In the midst of the controversy over David Chappelle‘s new Netflix special, LA Times columnist LZ Granderson dropped a piece on Friday that argued the comedian had blind spots when it came to the LGBTQ+ community and especially the Black LGBTQ+ community. It was a realization that came to Granderson while watching screeners for the upcoming second season of HBO’s “We’re Here,” an Emmy-nominated reality program that follows three well-known drag queens (Shangela, Eureka, and Bob the Drag Queen), as they visit small towns across America. In the second go-around, the production visited Selma, Alabama, a monumental part of the Civil Rights Movement, but a city where even Granderson, an out gay man, admittedly did not think of having a queer community. And, of course, it does.
READ MORE: ‘We’re Here’ Producers On Tackling A Second Season During COVID [Podcast]
During that episode, which airs in the middle of the season, Bob the Drag Queen (Christopher Caldwell), has an emotional moment speaking to survivors who were beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge march on March 7, 1965. A moment forever known as “Bloody Sunday” in the United States. While the show went to Selma to help the queer residents transform themselves for a celebratory drag show, the scope of the program expanded its outlook in the story it decided to tell. “We’re Here’s” showrunner, executive producer and director, Peter LoGreco, didn’t expect that particular moment to occur, but that broader perspective was intentional for the second season.
“Yes, LGBTQ issues were always going to be at the forefront of this particular show, but there was a lot of intersection and there were other issues that were often at play in people’s lives,” LoGreco says. “Other facets of their identities that came to bear in terms of the way that they were perceived and how they experienced the places where they lived. And that really did influence [myself] and the rest of our producing crew a lot in terms of outreach and how we decided to approach where we went .”
The new episodes find the Queens returning to Spartanburg, South Carolina (where production on a season one episode abruptly ended in March of 2020) and the U.S./Mexican border city of Del Rio, Texas, among other locales. Speaking to The Playlist last week, LoGreco expanded on the show’s goals for season two, the difficulty in deciding when to resume shooting during the pandemic, how the show lands its incredible soundtrack, and more.
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The Playlist: Congratulations on the second season. Can you run us through the production’s mindset about when and how you decided to restart filming during the pandemic?
Peter LoGreco: That’s a really interesting question and I wish I could tell you, “Oh yeah, we had this clear plan and we just executed it.” We were all very grateful that HBO was enthusiastic about starting the show up again. So, at first, we’d hoped we were going to be up and running again by August 2020, then we decided, “Well, let’s wait things out, and hopefully stuff will get a little bit more chill, and we’ll be able to move forward in a more relaxed way.” We sort of hit the wall by the time we got to the end of 2020 and actually shot what ends up being in the run of the series, our second episode in December 2020, which was definitely a trial run and turned out to be a real challenge, because that was one of the more difficult points in the pandemic. Obviously, no one planned for that. We got the ball rolling and got everything up and running and then decided, you know what let’s just work within the parameters that COVID safety allows and do an episode and see how it works out and it worked out great. But I think after that, we did decide we wanted to wait until there was a real clear sense that things were easing up, which is why we returned to Spartanburg at the end of April, by that time, vaccines had started to roll out. Things had really started to genuinely seem like they were easing up. And then we were fortunate enough to be able to just kind of roll through the remaining seven episodes of the season, as quickly as we were capable of from a production standpoint. COVID was always a factor, but we were able to work around it and work within the parameters necessary to keep everyone safe. Everyone had hoped and wished that it would’ve got been out six months sooner, but the pandemic made that hard to do, especially with this show. It’s hard to sort of lock it down and not access the community at all. It kind of changes the DNA of things
100%. In terms of the Spartanburg episode, which was originally meant for season one, were you ever concerned you wouldn’t be able to return? Were you guys always tracking the “drag kids?”
Obviously it was a concern. I have to hope and think that our creative process, which has a lot to do with really developing more of a relationship with the participants and making sure that myself and the producers, as well as the Queens had a genuine rapport helped us rekindle the relationship with them. And I think frankly, having seen the first season, it made the Spartanburg participants in particular that much more enthusiastic about stepping in and kind of finishing what we all started a year earlier. For the first season participants they were really kind of taking a different type of leap of face in the sense that they didn’t even know what the show would end up feeling and looking like. It was always in the back of our mind that maybe something would change significantly because so much time had passed. So, there was always a little bit of that crap shoot risk taking element to it. But I think that’s also just part and parcel of working in unscripted. Certainly the way that I like to anyway. We try to actually keep things real around the people who we’re working with. To be perfectly frank though, because we’re going to rural places that tend to be dominated by a little bit of a different point of view on COVID even, we often came in a lot more concerned and paranoid as the crew that was largely based in New York and LA than the local environments into which we were traveling.
The first season debuted during the stay at home. Was there any viewer reaction that influenced where you guys went with the show in the second season?
I think so. I found that this show was unique in the degree to which it really seems to impact the kind of climate of the places where we were shooting. And also it impacts the lives of the participants. And then because of that maybe, getting this sense that it was really impacting the viewers as well. We were getting messages and social media talking about how it was prompting whole different levels of discussions amongst family members bringing, coming out stories to light and empowering people to come out to their families. All of these kinds of things, which I think inspired us to be that much more ambitious in terms of what types of stories we were telling. And then also, frankly to really hear from people about the general environment in which they felt they were growing up and realizing that yes, LGBTQ issues were always going to be at the forefront of this particular show, but that there was a lot of intersection and that there were other issues that were often at play in people’s lives. Other facets of their identities that came to bear in terms of the way that they were perceived and how they experienced the places where they lived. And that really did influence [myself] and the rest of our producing crew a lot in terms of outreach and how we decided to approach where we went. We really went in hoping to find people whose stories had more facets to them that also kind of overlaps with their LGBTQ experience, but also kind of talked about other issues and other types of identities that are experiencing different levels of marginalization or challenges in life within the communities that they’re living. I think that the fan reaction really did influence that.
One of the things I love about the show is how beautifully lit is and how impressive many of the shots are. How do you avoid the easy, standard newsy documentary shot?
I thank you for noticing that. And I do think it’s a very conscious decision. That’s really important to all of us who work on the show and something that I have to give a tremendous amount of credit to the cinematographers and our camera operators for really being able to take that to heart and having the talent and the eye to execute on that. It’s been a longstanding thing for me that we don’t have to dumb down or simplify [the show’s look]. Just because we’re doing unscripted [doesn’t mean we don’t] try to make it as cinematic as possible. And that there actually is an [aesthetic] that is very authentic. And so a lot of it is the people with whom I’ve worked with for years. We have a rapport, we have a shorthand. They like to work in this way. I know that they’re good at it. We approach everything as if we’re covering it with a single camera and then often we have multiple cameras, but the idea being that allows that one sort of “The main visual storyteller” with whom I’m working and I’ll be talking to them in their ear from time to time. But they’re really taking planning discussions and ideas about the locations, ideas about the story and executing them. And I’m trusting them and very lucky to have their talent and ability to do that. Honestly the same thing goes, what would normally call B-roll, for the visuals of the town, the environment of the world that we’re in. I’d really always encourage them to express what they think is most interesting about what they’re seeing, not just get the information. I think it’s a really important characteristic of the show, certainly for me. And I think for a lot of us who work on it we’re proud that people have that reaction to the visuals.
Well, don’t stop for season three! That’s all I’ll say. During the first season, there was one town that you went to where the reaction from locals wasn’t so great. Was the reaction better for season two?
Branson, Missouri, was the place where we got the most sort of obvious, overt resistance, pushback, whatever you want to call it [in season one]. And I think that this season was a little different only because the show already was known by the people who actually were fans of the show and we did find those people pretty much everywhere we went. I would say the level of resistance and the presence of that was probably about the same level where in most towns, it appeared online. It appeared in ways that were just sort of very subterranean. I heard that this person heard that this person said this thing. We really were only in one place where there was overt and obvious resistance in the same vein as Branson. It wasn’t like particularly violent or nasty per se. There were a couple things that happened off camera that some of the LGBTQ members of our crew did experience that were unfortunate. Epithet yells and things like that. But mostly we had this sort of quiet, religious oriented resistance and protests that we experienced in one of the places where we went. Other than that, it was always whispers, looks, side glances. Quiet, sort of declining to participate, not wanting to be on camera, that kind of thing, but about the same level. The Queens are just so disarming and what we’re doing is sort of fun and joyous. So the people who are into it are much, much louder.
Can you say what that town was? They’ve only provided the press the first five episodes, so maybe it’s in the last three.
Yeah, it is. [Laughs] I’ll leave it to suspense. Yes.
Suspense.
Massively dramatic.
OK. So, you’ve gone to different parts of the U.S. You’ve gone north, south, east, west. What about “We’re Here” visiting the U.K., Europe, Latin America, or Canada?
I can only speak personally. I can’t speak on behalf of HBO. I know that Johnny and Steve, the other EP’S that I work with on the show we’ve all talked about that and how amazing it would be to be able to do that. As far as I know there aren’t any plans and there’s still a lot of states left to cover, but certainly it’s crossed our minds.
Well, HBO max is launching in Europe. So you’ve certainly got an argument to shoot there. The last question for you is regarding the incredible songs you’ve licensed for the show. You’ve got a Celine Dion song, you’ve got a Beyonce track from “Lemonade” and there’s no way that’s not expensive. You’ve got Madonna and Lady Gaga multiple times. How do you secure the rights to these songs on what must be at least a limited budget for reality or docuseries?
II think that we’re really lucky to have a budget to license pop songs, but it is very, very limited and we’re getting them at a huge discount. Let’s put it that way for the level of songs that they are. And I have to give tremendous credit to Julie Sessing and Wendy Turnbull, who are music clearance and people with whom we work. They’ve got great relationships with the labels and they’ve done a great job of kind of evangelizing for the show in the music industry. And the bottom line is I think that what we’re seeing there is support for the content of the show. It didn’t start out where we thought we would be able to get those songs. We were told, “Don’t even think about Lady Gaga. Don’t even think about Beyonce.” But once we had some footage in the can, we started sharing it with them. We were able to get whoever it was on their teams and their labels to look at it. And it seems to snowball and it’s not like we’ve gotten every song we wanted, far from it, but at the same time, we’ve been incredibly lucky to have, I think, what is the support in some ways of the spirit of the show from all these artists and labels. But yeah, we’re super lucky. It’s awesome.
“We’re Here” airs on HBO and is available on HBO Max on Mondays.