By Ryan Flaherty

We chatted with the stars and creators of SeriesFest pilot ‘Hysterical Women’ about the Me Too movement, female representation in Hollywood, and how hard it is to shoot in New York City.

To start off, how did you guys get into the television industry?

Nora: Well we’re both actors, I’m theatrically trained-

Whitney: and I went to school for Musical theater. Both of us have done improv training at Upright Citizens Brigade as well as on camera classes.

Nora: Both coming from a comedy background, and television is clearly booming right now with the Golden Age, so we were auditioning for television but also wanting to have complicated female characters and so we wrote that for ourselves. 

How did you guys come up with this idea for ‘Hysterical Women’?

Whitney: The initial idea came from a fever dream of watching ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and wanting to do something with the workplace.

Nora: Just wanting to be Meryl Streep.

Whitney: And I wanted to be Emily Blunt.

Nora: Oh perfect!

Whitney: We had this idea, thinking about the Me Too movement and how it’s changed, so we thought “what if everyone in an office who was accused of assault was fired. Then what?” All of these women finally get what they want and have to reckon with it.

Nora: They’re talented, they’re smart, they’re confident, but they haven’t been given the keys to the castle because they haven’t been the men. So how do they learn on the fly to take over these positions that have never been offered to them before. 

Whitney: That was kind of the original idea, and we wrote a sketch (we didn’t think it was a sketch at the time) but we wrote our first draft of the pilot and it was just kind of crazy, very heightened comedy.

Nora: Super characters and everyone was at a 10.

Whitney: This pilot we had written was actually like a whole season worth of content. We had just really slammed it all into one episode. Then it was a matter of scaling back and saying “okay, sexual assault isn’t funny, so how do we make a comedy while still honoring these issues and honoring the survivors of assault”. 

Nora: it’s exciting because we’ve written ten episodes of ‘Hysterical Women’ and the end of the tenth episode is basically the ending of the first sketch version that we had. Even though many things changed, it turned out to be a blueprint. 

How much of the characters are based off of your own personalities?

Nora: Oh none. I’m very poised and graceful and never feel crazy. No, honestly I think they’re heightened versions of parts of us. The good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Whitney: It’s funny because Nora will tell me these little tidbits about her life and I’m like oh you’re even more Miranda than I thought. I know for me I usually feel like the quirky friend and I was interested in playing the women in charge a little bit more because I am a businesswoman and I love wearing suits. 

Nora: You look great in a suit. 

Whitney: That was a character I wanted to explore and I think it has parts of me as well. 

What was the biggest challenge you encountered while shooting?

Nora: It was a super independent pilot so in shooting it we were able to self fund and then crowdfund later for post production. You have a really condensed amount of time and a limited budget so getting creative and problem solving on the fly. We were really lucky to get an amazing crew and cast so any rehearsals could be minimal and they really understood the characters. The crew was down to do everything so even though it was definitely challenging I think it was the best possible outcome. 

Whitney: We shot almost 30 pages in under 3 days, which is crazy because a normal television show would shoot that in over a week. We had 2 and a half days and very limited resources but we had this team that really believed in what we were making so much that they were willing to make it a labor of love. Everyone was so passionate about it, I remember one of the nights we ran a little late and we were taking the elevator downstairs and the whole crew, who had to stay the latest, were all laughing and joking together at the end of this really long day. I think that was a testament to how passionate everyone was about the project and we were really just there to do the work and have fun.

Nora: Also if anyone is considering getting a co-creator or a writing parter, I’d do it because I think working with Whitney has been a total gift. We both have different strengths that we’re able to put together and we’re able to check each other and ‘Hysterical Women’ has become such a thing because of our collaborative abilities. 

Whitney: 110 percent.

You have this incredibly cohesive cast that makes your indie show feel like a network sitcom, how did you find them all?

Whitney: I went to school with a good majority of the cast, and others were just friends. Everyone did it as a favor because they loved the project.

Nora: Our crew are friends now, but a lot of them we knew before the project because of the Manhattan Film Institute where you get to work with a lot of directors and sound people and you get to build this community that are then people that you can shoot stuff with in New York which is amazing. 

How did you navigate shooting in New York City?

Whitney: Honestly one of the biggest assets that we had was this office space, which looks incredible on camera. We wanted this to be a millennial tech startup which is such a specific look.

Nora: You can get a regular office space and throw some plants in there but it’s really hard if it doesn’t feel lived in.

Whitney: One of the greatest things is that my husband was working for a tech startup at the time and was producing with us so he was able to get this space donated because the company believed in what we were doing and thought it was an important message. That saved us so much and created this world for us. The same goes for the restaurant we were filming in.

Nora: It was a brunch restaurant and they just threw up some purple lights. I showed it to the owner of Egg Restaurant in Brooklyn and he told us we could shoot their any time and that it looked amazing. They’re so supportive of artists. 

Whitney: New York is such a specific look too, but it was so fun to shoot there. We shot a lot in my neighborhood and friends’ apartments. 

Nora: We got super thrifty and called in a a lot of favors. 

Whitney: People were excited about it, no one felt put out because they all believed in the project. I think they felt like we did right by their donation. Being at SeriesFest I think people were like “oh, it was worth it to let them use the space for the weekend”.

You only shot in two and a half days, so was that based off of a time restriction with the office space?

Whitney: I don’t think we’ve told anyone this story yet! [The office] has freight elevators that are used to get equipment up the stairs because they don’t want you to use the regular elevators in case the equipment scratches the marble- so they had us use these shady back elevators. Someone needs to operate the elevator and they’re only there until 5 p.m on Friday night. 

Nora: We were doing an early shoot that morning to get the beginning shots of the show and the bathroom scene, so we’re shooting uptown. It’s getting tight, about 4:30, so we all pile into cabs and are pleading with the drivers to drive faster. We’re driving downtown in rush hour traffic.

Whitney: So I hop out of the cab and just start running because I’m thinking “maybe if I meet this elevator operator he’ll stay a couple extra minutes while we circumvent traffic to get the equipment there” so I’m running and I’m like “please let us in!” Then we get there and he’s like “do you have the insurance paperwork”? And I have to run back to the taxi and get it, but we made it! We had to be out by a certain time and we ended up sneaking out because we had to get another location and the operator wasn’t there. It was exciting. 

Nora: It was thrilling.

That truly is the wonder of Indie television. 

Nora: that would never happen on NBC, as it shouldn’t. 

So you have this office space loaned to you, how did you go about decorating it? You really nailed the millennial feel with the tiny rooms and the post-it notes on the wall. 

Whitney: [The Post-Its] were the only thing that we brought. I had actually never seen this space, and then I saw the chandeliers and I was like “yes”. One of the funny things was we shot it on Halloween and they said that the only rule was we couldn’t take down the decorations. We were like “I guess it’s gonna be Halloween”. There were bloody handprints on the windows and bats hanging it and there was a skull.

Nora: We were like how many shows do you think have a pilot episode that’s also a holiday episode?

Whitney: Also, how many shows have Halloween episodes where the plot has nothing to do with Halloween? That was why the day of we have that line of “Happy Halloween”. We had to at least acknowledge it. 

Did things usually go according to script or was there some ad libbing involved in shooting?

Whitney: When we were working with the actors ahead of time we told them that we really wanted them to be comfortable in their words, and if they felt like they would never say that then we could alter it. We set things ahead of time because we really didn’t have time to improvise. To get all of the coverage we needed we knew every single shot and how many takes we had time for. By the time we were rolling it was just “these are the lines”. 

Nora: People were also super flexible, we asked them to switch words around if we figured out “oh this sounds crazy”. 

Whitney: There were a couple things on set where we were like “oh this doesn’t make sense, thank you for learning the lines now can you change them?” But that was minimal.

You have this theme of sexual misconduct in the workplace, so was that based off of your experiences in this industry or just the stories that have been in the news?

Nora: I think it’s a mix of both, just being a woman in this life. 

Whitney: Unfortunately I would say it was based off of real experience, not a ton in the industry but more from side jobs. We’ve both worked in offices so it came from that for sure. There was also a lot of micro aggression, like how Clint talks to Jessie, those kinds of things have happened to us. We’ve had a lot of people ask if our male cast and crew members learned that they can’t talk to women that way and the men we’ve worked with are just delightful and very self aware and looking for others’ experiences. My personal experiences in the industry have been positive for the most part. 

Nora: We’ve all experienced aspects of it so we put it together in a cohesive story. 

Whitney: I think it’s interesting to be on this side similar to Alexa where she maybe hasn’t experienced it but it is existing in her peripheral world. Alexa hasn’t experienced this harassment from the men in the office so she doesn’t have this opportunity to believe them. The question is whether she’s going to believe them or not throughout the series.

What about the show do you think separates it from other projects that concern the Me Too movement?

Nora: I think delving into the sexual misconduct theme through a comedic lense is something that I haven’t seen as much. I was really drawn to that idea because comedians have used comedy to talk about hard things for ages, and I think that it gives people an avenue into thinking and talking about these issues- specifically for us, the Me Too movement. That really excited me because I think the only way for people to change in their thinking and learning is if they’re interacting with the material and interacting with thoughts and concepts. I hope this show is a way for people to listen and realize that this issue isn’t black and white and there’s so much nuance. Yet I don’t feel bombarded [with Hysterical Women], I don’t feel like I’m watching the news which can be super hard. 

Whitney: Some of the impetus in writing this was that after the Harvey Weinstein scandal a lot of Hollywood wanted to respond to it, and write about these issues but then what ended up happening is they were writing about women being raped by men. So the women roles were still victims again. Even these movies that are talking about the first woman that did this thing, which of course we need these stories, but it’s a whole cast of men and one woman. We’re still hiring more men, and we’re still telling a woman’s story through a man’s lense. That was something that was really important to us when creating the Cynthia and Alexa characters, we wanted to tell this story from a woman’s perspective in an empowered way. There is obviously a victim of assault in the series but we didn’t want that to be the only woman’s experience that we see. We wanted to show women coming from a place of power rather than just being victims. 

Nora: This is a new era because these new issues have been brought to light, and we’re all figuring out where we fit into these stories and how we interact with the world. We wanted to create this cast of characters that have a lot of differences in how they feel from Miranda to Jessie to Alexa to Naomi to Matthew to Robbie. 

Whitney: The person that cares the most about it also has a crush on a coworker, so it’s not black and white. That’s just human. 

In terms of distribution, what would the ideal home be for ‘Hysterical Women’?

Nora: I think a streaming service, because that’s where I watch all of my content now. There’s so much new content and it feels like they’re really giving voices and time to the creators and telling less conventional stories. Like a ‘Pen15’ or a ‘Fleabag’ is just the obsession of my life right now. 

Whitney: We’re taking meetings from both networks and streaming services, so it’s more about which of these companies want to tell the same story that we want to tell and is excited about it. It seems like Netflix gives the creators a lot of liberty in that way, but at the end of the day it’s about who wants to tell the story the right way. 

What’s your plan for the rest of the series in terms of writing and shooting and producing more content?

Whitney: We originally conceived it as a web series so we thought we would be doing it all independently, but the traction that it’s gotten us has made us think maybe going with a network could be a better option. We would have more resources and more visibility. We’ve written ten episodes total and producing it independently we would use those, but if we end up joining with a network that wants to develop it with us we would love to get a writer’s room and redevelop all of the stories. 

Nora: We’re the ones writing the characters, but I think one of the strengths of a writer’s room is you have a myriad of people that are all bringing different voices and experience and humor to a show. I think a show like ‘Hysterical Women’ would benefit from that because we’re trying to have a large scope of experience. 

If you could be a show runner for any show that’s currently on, what would you choose?

Nora: I just want to be Phoebe Waller Bridge. 

Whitney: Right now I’m in the middle of ‘Dead To Me’ which I love because it’s dark humor. Two women that are angry and sad and complicated- that’s my current obsession.

Nora: In a different world I would love to contribute to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, but I think I would try to make it weird and they have a really good thing going. It’s a not fair question because there’s too much good TV. 

Whitney: It’s a great time to be in our industry. 

What advice do you have for women entering the workplace?

Whitney: I would say go for it. There’s this idea that at some point people will start handing you things and hand you opportunities, and at the end of the day you have to go for it yourself and create your own opportunities for what you want to be part of. That’s what we did and I think it’s brought us success. Also not being afraid of not knowing how to do something, we’ve worked on some projects together but nothing of this scale. We didn’t really know how to produce something and we didn’t have a producer with us, and so it was daunting but we just had to ask “what’s the next step”.

Nora: Also you don’t need to laugh at any dumb jokes anymore. Be yourself, and that’s okay- you don’t need to change or conform to the office. You’re smart, you’re confident, you’ve got this. 

When and where will this episode of ‘Hysterical Women’ be available?

Whitney: It probably depends on who wants to make it with us. In theory we’ll probably be pairing with a network who wants to redevelop it and reshoot it. If that happens, they probably won’t want this version to see the light of day. By now I’ve watched it so many times that I can’t wait to reshoot it. So probably not for a little while, but we have some other projects going on so people can follow our instagrams [@whitneyuland and @nokaye]. 

Nora: And the website of our production company is changitoperrito.com.