Grounding the Worldbuilding and Characters with PONIES Co-Creators Susanna Fogel and David Iserson

Moscow, 1977. Two "PONIES" ("persons of no interest" in intelligence speak) work anonymously as secretaries in the American Embassy. That is until their husbands are killed under mysterious circumstances in the USSR, and the pair become CIA operatives. Bea (Emilia Clarke) is an over-educated, Russian-speaking child of Soviet immigrants. Her cohort, Twila (Haley Lu Richardson), is a small-town girl who is as abrasive as she is fearless. Together, they work to uncover a vast Cold War conspiracy and solve the mystery that made them widows in the first place.

Ponies is a nail biting, anxiety inducing, stomach turning experience. The first five minutes of the pilot sets up the tone and pace wonderfully, as the story and conflicts ramp up in such an unsettling way that you’re hooked to see what oh what have Bea and Twila gotten themselves into in Cold War Moscow. Sprinkled with a smattering of colorful 70s clothing as colorful as each character, from the brooding antagonist to the try-hard office workers, over a 70s conspiracy-thriller like show – you’re sure to be entertained. And did I mention the anxiety inducing watch?

Co-creators Susanna Fogel and David Iserson spoke with Script about the creation and development of the spy thriller show, making way for creating grounded characters, the importance of the pilot episode and setting the tone, and what shows and films influenced the visual style.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean:  What came first? These characters or the situation?

Susanna Fogel: The genesis of the show was right around the time that The Spy Who Dumped Me came out, and when you do something, everyone's like, 'Hey, what are your plans to do the same thing you just did?' And we were like, we don't have those plans, but we want to do something with friendship, and we love the spy genre, and we want to do something that was less on the comedy side. We wanted to do something more grounded, but also with deep characters.

And we'd heard about these women that were case officers, kind of secretly under the radar at that time, just because women weren't really doing that. So, we kind of had the idea to do it as a show, and floated that idea to a couple of people in meetings, not as a fully formed pitch, but just as a thing, because they were asking.

David Iserson: These things happen in different orders all the time. I don't think we have any version of this is chiefly how we do it. But for this one, yeah, the characters came second, but they did come fairly fully formed. I think once we had a sense on... the situation that called for them to exist in.

I remember we were sitting outside of a pool at an Airbnb, deep Covid, and we just started naming these characters, and their voices just kind of burst out of us really quickly. And the development process of this show took a long time. As a result, we really kind of were able to sort of explore everywhere the show would go by the time we knew we were making a show.

Sadie: The pilot is such a great way in to the series. The tension is there. The comedy is there. Character and world building. Using that as your guide rails to break the rest of the season, and lean into the 70s conspiracy thriller genre – but being clever and not giving away too much to the audience on this journey.

David: I love pilots. I watch pilots for shows I'm not interested. I just kind of want to see how people do it. It's really just intriguing to me. It was a lot of pressure on us to also make our pilot feel as essential as the pilots I love. We never know if anything is going to become real. We write so many things that don't become shows or films.

I think there was definitely a version of the pilot that would have made sense in the arc of a series to just kind of get them to the place where they've convinced the CIA to send them back to Moscow, but we knew that that no one's going to want to order that show... we really wanted to be able to have all of this journey of who they were before the tragedy that befalls them, when they make the decision to go back, going back to Moscow, getting an assignment, embarking on that assignment, and having to do that all in 50 minutes was a challenge, as we were shooting it was a challenge, as we were editing it. We ended up adding some more scenes late in the game to help settle us into the world more firmly and to establish the antagonist a little bit clearer. 

The pilot is a thing that you're going to have the most opinions on, most eyes on - it is where we are convincing the audience how to watch the show and what the tone is. And so, by the end of the pilot, we wanted the audience to feel like they were on this ride and they were gripped. By the end, they should feel so much tension, and maybe not expect to.

Sadie: Incredibly rich characters across the board. What was the process in making them feel like authentic people on screen and of course characters we want to just be on this ride with?

Susanna: For both David and me, it's a combination of there's such a high concept to the story, but then within that... we're interested in shifting where the lens is on characters in this type of story. Most spy stories, you're not seeing them go home after they're done with the mission. You're not really seeing them have arguments with their spouses or have crushes on people. I mean you are in this heightened way, but you're not seeing them when they're at ease, because usually in spy stories, you're trying to keep the tension so high.

We want the show to have those moments of sweaty palms, but also those people are still having lives. And we were like, if the camera's just over here at this part of their life, what are they doing? And that's as interesting to us as what they're doing when they're on a mission. We have to really talk about who these women are, as though they could exist in a drama that wasn't about spies. If this was just a workplace comedy, who would these people be? And what is sort of the game of each character within any genre? Because the show does go into different modes.

And we wanted to ground each character within each realm they're in. So, within the office, Bea's of course the try hard who's gonna check every box, and that's how she attempts to be in her relationships, and that's how she attempts to be at work, and then also as a spy. That personality is what she brings to a spy mission. Trying to develop these characters, not as a secondary thing to the to the fact that they're in a spy show, but apart from it and then putting them in the show.

And then trying to just apply the principles of every character that's there in any sort of way should have an interior life and a personality enough that you can go on subplots with different characters in the office, and you want to watch them do a thing the way that only they would do it. David has a lot more TV writing experience than I do, but it's sort of just best practices for trying to write any genre of show.

Sadie: There’s so many great elements from just the first few minutes of the pilot that hooked me, from the music selection, the tone, the aspect ratio. Did you have a pretty clear vision as a director how you were going to set up that tone and framework visually, knowing what you had written on the page with David?

Susanna: It definitely helped just knowing that I was going to be directing the first couple of episodes. The limitations were going to be what they were, but at least the two of us were aligned in what we wanted it to be, and we knew we wanted it to feel like a fun show in the sense that we're used to seeing the Soviet Union at that time. And spy shows generally being drab and gray and it's always raining, and there's never sun, and there's no flowers, and there's no joy, and there's no laughter. And in truth, especially David having traveled around that part of the world, closer to when communism fell, people are really making an effort to bring vibrancy and individuality into their lives. There's so much color and so much vibrancy, and almost like a chaotic sense of pattern mixing that was evident in pictures we looked at, and we're like, this isn't in the spy shows we're watching.

When you're giving people little signifiers that tell them how to watch the show, so that by the end of the pilot... they know they're going to feel all the things we wanted the visuals to help them with that early on, so it wasn't too heavy of a lift for them to figure out that they could also have moments of amusement and relating.

In terms of just how that affected aesthetic choices, beyond just the palette and our designer’s ideas, there's so many times that you see the 70s grammar with the zooms and the square framing, and it feels really slapped on. But if you're not putting in your 70s show, you're missing an opportunity. It was a great joy of directing the show to talk to the cinematographer about all of the tricks that feel anachronistic in kind of any other show. And here, maybe they make the show feel like we're a little bit winking at that time. But it's also telling people that we want to have fun with our knowledge of that canon.

Sadie: Were there any specific film or even maybe television show references of that time that you guys were looking at in dialing in that tone?

David: We talked about Three Days of the Condor a lot. We talked about all sort of 70s paranoid thrillers, The Parallax View and All the President's Men. On television itself, that's where we were talking about the aspect ratio. There were some great shows that had just fantastic aesthetic, but not necessarily the highest budget, so shows like Columbo that we love. There is just sort of a grittiness and a griminess that was really, really fun with that, or Mission Impossible. I thought a lot about Inglorious Bastards when we were making the show as a more contemporary movie that shared a lot of themes with our show, but also had some modern feel to it.

There's so many elements to these characters that are outside of the spy genre, because they are grounded people growing up in the 70s. We talked a lot with Emelia [Clarke] about Diane Keaton, we watched Annie Hall, we watched When Harry Met Sally for a little bit of romantic comedy banter. There's just a collection of lots of things that felt like it came up and was exciting to watch or read.

Sadie: Coming out of this first season, anything you’ll carry with you onto the next season or your next project that you learned from this?

David: I think you could never go into any project that goes into production thinking that you know all of the information that you are going to know. Every day is learning. You're learning from the actors about characters, you're learning about what the crew is excited about, or where the limitations are. You sit in a room, and you write these scenes and you don't always think in terms of, 'This episode sure is set a lot at night.' And when you get into it, you're like I'm truly staying up till five in the morning every night this week, because I made that decision seven months ago without thinking about it. [laughs]

Susanna: The interesting challenge of this one was actually... it was the many hats that I was wearing on this particular show, and it was different from any other job I've ever been on. The challenges of this particular production were just how do you do eight jobs at once, and what's more important at any given moment? And so, for me, being the director, I was more mired in production concerns than David was. I think just figuring out which part of my brain to lead with, because sometimes, if I'm the director and I'm not the producer and it's me against the producer, I can fight them for stuff, but if I'm also trying to keep the budget in mind, or what you're sacrificing one thing for another... it was constantly evolving. It was definitely a challenge to just figure out what's most important at any given time, and reminding myself to be really flexible at all fronts.

One thing I learned on this one was as I was in the middle of shooting and prepping the last episode, there were things that came up for David just being immersed in editing cuts of episodes I didn't direct, I was prepping when that person was editing, and I was not up on every editing session. And David was like, 'Hey, I think we need to change the script for the finale based on some things that I saw in this episode.' And my initial reaction was, 'No, that's gonna mess up my plan. Don't do that.' As I would if I wasn't also the creator of the show. And Dave quickly explained why. And I was like, of course he's right. But my initial reaction was, 'I'm trying to do this thing really well in my little lane.'

And we made some last minute pivots due to just Dave thinking expansively about how to make this episode even better... him being able to be abstract and zoom way out when I was zoomed way in, it was just an interesting learning curve, because I had to sort of be like, actually, he's right, even though it does make more work for me to make this change.

I'm so glad we did. Some of the best parts of the show are due to that part of our collaboration, which I think, I also discredit how comfortable we are with each other. Because I think if we had met in the normal span of a time that a director meets a writer, there would have been friction over that. There were moments that were weaker moments in the show, and as we raised the bar on other moments along the way, there were things that just weren't as good as the best moments that we were capturing. And when we went back and looked at them, we wanted to raise them up to that level. And I'm glad that we were in a real symbiotic conversation about that.

Ponies is now streaming on Peacock.