The sordid yet intriguing world of casual online dating: you really have to experience it firsthand to believe it.

Or secondhand. Because for his hit show Casual, creator Zander Lehmann has a team of writers who pool their personal stories to fuel the adventures of his protagonists, as Valerie Meyers (Michaela Watkins), a recently divorced 40-something mother, and her younger brother Alex Cole (Tommy Dewey) try to find their next partners online.

Lehmann penned the pilot episode for Casual when he was in his mid 20s. It wasn’t long before it got the attention of Jason Reitman, and was picked up by Hulu for its first ten episodes. Now entering its third season, the show offers a hilarious and often touching insight into the excitement and frustration of dating in the 21^st century.

Creative Screenwriting recently spoke with Lehmann about the show, how he first came up with the concept, and what he’s learned in his three years as showrunner.

The experiences your characters have are so specific to this world…and by all accounts quite accurate! Tell me about your research for the show.

Most of my writers on the show are women in their 30s or early 40s, who have either had relationships like this or have gone through similar things. So it’s a lot of stories that come from personal experience.

I try to talk to everyone I can who is going through this, to try and get the most fun stories I can then use. A lot of stuff that’s on screen is from real life, and we find that’s obviously the best way to tell a relatable story.

You came up with the original story at a relatively young age. How did you go about pitching it?

I was either 25 or 26 when I wrote it. I wrote the pilot on spec because I wanted to get into more comedic material; before that I’d written only drama for the most part, and I was trying to branch out.

I liked the character dynamic of this brother and sister who tell each other everything, and are kind of these screw-ups who need each other. I was living with my sister at the time, so it felt appropriate that I would write about our experience living together. We’re close so I thought I could just heighten that and turn it into something.

I didn’t expect it to be a show; I just felt like I needed a sample to show that I could be funny, because I had written mostly drama.

My agents thought Jason Reitman might like it…and Jason did like it! I waited a few months for him to read it; he read it, liked it, I wrote the second episode very quickly thereafter, and then we took it out to the streaming networks and a couple of cable places to see who would want to do it.

It was Jason’s first TV series so we thought there was a chance someone would give us, if not a pilot order, maybe a series. Since we had two episodes, we thought that was a decent shot.

Hulu had rebranded; they had a few new executives and were trying to do larger-scale television series and bigger budget stuff. I think it was really just timing and luck to have found them at the time that we did, because they wanted to work with Jason and we had two scripts.

They didn’t care necessarily that I was 27 years old, and said, “OK, if you guys think you can do it, we’ll give you ten episodes and see what you’ve got.”

At that point, we were just sort of “going” – we were all figuring it out on the fly.

And now three seasons in, we’ve seen how these two main characters have evolved. What kind of arcs did you want them to follow?

I’ll say this much: I don’t know exactly where this series ends, and it could end after this season, for all I know.

I think for us, the most important thing arc-wise is that the stories always feel true and that they always feel interesting. Whether that leans into a more dramatic storyline and more inner personal drama, or whether that’s more comedy where they’re up against external forces and having to deal with them, that kind of goes episode by episode, season by season.

It’s hard to say, arc-wise, “We know that season four is the marriage season,” or “Season five is the pregnancy season”. We don’t think in terms of story points as much as we think in terms of having these three characters, and considering how their dynamic changes, how they shift. Are they good with each other? Are they bad with each other? How allied are they? Are they living together? Are they not living together?”

We sort of take it season by season on an arc level, and we essentially get thirteen weeks of prep time to write before we start production.

We break out the whole season and get probably about ten of the scripts written, so we know what we’re doing. That usually gives us enough time to understand “OK, this is our last episode, this is what we’re building towards, this is what we’re targeting”.

So far, for our first three goes around, it’s worked pretty well.

Hopefully I have enough stories for another couple of seasons, but we’ll see.

Do you write all of the episodes yourself? Who is in your writers’ room?

It is me and five other writers. They’re wonderful – I have the same five this year as I did last year. They’re mostly younger, and it’s all women except for one other guy who’s been with us since Season One.

I probably end up writing about 35-40% of the episodes. I did six in the first season, five the second season, and I’m doing three this season. So less and less as we go.

I understand that there’s an episode this season written by Michaela and Tommy. What was it like to hand over the reigns to your two lead actors?

There is, yes! We felt like they understood the show and understood these characters so well. They both have experience writing, and they’ve both had their own shows.

I think when you get into the third season it becomes something where you can say: “OK, do you guys want to take a crack at this?” Let’s let other people try other things if they’re interested.

They were very excited to be in the writers’ room for a few weeks, and they did a great job on the draft. I did not rewrite them and it was a lot of fun.

What kind of industry do you see television as being for an aspiring screenwriter? Is television the place to be?

That’s a good question. And it’s funny, if you’d asked me before production started, I would have said, “Absolutely, TV is the best, go into TV!” But I haven’t slept much in the last two months and all I’m thinking is, “I should write a movie…and go to the gym and take vacation.”

Seriously though, I think as a writer in this business, television is the best. I think it moves fast enough and the technology is good enough that you can do so many things creatively. Given the speed of it, people can’t really slow you down unless they want to take a huge financial hit.

I think you can write a movie, and you can prep it and budget it and try to cast it all you want, and then something can fall apart at the last second and it goes away. Whereas in TV, we’re halfway through the season and we have to keep shooting to the end of it – it doesn’t just go away. You can’t just stop, the financials don’t allow for that.

We write so many pages. It is an inundation, to our executives, to our network, to everyone. And thankfully they’ve trusted us enough creatively to allow us to do almost whatever we want to do.

For me, that is the dream obviously. You want to just make the stories you want to make, and you don’t want anyone telling you “this needs to be broader”, “this is too dark”, “this is too subversive.”

I think in TV you can certainly get away with that more, because the audiences are more specific and the budgets are a little smaller, and it’s a little more character-focused. You can touch on these things that I don’t think you can really do as much in movies – unless you’re one of those special filmmakers who can make these smaller dramadies.

Talking about films, you currently have a movie script with Focus Features, called The Beautiful Game, is that correct?

I do. They’re actually going through that process I just talked about right now, trying to get it put together.

How did you find the experience of writing a feature film as compared to your work on Casual?

I like the scope of a movie, because you can tell a big story about one thing. You can pick a subject, you can pick an idea, and you can really explore it for an hour and a half. I think movies are really good for that – you have a captive audience, they’re sitting in a theatre and they can’t tune out, which I think is a wonderful thing.

As for the process itself, as far as writing a movie compared to TV, I think it’s an interesting one, but it involves a slightly different skill set.

In movies, in my experience, it is just rewrite after rewrite after rewrite, that change certain things and don’t necessarily make them better or worse. It’s just different. And I think you’re trying to put together this magical formula to get the perfect cast, to justify a budget, to make it work with this release date with this marketing spend…

Those are all of the things I’m just not that interested in. I’m interested in writing, I’m interested in sitting on set and producing and making sure that words come out as they were meant to be read.

I would definitely do more movies, but you have to go in knowing that the worlds are different, and they treat writers very differently.

Having become a showrunner at a young age, is there anything specific you’ve learned which you will take with you through your career and onto other series?

Yes! I’ve learned so much in these few years. I am surrounded by some of the smartest, most competent people – writers, directors, producers, cast and crew. I think my creative support system in this show is unbelievable. I have multiple other EPs, and we essentially share the showrunning duties.

What I’ve learned is to let people who are good at certain things do those things, and learn from them so you can then figure out what makes them good.

I am good at writing. I’m good at writing scenes and characters, and I think that’s probably my greatest asset to this production. Then I have producers who are good at producing, who can get a budget together that works; I have people who are good at story breaking, who can really arc out an episode or a season; and I have people who are good at directing, who have a creative vision and a look that escapes me.

So I think you have to find the combination of people that put the vision on the screen. For me, learning to trust other people who are experts in their field was something that was not intuitive, but helped me a ton, and has made this process really easy.

Finally, do you have any other advice you could offer our readers?

The question I always get asked is “How did you break in?”

I wrote for many years trying to break into the business – I wrote eight or nine movies, I wrote a couple of pilots, and nothing worked. I wrote what I thought people wanted to read and buy. I wrote the things that I saw the marketplace stacking up, and it never felt real.

Finally I just decided “I’m not breaking in this way, my voice is not being heard this way – I should just write something that I would want to watch, and that I find funny on the page. If no one wants it, then so be it, I’ll do some other job and maybe this isn’t for me.”

And as soon as I started doing that – I mean seriously, from that point on – I think there were four or five projects in a row that I’d done on spec, and all of them were either bought or optioned or made.

It was very clear that “OK, I have a voice and that is my greatest asset”. If you try to make something that is in someone else’s voice, it’s just not going to be as good, and no one’s going to care.

So my advice is write in your voice, and hopefully other people like your voice too.

Season Three of Casual is now airing on Hulu.

Featured image: Tommy Dewey as Alex, Michaela Watkins as Valerie and Tara Lynne Barr as Laura in Casual, Season Three, “Ashes to Ashes”. Photo by: Greg Lewis/Hulu

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