“With an adaptation, you can never give back your first read. So, what are you taking away? What fills your soul? Why do you want to tell this story? And then that becomes sort of the North Star. And I’m tethered more by that North Star than by the actual moves that are happening in the book,” says Long Bright River showrunner, Nikki Toscano, about adapting Liz Moore’s best-selling novel for television.

Long Bright River is an emotional suspense thriller that follows Mickey (Amanda Seyfried), a police officer in a Philadelphia neighborhood hit hard by the opioid epidemic. As a string of murders unfolds, Mickey must find her missing sister who’s also battling addiction before it’s too late – but long buried family secrets stand in the way.

On the surface, the show is a highly engaging murder-mystery, but beneath the whodunnit is a love story between two sisters. We chat with Toscano about delving into the sisterly dynamic that is both compassionate and toxic at the same time.

Toscano shares tools for building an enticing mystery that includes giving your characters secrets to help drive the story.

“I think that in the beginning of anything, you have to determine what your character wants and then put a bunch of people or things in that character’s way. So that’s how secrets are born, right? And that’s how you have your audience leaning in. Is the secret going to come out? Who’s going to tell the secret? You and I could be having a conversation and I say, ‘Don’t tell anybody!’ And then the next scene is you being in a situation where do you tell, do you not tell? It’s about setting up those kinds of things. I mean, whenever building any kind of show, whether it’s an adaptation or not, determine what your character wants and then stick a bunch of people between them and that goal that either complement or compromise your character’s journey,” says Toscano.

To hear more, listen to the podcast. Long Bright River streams on Peacock March 13.

“My recommendation to anybody who is writing animation is to take advantage of the things you can do in animation that you can’t do in live action, which is to spend an infinite amount of money, right? If you and I are going to write a scene and you say, ‘Oh, let’s set it on a battleship, but then space aliens come and suddenly we’re transported to Jupiter,’ it better be animation because if it’s not, we’re never going to be able to shoot that. But if it is animation, that’s exactly what we should be doing all the time. You want to create the most expensive set in the world because it costs nothing to draw that battleship and send us to Jupiter. And that’s really the glory of an animated show,” says Brent Forrester, about what he learned writing for The Simpsons for three seasons.

On today’s episode, we chat with Emmy-winning writer Brent Forrester about his prolific comedy writing career that includes shows like The Office, King of the Hill and Space Force. He shares why the writing room for The Simpsons was so intimidating and his surprise when The Office showrunners had to teach him the specific tone and structure for the show after he turned in his first episode and just wasn’t getting it.

“I had gotten the tone wrong – it was largely my attempt to make it wall to wall funny. I wasn’t getting that you really had to make it serious. There were other aspects, too, that I had to pick up. One of them is the use of what are called ‘talking heads.’ It’s when the character speaks directly to camera. It comes from reality TV where they pull the subject of a reality show aside and ask them a question and they just speak directly to camera. So we stole that device and it’s a great crutch for writers because one of the hardest things for us is getting the exposition across,” says Forrester.

He also shares his advice for writing a great TV pilot that will hook the reader and offers a simple formula for writing jokes by mixing the sacred with the profane.

To hear more, listen to the podcast.

“Fugler (Robert Carlyle) was a character that I really connected with from the beginning. I know it sounds a little strange that the Nazi was my way into this, but it really was that idea of, ‘How can we get inside his head and make sure that he’s a fully fleshed out person that way?’” says Josh Salzberg about trying to make his villain, a Nazi named Damien Fugler, a three-dimensional character.

Josh Salzberg wrote the screenplay for The Performance with co-writer/director Shira Piven. In this episode, Salzberg talks about the challenges of adapting a short story by playwright Arthur Miller that’s about a Jewish-American tap dancer (Jeremy Piven), who’s willing to compromise his own core values to find fame and fortune in Nazi Germany.

“The idea of all [the characters] is that they’re all performing on some level. They all have another life. And that’s true to show business, that we all have sides of ourselves that we’re not sure we want everybody to see or that it’s okay for everybody to see. And then in Berlin in the ‘30s, there’s all these different communities that were impacted – not just the Jews in Germany,” he says.

Salzberg also talks about his background as a film editor, how it helped him transition to screenwriting, and the challenges of writing morally compromised characters like his protagonist, Harold.

“I think embracing the mistakes that they make, embracing those flaws and leaning into that is important. Sometimes we can care about our characters to the point where we want them to be likable, which is a note we always get, but we’ve got to be okay with the mistakes – and the consequences for those mistakes. And that was a lesson that Shira and I kept learning as we were developing the script,” he says.

To hear more about Salzberg’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

Please note: this episode contains discussions regarding racism and anti-semitism.