Writer and producer Meredith Scardino’s series about a reunited one-hit wonder girl group from the 90s will strike a chord with anyone who grew up listening (unabashedly or secretly) to the Spice Girls or Backstreet Boys… or NSYNC,  Girls5eva stars Sara Bareilles, Busy Philipps, Paula Pell and Renee Elise Goldsberry, and looks at the highs and lows of what it means to be a once-idolized, quickly-discarded pop star, all through Scardino’s unique and quirky comedic lens. As Backstreet Boys pick up their pandemic-interrupted tour and fans of all ages continue to dream of a Spice Girls reunion, the series is high on the nostalgia scale.

Scardino (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Colbert Report) has had an interesting career path, starting off with an academic background in visual arts. Eventually following her first love of comedy, she’s worked with and learned from the likes of Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey. I spoke with her about her nearly two-decades-long career, how TV writing and painting aren’t all that dissimilar and what makes the “girl group” so relatable.

Let’s talk about your career trajectory. You have a Bachelor of Fine Arts – it’s interesting that at a time when people seemed to be moving from written to visual entertainment, reading less and watching more, you took the opposite path. What triggered your transition to writing?

Luckily, as a kid I had parents that were very encouraging of the career paths and interests I had, regardless of how non-lucrative they seemed!

I love art. I had a bit of a knack for drawing and I liked it… and I loved cartooning. I took a lot of cartooning classes when I was a kid, and followed that path because it was fun and interesting; and it was something I had access to. I could take art classes in high school, on the weekends and then in college.

Meredith Scardino

Comedy had always been a huge passion of mine. I was obsessed with late night shows and SNL. I would watch Conan and Jack Handey and Gilda Radner… and a lot of cartoons. I loved Gary Larson and the New Yorker. I always liked jokes and standup. I would watch it incessantly on cable, wherever I could get it. I would always try to gravitate towards the funny people in my high school; we would write fake top ten lists and stuff like that.

So it was always something that I loved. But I didn’t know how on earth you could end up in comedy. At least there were art classes, there were no comedy classes I could take. So I pursued art instead.

After college I moved to New York City to go to grad school. I went to Parsons and got my MFA. Once I was in the world of New York there were so many more things I could do there. I did improv and ended up being an animator working for Bill Plympton, making digital shorts. Then I worked at Comedy Central, also doing digital animated shorts.

The world of possibilities opened up in New York; it felt like there were ways I could flex the comedy writing interest that I had had my whole life and just didn’t know how to access. Eventually I dropped the art side, in part because I had been working as an animator. I was always about the delivery of the story, and I had a sloppy weird style which didn’t always fit with an accomplished artist style. So it didn’t feel like something I should keep going towards, but comedy writing really did. I found like-minded people that were also trying to break in and I found a writing partner (my friend Ben Tischler) and we wrote a million SNL packets, pitched reality shows and basically tried everything.

I eventually got my first job writing comedy which was at VH1 on the show Best Week Ever. It had all these heroes of mine, like Rob Huebel, Paul Scheer… just a ton of hilarious people. Once I was there, I was like “this is 100% for me”. I loved it. I eventually jumped to a job working at The Late Show with David Letterman; after that, I went to The Colbert Report. I was there for six years. It was a real home; I love all the people there and still keep in touch with them. Stephen is just one of the most wonderful people ever.

After six years of writing late night jokes and having the fodder be the news, I started thinking about how to model insane behavior in a hyperbolic way. I thought it would be interesting to write for characters that were not necessarily immediately tied to the news and to also write different perspectives.

When you write for late night, you write for one person. Stephen was like a genius and I could have done it for the rest of my life, but I wanted to try something new and flex my muscles. So I then jumped to episodic.

I read the pilot for a show called Tooken, which was Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s project after 30 Rock. So many lights were going off… I just thought “man, I would love to write for this.” I wanted to learn from them and meet them. I was lucky enough to get the job and work with them for all four seasons, plus an interactive movie.

So it definitely has been a trajectory, and it seems like a lot of mentorship along the way. Was there anything specific that you learned in the writers rooms that really prepared you for showrunning?

I don’t think anything truly prepares you for showrunning because it’s such a “learning on the job” kind of thing. There are so many questions to answer and so many departments you have to work with… the budget, production changes, pitching and so on. There is just so much more to juggle as a showrunner that you don’t necessarily have to think about when you’re in the room.

But I do think I was prepared for it as much as you could be by Tina and Robert, because they kind of let me in to more parts of the process on Kimmy. I was on set a lot and I could see what they were doing. They tend to do everything with such ease and a level head that it seems doable.

So I did know every part of the process from working with them – and I think that’s really one of the most important things to get your head around if you’re thinking about making the leap. Going to all of the meetings, meeting everybody and knowing how they work. For me, the hardest part is making sure I get everything done on time – or close to it – because the schedule is pretty fast-paced. The balancing act is, I think, one of the most challenging parts. You can be at a certain part in the season, breaking one episode, while writing or editing an outline for another episode, editing an episode that’s already been shot and on set, shooting a different episode…and writing or rewriting a table draft of another episode. So that’s potentially five different episodes all happening at the same time. At times it’s just a real juggling act.

How did you find the adjustment in format from variety writing to 13-episode seasons with Kimmy Schmidt to now this, essentially, 4-hour (8 half-hour episodes) window per season with Girls5eva?

When we would break 13 episodes on Kimmy we would basically have a rough arc for the season. Every show is different but when you first start, you kind of blue sky for a couple weeks and collect all the funniest ideas for where characters can go.

But you also collect one-off story ideas that would just be fun to watch or interesting to see… and you eventually get this big board of ideas by characters. On Kimmy Schmidt, it obviously would be Kimmy, Titus, Jacqueline, Lillian and so on. You have those in the background and then when you’re working on the arc, you’ll think “oh, these things go together and those and those.”

Cast of Girls5eva

It’s much like a painting, to be honest! I think that there is something about making things that are connected across mediums. I mean, everybody can do it however they want to do it, and there are no real rules… but the way I was trained, it’s like the finished painting slowly comes forward. You don’t go one inch at a time on a white canvas, you let it find itself and the whole thing is developed at the same time. In a lot of ways, that’s how TV writing is. You throw a lot at the wall and figure out how to fill the holes and complete the arc for your characters. I basically brought that approach that we did on Kimmy to Girls5eva.

It’s funny because Kimmy was originally 22 episodes and went down to 13. The network model was 22, so that’s what 30 Rock was. When you’re used to doing that and then go down to 13, you think there’s not as much room for the one-off, weirdo stories that are making the writers room laugh but maybe don’t fit in the overall arc for the season as much. But you keep putting them on the board and eventually, by season four, all your favorite things have hopefully found a home.

With eight episodes, like on Girls5eva, it pares things down even more to where you have a bit less room to do things that feel like outliers within the season. But in some ways it probably focuses me in a good way.

But one thing I will say is that approaching season two in particular was nice because it was basically four hours, like a long movie. So we thought that the characters making an album would be a great background. Even if the stories are about their personal lives, it gave a structure to these eight episodes so that at the end you’re like, “OK, we’re building to an album.” We’re building to that point and what are all of the logical steps and the things we want to do for these characters that help get us there?

There are a lot of elements tied to the idea of the “boy band” or the “girl band” – a sense of nostalgia but also maybe some tropes like corrupt managers, mall concerts, etc. (both of which are referenced in the series). What was important to include in the show’s content, both in terms of the public perception of this specific element of pop culture, but also the dynamic that might exist among band members?

I think when you first get an idea that is fruitful, it’s like a subway map – you can go this way or that way and up in your brain you’re like “oh my god, it’s hard to write fast enough.” You just want to get a bunch of stuff out and then figure out what’s fertile.

In some ways, emotionally speaking, this has nothing to do with girl/boy bands but is just something that works really well with this show. I feel like you kind of end up processing your life a little bit when you’re in your 40s and looking back. You think “oh, is that why I’m the way I am” or “is that thing that I thought was super innocuous just the way it was or did that give me some weird armor that I take with me now”.

So it felt fertile in the way the group is almost like therapy for each other – they call each other out on bad behavior and they make mistakes and learn from them. They had a bad manager but they also looked back at their disposability through the eyes of the pop machine…and as underestimated women in general. It felt relatable to anyone who is in this age group.

Add to it the fact that I consumed a lot of MTV and watched Making the Band…  it was a time when there was this sort of collective or “monoculture” – we all knew what was popular. Now it’s fractured, everybody does what they want and algorithms only feed you things that are specific to you, even on TV. Everyone has their own shows that they love and there isn’t necessarily an overlap. When you talk to other people, it’s all so individualized.

Back then, we all knew Destiny’s Child, Spice Girls… those visuals are seared in my brain and there’s just something really nice about a group of people that are put together as far as storytelling goes. Because they didn’t necessarily choose each other, right?

These characters were assembled, and by this exploitative guy… so now in the present, you have a group of people with a flash point where they were best friends (or seemingly best friends) and then it went away. They went their separate ways and we all have those relationships in our lives.

So it was also fertile in that they are also a group of people who are now finding their friendships in the present, choosing each other in the present.

I had watched Lance Bass’ documentary called The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story. It was astounding. I think there was so much trust of people back then…now you can look up anyone’s past and maybe it’s easier to tell who’s terrible. But the promise of being famous back then probably make you overlook so many things. This guy was just such a scammer.

There were a lot of groups of young people back then and some disappeared very quickly. It was always interesting to think about “well what do they do now?” Bands that maybe had a number one and then a couple of years later you didn’t hear about them anymore. And maybe it was a time in their lives where they were trying to figure out college and career. You’re being promised the world and then it all kind of flames out. How do you pick up the pieces of your life? How do you move on?

So many groups made no money – they’d be on billboards and on TV, but were just in handcuffs with their contracts. They were young people taken advantage of by being promised fame and fortune. And there was this disposability of pop stars and the way they were treated by the media. I would watch old interviews and the girls would be asked if they were virgins or not! Why are the interviews for women about that? Maybe they could talk about their album? It all just felt like a path that was fertile to explore in a show.