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| ABC's Speechless stars, l-r: John Ross Bowie, Mason Cook, Micah Fowler, Kyla Kenedy, Cedric Yarbrough and Minnie Driver at the Paley Center for Media, Beverly Hills May 9, 2017 |
And as beautiful a bookend as this 23rd episode -- ABC likes the show so much that back in December, they ordered one extra installment for this first season -- was for the family we had come to care about, JJ's ability to survive summer camp certainly doesn't signal that the struggle is over.
Last month, on the eve of its upfront presentation, ABC officially renewed Speechless for a second season. Just days before the official order, which everyone had anticipated, I attended an event celebrating the series at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, and caught up with the show's creator, Scott Silveri -- upon whose own family the DiMeos are loosely modeled -- to talk about what we can expect for season 2 and beyond.
Must-Hear TV: So what have you
thought about for season 2? There obviously
must be some family stories with which you probably frontloaded the series in season
1. But are there still more personal stories
you want to tell?
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| Speechless creator and Executive Producer, Scott Silveri |
Scott Silveri: Yes, that’s the
way to characterize it. In the first season,
you have to really concentrate on those dynamics between the [main characters] who are in
the show every week. And in the second
season, hopefully people are familiar with them, and we can open it up a little
more. We can learn a little about where Minnie’s
character came from, where John’s character came from, and have the kids have friends who are not paid
aides [like Cedric Yarbrough's amazing Kenneth] or siblings.
But I think more than
anything, it’s just not going to get easy for these guys. Because that’s life, and that’s particularly
this life. You go to the right school,
and then something changes. You get the
right aide, and then they go on to something else. Life is like that. But particularly for a family with someone
with a disability, if you care about the care of the person you love, you’re
setting yourself up for disappointment over and over again.
MHTV: People change, and
people move.
SS: Exactly. It’s not difficult to think of ways to make
life hard for these guys! And the joy is
going to be in that struggle, and having them face it with a little bit of
courage and some fun.
MHTV: Have you pitched
season 2 to ABC already? For many shows,
that’s what happens, pitching to network executives, "This is what our
season would be, if we get renewed."
SS: No! Sometimes you do that, but we were not asked to,
so… I think they know generally we’re going to open it up a
little, to explore the next step for these guys.
JJ is a senior in high school. What
is his next step going to be? And towards
the end of the season, we really explored his independence, and his life away from his
family a little bit. Before that
there had been none of that, and now we’re
slowly rolling that out. And I think it’s
a natural spot for a lot more of that, which will be a challenge for him and a
challenge for people who care for him.
MHTV: When you said you
would be "expanding" their world, obviously there’s a certain percentage of the main characters of season 1 that came right from your life, and other writers’ too. But do you have auxiliary people in your
mind, who were in the background of your real life, and now you get to think, “THAT’s a good secondary character!”
SS: Yes. People I both want to celebrate, and to take
down. A healthy dose of both! Celebrating people – how much fun is that? I have some names of some administrators we’ve
been sharpening the axe for for months – for years, actually! We’ve got some Silveri grudges to settle.
MHTV: It’s an Italian
thing. What percentage of season 1 is
from real life for you? In real life, your brother's disability is a little more pronounced than JJ's.
SS: From my real life,
it really wasn’t episode for episode.
There are shows that do that and do it well. Like The Goldbergs do that, and there’s a lot
of “this happened to me, my brother said this, my mom wore that.” And that’s cool! But that’s not how we chose to do it. I found it particularly suffocating, frankly,
to try simply to mimic things that had happened in my life. I found it a lot more freeing when we changed
who these people were, we put a couple of people together, and gave license to
these guys to be characters rather than caricatures of my folks.
MHTV: I would think it
makes it easier to take a step back so you can fictionalize it without feeling
weird about it, like an actor with a mask.
SS: That’s it,
precisely.
MHTV: So JJ is not
exactly your brother, and your mom is not British.
SS: They have some
overlap, but no. And I’ve had my mom
checked. She’s not British.
MHTV: So you did 23 and
Me while she was sleeping?
SS: Exactly. I think there is a feeling that was important
to convey. These guys feel
different, and take pride in being different.
No apologies. In fact, sometimes
we think we’re better than the other folks for being a little different. There was that, and there was how they always coming
back to their center, and form a unified front.
“It’s us against the world.”
But luckily that
doesn’t happen too often. But you have a choice in any given situation: are you going to cry or are you
going to laugh? And my folks, God bless
them, always chose to laugh. So I thought that was something to be replicated,
protected and celebrated. The rest of
it, the exact quirks and plot twists that our lives took, I didn’t feel the
need to cling closely to that. The
vibe is what I wanted to protect. And it’s been
fun to get to do that.
MHTV: In terms of
tentpole events that might happen in season 2:
will JJ’s graduation be one of them, like at the end of the year?
SS: I think that’s
something to work towards. And that’s
such a big thing. A lot of friends of
mine who have disabilities bemoan the fact that there’s a lot of attention paid
to children with disabilities --but once you grow up, there’s a little less of
that. There’s something adorable and
cute and inspirational – which is a word that everybody hates – about a child,
but then you don’t get quite the same attention and care as an adult.
MHTV: "Good luck to you –
and thanks for taking forever to get on the bus!"
SS: Exactly! So I think we’d like to explore that. Because every time there’s been a challenge
that has come up for the characters, we’ve tried to find a funny take on
it.
MHTV: Non
saccharine. That’s what I appreciate.
SS: We’re going to keep looking for these very
real challenges, and it ain’t hard to find them. And turn them into opportunities for this
family to bust their asses, to find a way, and to laugh.
