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Comisery Production Diary: Week One Takes Us from Rehearsal to Pilot

And so, we go right into shooting the pilot of our web series Comisery. This is crazy, setting up and filming in less than two weeks after the initial pitch. Yet here we are, my friend Quentin Lee and I, jumping in the deep end. We have no idea how this would work out – actually, no, we both have a sneaking idea that it would come out just fine. We never thought we would fail. After all, we're all professionals, as are the actors. If it didn't work out, we wouldn't release it, but neither Quentin nor I believed that would happen.

Quentin is the engine behind all this, really. An experienced producer and director with at least a dozen projects under his belt, he just took our script and called up the actors he knows to ask if they were interested. Quentin knows nearly every Asian-American actor in Los Angeles. Quentin said that it's very hard to get actors attached to any script. That we got six actors signing on almost immediately is a sign that Comisery is a worthwhile project.

The Rehearsal

For the pilot, we introduce the three lead characters, played by Hmong actor and activist Bee Vang, Chinese-American actor Harrison Xu and former Miss Asian-America Jennifer Field. Bee had been in Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, Harrison has been acting since his teens and recently appeared in Pretty Little Liars and Shameless, and Jennifer has appeared in For the People, 9-1-1, and a whole bunch of other television shows. All three of them have comedy chops.

We rehearsed on Monday for about two hours to gauge how the actors would approach their characters and give them notes. Part of directing is to steer the tone and direction of the performances. Bee was playing someone mourning the death of his boyfriend but suddenly having to deal with two of his closest friends acting weird. Harrison was playing a guy trying to convince Bee he's come from the future to prevent an apocalypse. Jennifer was playing Harrison's girlfriend who may or may not be possessed by an alien virus. All three roles had complicated layers.

We spent about three hours rehearsing on Monday.

In Production

After Monday's rehearsal, we reconvened on Thursday to film it for real. It was all on Zoom. It's a surreal experience because Quentin and I were directing without having to leave the house. The actors were all in their individual places. Bee had just moved to his new apartment, so its walls were still bare, so he was invited over to Quentin's place and shoot it in a room with a more interesting background. I was concerned that Bee was leaving his apartment for this, but Quentin assured me that they would be safely distanced. Quentin had also just been tested.

We watched Bee during rehearsal and discussed how heavily he should play Skylar's grief. This was a comedy, so best not to lean that deep into the heaviness. Skylar was normally a pretty happy-go-lucky guy who's fun to hang out with when he doesn't have to deal with the deal of a loved one. We felt part of what drove the comedy in Comisery would be Skylar's bewilderment at the ridiculous scenario that Harrison's character Kel was presenting him.

Harrison's Kel was a different kind of complicated. He was playing a guy claiming to have come from the future to take over his younger body to try to change history. What Harrison had to play was a time traveler who was desperate to convince his friend Skylar that he was the key to preventing the world from going to hell. The comedy here was that Kel was trying to reassure Skylar but he kept saying exactly the wrong thing that would keep pissing off Skylar and risk alienating him. I knew that the more desperate Harrison played it, the funnier he would become.

Jennifer had less preparation time than Bee and Harrison because her role was rewritten and combined with another due to another actor having to drop out. What's more, hers was the most complicated role – she had to play Kel's on-and-off girlfriend Camila, a manipulative control freak who's been taken over by an alien virus. She had to convey both Camila's personality and also be an alien still getting used to inhabiting a human body. She worried that she wasn't hitting the right tone, but she got better with each take. It was hard work to strike a note of ambiguity – was she human or alien as she subtly undermined Kel's attempts to get Skylar to believe him.

It's a new and unique experience to direct on Zoom. There's literally no budget. We're all sitting in front of our computers. We don't have to wait 20 minutes or longer between takes waiting for the camera set-up and lights to be adjusted. No camera movement, no laying of dolly tracks, no cranes, no moving the camera tripod to change positions. It takes even less time than directing theater. We could just direct the actors and hit "record" to shoot. Then give the actors notes and go for another take. A director could be spoiled by this.

By Thursday night, Quentin had cut together the first assembly and we arranged for Jennifer to spend less than an hour on Saturday to shoot some pick-ups, a couple of close-ups, including more intense takes of her final speeches and the final shot of the episode. By Sunday, Quentin locked the final cut after we reviewed the edits and chosen takes. By midnight Monday, the pilot episode went live. You can see the final product in the embed below.

(In case you were wondering, the title of the show came from Quentin and I brainstorming a week before. We found that "invasion" and "apocalypse" were too widely used. I brought up the world "commiseration" because that's what people are doing on Zoom and Skype. Then one of us cracked a joke about Asians being miserable together and we suddenly looked at each other and went, "co-misery, COMISERY! That's our title!")

Onto Episode 2

It's Wednesday night as I write this. By the time you read this on Thursday, we'll be spending Thursday afternoon shooting episode two, with Amy Hill, who had been on Unreal and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, joining us from isolation in Hawaii play Mary Suzuki Miller, Skylar's therapist. I'll write a diary for how Comisery Episode 2 went next week after it goes live.

[Ed. Note: Adi Tantimedh is also a contributing writer and columnist for Bleeding Cool. Coming up, Adi will be posting his thoughts on what went into pulling the project together as well as some behind-the-scenes perspectives on the pilot process]

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