Photo courtesy of Showtime

In Showtime’s new comedy series I Love That for You, we follow Joanna Gold (played by co-creator/co-showrunner Vanessa Bayer), a childhood leukemia survivor, who finally achieves her lifelong dream of becoming the host of a home shopping channel. The catch? She told her boss her “cancer is back.” Oops!

Inspired by true events in Bayer’s life and their mutual love for the home shopping channel, co-creator/co-showrunner Jeremy Beiler (SNL, Mrs. Fletcher) sat down with Final Draft to share his experience of taking the series from the page to production.

Home shopping research

“I turned on [QVC] as a joke, but then I wasn’t able to turn it off.” Beiler shares. “There’s something strangely magnetic about the world of home shopping. It’s an indescribable experience, watching someone talk about a product and only say great things about it.”

Bayer and Beiler’s research in preparation to write the pilot brought them to a QVC set, where they were surprised to learn that “the world of home shopping is not a janky operation.”

“They make a ton of money. They’re rivaling Target!” he says. “And they’re constantly navigating their own sales, minute to minute.”

Creating a world set in a live TV studio lent itself to a “rich, layered environment” because “there’s a threshold of what’s happening on and off-camera, and a million things are happening at once.”

However, Beiler makes one caveat: “A world is not a show. Regardless of the world, you have to separate what each character wants and how they’re going to get it because a show is about people struggling to get what they’re trying to get. ”

Weaving multiple storylines 

“Interactions with another character can change their journey or give them a new tactic,” he says. “A lot of the work in the writers room was staying organized, so we knew which characters were going through what and weaving that into the world. But the show didn’t really begin until we figured out who was in the show.”

So how did Bayer and Beiler decide who was going to surround the earnest yet awkward Joanna? “Molly Shannon’s character Jackie was a real early invention. We felt drawn to creating someone for her who she would’ve watched as a kid and then get to meet and receive mentorship from in person,” he says. “We wanted someone who had this fun quality and is a star in this really specific world. She’s on top of the mountain and floats into every room, which plays against who Joanna is.”

“Then we thought about the CEO of this network,” says Beiler. “We came up with this powerful boss, a woman who dresses amazingly, doesn’t suffer fools, insults everyone, and is unapologetic in her quest for money.” He adds, “Jenifer Lewis is a force in that role.”

Tonally, I Love That for You is a balancing act

At its core, the show’s subject matter is about faking cancer, and to do that with humor requires a delicate touch. To navigate this, Beiler says, “It’s a constant moment-to-moment judgment as we stitch things. We’re always asking ourselves, ‘Is that joke serving the story?’ Are we feeling what the character is feeling? Is it too heavy-handed, or do we need something funny here?’”

He also mentions, “None of [the QVC world] needs help being funny, by the way, if you just do it the way it is.”

“We had a hard time [with] stopping writing the QVC segments where people are selling,” Beiler shares. “Vanessa and I could write a 35-page sentence that never ends because when you watch the show, it’s a half-hour sentence that never ends. There’s no air.”

“But honestly, I had the most fun making fake product names. It’s endless fun.”

Everything is funnier when it feels real

In creating fun, playable characters that are distinct, Beiler was able to utilize his sketch experience, but he makes an important distinction.

“Sketch, you can get away with being more cartoony, and it doesn’t need to be as detailed. It can be a blip. The biggest difference in writing characters for a series is that you can’t afford to keep them in the reality you might be able to in a sketch.”

“You have to believe these characters are real,” he says. “Everything, even in sketch, is funnier if it feels real.”

“It’s hard to track how you build a character from writers’ room to screen,” Beiler admits.

“Because you’ve seen some of these actors in everything, and they’re amazing. Then you meet them and see what they’re interested in doing. Then you’re working on writing something that would be different for them to do that they’d like to do while knowing that you can give them anything, and they will slam dunk it because they’re so good and can make it their own.”

And that’s when a project becomes “more than the sum of all its parts.”

“It’s unbelievable. I feel overwhelmed that we get to make this idea we came up with,” he shares. “The biggest feeling is not that I feel intense ownership. It’s the complete opposite. This [show] belongs to so many people. It belongs to the hundreds of people who worked their asses off to make it happen. That’s the most powerful feeling.”

Beiler jokes, half-serious, “The part that makes me most happy is that I could drop dead tomorrow and that they’d still make the show.”

He pauses, “It’s such a relief to serve something bigger than you as a writer. It’s very exhausting if it’s just about you.”

And what would he say if he could go back in time and high-five himself? “I would maybe choose to go back to when I first had the idea to write something about QVC. It’s so common to have ideas, but it’s rare to get them made. I would feel more fortunate than I do now that we could come up with this and then we get to make it.”

‘I Love That for You’ is available on Showtime.