Looking at History Through an Intimate Lens: A Conversation with ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Creator and Showrunner Erica Lipez

Based on Georgia Hunter's New York times bestselling novel, the television adaptation of We Were the Lucky Ones is a limited series inspired by the incredible true story of one Jewish family separated at the start of World War II, determined to survive and reunite. We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century's darkest moment, the human spirit can endure and even thrive. The series is a tribute to the triumph of hope and love against all odds.

While the world is currently on fire and in great turmoil and chaos, it’s a lot easier to turn on the TV and escape from reality. Yet, it’s a lot harder to escape into a series that retells a devastating moment and time in history that feels like it’s holding a mirror up to current events. 

We Were the Lucky Ones, a heart-wrenching historical drama mini-series adapted from author Georgia Hunter’s book of the same name, creator and showrunner Erica Lipez digs deep, and leaves no emotional stone unturned throughout eight episodes. But by the time we get to “Rio” – there’s a deep sense of communal hope, both for the characters on screen and as a viewer – love will find a way.

Erica Lipez spoke with Script about how after reading the book she became instantly “possessive” and had to adapt it, why the show is both character and plot-driven, how a pivotal line from the show was a huge part in figuring out the tone for the series, and how her writers’ unique voice and perspective shaped their episodes, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: I'd love to just talk about adapting the book and how it initially came across your desk. And you going full steam ahead with, ‘I will take on this emotional burden’ - it’s so emotionally raw and heavy.

Erica Lipez: The book came to me through Tommy Kail whom I had the pleasure of working on a play with 10 years ago at Second Stage in New York. And we loved working together. And he's such an extraordinary director and person, and we really wanted to find something to do together in television. And he just called me one day, and he said, 'I have this great book. I think you will connect to it on a very deep level.' And he's like, 'Just read it.' And he didn't really give me much more information than that.

I picked up the book, and I just couldn't put it down. I read it in probably 24 hours. And my heart was in my throat the whole time. I fell so madly in love with the family…I'm sort of in awe of what they went through. I was so amazed at looking at this chapter of history through this really intimate lens of this family. I thought that was sort of something I had never really seen before. I also felt like as a Jewish person, I felt like my Holocaust education was pretty good. And I read this book, and I was like, 'I don't know any of this.' What the family experienced and how they were sort of flung around the globe, and everybody had a very different trajectory through the war and being on four different continents. It just was unlike anything else I had ever seen.

And I felt like, 'This will be so impossible to make. It will be impossible to find someone willing to do this. But I don't want anyone else to try.’ I felt so possessive of it so quickly…I did connect to it on a really deep level.

And then I had the pleasure of meeting Georgia Hunter, the author of the book, and I think Tommy had a feeling - one of his many gifts as a director is matchmaking like he really knows how to put a team together - and Georgia and I just really feel like we're a bit of kindred spirits. And it has also just been one of the best creative collaborations of my whole life.

So, it's been great, but it's been a journey because I think as you picked up on - I knew it would make an incredible TV series and have the spine for it. But it also defies a lot of television conventions. And so, I knew it would be an uphill battle to find a network willing, luckily, we found Hulu, who really supported us really doing what we wanted to do, which was an extraordinary gift.

Sadie: Yeah, absolutely. Having direct access to Georgia Hunter, the author of the book, what was that process like for the two of you with you adapting her work but also having her there to give you some guidance when and if needed along the way?

Erica: One of the things I did realize in reading the book is I think Georgia has a bit of a soul of a TV writer, because I think television it's such a great space to really deeply explore character - I think it's very character driven. But it is also very plot-driven. And there is a propulsion to really amazing television. And I think you want to find that drive. And her book was just written with that kind of breathless pace.

You don't adapt a book like this unless you really want to be faithful to the material. And that felt actually quite easy to do, because of the research she did to write the book. It was so well-researched. And then just the way she mapped out the trajectories of the family and interwove the stories, we were able to be really faithful to that. I think the thing that was, I mean genuinely, I think fun - it always feels weird to use the word fun, we did try to surround this project with some joy - but I think what I realized was going to be so exciting about bringing it to screen is just bringing those relationships to life. And I think, obviously, in a book, you have the privilege of being inside people's heads.

I realized pretty quickly that there were so many memories evoked in these characters' minds thinking about being together and what those relationships were between people. And it was just about finding ways to activate that between the sibling dynamics and the parent-children and the romantic relationships.

I really believe in romance, I think it's one of the great pleasures of what we do. I mean, I think it's like all of the TV shows I have always loved have had great romances at the center of it. And so there is so much love within Georgia's family; I would say everyone was very sure about their love pretty quickly. So, I was like, ‘Maybe we can change that a little bit for the adaption’ - I think a bit of will they won't they is always an interesting dynamic. So, with her blessing, I think we complicated some of those relationships a little bit while still trying to be very true to the essence of who these people were, and ultimately landing in a place of happiness for those couples. That's the joy of writing - figuring out those character dynamics.

And I think she has sort of done what is one of the harder parts for us already, which is plotting out a series. Everyone will tell you in a writers' room, knowing where you're ending is the most difficult piece of the puzzle to find. And I think that's where writers' rooms can really lose their way when you just don't know where you're going. And we did. I don't want to minimize it was a puzzle, and it was a process, and we have the most extraordinary group of writers in our writers’ room. And we figured it out together. But it was, for all of the difficulty of that material, it was a pretty joyful process.

Sadie: There’s this line that Sol Kurc quips in Episode Five that is so heart wrenching, but I feel like it's such a defining line for this family in the series, 'Where do we stand when the bottom keeps dropping?' And I just felt like that's such a great way for a writer to kind of think about how you unfold the drama and hitting those emotional beats.

Erica: I think that line is really sort of indicative of what we were thinking about when building out the plot of the series, or what we wanted it to feel like. Which was, of course, we have the privilege of hindsight, we can look back at this history, we know sort of the scope and scale of what happened, and we know a lot about how it happened. 

But I think what we really wanted and saw the opportunity with this family is creating a fiercely intimate lens on it. And part of that we thought would bring a real immediacy to what happened to them and a better understanding of how it happened. Because I think it can be very hard to wrap your brain around such horrifying facts that came out of the Holocaust. And I think a lot of times the education looks sort of more towards the end. 

And we hear a lot about the death camps, which of course, we need to really understand and wrap our brains around or try to wrap our brains around. But I think with the show, I saw an opportunity to really look at how this happens to a family in this society, how this happens to a Jewish family in this society, and the very piece-by-piece chipping away of their rights and their place in society. And it doesn't just happen overnight. And so, we both really deeply understood the history, we were writing about that.

But then in some ways, we'd also try to forget about it while we were writing. And it was so much about that bottom…you can only imagine so much…they can't imagine what will happen when the Final Solution starts, they can't imagine the Final Solution. And so, it's sort of seeing this family reckon with the unimaginable over and over and over again.

And then - and I saw this in Georgia's book, and I think this is what I related to - my own Jewish family that I had come from, there's a lot of humor, there's a lot of irreverence, there's a lot of [laughs] bickering in a loving way. I was surrounded by a lot of really great thinkers growing up, people who liked an intellectual argument. There was a lot of life around me. And I saw that in this family. And so, I felt like this series had a very clear sort of the horrifying moments that sort of drive the plot were very clear.

But to me, the most interesting moments were those human moments in between. And I thought that the show is actually, I think, is so much about resistance. And not, I think sort of what we traditionally think of as resistance, but we should think of it more as resistance, which is what people were doing just to get by day to day, how they were advancing their lives. Because these were their lives, you don't get those years back. And we're dealing with adult siblings who are in their 20s and 30s, and those are the years that you fall in love, that you decide if you want to start a family and you figure out who you want to be in the world. And I was really moved by how all of those things happen to them during this time. And they had to find a way to just do it.

I think that's to me where I felt like the most interesting part of the series lives and that was what was really joyful to bring about and allow and remind all of us as writers - and our writers' room was really funny and everyone was writing jokes in their script. So, I think it was really important. I mean, it's not like the series is a laugh riot but jokes are OK, they made jokes, you know? That was a huge part of figuring out the tone of the show.

Sadie: How much did character development coincide with the writers you brought into the writers’ room and how their unique vision and voice lent to that?

Erica: I just knew I had to find an amazing group of writers. And I really took my time with that part of the process. Having been in so many writers' rooms...I really believe TV writing is a team sport, not within an episode, everyone has their episode, but it's like the breaking of television. And I think your show can be made so much better if you have writers that you can really trust and trust their voices.

And so, I was extremely lucky with this group of writers. They all come from different backgrounds. I think they all have very unique perspectives and very strong individual voices. And part of what was really great about that was I felt like when I was figuring out how to break this into a season of television, I felt like well, of course, there would be a feeling of cohesiveness through the tone of the show, I did feel like each episode felt a bit like a chapter and needed to have its own identity in some way.

And that really lent itself to when it came time to assign people's episodes, it felt pretty obvious who should be which episode, which was very cool. I think Episode Four has some of the most harrowing sequences in the series and with that one, our writer Anya Meksin, with her own personal connection, she's a Jewish refugee from Russia and from the Soviet Union. And she raised her hand, emphatically, she called me and she was just like, 'I really want that episode.' And I don't think many people were racing towards that one. I wasn't racing towards it. She was just like, 'I need to do this.' And I felt that in her writing. 

I joke about Episode Five being the “One Day More” episode - I do come from a theatre background – and there's that moment in a musical where it's like in a big ensemble, everyone sings at the same time. Episode Five is sort of this midway point where every character is in it, and you have to figure out how to juggle that. And our writer, John Caren, comes from a theatre background, there was just something that really lent him to that episode.

And then Episode Six was deeply psychological. And it's so much about how you sort of maintain your sanity in the face of the escalation, that sort of when the series comes up against the Final Solution, and the family is really trying to live under false identities and our writer Eboni Booth, just really seemed to understand that and captured it so brilliantly.

And then we have this amazing writer Adam Milch and he and I worked on The Morning Show together, he's like my partner in crime. And he did episodes three and seven with another writer, Tea Ho. And Adam I think can wrangle a story like no other – episodes three and seven are pretty big episodes. And then Tea also had her own unique perspective that I think really influenced, particularly the way she was writing. She was really tackling a lot of the older Felicia stories and what sort of happens to a child psychologically who's going through what she's going through.

It was a team effort. And all I can say to people is find your writers and then let them write, and your life will be made much easier as a showrunner.

Sadie: Were there any big learning curve moments running this show or maybe some skills that you were able to add to your writer-producer toolbox working on other shows, like The Morning Show and Julia?

Erica: I really compare, having now showrun for the first time - I also I feel like I could say this because I became a parent also while working on the show -I think actually being a showrunner is so similar to be a parent. You can't really know until you do it. It's a lot of like, ‘Maybe I could do this? Maybe I can’t do this?’ - there's a real trial by fire element.

I was so lucky to actually come up in writers’ rooms. I had 14 years of pretty steady writers’ room experience. And the biggest thing I learned from all these rooms and getting to work with some really great people is you have to make decisions. I think what can feel so intimidating about running a show is you're faced with daily - so many decisions and it gets very easy to get paralyzed in that. I think I just saw from people who did it well, that they just made decisions, and they try not to second guess them.

And the truth is, you're working with a team of people – so if something turns out to be a dead end or turns out not to be the right way you can fix it. But you run into problems when you stop making decisions when you put it off for another day. And so, I just really kept that in my head, I stayed very in the moment in the day's work. And I was like, ‘Piece by piece, you will build this.’ And that's how I ran the room. I would have crumbled over the size of the show if I had thought about the big picture of it. I knew it was massive. And so, I really strive to try to stay focused in that way. Make your decisions and be confident in them.

And know that you have a team of people with you who can also say, ‘Oh, maybe that or maybe this direction,’ but also particularly in the room to keep the room moving, you need to throw your thoughts out there. You need to throw your instinct and allow your writers to push up against that or have something to say but if you're not starting that, and you're not clear about that in some way, you will sort of fall off the pace that you need to move at. And so that I would say is one of the biggest things I learned and also learned that is true about showrunning. [laughs]

But I think my other piece of advice and it is so much about your hiring too. Take more time hiring. Take time hiring your writers, hiring your directors, hiring your cast, and your crew. If you put effort into that piece to really make sure you're bringing both the best artists but also the best people to the table, your job is easier. Environment matters. It really matters. And it's really possible to have an amazing time if you do those things - this was the experience of a lifetime for me. It's been such a joy even in the hard moments. 

We Were the Lucky Ones is now available to watch on Hulu.