a big part of TV writing. Comedy writing is you're sitting in a room and you're rewriting people's scripts in real time with everybody there, right? That's uncomfortable. If somebody's saying, ‘Hey, this thing you did, this isn't exactly right. We're gonna do it this other way.’ And it's subjective, right? It's all subjective. But ultimately, someone's got to make the final decision. And that's the showrunner. 

And so, I think that the way that we always, he and I, always approached it on staff was like, ‘Look, we're all cooks in this kitchen. But the head chef has designed the menu.’ Right? And if they said, ‘This is the kind of Italian food we're cooking, and you've made this amazing paella that may be the best fucking paella anybody's ever had. But it's not what the chef is asking for. In this moment, it doesn't fit with this menu.’ So you either have to go start your own restaurant, and then you can make the menu or we got to be in here, we got to take criticism.

Anytime we're working through somebody's script, and we're rewriting something, we'll explain why. Now, with that said, we generally send people off with super detailed outlines. Our outlines are like 12 pages long, and they're filled with dialogue, and they're filled with the flow of the scene. And so, we're not sending people out to do a fool's errand. We're saying, here's the roadmap, stick to this roadmap, and then put things in between.

But it is tricky, you have to be able to sort of like take your ego out of it and have a discussion with all the other writers. And this is just like he or I, or Quinta being like, ‘I don't like that, it's got to change.’ If one of us is like, ‘I'm not really feeling this’ and there's so many times on Abbott especially, and on Harley, where we'd be like, ‘I don't really get this.’ And everybody else would be like, ‘We all get it and think it's great.’ And then it's our job to be like, ‘You know what, we hired these 10 smart people, and they all think it works. So, we're the ones who are wrong.’ And so, we move forward with it.

Patrick: Yeah, I think a good example of that was an episode in Season Two of Abbott, early on is the “Story Samurai” episode with Jacob, we wanted desperately to do a Jacob A-story, because I don't think he had really gotten a big one yet. And that concept for us, it was so nuanced and I think it was not necessarily, I guess, an experience that Justin and I had had, where we struggled with him getting put through the wringer of like this idea of he's being called out as being corny. And what does that mean? 

And for us, it felt like low stakes. But it wasn't really. And at a certain point, we were just like, we just have to trust that so many other people who are brilliant on the show, are like, we need to do this. And we did it. And I think the episode turned out great. [laughs] We watched the episode sitting there in the edit bay, and I'm like, ‘Yeah, you know what, that was wrong. This totally works.’ [laughs] But I didn't know it until we got into the edit. [laughs]

Sadie: It’s a great example for that character and his development. But also, for you guys in your position to listen and take a chance on your writers’ room – and it paid off. Between your two shows, Abbott and Harley, there isn’t really a central villain, right? What is your approach to being able to build those character’s worlds and develop those voices?

Justin: Yeah, I mean, I think that for, at least for me, I always feel like in any story, a villain is just someone who is putting the mirror up to you and you're seeing something in yourself you don't really like, right? It's making you insecure in some way. I think very often like with Janine's character in Abbott, she has an unwillingness at times to look at her own flaws and to self-reflect, right? Because the answer to the self-reflection is painful. And that's the same for Harley. And I think it goes back to what I said I was so interested in always in writing is that inward look where you look at the thing that really, really you don't want anyone to see or talk about, and you don't want to talk about. That's where it gets really interesting for the audience, I think.

And so, I think in terms of distinction between characters, we try to say, what is that thing in all these different characters? Because for everybody, it's different, right? For Janine, it's that she can't just smile and change the world, it's that there's all these large factors, she's never going to be able to change. And if she can't change them, she's going to fail people, there will be people in her life she fails. And that is her greatest fear, because she was failed so often, right? She remembers how that feels. 

But for Gregory, it's different. He grew up in this sort of like, toxic masculine upbringing, where success was said to look like this. And he's in this place where he's feeling success, but it doesn't look how it's supposed to look. And that's making him feel deeply insecure with everything that he knows, right? And it's making him look inward and challenge his ideas of masculinity and how you define success.

We try to do that with every character. What is their thing that they don't want to confront? And how do we kind of build them from those places? Because those insecurities are what builds all the funny things in the character.

Patrick: It was a kind of a craft lesson that we learned very early on, being exposed to a way that I would say is not the way to do it. We worked on a show where it was the first season of a show and day one in the room the showrunner was like, ‘All right, who’s got stories?’ And we never talked about the characters, it was almost like, well, you've seen the pilot, you know who these people are. But that's not the case.

And so, what we try and do, especially in the first season, but really with every new season of a show, we try and spend the first several weeks talking about just the characters and obviously their backstories and all that, but also what is that emotional journey that we want them to go through in the season? What do they represent? How do they bounce off each other this season? And just doing sort of the due diligence, putting in the work early on, so that everybody kind of understands these characters on a basic level and what they represent before jumping into any story.

Watch new episodes of Abbott Elementary on ABC Wednesdays 9/8c and stream on Hulu.

Watch Harley Quinn Season 1-3 on HBO Max.