CELEBRITIES
The show Swanberg wants to
do for life
Last November, indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg quietly began shooting a TV series for Netflix, with a focus on (mostly) young people dodging and weaving their way through modern romance. Premiering last week, each of the eight episodes of “Easy” stands alone as its own story, like a mini-movie.
The main characters change from one episode to the next, and each chunk is meant to be watched as its own distinct thing: a story that begins and ends within 30 minutes or so, starring actors you probably recognize. Dave Franco as a wannabe brewmaster. Orlando Bloom and Malin Akerman as a married couple. Marc Maron as a graphic novelist who mines his personal life for his books.
Everything about the way Swanberg has designed the show, with its bite-size relationship capsules, is meant to extricate you, the viewer, from the tyranny of serialized TV and its demands on your time.
The following is an edited transcript.
?
A: No, I sent Netflix 15 episode ideas, and they chose the eight that they were most interested in. And then I talked to a number of actors, and I was like, “There's four or five roles you could play. Let me pitch them to you. Are any of them more or less exciting to you?” And a lot of times an actor was like, “This one in particular hits close to home. I would like to play that.”
?
A: I didn't want to be trapped with a set character list — I'm way too ADD for something like what Lena (Dunham) is doing with “Girls,” where I think they're in Season 6 or whatever. She still has the same central four characters. I don't do that. I'm impressed by the ability other people have to do long-term storytelling, but it's just not my natural thing. So I liked movies because you can just start and finish them and then move on.
?
A: Some of these characters in “Easy” do know each other, so there are little incidental bits of overlap. But there's not a grand narrative. I'm not like, “These are the first eight pieces of an 80-piece puzzle I'm going to put together for you.”
So (if Netflix greenlights future seasons), I need Season 2 to be totally up for grabs.
I would like to do this show for the rest of my life. I would love to meet characters from Season 1 40 years later and pop back in on their lives. It will always be genre-defying simply because I could never tell you what the next season would be about. I just know I want it to be about real.