By Matthew Wade Reynolds.
May Chan
For anyone who grew up in the quaint old days of cable television, with only hundreds of channels to flip through (never mind the era of just three networks and PBS) today’s wealth of choices can be overwhelming – not just what to watch, but how. On-demand? Streaming? DVR? Watching – gulp – at the actual scheduled time of broadcast?
What hasn’t changed is what we want – Classic storytelling.
Writer turned producer May Chan has a perfect case in point. Her original concept of Table 58 has debuted as part of Amazon Studios groundbreaking approach, where pilots are ordered and put into production and then posted online. Instead of a select group of executives, anyone who can get into the Internet can watch, and cast a vote for what gets picked up for series.
Zack Shires as Dullbert Finkelsteen, Nathaniel J. Potvin as Logan Davis and Jacob Melton as Feeney in Table 58
Tell us about Table 58 – it must be terribly exciting to have your idea go from script to screen so quickly.
It’s a show about six kids who are from different cliques in the school – the bully, the jock, the princess, the outcast, the nerd and the slacker, and they all normally would not be a part of each others’ lives but because they have no one else to turn to this is the one place they sit at for lunch. On the outside, it appears they have nothing in common, but realize they’re not that different, that they can be friends.
The Logan character, who is new, is used to being the top dog at his old school and now he’s starting over in a place where no one knows him. Before he arrived they all just sat together but never hung around outside of the table. He rallies them together.
You had experience writing on other shows, such as Avatar: The Last Airbender (Nickelodeon, 2005-08) and Phineas & Ferb (Disney, 2007). But this was the first you conceived and wrote entirely this entirely on your own, right?
I did. I came up with the idea when I was on Phineas & Ferb, and I pitched it to Disney as an animated show, but with aliens. And they thought, no, it seemed like it could be a live action show. And so I kind of put it on the backburner. I pitched it to Nickelodeon and they didn’t gravitate toward it because it’s a show about average kids and they’re not rock stars or anything.
When I found out Amazon was doing original series I went in and pitched them a couple of things, one of which was Table 58. And I like that they wanted to do a show about real kids. And I said, well actually I have one.
Phineas and Ferb
Amazon is one of several tech companies entering the movies and television space. How was your experience different than with traditional studios?
The way Amazon does it, that’s really original and different, is that they put all the pilots up, for people to watch and review.
It’s unique from a creative standpoint, because most pilots for networks, if you’re lucky enough to have it greenlit and shot, it’s just for executives to look at. With Amazon, people get to watch it, and it will be out there. It’s unique. And terrifying.
Did you have the pilot already written when you pitched it?
No. I did have a fairly good idea of who the characters were though, a rough idea of the main character, Logan.
Zack Shires as Dullbert Finkelsteen in Table 58
How do you strike a balance between teasing out future storylines while ensuring the pilot exists as a stand-alone piece?
When I was developing the show for Amazon, they didn’t just have me write the pilot, they had me write a whole show bible, where I pitched what the next six or seven episodes could be, and arc out where each character would be by the end of the season. That mattered more than just, what’s the pilot? Creatively, it’s different but it’s nice to know this is where I want to take it even if it’s going to change. And then you have to think about what the second episode is, you also have to think about the third and fourth episodes are. For me, it’s a little less scary because I like to plan out things in. In my real life, if I don’t put something in my calendar, I’m going to forget about it.
The show is remarkable for its mix of humor and realism. Did the idea spring from any real life experiences in the lunchroom?
Sometimes when I make a new friend as an adult, I think, “I wonder if we would have been friends in school? Maybe you would have sat with the popular kids and I would have sat with the nerds.’ But now we’re at the same place. It’s something I wanted to write about, as a kids show.
Were you one of those kids who always knew you wanted to be a writer? Writing plays and short stories?
I didn’t write plays, I wasn’t one of those people. But you had to do class projects, and I always did video projects. I would take an episode of Seinfeld or something and pretty much cast my friends, and reshoot it.
It’s funny, I watched a lot of TV growing up, but we didn’t have cable so I didn’t watch the typical kids’ stuff. I watched like, Golden Girls. That was my favorite show! (laughs).
The Golden Girls
There was a cult quality to that show – Quentin Tarantino was in an episode!
To me, what got me interested in writing television is that you had characters that you visit every week. You want to be their friends. Even though I was a kid, I liked hanging out with these old ladies! I didn’t realize how dirty it was until I watched it as an adult, in reruns.
Some writers had parents who encouraged them, others were pressured to become doctors or lawyers. Did you fall into either camp?
My parents were pretty open. They emigrated from Hong Kong to Hawaii then they moved here to Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. They took us to the movies when we were 2 or 3, at a very young age.
I didn’t always like to watch movies when I was a kid because I was afraid of the dark. I remember – actually I don’t really remember, but my parents tell me, that we went to watch E.T. with my sister – I have a twin sister – and she loved it, she could sit quietly and watch the movie, enthralled with what’s going on – but I was scared.
In a way that kind of helped push me into wanting to do this. Fear is a still an emotion that you’re helping to create, in filmmaking.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Did you go on to study writing and film?
In college (at UC Santa Barbra) I studied film, I took classes in everything, but I didn’t really know what it was I wanted to do in the film industry.
Did school at all prepare you for your first experiences in Hollywood?
The first job I got was as a production assistant on this independent movie. It wasn’t glamorous. I just remember having a walkie-talkie and standing outside of a house in the middle of summer, making sure no one went through the door when they were rolling. That’s when I realized that I wanted to focus just on writing, because I didn’t just want to be on set.
It was four or five years of writing specs. I got a day job working at a post-production house, and then I would just write at night and send out my scripts to every screenwriting competition that existed. I wrote a spec script episode of Will & Grace and I got into the Nickelodeon Writing Fellowship, in 2005. And that got me a staff job on an animated show, Avatar: The Last Airbender, which had a writers’ room, and a lot of animated shows do not.
Avatar: the Last Airbender (animated series)
It must have been enormously challenging to transition from the solitary work of writing alone to suddenly collaborating with others you’ve just met.
To me, with TV, when you’re on staff and writing for someone else’s show, you’re still bringing your personal stories and your own life experiences to that show. To be able to go into a roomful of strangers and tell the embarrassing personal stories that maybe an episode can come out of was something that I had to learn.
And I got really good advice starting out that the people who get paid the most, speak the most.
When that season ended I got an agent and got on another animated show at Disney, Phineas and Ferb, a completely different show, eleven minutes all stand-alone episodes, kind of crazy, funny gags, the storylines all basically the same, kind of like Mad Libs where you could just plug in the jokes. It was a nice challenge to go from one show to a completely different show.
That must require a lot of versatility that I imagine a lot of aspiring writers don’t realize would be asked of them.
Avatar was like writing the kids’ version of the ABC show Lost, while Phineas and Ferb was like writing an old school Loony Toon.
Most of your career has been in the kids’ space, as it is called. Was that your intent?
I did happen to fall into writing kids, but when I write original specs, I don’t necessarily gravitate toward kids’ stuff.
The thing that’s really fun and refreshing about writing for kids is that you can kind of go really crazy.
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
What was the turning point, if any, when you first had an idea you could really do this, could really write as a professional?
In college, I had taken this adaptation class, where we learned how to take a book or short story or whatever and adapt it for the screen. I took Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein and wrote it as a screenplay and I entered it into a writing competition in college, and I won. It was $100 and it was the first time I had been paid for writing something. It sort of gave me hope that maybe I could do this for a living.
I remember thinking I should frame it or something, but I didn’t, I bought groceries with it. (laughs).
All the characters and their walks of life on Table 58 feel so authentic. If we went back in time, what table in the school cafeteria would you be sitting at?
I was a nerd. Definitely.
Everyone says that! It almost seems like a badge of honor now.
The nerd character, Olive, she likes being a nerd, and she’s proud of it. She doesn’t say it with disdain. ‘We’re nerds, we’re smart. We’re in school!’
May Chan’s Table 58, directed by Gil Junger, can be found online at Amazon.com.
