If you have not binged on the marvel that is the first season of “Russian Doll” you’ve really missed out. The Netflix comedy series follows Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), a New York City software engineer who finds herself reliving her 36th birthday over and over in a “Groundhog Day” inspired series of time loops where she keeps getting killed again and again. Unable to get out of the cycle, she’s thrown for a mental loop when she meets Alan (Charlie Barnett), a man in her neighborhood who is stuck in his own series of loops.
READ MORE: “Russian Doll” is a hilarious, vulgar and death-filled take on “Groundhog Day”
The program was created by Lyonne, Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland and was just renewed for a second season by the streaming giant. It’s also a major Emmy contender in the Comedy Series, Lead Actress, Writing and Directing categories. Headland, best known for her 2012 Sundance debut “Bachelorette,” jumped on the phone earlier this week to discuss the extreme difficulty of tracking all 22 (yes, 22) time loops Nadia takes during the series and what she thinks of a second season (at the time of the interview it had not been officially greenlit).
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The Playlist: How long ago did the idea for the series even come about and how long did it take to write it?
Leslye Headland: Let’s see, we wrote the pilot at the end of 2016. I think if my memory serves we pitched Netflix summer of 2016. We were like, “Hey, Netflix, are you interested in this, blah, blah, blah.” And then we wrote the pilot the end of that year. And then I don’t remember if it was because of “Orange [Is The New Black’s]” schedule, or whatever, but we actually didn’t start the writer’s room until about a year later, which was the end of 2017. I came on…I feel like it was around when “Sleeping With Other People” came out, which was 2015, so maybe a year before we pitched. But Natasha and Amy had been developing an idea about a girl that was at a party she couldn’t escape, and it took place in the East Village, and her friends were the type that you see, like, Ruth, and all these kind of things. They’re also a little bit borrowed from Natasha’s real life and all that kind of stuff. I remember specifically all of us getting together, and then Amy going, “All right, now figure out the rules.” Right?
Yeah.
“What are the rules of this idea and this space?” We just went in Natasha and I and Flora Birnbaum, who ended up becoming the writer’s assistant and the writer of episode 106. And we would just do these little mini rooms basically in New York in my apartment and send them to Amy, who was in L.A. And she would give us notes back and talk about the stuff that she felt was the most exciting. She kept talking about the tiny doll and what’s the tiny doll inside all of us. And Natasha would be talking about her experience and her life. I mean, Natasha gave me a list of films to watch, and I watched all of them. It was really a fun soup for that first year or so of working on it. And then once the writer’s room started, at the end of 2017, it was right around when the Harvey Weinstein thing happened, it was almost coinciding with that, was when we were getting our room together and all that stuff. That was when really a lot of choices got made, where Alan started to come into focus. He’d been around as a character, but we weren’t really sure what to do with him, and so on and so forth. The room was almost like this endurance [test], like we were running the marathon that we’d been training for kind of thing. It felt like, “How do we get this into eight episodes? How do we make this into that?”
How difficult was it to map it all out? Did you have a big board in front of you with all the different times she goes back? how did you guys track it?
I mean, the quick answer is that it was very difficult, and that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fulfilling, or fun, or exciting to do, but it was very hard to keep [track]. Once the show started to become about the looping, there were episodes which were obviously these increments of storytelling. But then there were the loops which were different. They could go from episode to episode. So, there were the episodes that the characters were living – the loops – that they would live through before they died again and then there were episodes which were that were writers’ loops, if that makes sense.
Absolutely.
So, we needed to make sure that those from rebirth or re-spawn moment to death moment, all had their own little arcs and reasons for existing and that the characters would learn their own new things then. But also, there had to be the episodes that would feel like they had their own beginning middle and ends for the writers and for the viewers. So. the episodes were mapped out purely from basically what anybody would do on any TV show, which is outlines that were sent to the network and to the studio to get that thumbs up or to get feedback. And then the loops themselves, we created different ways of tracking them. At first, we started the big wall of each loop, and then realized we didn’t have enough wall for anything. So then the production designer actually ended up putting one in his room, because he had a lot of wall space. So we would call them loop A, loop B, loop C, loop D. And then we would start doubling up the letters when we ran out of letters.
That’s a lot.
And then once they’d split into two separate dimensions, then it would be double G-2 and double G-1. So those all had to be mapped out, so that when we got to the shooting script, when you would say, “Interior, Maxine’s apartment, bathroom, night.” It would also say, “Loop G.” Do you know what I mean? So that the production designer, the costume designer, and the script supervisor would all know which loop we were in. So it wasn’t just that we were resetting to a particular time within the time period of the episode, meaning this is the third or fourth, or fifth scene, but we also needed to know that for the characters this was the 15th time they’ve done this, this is the 23rd time they’ve done this. I actually think it ended up being 22 loops, I think, at the end of the day. We just ended up getting rid of some letters, like I, you know?
Yeah.
Letters that looked like numbers, we thought might be confusing. Gosh, this is such a long winded way of explaining it, but it got tracked in many different ways at different points. So the writers were tracking it one way and there were Excel sheet documents and things up on walls. But then the designers tracked it in a different way. And then of course once we got to the script supervisor, she had her own Excel document and her own way of doing it within the script, so that she could give us that feedback on set.
How did you decide to shoot it? You’re credited with directing the first three episodes, Jamie Babbit has the next three, and then you come back, and then Natasha did the last one. Did you shoot everything in the apartment from out of the bathroom all at the same time or was that too hard to do?
No, we had to shoot it that way because we were also shooting on what I would call a half-hour comedy budget. I’ve done a couple of those episodically myself and they’re all structured the same way in the TV industry which is if you’re doing a half-hour comedy at a certain budget level, you are expected to cross board them. That’s why you see that a director has directed two episodes. It’s because they call them blocks. And so, they’re like, “Okay, so in this block, we’re going to knock out episodes one, two,= and three.” So it isn’t like director A comes to direct one, B comes to direct two, C comes to direct three. It’s like all that kind of stuff. So, what happens is they decide, “You’re going to shoot episodes one through three, altogether, at the same time, in the same block of time.” So we had five days per episode, so that’s a 15-day block, which means for three weeks you’re shooting three different episodes. The only set that we actually built was Maxine’s apartment, everything else was on location, [so] what you shoot is dictated by your location. It’s not dictated by what’s in the script. It means like, “O.K., so when we go to-
The park.
…the park, we’re going to shoot all the park stuff at the same time.” It doesn’t matter whether someone’s crying in the scene, whether the scene happens before something else we’ve already shot. We’re just shooting it. I found it to be both difficult and also very freeing and fun. So you were not only shooting every time she resets in the bathroom in episodes one through three at the same time. We were shooting all the times she resets in the bathroom for episodes four through six at the same time. So, if Natasha’s character was confused and not sure what was going on, you shot that. Then next time you would reset, you would say, “This is loop G, this is scene three of episode two, and this is what’s just happened.” And she’s like, “O.K., great.” So then she does that. It means that you have to rely on the people around you and your amazing crew, like the script supervisor to tell you, “Actually, the last time that when we shot the scene before this, which was actually two weeks ago, this is what her collar looked like, and because this is loop C, she actually doesn’t know about this thing yet, so the improv that so and so just did about something actually wouldn’t work. So we have to go back and shoot that again.”
People loved the first season. Does the idea of doing a second season scare you at all?
No, it doesn’t scare me. it’s just like being realistic about what [we can do]. Look, I think we learned a lot if that makes sense. Not in a negative way. I think we just learned what is doable and it all turned out great. But I think approaching a second season would be more about approaching it from the place of knowing that we’re shooting a half-hour comedy series, and knowing what the restrictions are. I mean, if I would take a guess, part of the season two approach when we end up working on it will be about embracing those restrictions and trying to push the boundaries of what we are and aren’t allowed to do. Does it make more sense to have [blank happen]? Did three directors for the season work? Does it make sense to hop back and forth between those things? Is it worth it to build more sets so that you can do X, Y, and Z? It doesn’t feel daunting, it just feels like, “Oh, it’s just going to be something different, and we learned a lot on this one. So how can we improve our qualities in moving forward on how to complete these things?” Because there were definitely moments when we were making it that I was like, “Gosh, we could’ve made this easier on ourselves.” But at the same time, I think one of the reasons the show is so special is because you can see the real truth beat that it is.
“Russian Doll” season one is available on Netflix.