Erin Cardillo and Richard Keith – Life Sentence

By starrymag | July 5, 2018

By: Spring Cullen

 

 

Q) What inspired you to write “Life Sentence?” Are the characters based on anyone in particular?

 

Rich: I think it was a couple things. The fictional story was based on…We’d seen a lot of these romantic cancer dramedies that had come out. I had actually written one about eight years ago where boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy finds out girl is dying of cancer, they agree to spend the rest of her life together and they do and then he moves on inspired by her. And we thought, dramatically speaking, how interesting it would be if they agreed to spend the rest of their lives together under that pretense and then that pretense changed and suddenly their forever got a whole lot longer than they thought it would. So, we thought that was interesting from the love story perspective and then I have a father who has a terminal illness (he has Parkinson’s) and then Erin’s father, more directly, dealt with and beat cancer. And I’ll let Erin hop in, but that’s sort of where the whole family aspect of not dumping in and hiding things from your loved one who is sick sort of came about.

 

Erin: It was a suggestion from my dad’s doctor not to burden my father with me and my siblings’ personal problems while he was fighting cancer, just to keep him feeling positive during his treatment and I think we were thinking, “Well, what if that went on for eight years and they just never told her anything?” So, they were both exaggerations or plays on things that we were thinking about at the time.

 

Rich: On “Significant Mother” and this show and everything we write, tend to have a fascination with what it means to become friends with your parents as an adult and get to know them as real people. And, so, I think this was an interesting way to delay that moment for a girl until she was twenty-three years old, that sort of moment of, “Oh god, my parents don’t have any answers. They only have questions.” That is something you normally figure out somewhere between ages eleven and fifteen. We thought it’d be kind of funny if we could find a way to delay that until much later in life.

 

Q) One of my favorite things about the series was the chemistry between the Abbott family and even the supporting characters, how did you manage to bring such a perfect cast together?

 

Erin: Rich and I were both actors originally and I think we have a good sense of different types of actors and the types of actors we always like to work with when we were acting are people who are really generous of spirit and who really believe in collaboration. There’s a way that you can sense who those people are during a casting process and it was definitely in addition to people being right for the role and very talented, it was definitely part of what we were looking for.

 

Rich: Also, Brooke [Lyons], Lucy [Hale] and Jayson [Blair] have the exact same eyebrows so we had to cast them. It was bizarre. We were like, “I don’t know if they’re genetically linked, but at least in the eyebrows people are gonna buy that this is a family.” And I think that chemistry comes across on screen because it exists off screen. Even after we found out the show was cancelled we still all got together as many of us that were in town and watched episodes together, we were all texted today about getting together and seeing each other. Aside from on screen chemistry there was a sense of family and camaraderie amongst the cast and crew that translated on screen, but certainly existed off screen as well. When we were shooting the pilot, Dylan [Walsh] was very skeptical about the show getting picked up because he said it was a perfectly lovely experience with wonderful people and those are the sort of shows that always end up doomed because you really want to spend the next seven years with those people and that’s never the show that pans out. And in the end, he was sort of right, but we got a season anyway.

 

Q) Was Lucy the person you had in mind first to play Stella? She’s so funny and most of her work before this she hasn’t gotten a chance to show off her comedic timing and how organically and instinctively she can deliver these hilarious lines.

 

Erin: Lucy was definitely in our minds from the beginning. Not before we created the show, but very early in the writing process. We had met with her and got excited about creating this character with her in mind, even if she wasn’t going to end up playing her. It was a really wonderful confluence of events that she did get to do it and we just adore her and we’re excited to see whatever she does next.

 

Rich: One of the things that initially upset us about the show not being around is not getting to write for her. Like you said, she was just so surprisingly funny and emotionally available, even more dynamic of a performer than we could’ve imagined. When you have such a single lead heavy show, it’s rare to get someone who’s that amazing. We definitely didn’t take that for granted and we’ll miss writing for everybody, but definitely writing for her.

 

Q) One of the things that stood out to me in the series was the diversity, not only was an interracial couple at the forefront, but there were multiple interracial couples in supporting roles as well. Was that something you aimed to include or did it happen naturally?

 

Erin: It was something we aimed for. We didn’t know which roles necessarily we were aiming for that with, but I think it was definitely a goal of ours to reflect as much as the real world as we could and also giving the best actors the job no matter what.

 

Rich: Yeah, I agree. Erin said it really well, I don’t need to add anything there.

 

Q) I’ve seen you answering some questions about Wes and Stella ending up together in the end, but what would their journey finding their way back to each other have looked like?

 

Erin: Obviously, you don’t break your whole series up and every season before you get one, but I think what we had planned to do was to let them go through all of these kinds of normal…Well, let Stella go through some normal stages of what a typical girl might go through before she found or ended up with the person she was supposed to be with. I think they were going to probably keep finding their way back together but needed to figure out who they were and for Stella that probably would’ve met dating some other people. Not Dr. Grant (Riley Smith) because I think that ship had literally sailed, but it’s finding and maturing in relationships, maturing as a person, finding a career path, meeting new people and always finding her way back to Wes (Elliot Knight) because the bond that they shared was so strong. But they may have gotten into more of a friendship for a little while before it became romantic again.

 

Rich: And I think to what Erin said, there’s so much that she hadn’t experienced that if we’d gotten a Season Two we’d go throughout her potentially being roommates with Finley and really experiencing what it means to be a college-aged person and dating a little. Maybe going on a date or two with a guy who didn’t have the best of intentions or didn’t treat her so wonderfully because I think for Stella she was in a good and bad way, robbed of the experience of both positive and negative that shape who we are and make us recognize the person that we’re meant to spend the rest of our life with is special and unique. Not that Stella didn’t think that, but you can’t really know that (in Erin and I’s opinion) until you feel that in your gut…And you can’t substitute that feeling with all the thoughts and good intentions in the world. We both felt like Stella was going to need to live a little before she could really feel the love in her gut for Wes exactly the way Wes felt it back. It wasn’t a failing of Stella’s; it was just a failing of circumstance. And one other fun thing that we liked was Wes was going to end up living across the bar, which was literally right across the street window to window to Stella’s apartment. She’d be going early he’d be locking up late. They’d be ships passing in the night, but as Erin alluded to, form an unlikely friendship, which was at the core of their marriage as much as anything. And eventually when they did find their way back together, the way I alluded to, would be the foundation upon which their future was built.

 

Q) Besides Stella and Wes, “Life Sentence” was full of shippable relationships. Did Peter and Ida fall in love again? Did Lizzie and Diego have more kids? Did Kayla ever come back for Aiden?

 

Erin: Yes, to all of them. Those would all be great story areas. Peter and Ida (Gillian Vigman) for us were going to start dating in Season Two and that would have been interesting to see people who’d been married for that many years try to have a fresh slate and start over and see what that was going to look like. Especially with Ida being bisexual, which was definitely something we didn’t want to drop.

 

Rich: We talked about exploring the fact that as she and Peter reconnected she might have met a woman that she also had feelings for and sort of figuring out how that would work and how complicated that would be and if they should maybe have an open relationship and all the things you would expect a twenty-five year old couple go through. We thought it would be really interesting to see Stella’s parents earnestly and honestly go through in a positive way and also in a way that would be hard to process if you’re their adult children.

 

Q) What did you have planned for the second season? Did the trial work for Sadie? Would we have seen more of Finley? Would Stella have found her passion?

 

Rich: For Peter and Ida it was really going to be navigating this relationship and figuring out could they make their marriage work given that Ida is who she is. For us it echoed Stella and Wes in Season One, where they love each other but is that love enough because the situation they’re in is so complicated. Now that that situation was resolved, at least for a season, we were going to explore a similar theme in Peter and Ida. We talked about Stella getting to buckle down and be a twenty-three-year-old and see what that means and see the parts of it she likes, the parts of it she hates. We talked about maybe her going back to college as well and continuing down a path of becoming a more full-time patient advocate.

 

Erin: For Stella, we hadn’t made a full decision on Sadie (Nadej K. Bailey) yet, but we talked about the fact that if Stella suffered a big loss at work and potentially that being Sadie that it might’ve kicked her back into deciding that she needed to just be frivolous and young and free and not be spending so much of her time trying to give to other people because it was too hard for her. But then I think by the end of the next season she would’ve swung back, either by going to college for social work or by getting the job back at the hospital or a different kind of job at the hospital. In her core by volunteering at the hospital Stella tapped into what her life’s purpose was, but it wasn’t doing events for the hospital and volunteering forever. It might’ve been becoming a doctor. There were a couple different things we talked about that would’ve felt fulfilling for her long term, but the next season was going to be a swing back for her into college life and dating and like, “What if I just don’t care about other people and I just think about myself for a minute.” And ultimately that’s not who Stella is, but it would’ve been fun to see her go into that for a minute.

 

Rich: We even thought about her potentially if she met a cute guy and they hooked up in a TV-friendly way and then she found out that he was a TA in one of the classes she enrolled in at college.

 

Erin: That was our “Grey’s Anatomy” moment.

 

Rich: Aiden and Wes, one of the one’s we talked about, was them hiring a new bartender at the bar that they both had a crush on and what that would do to further complicate their work relationship. We also talked about Wes meeting somebody, but not being willing to get out and date until Stella did first because he wanted to make sure that this new arrangement was beneficial for her. Like Erin said, if she lost Sadie or we talked about a couple other things that could’ve happened to her, we liked the notion that she got in the beginning of the season a reason or two not to move on and see the world that she so boldly said she was going to see it in Season One so that maybe Wes could help her with that in Season Two. We liked keeping them supportive of each other in one way or another throughout the seasons. To answer your Kayla (Alyssa Diaz) question, maybe. We loved Kayla. She’s a terrific actress and she actually left us a little sooner than we’d planned, because she got a fantastic role on the new season of “Narcos” and so we wrapped that story up. We love her and that’s one we haven’t talked about, but we definitely liked the notion of her coming back or a similar character who was emblematic of what she represented, which was yet another for Aiden to start putting the pieces of his adult life together coming into the picture.

 

Q) How did you go about balancing the humor and the heavy topic the show revolves around without making things be melodramatic?

 

Erin: Rich and I both use a lot of humor in our real lives to get through painful or uncomfortable situations and so do our families. So, I think that’s the sensibility that we are aware of in our own lives and were trying to reflect accurately in the show. It was also an interesting balance writing to ending up with our final edits because sometimes we would write more jokes into the script that we thought were going to end up in the show, but we knew we wanted at least a few jokes per episode that were going to inspire laughter. And then there were those moments that we dropped all of that and we knew that it was going be something that felt real and serious and something that we wanted to take seriously. In editing is where you pick and choose your moments and make sure that you have a good balance of everything.

 

Rich: Generally, the way we would ideally construct an episode is that the episode should work without any of the jokes. Then, you know if you have a scene where the emotion is landing in a way that doesn’t feel melodramatic, you can pull the jokes out cause there’s nothing to undercut. Then, you know otherwise like Erin was saying, in editing you have a plethora of jokes in there that you can pick and choose from. But for it to work you have to really know that if you cut them all, the show would still work without the jokes. Then, in editing you can pick and choose where you want a moment of levity.

 

Q) What was your favorite “Life Sentence” line?

 

Erin: My favorite line was in the finale when Wes says, “It was meant to be, it just wasn’t meant to be forever,” because I think that’s very emblematic of the show.

 

Rich: I would say my favorite line was Erin’s from the pilot, which is Aiden to Dr. Chang, “Whoa, hot doctor alert. I should tell you, I’m here with someone. She’s outside. It’s not serious, but she does exist.”

 

Q) How did you go about constructing things around Stella, but making sure it wasn’t just about her and everyone else had an essential storyline that fit so well together, like pieces of a puzzle?

 

Rich: That was something that Bill [Lawrence] felt was important from the beginning, to start with Stella. He worked on “Spin City,” which was a Michael J. Fox show, so he really was adamant coming out of the gate we focused around Stella and then our goal was to slowly build up the world episode by episode. If you watch the season back you’ll see it becomes gradually more ensemble because it goes from our audience being in Stella’s shoes when she knows nothing about the family to learning more and more about them. By the time episode four or five rolls around and she really knows them well, it felt like it was okay for us to deal with the show as an ensemble because we were all in on everybody else’s dirty secrets, so to speak.

 

Q) Aiden could’ve been very one-note and solely comedic relief, but Jayson Blair brought a lot of uniqueness and light to him and he became a big character, eventually going through a journey you wouldn’t expect for him, which is a testament to the show you created.

 

Rich: Thanks. That was ultimately our goal. Jayson was the first person we cast after Lucy and to his credit we had some notions for him. But that character, like you said, when we had written it we were worried it would come across as two-dimensional if we couldn’t find the right actor. Jayson came in and we just all were like, “Oh my god, this is the guy that’s gonna make Aiden not a character, but a person.”

 

Erin: It’s really exciting when you move beyond the pilot stage and you understand who your actors are and what their skill level is and then you get to write for them specifically. It was nice that Jayson had the depth that we were hoping Aiden would and we were able to do it. It was great.

 

 

Q) You and the cast were very active on social media as the episodes aired. How was it live tweeting along with the fans and getting their instant reactions?

 

Erin: It’s really fun. I didn’t do it as much as Rich, cause I’m not as big on Twitter.

 

Rich: Nobody did it as much as Rich, to be fair.

 

Erin: Nobody’s as big on Twitter as you are. But I love watching things with a group. Going to movies or watching the show with our cast was always really fun and then when you’re getting to interact with people online, you’re really feeling like you got to watch it with everybody who was watching it. It was really a fun situation to hear what people were thinking and to hear their responses to what we’ve been working on in a void of an audience for so long.

 

Rich: I agree. Because of the way our show aired, we didn’t really get to put fan responses and reactions into the show as we shot it all ahead of time. But we really took those reactions and responses to heart and had there been a second season it definitely would’ve informed at least in some way the directions we headed in. You want to tell the best possible story, but also audience feedback is invaluable. The goal at the end of the day is to connect with an audience and have what you’re saying resonate with them. Taking into account what is and isn’t resonating with them and using that to shape a future season is definitely something we would’ve done.

 

Q) What do you hope fans take away from the series?

 

Erin: The biggest thing for us was that people took away a sense of hope. Even in tough situations, even if your family is going through a tough situation, that there are people in your life that will show up for you and help get you through it. In the world that we’re living in today, that sense of hope is really important for Rich and I to hold onto and we were hoping that our audiences felt that as well.

 

Rich: In addition to that, Stella didn’t get the ending she thought she would. In some ways, in life we’re taught that if you want a happy ending that looks a certain way and if you don’t get that then it’s not a happy ending. For Erin and I, we like putting out the notion that there are lots of different versions of happy endings in life and in family. If you let go of what you think your happy ending is supposed to be, you might end up with an ending that’s even better than you expected.

 

Q) Why do you think the show didn’t connect with viewers on a wider scale? It connected with the fans of the series who were watching, and they were passionate about it, but why do you think it didn’t expand to a broader audience?

 

Erin: I think part of it has to do with the fact that the show was marketing to a younger demographic and a lot of young people today don’t have TVs and are maybe watching it online or will watch it on Netflix. It’s on Netflix now. I think the people who tune in live to shows, I just don’t think it’s as big of an audience as it used to be. It’s really divided up between all the shows that are on that night, but then anything that you want to watch on a night (any movie, anything you want to stream) so live viewing is tough. It’s tough for everybody. But I also think we were doing a family show on a small intimate level on a network that is mostly big superhero fair and big comic book fair with a lot of promotion. As much as we wanted it to be an interesting offering for The CW viewers, I don’t know if it was.

 

Rich: I did a little bit of traveling on the break and I was surprised that most people just hadn’t heard of the show and I think that’s just sort of symptomatic of the amount of shows out there right now. It’s hard to break through, even with someone as awesome and as well-known as Lucy. I met a lot of people who knew who Lucy was, but had no idea she was on a new show. Unfortunately, if you don’t break through the noise early, sometimes you just don’t. Like you said, we’re thrilled that the people that found it mostly connected with it, but for whatever reason (and networks never know why this is, it’s why pilot seasons exists) it just didn’t find that initial audience. Most shows if you look at them, if they don’t find an audience out of the gate they don’t usually. Unfortunately, we also aired late so we didn’t have the benefit of waiting to see if it found an audience on Netflix before they made their pickup decision. For better or worse it had to be based on the live numbers and while we loved the show, the live numbers just weren’t there.

 

Erin: Also, I don’t think this was a show about cancer or about making cancer look like it’s easy to get through. It just happened to be that our lead became cancer free at the beginning of the show. If you were just going to read about the show and you heard, “This girl’s cured of cancer in the pilot,” that may have turned some people who were dealing with it in their lives off in some way. We were concerned about that from a marketing perspective because if you had gotten passed that or if that didn’t bother you, then it’s really about so much more than that. It’s really about getting a second chance at life through these circumstances, but that might have been a deterrent for people to show up at the beginning. I think if we had anticipated that we may have tried to market it slightly differently.

 

Q) If you could go back and do anything differently with the show, would you have?

 

Erin: The show became a confluence of a lot of people and the network and the studio all really putting their best into it. I’m going to say while it could’ve gone a whole bunch of different ways, we’re going to stand by what we created and just appreciate the fact that it resonated with the people that it did in the form that it ended up in.

 

Rich: I agree. With any show there’s a thousand ways to go, but this one really was…We had a blessing that so many people on the creative side and the network and the studio loved the show and did everything they could to make it succeed. And given the amount of people that were involved and wanted it to succeed, it came out in a way that we’re both very proud of. You can’t, unfortunately, guess what an audience will want. You can only make what you would want to see. At the end of the day, we did that. Again, we’re just so thrilled that it connected with the people that found it because that was our end goal. Erin and I both had babies right at the end of when we were writing the pilot and were starting to raise them as we were shooting the pilot, so we spent a lot of time away from our families and our children. And getting paid to do your job is nice, but seeing it resonate with people makes missing moments with your children worth it. Every moment I missed with my daughter over the last eighteen months is worth it, as much as the show and the effort we put in made a difference in people’s lives. That’s a truly unique thing that we get to do in this business and we’re very lucky for it. Erin and I are both very thankful that we get to do that, even if it’s to a small linear audience.

 

Q) You touched base on a lot of serious issues in the series. Was there anything you wish you were able to delve deeper into?

 

Erin: We definitely planned to get deeper into loss. We hadn’t decided what was going to happen with Sadie or if there was going to be another patient in Stella’s life, but Peter recovered from his heart attack and Stella recovered from cancer. And I think we were looking forward to exploring what it would mean to lose someone that you love. That was something we were planning to do in season two in one way or another.

 

Rich: Season One for us we really wanted to focus on a theme about recovery and moving forward. But then in Season Two we really didn’t want to treat cancer and chronic illness as if it was something that our show always ended with a cure because anyone who’s suffered from it or had a family member suffer from a chronic illness, they’re chronic and more often than not they don’t have a miraculous ending. We definitely wanted to explore that in season two. We chose not to in Season One because we wanted it to be about a hopeful recovery for someone who wasn’t expecting it.

 

Q) How do you feel about the fact that there’s a petition going around to save the show? Did you see it?

 

Erin: We did see it. It was really awesome that people cared enough to put that out there. It was really sweet. I think it would’ve needed to go viral to get anyone to change their minds, but we were very moved by it.

 

Rich: As you said, it was very emblematic of the fact that we had a small group of fans, but a passionate group. That meant a lot to us.

 

Erin: Better than a bunch of people watching that don’t care.

 

Rich: That depends. Ten million people that don’t care might be nice.

 

Erin: That might be okay.

 

Q) How did the two of you become writing partners? I read something about you meeting in an acting class about a decade ago. Did your partnership start there?

 

Erin: That’s where we met, but we didn’t start writing together for a while after that. We were both acting and writing features on the side and then ended up working on the same pilot a couple years after having met in class and Rich had an idea for a pilot he wanted to write and asked me to write it with him. We were both acting in that pilot, but he asked me to write it with him and that kind of began our journey. I think it was back in 2012?

 

Rich: Might have been a little bit earlier. Might have been 2010.

 

Erin: Oh yeah, that’s right.

 

Q) What is the writing process like for the two of you? Do you ever butt heads if you disagree who compromises?

 

Rich: It really depends. If there’s something either of us feel really strongly about, we overplay that card with each other in terms of “this has to be this way.” And if we do, the other one’s very sensitive to that and either finds a way to agree or we try to discuss why we feel so strongly about it. And if it isn’t the exact answer one of us wants, we come to some sort of middle ground. Getting notes from a network or studio you have to listen to, not just the person’s saying, but try to figure out why they’re saying that and maybe there’s a deeper fix there that both of you agree with. Erin always says too, if it’s something we’re both super excited about it tends to work. If one of us is not super excited about it then it just means we need to keep thinking a little harder and usually that’s what we do.

 

Q) Now that the “Life Sentence” chapter has ended, what’s next for the both of you? How do you bounce back after an unfortunate cancellation like this?

 

Erin: We actually have two projects that we’re developing right now. Unfortunately, we can’t really talk about them because we haven’t found official homes for them yet, so we can’t spoil them. We’re hoping to get those projects out this year and have more to talk to you about later.