Jane Espenson is a cool chick. She’s written for Buffy, Angel, Firefly, The O.C., Gilmore Girls, Dollhouse, Caprica, Game of Thrones, and Torchwood. Cool. She’s been a producer for Caprica, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, Gilmore Girls, and the upcoming fable-icious Once Upon a Time starring Jennifer Morrison. Quite cool. She co-created Syfy’s Warehouse 13. Totally cool. But it’s all the more cool that she’s working on an independent web series. Yes, independent web series, as in where the cool people are. And then it’s even cooler that this independent web series is about marriage equality. Unbelievably cool. In Part 1 of our feature on Husbands, Digital Chick TV Creative Director Daryn Strauss grabbed some time with Jane to talk puns, non-stereotypes, and writing for the web. Expect coolness.
DARYN: First of all, I love the log line. “They’re doing it wrong. That’s their right.” Priceless. How important was it to create a gay couple that has marital issues like any straight couple?
JANE ESPENSON: Thank you! I liked that one too! We played with a lot of ideas, and I was all over this — I love making up slogans and things like that. I do adore a good pun! And that idea, that this is a couple that is foremost a newlywed couple like any other, was central to our thinking. This isn’t like the character of Sam Adama, on Caprica, where we played him as belonging to a culture that had no history of discrimination based on orientation — we’re playing this as the real world — but part of our point was that this was a show about people, not just about their gayness.
DARYN: Did the idea for Husbands come before or after the legalization of gay marriage in NY?
JANE ESPENSON: We had started work before the law passed in New York, and it gave us heart that we really were launching this at the right time. The views of the public are changing and it looks to me as if they’re changing fast.
DARYN: One of the things I love about web series is that you have the ability to create shows that are fresh and focus on unrepresented groups in realistic, non-stereotypical ways. Was that your motivation for producing Husbands for the web?
JANE ESPENSON: Yes, very much so. The web is quicker to reflect public tastes, and it’s also just plain quicker– we could get our show from concept to air without delay.
DARYN: Rumor has it that Felicia Day gave you some advice on producing a web series. (She kinda knows what she’s doing.) You co-wrote Husbands with Brad Bell aka Cheeks, who is hilarious. Was your writing process different knowing that the web was Husbands’ destination?
JANE ESPENSON: We did get advice from Felicia, who is whip-smart. And we were working with Jeff Greenstein, an experienced writer/director (WIll and Grace, Desperate Housewives), and a talented young line producer: M. Elizabeth Hughes. And Cheeks is a brilliant writer as well as performer, so I was surrounded by smartness. Our writing process was totally influenced by the web destination, in lots of ways — we wrote in short scenes that we could release gradually, we didn’t have to worry about our language (there are a few 4-letter words), and we could write what we wanted without anticipating network notes. It was regimented in some ways, like us being very strict on not going over 2 1/2 pages per episode, but mostly it was freeing. We had a blast!
DARYN: How many episodes can we expect and how often?
JANE ESPENSON: Eleven episodes. They’ll appear at HusbandsTheSeries.com starting on Sept. 13th, with new episodes appearing twice a week. They’re very short, but they snap together to make one pilot episode which we’ll make available at the end. I hope people go to watch — I’m very proud of how this turned out!
Check out a sneak peak from Husbands.
