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8TL_215_Celebrities, Crushes and Comics with Bryan Edward Hill

Melissa Roth: Welcome to 80s TV Ladies. Part of the Weirding Way Media Network.

Amy Englehardt: 80s TV Ladies, so sexy and so pretty. 80s TV Ladies, steppin’ out into the city. 80s TV Ladies, often treated kind of sh#*ty. Working hard for the money in a man’s world. 80s TV Ladies!

Melissa Roth: Welcome to 80s TV Ladies, where we examine female driven television shows from the 1980s Here are your hosts, Sharon Johnson and Susan Lambert Hatem.

Sharon Johnson: Hey, guys, I'm Sharon, and when I was growing up, my favorite comic books were Archie comics. I can't say that I've read any since then, although I am aware of some. But yeah, I was an Archie girl.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That's so funny. Do you watch Riverdale?

Sharon Johnson: I do not, because, it's so not Archie.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yeah, but it's Archie, apparently. Anyway, I'm Susan, and, my favorite comic books from the 80s were the ones I read when I got to visit my cousin mark in Mississippi, and he had a stack of them in his closet. The Amazing Spider Man, Justice League, X-Men, Wolverine, and of course, I personally collected the first ten Star Wars issues, which I still have today in a box in my closet.

Sharon Johnson: I'm really a little astonished that as a, a Star Wars superfan, that I wasn't aware that there were any Star Wars comics to be collected at that time. So I have none.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, yes, there were.

Sharon Johnson: Are they worth anything?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Well, you know, probably not, because I actually, you know, if they were in perfect condition, then maybe they would be worth like a couple thousand dollars. But, they're not in perfect condition. I was eleven. I read them and kept them in a drawer, not in sealed plastic, and then I stuck them in a box. But they're worth a lot to me.

Sharon Johnson: Well, that's what you're supposed to do with things like that. I don't know, read them. That seems to be what the purpose is, not stick them in hermetically sealed plastic or whatever.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I guess some people read them and then stuck them in hermetically sealed plastic because they wanted to be precious about it. But I wasn't that.

Sharon Johnson: I read a lot of books. I had a huge collection of, you know, at school you'd go to, you'd be able to order books through the catalog and stuff. I had tons and tons of books.

Susan Lambert Hatem: They still have that now. It's gone online. But in the early days, when our youngest, Washington, was, in elementary school, they still sent home the little magazine thing going, here's all the books you can get, and here's all the toys you can get with it now. Cause that's what they did to it. But what was that called?

Sharon Johnson: I can't for the life of me remember. Oh, my gosh.

Melissa Roth: I remember the RIF mobile. Reading Is Fundamental.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, I do remember Reading Is Fundamental, but I don't think they sent a mobile around to us.

Melissa Roth: It was like a mobile, you know, library that you could go in and look at a book.

Sharon Johnson: Well, I was very lucky. I remember at one point when we were living overseas, the library was literally across the street. I spent a lot of time over there.

MR: That is lucky.

Sharon Johnson: Checking out books. It was awesome.

Susan Lambert Hatem: The Scholastic Book Club.

MR: Oh, nice.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And you'd get those little-- I love that. And circling the ones that I wanted.

MR: I had the Highlights magazine.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I love the Highlights.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, yeah, it's awesome. I think that's still around too.

Susan Lambert Hatem: It is still around. Goofus and Gallant. Wasn't that Highlights?

Sharon Johnson: I don't remember them.

MR: I don't remember it that well.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, well, it would like so. ‘Cause Goofus was always kind of a jerk. And Gallant was really nice and polite and, you know.

MR: And gallant.

Susan Lambert Hatem: It’s gotta be—

MR: Do those old television Christian animes count? The—

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, yeah.  

MR: Gumby? Does Gumby count as a cartoon?  

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yeah.  

MR: But I also watched Captain Scarlet.

Sharon Johnson: Wow. I don't remember Captain Scarlet.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I don't remember Captain Scarlet at all.

Sharon Johnson: Would Mad magazine be considered-- It's not really a comic book, but there was a lot of animation in it.

Susan Lambert Hatem: There was a lot of cartoons, drawings.

Sharon Johnson: And stuff in it.

MR: I would count it as a graphic publication.

Sharon Johnson: Love Mad magazine.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Love Mad magazine. Yeah, I did love them. I love a lot of graphic novels now, but don't read as many comic books. But it's big. And there's a lot of television shows that were based on comic books and a lot of comic books that are based on television shows. But anyway, today we're going to actually talk to a comic book maker and television writer and producer and filmmaker. And so we're going to talk to him about television and, you guessed it, comic books. We have an awesome special guest today, my friend and amazing writer Bryan Edward Hill.

Sharon Johnson: Bryan graduated from NYU film school. His tv and film writing includes HBO's Titans, Ash vs Evil Dead, and the Legend of Muay Thai: 9 Satra.

Susan Lambert Hatem: For comics, he's written for Black Panther, Fallen Angels, American Carnage, Angel and Spike, and Chariot, among many, many others. DC, Marvel, and independent publishers.

Sharon Johnson: Welcome, Bryan, to 80s TV Ladies.

Bryan Edward Hill: Thank you for having me. It's a joy to be here.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I am so happy to have you on because you've been so supportive of the show and you're a friend, and so it's really a treat to have you on.

Bryan Edward Hill: Well, I just thought the show was a wonderful idea. You know, since I'm a fella that grew up largely in the 80s. You know, there's some 90s in there somewhere. But we don't talk about that.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Don't talk about the 90s.

Bryan Edward Hill: And you know, I grew up in a single-parent household, raised by my mother. So, you know, dimensionalized, strong female characters, huge part of my childhood. And so that intersection of that and the 80s, I mean, I couldn't resist.

Susan Lambert Hatem: So we know each other because we met through my husband, Richard Hatem. Because you guys have spent the last four to five years working on HBO Titans together.

Bryan Edward Hill: We have. We have indeed. The unsinkable Richard Hatem. Yeah, yeah. And it's been wonderful, that whole experience. You know, it's-- Speaking of television briefly, it's just so interesting because you spend the same time working on a show that you would spend in like graduate school, you know. And it sort of feels a little bit like college or graduate school as well because a hiatus, then you come back and then you're back in . and Oh, who got a haircut? Who got new shoes?

Sharon Johnson: I had never made the correlation before, but that's exactly right.

Bryan Edward Hill: Oh, absolutely. It's just like that. It's just like that.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That is so fantastic. And then you're like, okay, well, who's back and who's new, who transferred in.

Bryan Edward Hill: Who's new?  

Susan Lambert Hatem: Who left?  

Bryan Edward Hill: Don't let them sit by themselves at lunch. That would be rude. Like all of those different things. All of those different things.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh my God, I love that. Because it's like it is. Yeah. And you know, and you're hoping you make it, you know, through the four, five years of grad school.

Bryan Edward Hill: One hopes, one certainly hopes.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And then you can start another grad school later.

Bryan Edward Hill: And then you can start another grad school. You know, once you get into that kind of mindset, I guess it never stops, right?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes, it's true. I mean, that's what this show is. I was just, I had something to say, but also a lot of questions and, that I wanted answers. So I'm giving myself a grad school in 80s TV Ladies.

Sharon Johnson: So, Bryan, let's go back and, kind of start at the beginning. Where are you from and how did you get to Hollywood?

Bryan Edward Hill: Originally I am from St. Louis, Missouri. And I went to NYU and so I spent about 10,12  years or so in New York. And then I came out to Hollywood when I sold a screenplay. So because I was poor in St. Louis and I was poor in New York, I was determined not to be poor in every major American city. So I didn't move to Los Angeles until I had sold something so I could come out and not have any memories of Top Ramen on the West Coast. And I don't have any, I'm very proud to say.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That is fantastic. I love that. We could just spend hours talking about being poor in New York, because I don't—

Bryan Edward Hill: Certainly.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: My hat's off to you, because that's not a city that is cheap.

Sharon Johnson: Not at all.

Bryan Edward Hill: It's not.

Sharon Johnson: Was it always your goal to be a writer for television or movies?

Bryan Edward Hill: I, would love to tell you it was, Sharon, but it really wasn't. My goal was really to make a lot of money and not have to grow up. And so I searched in high school for something that would allow me to do that, that was keyed into a passion. Right? So storytelling was always a comfort for me. Stories were just always very important to me. Kind of helped me frame myself. I talk about stories as the last vestige of philosophy we have in culture. It's very difficult to get someone 16, 15,14 to read Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius, but you can present these ideas in fiction. So since I was an 80s media baby, basically, I was of the try not, do or do not. There is no try. Right?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes.

Bryan Edward Hill: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. Right? So these things were really important to me. And then, as I was kind of charting a course through life, I didn't want to be the interesting guy with a cubicle and a Spider-man tie, you know, that was always the fun guy to be around at the office party. That didn't seem like the way for me. So I was like, well, writing is interesting. I have some facility with words. I'm interested in the human condition. And I, went to NYU to be a filmmaker as well, because I loved film too. Writing was easier, so I just did more writing. And then when I came out of NYU, I intended to write to fund my filmmaking career. and then I got seduced by the ability to make money in an air-conditioned room without lugging equipment up flights of stairs. And so writing became more of a passion, from that point on. And that's kind of how I landed in Hollywood. I just threw a bunch of things at the system, and 99.9% of them came right back to me. But one of them got in, and then I got things started, so on and so forth.

Susan Lambert Hatem: So, when did the comic books, what came first? Comic books, television, film, it was sort of all simultaneous.

Bryan Edward Hill: I mean, when I was a kid, you could get a Snickers bar, a Slurpee, and a comic book for about $5, right? So, there were impulse buys, and they were some of the first things I bought with my own money, right. I mean, you can't really buy this and that, but you sort of cherish the things you can buy with your lawn mowing money. Just kind of loved them as stories. And then my father died when I was seven, and so I struggled with that like any young man would, and I just found a real affinity with Bruce Wayne. and that really bonded me towards Batman. And then comics were at large. In a lot of ways, it kind of bonded me to fiction in general. I mean, this is a whole different podcast. We could talk about, about how I was raised by fictional fathers, because I had no idea what masculinity was. I knew it was some kind of combination of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Bruce Wayne, and I would figure it out somehow. So they were all, comics were a really important thing for me. And then the interesting thing is, as I grew older, the writing got more layered and more dimensional. See, a bunch of  British writers came in, and did really strong work in the space.

Susan Lambert Hatem: In the 70s and 80s was this happening?

Bryan Edward Hill: In the 80s, like mid 80s, when the Alan Moores and the Neil Gaimans and the Grant Morrisons showed up. Right? Frank Miller. And so as I was, growing older and seeking more nuance, these stories also grew in nuance. And they also sort of framed how I looked at female characters in fiction, because comics are replete with interesting dimensionalized heroines and villains and all of that. It's sort of like a unique landscape in that way. When you combine that with James Cameron movies and what have you, I mean, how I arrived is pretty apparent. So, yeah, as I kind of grew older and started writing as a pursuit, comics were interesting to me to do, a bit opaque how one does them. But once I opened up a few doors in Hollywood, I suddenly became more attractive to comics. Imagine that. Ah, and then I started working in comics. And to this day, I still write comics on a semi-regular basis. And I write feature screenplays, and I also write and produce television.

Susan Lambert Hatem: So you keep busy.

Bryan Edward Hill: I try to idle hands, you know, idle hands. I do try to keep myself, -- Because I was an only child, so I grew up having to keep myself busy, I think. And I think you just never lose the knack of that.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And so when you were watching television, what sort of 80s-driven shows, or particularly 80s-driven female shows do you remember and were informational to you?

Bryan Edward Hill: I have to say, a lot of it has to do with people I had crushes on. Sorry to disappoint.

Susan Lambert Hatem: No, that's where a lot of things start.

Sharon Johnson: Exactly.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Magnum PI, whatever.

Bryan Edward Hill: It was like Scarecrow and Mrs. King because I had a crush on Kate Jackson. And we could be here for 8 hours talking about Jane Badler in V.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, yes! V!

Bryan Edward Hill: And Faye Grant. Right?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes.

Bryan Edward Hill: You know, Susan Day on LA Law, Jackeé Harry on 227. Like, I was just getting my heart broken across television most of the 80s. So I think some of that still left an impression on me. Like, even when I come up with comic book characters, sometimes they'll come out like Patricia McPherson from Knight Rider who played Bonnie. Like Stephanie Zimbalist will still kind of show up in the iconography, as it were. Marilyn McCoo will show up.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I love that.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah, yeah. You know, that's the thing of it. So that was my relationship because I was coming of age at the same time, you know, and a lot of that is just formative, and it kind of burns its way into you.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: They're so beautiful too. Like, you know, you're watching, you're like, actors are, and actresses are so beautiful. They're so, there is something really amazing. Like I think about how much we adore actors, right. And we can kind of watch them do anything. And it's often physical, a physical beauty. But it's also like, I think of, you know, Tyne Daly, who was very physically beautiful, but, you know, also was sitting here and I was just like, I'll listen to you read the phone book. Literally, just please, whatever you want. You want to read the newspaper, come into my house every day and just read something out loud to me.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, just sit there and talk.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Just sit there and talk.

Sharon Johnson: Anything you want to say.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Because there's a real gift in that ability to, I still don't know how actors do it. I'm around actors all the time. I've directed actors, I've written for actors. I don't know how they do it.

Bryan Edward Hill: Well, it was magical back then in a way that it isn't now because you didn't have 24-hour social media access to celebrities. Right? I mean, you basically, you had the shows they were on. If they were in movies, you had those movies, and then maybe you would have Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight that would do an interview or something. But you had very specific ways that you would experience these people. and it was the magic of them getting beamed through a television set in your grandmother's living room or in your mother's apartment where the big TV was, and you'd sit there and you'd watch that. It was kind of a different relationship, I think, that we had back then than now. I'm kind of glad that I never could go onto Susan Day's Twitter feed. No, I didn't need that.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That would have been too much. It would have broken some magic. It would have broken some magic.

Bryan Edward Hill: It would have broken some magic. There are things I don't want to see. Melody Anderson coming out of the gym. You know, like, that's not interesting to me. Like, I would rather sort of watch things, you know. Cybill Shepherd was just larger than life. Right? all those things. And so it's not that I think it's worse now, but I just think our relationship to media celebrity, ah, human iconography is different now than it was when I was growing up. And I think some of the inexorable quality of it all has been lost.

Sharon Johnson: I mean, I appreciate, and I'm sure they do too, the ability of a, for lack of a better word, celebrity to be able to communicate what they want to communicate directly without the filters of publicists or studios or whatever. But at the same time, yeah, I do, it does kind of take away from the magic of whatever it is that they do. Like Susan, I-- Sometimes it does seem like a magic trick, some of the things that some performers are able to do, so. But that does come back to the audience and they're, at least from my standpoint, choice in terms of what they want to consume and how they want to consume it. But we're still kind of going through this phase of trying to figure all that out because this is so new that all this stuff is just out there. But in the 80s, no, that wasn't an option.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah. You didn't have the expectation of access.

Susan Lambert Hatem: No. You were lucky if you got the TV Guide interview and the People magazine interview.

Bryan Edward Hill: Right on. You too, Susan. Like, you know, I've been very grateful to have met quite a few celebrities just through work, whether it's developing a script with someone or Wrestlemania event. And you meet someone and, you know, you meet people that are, you know, undoubtedly A-list famous, what have you, and it's, you know, it's kind of a moment. It's cool, whatever, but it recedes. I'm pretty good. I'm pretty cool about all of it.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I bet you're pretty cool. I see that.

Bryan Edward Hill: I was at a comic book convention maybe about two and a half years ago, three years ago, and Erin Gray was sitting next to me and I didn't have the power of speech because it was different, right. Because that activated something in my lizard brain from being like, eleven years old and watching Buck Rogers or something, or Silver Spoons. And I just literally just could not-- I think I stuttered in front of her. She was very lovely about it. I think she gave me a photograph.

Sharon Johnson: No, but I hear what you're saying. I had a similar reaction, quite unexpected. I was at, I don't know, some event, something or other, and suddenly saw Thomas Carter across the way and literally could not speak, could not move. And my friend Brittany was like, let's go say hello. I'm like, I can't. I don't-- You know, it's-- You just never know where that reaction is gonna happen.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah. Yeah. it's just different, you know, you can't sort of get that back. I mean, it's happened on occasion with, you know, other folks, like, you know, like Buffett, a Schwarzenegger or something. It's kind of hard to just take that one in stride. I've never worked with Tom Cruise, but I've known people that have worked with him and, you know, I'm sure that's a moment for sure. But, yeah, it's those folks that, when you were a kid and it was all like, kind of impossibly real, but also fantastic at the same time. You know, those feelings never leave you. and luckily, I've never had a bad experience--

Sharon Johnson: That's great.

Bryan Edward Hill: Meeting someone from that era, where it would tarnish anything that I used to love growing up. And I've been really grateful for that as well. Everyone I've ever met who worked on those things from when I was a kid and growing through that has all been very, very kind and very, very patient. Even though I'm sure they hear the same things over and over and over again. I'm sure Catherine Bach never wants to hear any more about how someone had a crush on her.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Right? Like, when you're in that developing moment of your teen years and your young early twenties, there's something really you're looking for, who you're going to follow, I think. How do I behave in the world? And who is going to inspire me? And like you said, the philosophy of our day is in our comics and stories.

Bryan Edward Hill: And that's why I think representation is so important, because I know it is empirically, from my own experience, because I grew up watching Linda Carter as a kid, that opened up my mind to the perception of a woman as a leader, a woman as a hero, a woman as someone that you would follow, virtuous, reasons, the rest of it, all these things leave an impression on you when you're young. And if you don't see those things playing out dramatically in our entertainment, it becomes harder to recognize the existence of those things in the real world, to champion those things in the real world. Right? And it's influenced a lot of my writing to this day still just, kind of, I never really had that barrier of gender when I thought about a hero or even a villain, whether we're talking about Linda Carter or Jane Badler, equally powerful and left a deep impression on me. And it's something that I do consider a lot when we sort of people get into the vicissitudes of feeling like we're being pressured to do this, pressured to do that, pressured to do that. It's like, no, no, no. We're just sort of reflecting the world that is. And, I think it's critically important that we do these things because our ethical language lives in our popular culture. And if we don't consider that, then we're not considering the potential harm of having a narrow vocabulary in our ethical language.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I love that-- ethical language lives in our pop culture. I'm writing it down.

Bryan Edward Hill: So sometimes you're looking at a mirror,\ to what you're going through, and then sometimes you're looking at a window to what you can become. Right? And so for, like, take Batman, for instance. So Bruce Wayne was kind of both, right? The mirror was, I'm sad, he's sad. The window is this is what you can do with that sadness, right? You know, Bond was incredibly important to me growing up, right? And I kind of grew up in the Moore era. Connery’s I found later. But when I was younger, it was always Roger Moore, you see. Bond, James Bond. Right? That was the thing. And it was like, oh, so you have to be polite, and you have to do the right thing, and you have to save people, and you have to have a sense of humor, right? And so all these things left an impression on me. Just kind of like, okay, I think I get how to grow up. And, I sort of sacrificed my teenage years knowing, that, Bryan, you're not really going to find your stride until you're 35.

Susan Lambert Hatem: You knew that as a teenager?

Bryan Edward Hill: Absolutely, Susan.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, interesting.

Bryan Edward Hill: I just do. I just gave up. I gave up on adolescence. I was like, I don't understand how any of this works. I'm going to read Esquire magazine. I'm going to read Ian Fleming books. But it wasn't only enlightening for my own life, Susan, it was also-- It gave me kind of a window into other aspects of my life. For instance, like Cagney & Lacey, you mentioned, Sharon Gless, Tyne Daly. Now in my TV viewing, there was sort of like a slide, right? So the stuff that kids would be interested in happens first. That's when you get your Riptides and Knight Riders and A-Teams and the rest of it. And then the grown-up shows start to happen a little bit later when you're yawning, but you don't want to go to sleep, and you've got that little television in your room, and you're keeping it going. And so I'd watch a lot of Cagney & Lacey, and I didn't understand most of it.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yeah, it's very adult. Like, looking back, I realized, like, how adult it is in terms of -- It's more Hill Street Blues than--  

Bryan Edward Hill: It's super adult. Like in the opening credit sequence, when the flasher guy opens up the thing and then they make the funny faces. I had no idea what he was doing for like, three years, until I realized, like, oh, that was a flasher. I didn't really care who that was. but I could recognize an emotional parallel between what Cagney & Lacey were doing as characters and what my mother was doing. In a way, it sort of felt the same, like the same kind of emotional battles, the same kind of things. And I didn't really recognize it consciously, but subconsciously it gave me a window into what her experience might be like, taking care of me and doing all of that. And it was like a glimpse into adulthood, which I think is a lot of, of how children get the first sense of adulthood and adulthood's terms is through media. Because you're not going to be in the room during adult conversations normally. You're not going to be involved in these things. But when you're watching  Thirtysomething because you have a crush on Mel Harris, which I do and still do, and then you're seeing these different sort of nuances going on between adults, it doesn't all land, but it gives you an idea of what, grown-ups are kind of going through. And TV was a real window into that for me.

Sharon Johnson: Have you had an opportunity recently to go back and take another look at some of those shows, those formative shows for you from back in the 80s?

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's kind of hard to know Rich Hatem and not revisit late 70s and 80s era television, I have to say. Although on my own accord, I watch and rewatch Miami Vice. So that is just something I always do, because I love that. But, yeah, I have gone back and seen them. And then now, as a student of film and culture and all that, I can look at Hill Street Blues and see the link to The French Connection in it. I can like, oh, okay. So this is a little bit of a Friedkin’s take, but it's got this emotionality that's in there and the rest of it. And then sometimes there are things that you saw when you were a kid that had moments that burned into you emotionally, and you didn't really catch all what was going on, but you got to go back and you got to revisit it. So there's a lot of little moments like that. I remember growing up, like, I have a very vivid memory of the scene where Mark Harmon takes a drunk Bruce Willis and takes him back to his apartment and sits him down. And even though they're both in love with Maddy and Bruce is mad at him, Mark Harmon's character isn't mad at him. And I was like, oh, Bruce is mad, but Mark isn't. He's not really a bad guy. Like that stuck in my mind. Or I, Daniel J. Travanti and Connie Selleca in that movie. I think it was, ah, ah, Adam. Yeah, they were both in that movie, Adam. And it was the moment where Travanti finds out-- Adam Walsh playing Adam Walsh. Adam Walsh finds out that his son has died and has been killed. And I just remember Travanti grabbing a mattress or something and emoting in this powerful way. And I just hadn't really seen a man do that on screen before. And I remember that being incredibly affecting. And so I do revisit this stuff all the time. It's weird, these things that just kind of lock themselves into your mind. Like that one episode of 21 Jump Street where Hanson's girlfriend gets shot in the convenience store. And Hanson, played by Johnny Depp, couldn't save her. And it was like, I forgot the exact number. But he had gotten the security footage of her shooting. And he recognized that there was about 2.5 seconds or something that he would have had to do something different. And within the episode, you see Hanson making a list of all the different things you can do in 2.5 seconds. You can take off your shoes. You can do this. You can do that. And there's a scene where Holly Robinson at the time. Holly Robinson. Holly Robinson Peete now, was consoling him through all of this. And maybe I saw the episode once or twice, but it doesn't leave you. And so, yeah, so sometimes I'll revisit it and be like, I need to re-watch this to kind of understand exactly what the context of this was. Sort of remaster it, kind of take it out of the deep viscera of it all, and then kind of revisit and see what's going on. So, yeah, I do it quite a bit.

Sharon Johnson: So were you finding that those emotional moments that you were describing, did they still hit you? Maybe not in the same way, but at least in some deep way this time around or on a rewatch as they did the first time around?

Bryan Edward Hill: They did. Because there was 50s and 60s television. You still have the theatrical presentation of drama, largely. I mean, you had some of your kind of edgier works that started to kind of push the envelope a little bit. And then when you go into the late 70s, that's when folks like Michael Mann were starting in TV. Right? And Michael Mann was working on Vegas and all these-- And so the naturalism kind of comes in. And the 80s was a really, interesting nexus of naturalism and style.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes, I agree with that for sure.

Bryan Edward Hill: And so the moments still work because they're presented in like a 70s method way. But there was a little bit more heightened style on top of the whole affair. And I think they're still, like largely effective. I mean, the acting within a lot of those shows is still really, really great.

Susan Lambert Hatem: A lot of emotional journeys in those 80s shows that I think are weirdly still resonant.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the stories still work largely. And, and it's a lot of first-love stuff. Like my experience with law was watching LA Law. I was like, okay, I guess that's just being a lawyer is like, you have to be really good looking. And then you have to get some wisdom from Richard Dysart.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes.

Bryan Edward Hill: And then you can go do a thing.

Sharon Johnson: Right.

Bryan Edward Hill: And so, like Victor Sifuentes was like, okay. I guess that's what you do, right? That's how you be a lawyer, even like Hunter. Right? And, you know, it was Dee Dee McCall. You know, like, on its surface, it's just, you know, cop show, and she has to go undercover. I think she went undercover as a hooker, like, maybe seven too many times on the course of that season. That was like, Dee Dee's go-to game was like, you know, she's gonna walk the streets and then she's gonna whip out the silver .38. But there is a lot of really good, like, fresh banter going on in there, and there's a real crack to a lot of those scripts that I kind of wish we had more of that today.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Well, Hunter has come up a lot because-- And the actress is Stephanie Kramer. And the relationship between Hunter and Dee Dee McCall has come up a lot as a working relationship, male-female, that is less romantic and more professional and friendship. And that's unusual, I think, both at the time.

Sharon Johnson: But even now, there always seems to be some push towards making the male and female leads have some sort of romantic relationship. And most of the time, I'm like, do we really need this? Let's just-- Well, you write comics and television and features in terms of storytelling and in terms of approach, do you come at them differently in terms of trying to figure out story for each of those kinds of things?

Bryan Edward Hill: It's a very good question. I mean, in certain ways, storytelling is storytelling is storytelling. So in the larger, philosophical sense, the work is about the same. I think the real difference is the level of economy that you have to use. So a screenplay anywhere, usually between 110 pages, maybe 100, 140 if you're working in one of those important films. But you have a lot of pages and you have a lot of scenes. Scenes still have to be efficient and all of that, but you have a little bit more time. TV, I find, is much less time, because you have to almost deliver an emotionally resonant, feature-level experience in literally half the space. So I think your scenes have to accomplish more things in television than they do in a movie. Like, when I'm watching a movie, what I'm struck by is that scene was only about one thing. And I'm like, I can't ever do that in a TV script. Every scene has to do multiple things at the same time. I can't just have a scene where Moneypenny comes to Bond and plays a video from M, and that's the whole scene. No, that has to also be about this thing and setting up this character thing and paying off the last episode and the rest of it. So it's economy. And then a comic book, it's even more economy because you only have 20 pages and about five panels of artwork, five images per page, to push that story forward. Right? So, you have to be even more efficient and more targeted about what you do. But one of the reasons why I really love writing comics is working in that efficiency matrix makes it easier for me, at least, to accomplish more, I think, in a television script. And a television script makes it easier for me to accomplish more in a feature because you're sort of used to having to do all that. So I think that is the largest difference in the art forms. But I write visually, in all of them. I’m a visual thinker. So, ah, that's kind of carried through. But yeah, I think that's what it is. It's really just about how long do I have to create the experience is the big question between all those forms.

Sharon Johnson: When you have an idea, though, do you know going in where it's going to be? Is it going to be a comic, a TV show, or something else? Or, does that sort of come as you begin to work through what the story is actually going to be?

Bryan Edward Hill: Good question. Unfortunately, a lot of that decision making is also encumbered by business strategy, frankly. Right? More about viability. Is this idea more viable as a comic or a, ah, television idea or a film idea? All of that. Rarely do I just get to sit and think format agnostic and feel it out that way. It's usually a conversation with my reps, with some friends figuring that all out. Now, there are some things that I think just work better as a comic book because either they're far too expensive to try to write as a screenplay or a television idea, or they're just so visually driven that you want to direct them on the page because the imagery is how the story is being told for those kinds of things where I think the imagery is really part of the experience. And I kind of view myself like-- Rich is a master writer. He's an excellent writer. I am not. I'm a pretty good writer who can also design an emotional experience. So experiential design is really what I do, I think, and writing is a part of that. But sometimes the experience I'm trying to create is just better served by having something that has images associated with it rather than living in the theater of the mind, you know? So that also kind of comes to bear when I'm making these choices. And then oftentimes a comic book for me would be a palate cleanser. You know, I just got done working on a thing here. Like, I'm working on this huge movie for Universal right now. I can't talk about the details of it, but--

Susan Lambert Hatem: That’s fine.

Bryan Edward Hill: It's enormous, right? And it's got cultural importance and all of those things that you say you want to do when you come to Hollywood. And I love working on it, but it takes skin, bone, and marrow, and blood to kind of get this thing going. So, working on a comic book for Marvel just helps me create and keep myself productive, but just kind of get out of the Olympic-level kind of pressure from that process. Just be like, here's a yarn about a superhero who stops a bad guy, right? So a lot of that is also kind of what governs what I do, how I do it.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And where does Titans fit in? I'm just curious about your experience on Titans, because it's been--

Bryan Edward Hill: Titans, it's interesting, because I came in very new to television. I'd only done one season of a show, Ash vs Evil Dead, which wasn't an intensely dramatic show because we didn't have much time, half-hour runtime. You have to have two demon fights every episode. So you basically had four pages where people talk to each other. We had a lovely showrunner, Mark Verheiden, who I think is amazing, who should be on the show too, actually, because Mark is a brilliant guy. He's been working forever, and he knows a lot of these folks. He was talking to me about Virginia Madsen the other day. He's that guy.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I love Virginia Madsen.

Bryan Edward Hill: He's got all the anecdotes, and Mark's a lovely guy. And so I love working on the show, but only in a season of that. And then I went to Titans. That was the first hour-long show I'd ever worked on. Deep serialization. Yu know, I, was familiar with the comic book stuff, but also, I'm more of a Batman guy than I am a Titans guy. So I had decent familiarity, but I didn't have the fluency that I have with, like, Batman.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Well, I was gonna say, but you've written for DC Comics too, but, but-- Yeah, I understand.

Bryan Edward Hill: But that's a huge pantheon. DC Comics is everything from lawyers, superheroes. Well, it's more Marvel. It’s Daredevil. But it's everything from super-grounded stuff to very cosmic whatever. And I sort of worked in the more Gothamy, could be possible for two weeks, maybe kind of space rather than the high fantastic. But it was great. I got to learn. I was pretty useless the first season of Titans, to be honest. I was doing more learning than I was contributing. And everyone was very patient with me, I think. But I think as the series went on, I started to find my sea legs a bit, and like I said, you grow through these processes. And since I've been on this thing for four or five years, absorbing everyone's technique, which I think is the biggest benefit of being in a writer's room, is you get to see how other people solve problems. And then that can go into your toolbox, because everyone comes at something from a different perspective. Right? And that's kind of hard to do when you're just on your own writing a screenplay, sort of shift your point of view. So that was, really helpful and, yeah, and it's, been really rewarding. But speaking to what we were talking about earlier, one of my focus points in working on Titans is making sure the female characters, I think, have dimension and agency. I don't want to say strong female character because I don't know what that means, but very human female characters that have shades and flaws and strengths, and the rest of it. I'm very focused on it, and I think that's because of a lot of the stuff I saw when I was growing up. Growing up on David and Maddie, growing up, on Kate Jackson, on various television shows. Some actors I would just follow from show to show to show. Charlie's Angels reruns and then Scarecrow and Mrs. King, you know what I mean? Like that kind of thing. And it all goes into the mind, goes into the heart. So now working on TV, it's kind of hard to get that stuff out of your mind in execution. And so I do pay a lot of attention to that just to make sure that these characters, I think, hold up to the kind of experiences I had when I was growing up.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Okay, we want to keep talking. We're going to take a short break.

Bryan Edward Hill: Sure.

Susan Lambert Hatem: But we'll be back with more. Okay, we're back.

Bryan Edward Hill: So I had a comic book I wrote called Seven Days from Hell that was like Ian Fleming meets Rod Serling, basically. Not going to get into the story of it all, but it was like a metaphysical spy thriller kind of thing. Wrote the adaptation of it as a screenplay on my own. I just kind of specked out, as we say in the business, because I had a vision for it and did a couple drafts of that, floated around and it got to Pierce Brosnan. Because his producing partner at the time, Beau St. Clair, who passed away a few years ago. She was so lovely. It got to her. She read it and she was like, oh, I think Pierce would really like this. You know, I showed him. So she showed it to him, I think. And I don't know if he like read all the way through it or what have you, but he wanted to meet me personally. We went all the way up to Malibu. I'd never been to Malibu before, and so I'd never seen that side of Los Angeles. You know, I'd seen like, the Tony Scott Los Angeles. I'd seen like, the Martin Brest Beverly Hills Cop Los Angeles. But Malibu was different. Right> That was like Aaron Spelling. This is where the gajillionaires live. So I’m going into Malibu, going to some private club or something to meet Pierce Brosnan. Nearly shaking in my Nikes. I walk into this place, feel totally out of place because I'm just in this private club. Why am I here? That kind of thing. I get to the table and I see Pierce. And he’s sitting next to Vijay Armitage, the tennis pro, who was also in Octopussy. Right? Now, Octopussy was a Moore film, but apparently Pierce and Vijay are friends.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Once you’re in the Bond world, they just hang out. It’s just like you’re all on a text chain.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah. Not only am I, am I sitting down with Remington Steele, Thomas Crown, James Bond. Right? There’s also Vijay Armitage, who, if it was just a tennis pro, he's an amazing tennis player. But on top of that, he was in Octopussy. And I can barely handle myself. So I sit at this table and Pierce sees that I'm kind of nervous. And he's so gentle. He's like, I think he said something like, do you need a few minutes to get through the Bond thing? And I said, I need like ten. So he talked to my manager for a bit and then I rejoined the conversation and everyone was laughing. But I told Pierce that when I was like eleven years old, I used to watch Remington Steele religiously. I thought he was the coolest guy on TV and I would try to act like him. So one of the things I would do is I would kind of lean back and put my finger against my temple like this. An eleven-year-old boy sitting like this that I absolutely picked up from Pierce Brosnan and Remington Steele. And he had a good laugh at that. And I made James Bond laugh. And it doesn't matter that that movie went nowhere. I mean, I could have literally been kicked out of Hollywood five minutes later and I would have had no regrets.

Sharon Johnson: That's fantastic. Oh, my gosh.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I once got to pitch a project to Jodie Foster, and it was pretty friggin’ amazing. The only thing that was terrifying about it was we were in her office. The heat, the air conditioning broken, so it was 1000 degrees, and she had a big, giant stand up of Anthony Hopkins from Silence of the Lambs right in her office staring at me during the entire pitch. It was really--

Bryan Edward Hill: I bet she's lovely, right?

Susan Lambert Hatem: She was absolutely lovely. She was absolutely lovely. Yeah, she was brilliant and lovely. She totally got everything. She had questions that were really smart, but very love-- But not in an attack way, and like, oh, my God, so let me. So this happens and that, like, it was absolutely the height of a lot of things. And, yeah. It was great.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah. I don't know many people who've told me Jodie Foster stories, but I've never heard a bad Jodie Foster story. I just hear that she's just amazing.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I walked in a big fan and walked out probably a bigger fan.

Bryan Edward Hill: Those are always the best. Much better than the alternatives. I've had those too, but I won't share those in the podcast. We'll do that later on.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That's a different podcast. That's a party. Later.

Bryan Edward Hill: Who not to meet with Bryan Hill.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, my God. We definitely need that. All right, I want to talk about Titans and the female characters on Titans for a minute.

Bryan Edward Hill: Well, first I have to give full credit to the female writers that we've had on the show over these years. Right? Like season one, we had Gab Stanton, who's amazing, who should be on this podcast.

Susan Lambert Hatem: We're going to get her on the podcast.

Bryan Edward Hill: Because she's just an amazing, ah, human being in every way. One could define the word amazing. And so that always helps because you have someone who really understands the experience from the center to add to it. And then we also pay a lot of attention to the actors. I'm very grateful that I've always had a decent relationship with the cast, even during season one, whether it was Teagan, who's very young. She was about 15 or 16, I think, when I started.

Susan Lambert Hatem: When you guys started. Yeah, she was very young.

Bryan Edward Hill: Anna Diop, who plays Starfire. You know, she was a little older, still very young, but, you know, old enough to go into a bar and order a drink. But, like, very friendly. And for me, it was really about harnessing the experience of the people in the room who've lived through these experiences, listening to the actors who play these characters, thinking about them and what they want to explore on screen, and then kind of filtering that in with my knowledge of the characters from the comics, and how we could realize them inside the vision of the showrunner, Greg Walker, which is different than an exact replica of the comic books. But it was really just a couple things. Just kind of making sure that every character, but especially the female characters, weren't acquisitions. They weren't there to be rescued or there to be ogled at and all of those things, and just making sure that they had layers. Right? You know, like, before, I kind of gave the Heisman trophy arm to the phrase strong female character. And I do that because I think that can lead to very one-dimensional writing. And instead of like, well, she has a gun, she shoots somebody, or she has laser beams and she'll use them, and she looks cool in her outfit, so we don't have to write her anymore because she's strong. Instead, it's just the layering of it all, and, and thinking about the emotional consequence of things. But a lot of that just comes from the real-time human feedback you have. And we also have a showrunner who is open and amenable to that kind of exploration, which is critical. Right? Because there's nothing we can do on the show that the showrunner, can't stop us from exploring. You need a leader who says, yeah, I want more of that. Yeah, I want to go deeper there. We can do more with this character in this moment, in those things. I mean, there's, look, there's a certain inherent amount of aesthetic style to these things. The outfits are very tight for everybody. For everybody, right? Equal opportunity oogling going on with all these things. So that is an element of it. I love the collaboration. I love working with people and getting their experience that I don't have. When I was on Evil Dead, I was sitting in my little writer's office, just a staff writer, as lowly as one can be while still writing a script, and I hear this beautiful voice asking me if I knew where the pretzels were. And I turn around and it's Lucy Lawless just standing there in the doorway. And so I remembered how to breathe and then I was like, Miss Lawless, I can take you to the pretzels. And she's like, just call me Lucy. I'm not even going to try to do her accent. It's mellifluous. And then, so I showed her where the pretzels were, and we just had this long conversation, about 15 minutes conversation, but it was wide ranging -- her experience as an actor and then doing stuns and the rest of it, and it all goes in somehow into the subconscious and comes back out. I hope that the work that we do that comes out on screen is really evocative of the real kind of family aspect of the show and how we're all paying attention to one another. And ultimately, we want everyone to do their best work. And that's kind of what I'm focused on all of the time. And because I'm a James Cameron kid and all of that, I have absolutely no problem with letting a woman run things in a genre story.

Susan Lambert Hatem: When it's all the Titans, I think of season two and three, four of the eight Titans were women, which, again, in the, superhero, collective shows, that doesn't always happen.

Bryan Edward Hill: It doesn't always happen. But there are a lot of interesting female characters within comics.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes.  

Bryan Edward Hill: Now we should. It's getting better now, but for decades, there weren't many women that were writing books. You know, like, there's a wonderful writer, Ann Nocenti, who did a lot of work on Daredevil, who I think is, like, super, awesome and open and all of that. And she actually might be an interesting guest on the show, too. And wonderful. And so there have been-- Gail Simone has been there for a long time. Gail's also a wonderful person, and she's into writing, but it hasn't been as balanced that way in terms of who's creating the stories, but in terms of the characters, there have been a lot of characters. And maybe some of these characters started as male fantasy.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: True.  

Bryan Edward Hill: But Wonder Woman kind of started as like a bondage thing wrapped in an American flag. Right?

Susan Lambert Hatem: But, yeah, the true story of Wonder Woman is insane. Crazy.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah. Bananas. Bananas.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That's another podcast. Go ahead.

Bryan Edward Hill: But these characters are a bit like clay, right? And they travel between the hands of storytellers, and hopefully everyone is kneading out some of the bubbles as they go along. Right? And so as the clay passes through different people, some of those unfortunate aspects are worked out and more interesting things are worked in. And they look at Kelly Sue DeConnick's work on Wonder Woman recently with an artist Phil Jimenez, which is brilliant, brilliant stuff. Right? So there's a lot of these really interesting characters that are there, that have all these great backstories, great character conflicts and all that. So, I grew up steeped in that stuff. That's why I've always been mystified at the resistance to women leading a genre story or any of these kind of gendered aspects of this stuff, because that just wasn't my experience growing up. Tou know, like, like, growing up, like, you went to rent Conan the Barbarian, and if they didn't have it, you rented Red Sonja, and you were happy about it. You know, like, I think, you know, this is film, but I think to, like, Dune, you know, and, and Chani working with Paul in the David lynch film, you know? Sean Young, you know, doing all the cool, adventurey things, right? Like, so it all, it really tripped me up when I got out here because I was writing all these female-driven genre pieces. Those, that was my library coming out to Hollywood. I just had tons of them I was doing, and I would get this weird resistance sometimes. I'm just like, but this stuff is already happening all over the place. So I'm glad to see that one of the aspects of comics is we do get now these female characters that have agency, and because they're being developed and written and filmed by really thoughtful creators, Matt's Catwoman is a lot more than just a fetching young woman in a skin tight outfit. Even though I would argue that Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman was also a lot more.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I would too. We could go on for days about that. I would love to come live with you in your big mansion and stay with you or whatever, but I just couldn't live with myself. That line has stayed with me since the moment I saw it. Okay, but go on.

Bryan Edward Hill: It's, like, kind of quietly feminist Batman Returns, you know? And it's got, like, shades of Working Girl in it a little bit. Right? So going kind of back to where we are, I was really awkward growing up. I was terribly awkward. So one of the things I would do to, like, learn charisma, basically, would be to mimic characters from shows. And so I picked up mimicry when I was a kid just to kind of find things to say and how to relate to people. And then later on, I used to watch a lot of stand-up comedy, and I would sort of study it because I knew that if I could make people laugh, that I could disarm situations a little bit. It seemed like something I need to learn how to do. So I watched a lot of stand-up comedians. And this is how weird I was. I would watch their sets, and I would remember their jokes, and then I would tell the jokes to myself in the bedroom. And then if I was watching, like, Rich Little or, you know, Eddie Murphy would do impressions on occasion. I watched a lot of the roasts. So, like, Billy Crystal.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I remember those, like, those were aired. They were huge.

Bryan Edward Hill: I used to watch all of those to kind of figure it out, right. But it all started with me getting over my, my social anxiety. I used to stutter really badly when I was a kid, and I think it was more of a psychological thing. Probably a holdover from my dad's death. The brain does weird things with trauma. Right? And I couldn't, you know what? I couldn't. I thought I couldn't, but I got over it. But, yeah, it was rough. So everything, that's why I'm always out there on social media telling people, don't give up. Keep moving forward, work on yourself, gain success in degrees, because everything that people may think I'm good at, I was terrible at for a while. Right? People are like, Bryan, you speak so well. Well, I didn't always. And writing was difficult for me. Like, so many things were difficult. And so I don't think I'm a person that was born with talent. I think my talent is I don't quit. Right? Like, that's where I think my talent lives, is. It's a nearly impossible to get me to quit. I don't give up. I don't give up on people. I don't give up on tasks, and that might result in acquiring skills. But I don't think I came out of the womb gifted artistically or anything like that. I kind of wrestled myself into it through the sheer force of will. So education's incredibly important to me. I was a scholarship kid growing up. I didn't have very much money, so, I was able to go to a high school where all the kids had a lot of money. Now, it made me miserable the entire time because I was ashamed and the rest of it. And dealing with all the things you deal with when you're the poorest kid in your school. But what it did give me was the proximity to successful people, and it demystified success. When I got to Hollywood, I realized, like, oh, this is just another high school. I know how to do this now. It was like going back to my high school with the skills of adulthood, understanding people's archetypes again, how to do that. So I think education is important in two equal ways. One, you have the academic aspects of it, the acquisition of information, the regurgitation of information with a sprinkle of active problem solving. Critically important. But what you also need is a social education.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yeah, I love that. Coming out to LA to go to film school at 17 from Georgia was a very cultural and social shift that I was very unprepared for. You're like, I'm on a different planet.

Bryan Edward Hill: Absolutely. That's why I love Bond movies so much. Because being in this business feels like being James Bond.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yeah. You're ported in and you got to solve a problem.

Bryan Edward Hill: You're ported in. There's a bunch of rich, dangerous people who want to destroy you, and you have to accomplish a goal without getting destroyed in the process. I think watching Casino Royale is excellent training for working in Hollywood.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And whatever you do, don't get caught in the wrong room with the wrong person.

Bryan Edward Hill: Because they won't save you.

Sharon Johnson: Exactly.

Bryan Edward Hill: Because you are on your own when you're out there. So it is up to you to get yourself back safely.

Susan Lambert Hatem: All right, let's talk about some of the projects you're working on besides Titans.

Bryan Edward Hill: Yeah, I wrote an issue of Black Panther. I'm working on, like I said before, this enormous film for Universal, which, without giving away details, it's romantic. It interfaces with music in a way that's very important to me. It's sort of a dual coming-of-age story. It's progressive in a lot of ways that matter to me philosophically. And I'm very, very excited about it. One of the things that I haven't really been able to access in most of my work has been romance, love stories, even like sexuality. Not really a lot. I haven't been able to do that much because I do comic book work largely. So I'm hyper excited about that one. I have a horror project I'm working on that is brewing. And cross my fingers, I should be directing a feature soon. So-- More to hear about that. But yeah. That is most of what I can say, yeah. One of the reasons why I do a lot of different things is I never really have to obsess about the fate of any one thing because I have some other thing I do. Right? The penalty for that is I don't sleep. I just have to keep moving forward and keep creating and remaining prolific. We'll see how it goes.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, my gosh. It has been such a pleasure talking with you. Where can we find you?

Bryan Edward Hill: Well, as long as it's operating, you can find me on Twitter. Bryan Edward Hill. Bryan with a ‘y.’ That's where I'm most active on social media. I'm fairly dubious of social media. I tend to think that social media is this generation's cigarette. Fifteen years from now, we're going to be like, why did we let children use this? We were crazy people who let children use this. Right? But here we are. So there's Twitter. Brian Edward Hill. You can also find me on Instagram. Bryan E. Hill. I have a YouTube that's called the Hill Administration. I rarely post videos there, but I do have some videos about writing and also the psychology of kind of getting through the business and dealing with some of the self-doubt issues, imposter syndrome, things I've wrestled with before. So there might be value there on YouTube. But those are the ways to-- You can also shine the bat signal on. I'll show up.

Sharon Johnson: Good to know.

Bryan Edward Hill: Not everyone has a bat signal.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Not everyone has a bat signal. And if you call for the Roger Moore Bond, that's--

Bryan Edward Hill: Right. And there's a special phone, it rings right to me. And, you know, but those are. Those are more difficult people to access. Maybe just stick with Twitter.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I will say that on Twitter, I have thoroughly enjoyed following you, and I really find your advice incredibly prescient and helpful.

Bryan Edward Hill: Well, that warms the heart, Susan. I don't know what to do with it, but I try to be positive.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes.

Bryan Edward Hill: I'm just gonna be a positive guy online. You know, keep the cycle of abundance flowing.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes. Oh, my gosh. Well, thank you. This has been a real pleasure.

Bryan Edward Hill: Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

Sharon Johnson: Thank you, Bryan. This has been great.

Bryan Edward Hill: If Jane Badler comes on, I’m coming.

Susan Lambert Hatem: We're calling you. And come do it in person.

Bryan Edward Hill: Okay.

Susan Lambert Hatem: All right. For today's audio-ography, you can follow @Bryanedwardhill. And that's Bryan with a ‘y’ on tTwitter, and @Bryanehill, also with a ‘y,’ on Instagram, and at The Hill Administration on YouTube. And if you want to check out some of his comic books, I recommend American Carnage, and Angel and Spike, Black Panther, and Chariot. And you can find a link to some of these in our website.

Sharon Johnson: And if you'd like to know more about American TV comic books, there's a book by Peter Bosch called American TV Comic Books, 1940s to 1980s, from the Small Screen to the Printed Page.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Dear listeners, we had some of your questions, listener questions that have come in over time for Eugenie Ross Lemming, who we interviewed back in season one on episode four. So we wrote to Eugenie and got answers back for some of these questions. So one of the first questions we had was, did she and Brad have any special touches, tricks, rules they would use when writing Amanda King and Lee Stetson scenes? And we had a couple of questions in that direction, and this is what she had to say about that. “We were marrying two realities. Suburban mom with James Bond, fish out of water. But often, instead of Amanda being the fish, we put Lee in the odd situation where he didn't fit and had no skills. He would pick up a flamingo lawn decoration and duel with it because he had no spy gadgets available. Her common sense complemented his training in arcane stuff, so she didn't always mess up and need saving. Sometimes he needed her to lead the way.”

Sharon Johnson: That's awesome. That's awesome to hear.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I thought that was really great.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah. And I think they did a very good job of carrying that through the whole series. So that's great to know where it all began. Next question. “The show's blend of action, comedy, romance feels like a nod to classic films, like if Charade, North By Northwest and Bringing Up Baby had a baby. A screwball noir, if you will. Were there any films or television shows that inspired this show? What was the tone you and Brad wanted for the show?” Eugenie said, “Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes or Victorious were inspirational. The predicament of an innocent swept up in a world of danger, excitement, and intrigue. But our style was more contemporary and less arch.”

Susan Lambert Hatem: I love that answer, too. And then we got a question about the fun theme song. If there were any neat little tidbits about the fun theme song by Arthur Rubinstein. When we did our music podcast. And Eugenie said, “We hoped for a grander than TV, more like a film score. Score. We played Bernard Herrmann for our composer, Arthur, as an example, and wanted Bernard Herrmann, but with more of a wink. And he wanted to create a theme for Amanda and another more heroic theme for Lee and marry the two.”

Sharon Johnson: I don't know about you, but when I hear that theme song, it stays with me for days. It just will keep rolling over in my head, out of my control.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Because it’s fun to be a spy and it's fun to be a mom. It's fun to be a mom and a spy.

Sharon Johnson: It really is a great theme song.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: It really is.  

Sharon Johnson: I miss theme songs. As we've discussed before, yes.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Thank you, Eugenie, for sending us those answers. Keep your questions coming, listeners, and we will try to get them answered from whoever we can, whoever will still talk to us after this. Hey, Sharon, you know what else?

Sharon Johnson: What?

Susan Lambert Hatem: We won three Podcast Awards.

Sharon Johnson: I know! We did, didn't we?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Guys, we don't know how it happened, but somehow they gave us three Podcast Awards from the People's Choice Podcast Awards. Thank you, voters. Thanks you, listeners. Thank you to our entire crew. We won, Best Art podcast, Best TV and film podcast.

Sharon Johnson: And Best Female Host podcast, which I think is the one that I like the best out of all three of them. Listen, I'll take any of them. I never expected we'd win any of them, let alone all three of the ones we were nominated for. So it's amazing.

Susan Lambert Hatem: It's really great. Congratulations to all the winners. You can go over to podcastawards.com and check out the streaming awards show and see all the winners and all the nominees. And there are really great podcasts in there. I also want to shout out our team. I want to thank Sharon, you right there, for joining me on this crazy podcast journey that's now an award winning, crazy, podcast journey. I want to thank Melissa Roth, our producer, Kevin Ducey, our sound engineer and editor. You guys have been on from the very beginning. I want to thank the 90s TV babies -- Sergio Perez, Serita Fontanesi, and Megan Ruble. And I want to shout out Sullivan and Sean from Concept Marketing and all of our amazing guests and all of our amazing, fabulous listeners. Thank you, guys. We're thrilled.

Sharon Johnson: And frankly, none of this would be happening without Susan. She's the one that came up with the idea that invited us all to go on this journey with her, this incredible, amazing journey with her. So, Susan, it all begins and ends with you. So thank you.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Thank you.

Melissa Roth: Yay. And don't forget Richard. Don't forget.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, I won't forget Richard Hatem. I thank him every day. But thank you, Richard Hatem, because, yes, we wouldn't be here without Richard Hatem, one of our original guests and a co-producer on this podcast. Thank you for listening to 80s TV Ladies. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcast or your favorite podcast platform. We're on all of them. Spotify, Google podcasts, Goodpods. Search 80s TV Ladies. And tell your friends Be sure to tune in for our next episode and listen to all the previous ones. If you're just joining us.

Sharon Johnson: We hope 80s TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward being amazing Ladies of the 21st century.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Let's go.

Sharon Johnson: Thanks for listening.

Amy Englehardt: 80s TV Ladies, so sexy and so pretty. 80s TV Ladies, steppin’ out into the city. 80s TV Ladies, often treated kind of sh#*ty. Working hard for the money in a man’s world. 80s TV Ladies!

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