This week, host Bobby Finger welcomes writer and comedian Halle Kiefer (@hallekiefer) to the studio to talk with writer, creator, and star of the new Netflix original series Special, Ryan O'Connell (@ryanoconn). During our chat Ryan opens up about his writing career, the long process of adapting his 2015 memoir into a series (thanks to some help from his "gay mafia"), the importance of representation and specificity in art, and why TV needs more gay sex. Skip segments you'd like to keep spoiler-free with these handy time codes: Final Destination 5: 5:30 - 7:30 Special: 7:30 - 31:45 Call 754-CALL-BOB and share your current obsessions, and we may discuss it on a future episode! Once again, it's 754-CALL-BOB.
This week, host Bobby Finger welcomes writer and comedian Halle Kiefer (@hallekiefer) to the studio to talk with writer, creator, and star of the new Netflix original series Special, Ryan O'Connell (@ryanoconn). During our chat Ryan opens up about his writing career, the long process of adapting his 2015 memoir into a series (thanks to some help from his "gay mafia"), the importance of representation and specificity in art, and why TV needs more gay sex.
Skip segments you'd like to keep spoiler-free with these handy time codes:
Final Destination 5: 5:30 - 7:30
Special: 7:30 - 31:45
Call 754-CALL-BOB and share your current obsessions, and we may discuss it on a future episode!
Once again, it's 754-CALL-BOB.
[Music]
Bobby: Welcome to I’m Obsessed With This, the Netflix podcast about the shows and films everyone seems to be talking about why. As usually, we will be having spoiler-filled discussions of all titles, so check the show notes for time stamps in case you want to avoid them. I’m your host, Bobby Finger, and I am joined today by writer and comedian Halle Kiefer. Hello, Halle.
Halle: Oh, hi.
Bobby: And calling in from beautiful Los Angeles, or at least I assume it’s beautiful today, is Ryan O’Connell, writer, creator, and star of the new Netflix original series Special. Hello, you two. Hi. Hi Ryan.
Ryan: Hello, hello. LA is actually being a temperamental diva today. It’s about to rain.
Bobby: It’s about to rain? Wait, what?
Ryan: Yeah.
Bobby: It’s rained a lot this year, I feel.
Ryan: Yeah. She has feelings this year.
Bobby: So you had your beautiful super bloom, and now you have the rain. You’re getting a little bit of both. I’m sorry.
Ryan: Exactly.
Bobby: Did you see the super bloom?
Halle: I did. I just saw one video where someone was driving their car over it. By the time I caught it, it was when there was the backlash of people visiting at all.
Bobby: I didn’t see that. People were driving their cars on it?
Halle: Well, they’re like don’t pick the flowers, and then there’s just a video of someone just driving an SUV through them. I don’t know where they were going. [Laughter] There was no road there, so I think that was my first and only foray—it was beautiful, though.
Bobby: Yeah. It was Ryan. Ryan, why were you driving through the super bloom?
Halle: Where were you going?
Ryan: I know, and I don’t even know how to drive, so it was my first time driving. [Laugher] Someone said there’s a parking lot we can go, or we can go in the super bloom, and I said super bloom, you know?
Halle: Right? There’s no other car, so it’s actually very safe.
Ryan: Yeah. Actually, it really, really worked.
Bobby: That’ll be the next, you know, once-a-century super bloom. How—every 10 years, every 15 years? There will be some business that’s like learn to drive in the super bloom. It’s extremely safe. Last time I was in LA, I was in a Lyft, and we were talking to the driver, because you know, everyone talks in LA, and it’s like sometimes fine.
Halle: It’s shocking. I’ve only been to LA once, and it was honestly—
Ryan: Everyone talks in LA.
Halle: I had a full book conversation with someone I just met. I’m like wow.
Bobby: We talked about the rain, because it was raining a lot when I was there, and I was like you know, that’s great, because you just had all those horrible fires. At least there’s a lot of rain, and he was like, actually—he full on Debbie Downered us, and he was like, well actually, that just means it’s going to be incredibly well-grown in spring, and all of that’s going to die in the summer, and then it’s just going to be kindling for more fires.
Halle: Oh my God.
Bobby: So that’s all I see when I see the super bloom now. I’m like well.
Halle: Is he like a fire fighter on the side? Like, he knew all of it?
Bobby: No, but he did say that when he was a kid, he loved setting fires.
Halle: Oh, girl.
Bobby: Somewhere in New Jersey.
Ryan: As one does.
Bobby: So again, I’m so sorry. We’re talking about fires instead of Ryan. Hello, Ryan. Thank you for being on the podcast today. I know you called in. It’s three hours earlier there.
Ryan: Don’t worry about it. I’m an early bird. It’s all good.
Bobby: What are you drinking? We always talk about the drinks on the show. It’s such a stupid part of the thing. Halle has an iced coffee with oat milk?
Halle: Right, which I felt like a real ass requesting, but boy, is it hitting the spot. So thank you so much, Bobby.
Bobby: I love oat milk, and I feel like—Ryan, are there new milks in LA? I feel like you get the milks first.
Halle: What’s the milk goss?
Bobby: What’s the newest milk?
Ryan: There’s a lot of different milk journeys that you can take. I’m going to say something disgusting and say that I actually was doing low fat milk up until two months ago. I know. I know. It’s not right.
Halle: It’s how you were raised. I mean.
Ryan: It’s not right, but it’s okay, you know what I mean?
Halle: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: And then I switched over to almond two months ago and never looked back, and then I tried oat the other day, and I was like not for me. Not for me.
Bobby: It’s not for you?
Halle: I like a coconut milk. To be fair, it does taste a little bit like coconut, which for some people, they’d rather drink blood, I don’t know.
Bobby: I like a whole milk or an oat milk.
Ryan: A whole milk? Okay, she’s living her life. She’s living it.
Bobby: I love whole. I hate half and half.
Ryan: Oh, well half and half is Disturbia.
Halle: What’s the difference? I don’t know if I could tell the difference by taste.
Bobby: I’m not really sure I know what the difference is.
Halle: Oh, you seem so confident. I believed you.
Bobby: I think it’s lower carb. I think half and half is lower carb.
Ryan: It is.
Halle: That’s what they tell us. If they tell us low carb, I believe it.
Bobby: It seems richer, but it’s actually—it doesn’t really do much for me. I don’t enjoy it. What are we doing here?
Halle: I don’t know. I’m just getting to know both of you. This is really a delight.
Bobby: So let’s move on to the part of the show where we talk about the things we watched on Netflix recently. Halle, let’s start with you. What did you watch recently on Netflix, not counting your homework assignments? Just something else that you watched that you liked. It could be anything.
Halle: Oh, other than my homework assignments, I finally watched You, which everyone had enjoyed, and it was great, and I’m bored for all of it. I am concerned that we have now entered into phase of TV where every show is about a sympathetic serial killer. Because I was like don’t let them find you out, you know, and then by the end of it, you’re like oh boy, I guess I’m really rooting for the wrong—
Bobby: He should have been found out.
Halle: Right. I feel like we’re in a point where we’re going to come back out of that. Once we realize we don’t have any more serial killer stories, we’re going to cycle back out of that. Still loved it. And I just pretty much just watch horror movies, any terrible horrible movie, any good, bad, you know, on Netflix.
Bobby: What about you, Ryan?
Ryan: Oh my God. With Netflix, let’s see. I mean, I’m watching the new season of Queer Eye.
Bobby: I have been watching—what have I been watching? All the Final Destinations over again.
Halle: Oh yes. I just watched the first one. Loved it.
Bobby: You know which one I love? The last one.
Halle: I don’t think I saw that.
Bobby: Halle. Can I spoil it for you?
Halle: Spoil it for me? Yes, of course!
Bobby: Do you want to know how it ends?
Halle: It turns out it’s a prequel to the whole thing?
Bobby: Yes!
Halle: Are you serious? That’s what it is? I literally just guessed that, because I was like what’s the dumbest thing it could possibly be? I’m kidding. I love that. Wow. Love it.
Bobby: I saw the final Final Destination, too, in theaters in 3D, had no idea what to expect, and the whole time, you’re kind of like, why does this weirdo have a flip phone? Weird little signifiers that it’s in the past.
Halle: Oh, love it! Love it.
Bobby: But not enough to kind of make you go crazy, because the ‘90s are hip again, so you’re like oh, he has a flip phone. That’s ironic. Or like the fashions are a little dated, but also like what is Bella Hadid wearing lately? It all looks like that.
Halle: Yeah, exactly.
Bobby: And then they get on the plane at the end of the movie—
Halle: I die. No.
Bobby: —and they get on the plane that Devon Sawa gets off of.
Ryan: [Gasps]
Halle: Thank you for spoiling it, because now I will go back, and I will watch all of them up until that one.
Bobby: It’s incredible. No, when you realize what’s happening, it’s like oh, we’re going to Paris for a school trip in the final, you know, five minutes of the movie. It’s like this wonderful reveal, and then you blow up.
Halle: That’s an M. Night Shyamalan style twist.
Bobby: It really is, and I feel like people didn’t talk about it enough. No one saw it.
Halle: I was going to say. I don’t think people were talking because nobody probably knew.
Bobby: You got to watch Final Destination 5.
Halle: I’m in.
Bobby: One, two, three, all good. Four is a little rough. Five is—is it the best? Maybe.
Halle: Wow. All right. I’m in.
Ryan: Hot take, hot take.
Bobby: Maybe. It’s very, very good. And then recently, I was a party a week ago, and the host—you know how sometimes people put a thing on the TV on mute? You ever seen that?
Halle: I don’t care for that. Yes, I’ve seen it. Not for me.
Bobby: I’ve seen it. I’ve never done it, but I’ve seen it, and they’ve had The Fifth Element on mute.
Halle: That seems like a wild choice.
Bobby: And I didn’t know a lot of people there, so I found myself watching The Fifth Element on mute the entire time, and then I went home, and I was like I’ve got to finish The Fifth Element with sound, as it was intended to be seen.
Halle: I was obsessed with Fifth Element, and I believe Gary Oldman is the villain.
Bobby: He is.
Halle: For some reason, I had a weird, absolute crush on him in that movie.
Bobby: He has like a weird hair style.
Halle: Like a plastic toupee sort of. Loved him.
Bobby: You have a weird crush on Gary Oldman. You love serial killers winning.
Halle: Yes, I’m the target audience of Netflix, pretty much.
Bobby: But we are here to talk about Special.
[Clip from Special]
Bobby: A show written, created by, starring Ryan O’Connell, who’s on the phone with us.
Halle: Ryan, I watched it all yesterday, and let me just say, I hated it. I’m kidding. [Laughter] No, I thought it was lovely. I did have that moment of like what if I hate this so much, and then I have play it off?
Ryan: Well yeah, of course.
Halle: Frankly, I was like most shows should be 15 minutes or could very well be 15 minutes. Great cast. Also, this was, Ryan, what I wanted to bring up to you, being of a person I’m assuming of a similar age, working for a company and going through an era as a writer where you are expected to mine all of your personal—the details of your life.
Ryan: You traumas, yeah.
Halle: And I just sort of wanted to ask you about that. Is that your takeaway now? Well, maybe not always a great idea, but ultimately, I reached out to people. There was some good to it. What do you think about that now?
Ryan: I mean, it’s so weird, because I feel like the three, two years—I feel like I only worked at Thought Catalog full-time for like two years, which is LOL, because in internet years, it’s like 20, you know what I mean?
Halle: That’s true, yeah.
Ryan: And I think that—I’m so ambivalent about it, because I think on one hand, it was a really exciting time, and it was really cool to be writing about things that no one else was really talking about, but it also became this like we created a monster, where it morphed into something else, which was like viral hits, viral hits. What weird aspect of my personal life has the opportunity to go viral, which is like honey, a lens where you don’t want to be looking through, you know what I mean?
Halle: Oh, absolutely.
Ryan: So it got a little like Zero Dark Thirty at the end, but I think it came from a good place, and it kind of evolved into something else. You know what I mean?
Halle: Oh yeah.
Bobby: What was the first blog post you remember writing, that you were like wow, that may have been too much?
Ryan: Oh, I wrote this post called “Sleeping with a Slut, LOL.”
Bobby: Was LOL part of the thing, or are you saying LOL now?
Ryan: LOL was my bridge, my postscript. I was 24. I mean, honey, when you’re 24, you have a rat poison brain. Anyway.
Halle: Oh yeah, no, 100 percent.
Ryan: Like you just do. Like, do not disturb. Do not touch. So basically, I was sleeping with this guy, and he was really, really good in bed, and when someone’s really good in bed, it’s like this kind of double-edged sword, which is like yay, but also like honey, like where have you been? And you feel self-consc, you know what I mean? You feel very self-consc, because you’re not sure if you’re delivering on your end of things. Anyway, so I wrote this post, and of course the guy was upset, which I was like so stupid. I was like, what do you mean? I didn’t quite understand. I had no boundaries, honey, like none, none, none.
Halle: Did you name him in it?
Ryan: No, no, no. I mean, I wasn’t that psychotic.
Halle: Right. I feel like there was a lot—you know what I mean? People would sometimes do that.
Bobby: Was that your most Harriet the Spy moment? Like, did you ever write something that people go actually angry at you for?
Ryan: No really, but the thing is with Thought Catalog, it took a lot of heat, but the fact is that everyone was garbage. Gawker people were garbage. Jezebel—everyone was trash. Let’s not try to elevate anyone above anyone else. Everyone was just jerking each other off and getting each other’s intellectual cum on each other’s faces, and that’s what it was. It like a giant circle jerk.
Halle: As a woman, I swear to God everyone I knew, you could find the most intimate details of your life all on xoJane. I don’t even know if that’s paid, or maybe it paid like 50 bucks a pop, but stuff that you—
Bobby: Fifty buck on a good day, I would assume.
Halle: Oh yeah, I mean for something that’s going to get traffic. There’s stuff that I would not admit if there was a gun to my head. People were just like that’s what it is now. And I feel like I’m not nostalgic for that, but it is funny how we just don’t have that in a matter of a couple years.
Ryan: Yeah, the culture’s changed completely, but I will say, there were a lot of fun aspects of that time. There just was. Like Cat Marnell’s writing was incredible. The internet to me was like—I remember it used to be like funny. Like Tracie Egan Morrissey would write these truly LOL posts on Jezebel that were so fucking funny. Slut machine—
Bobby: Lindy West.
Ryan: Yeah, Lindy West was hilarious. The LOLs flowed freely, and that’s the part that I miss.
Halle: And it was expected. It was like if you weren’t bringing that material, then people were not going to read it. I was reminiscing recently about Videogum and Gabe Delahaye, which for me, every post was hilarious.
Bobby: Every post was like golden.
Halle: And once things changed, you’re not expected to do that. And if anything, if you do that, people feel a certain way about it.
Bobby: And then it was like Facebook News kind of changed everything. People getting all their news on Facebook destroyed all of those very personal, funny blog sites. They could no longer exist.
Ryan: You know what, you would see the beginnings, though, of outrage culture, which is someone would get like harvested, be like the new victim of the week, someone like the Justine Sacco or whatever the girl who was like, I’m going to Africa. I hope I don’t get—so the public shaming would begin. That was the origin. And it was really interesting. Yeah, people would just like devour someone, leave them for dead, and then move on to the next victim. There was the seeds of that kind of Salem witch trial vibe. I don’t know, but still overall, I think it was a more innocent time. I think the world was simpler. It was pre-Trump. I don’t know. It also felt very creative. I remember in the beginning of Thought Catalog, one of the first posts I wrote was like what it feels like to get fucked in the ass, because no one had written about it before, and I was like, why is no one talking about this? Having anal sex is truly incredible and insane and overwhelming and all these things, and why is no one discussing it? I don’t know. I know that sounds stupid, but—
Halle: Oh, no. Not at all.
Ryan: There was a lot to explore that had not been explored yet, you know what I mean? I don’t know. That was the exciting part for me was being able to challenge that and bring something new to the conversation. Also, by the way, this is again LOL, but this was 2010, which was before even Girls game out, so talking about being in your 20s, well now, it’s like are you kidding me, we’re all 36 and trying to buy a house, but back then, it was like a different time. No one really was talking about being a millennial and what that meant. Again, 2010, it feels like 40,000 years ago.
Halle: You’re right. It’s changed so much. I almost feel like Twitter is sort of the bastion of that, where people are like both overly a little personal and also trying to be really funny. And as a result, I’m almost done with Twitter. Like, I’m at a point where every day, I’m like I’ve got to delete this because I can’t take the onslaught, but also, Ryan, just as every 24-year-old has a rat brain, it’s like—but also like 24-year-olds, they should be allowed to have rat brains. They should be allowed to spew things and have—you know what I mean? To mess up and have these weird adventures, but because of the way the internet works, it’s then preserved forever, and then people feel the need to comment on it. It’s unfortunate to be like—I don’t know what a 22-year-old would do now, but that sucks. There was a lot of freedom in that.
Bobby: But I feel like because so many people were doing it, we’re going to have to find a way to just deal with that past at some point. When we’re all older, it’s like you know, we all share this decade of nightmares that we shared online. They’re all there. Let’s just overlook it. We’ve all grown. It’s fine.
Halle: Right. For me, I think maybe the jumping the shark moment is when that woman wrote for Jezebel about hooking up with her biological dad, and I was like perhaps it is the end of an era.
Bobby: Oh, wow.
Halle: Perhaps we’ve arrived at the end.
Bobby: Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
[Audio clip]
Bobby: So Ryan, you worked at Thought Catalog. Then you sold your book, I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, in, correct me if I’m wrong, 2015.
Ryan: Yes, that’s correct.
Bobby: And then you took the long, arduous process of developing a television show. I can imagine that developing a television show about a gay man with cerebral palsy is probably very difficult. Can you tell me a little bit about that process? Because pitching a show is probably already a nightmare, and it was probably a nightmare for Lena Dunham who was like, I’m a white, straight lady, I want to write a show. I can only imagine what it was like for you.
Ryan: Yeah, it was a journey. People weren’t chomping at the bit, initially, because it was confusing for them. So I went out with a pitch in 2015 with like my gay mafia, Jim Parsons, this producer John Reech [phonetic 00:16:40], who produces Comeback and 30 Rock, and my close friend Craig Johnson, who directed the movie Skeleton Twins and Alex Strangelove. We did every pitch, and everyone seemed to really love it and respond. It went over really well. We had been told that some places were going to make an offer, and then one by one, they got cold feet. And you have to understand, 2015 was again, a different, different time, especially in Hollywood, people were just like, Broad City? Inside Amy Schumer? Women being funny? Crazy! So like gay disability was like babe, like LOL, like what’s that? In terms of the marginalized populations, it was like down the list. So basically, we ended up selling it to this digital branch of Warner Bros. called Stage 13, and they commissioned me to write the scripts. And partially also why it took so long was that I was writing for television shows, and so I was in a writer’s room, and I was basically just doing this on the weekends. When I finished Will & Grace, I finished the scripts, and then we sent them to Netflix, and Netflix had never done short form before, but they really liked the scripts, so they bought them.
It sounds really truncated when I telling you now, but it was four years of this will never happen. This is never going to happen. Should I just quit? Should I just not even write the scripts? It was really, really demoralizing, because it felt like we were just faced with all these roadblocks. To me, what I didn’t understand was I was trying to tell a pop song. The pitch was basically like Ryan seems unconventional because he’s gay and disabled, and there is specificity to that experience, but really, when you boil him down, the basic wants and desires of a human being are all universal. I’m not trying to make some low-fi whatever, weird, experimental show. I’m trying to make like Ariana Grande’s Sweetener, but in a weird package. You know what I mean? What’s great about it is the show came out on Friday, and the reaction’s been so positive, and everyone’s calling it relatable and all these things, which to me, that just means so much, because I’ve always known that my life isn’t so fucking strange. [Laughs]
Bobby: To go back to Lindy West, it reminds me a lot of the response to Shill, the Hulu show
Halle: Shrill.
Bobby: Shrill, sorry.
Halle: Shill’s the movie [crosstalk] out.
Bobby: But the show where it’s like very specific, unique experience about a woman who’s a writer in Portland. I know plenty of people who watch that show and had no idea what it was, had no idea who Lindy West is, who were like that was a great show and having nothing in common with her. And I think that that must be surprising to the people who see it as such an acutely specific experience. It must be satisfying to see like hey, we’re all pretty much the same. We’re all going through the same shit.
Ryan: Right. Well, what execs in Hollywood, especially at the network level, like the big NBC, CBS, those things, people are really scared to make specific shows because they worry that people won’t relate to it, so what they end up doing is they end up dulling the edges, and then by trying to make it relatable to everyone, it ends up being relatable to no one, because it doesn’t resemble anything. It’s just a pile of gibbidy, gobbidy, goop. So they need to realize that through specificity, you get to the universal aspects of the story. That’s just story-telling 101.
Halle: I don’t know they react, because I feel like my favorite part of the show is your relationship with your mom, played by Jessica—is it Heysh?
Ryan: Hecht, Jessica Hecht.
Halle: And it was interesting. I was thinking about the pitch, because I feel like shows about young people, and they’re like, we want to be out dating and sex, adventure, and it’s like and also about an adult gay man his relationship with his mother. But that’s what I want, especially as someone who is in my thirties, where it’s like yeah, I’m kind of over it. The twenties experience, I had it. It was great. And now I’m like how can I have a better relationship with my parents?
Bobby: Are my parents okay? I’m hope they’re okay. Yeah.
Halle: How can you learn about them as people before they die? You know what I mean? For me, I was watching it, loved it. I don’t know. It was almost something where it’s like—maybe that’s what my question is. Did you have to sort of sneak that part in the back, or were you very upfront about the pitch being like and a big part of this is this intense, complicated relationship with your mom, in part because of your disability?
Ryan: Yeah. That was definitely up front. Listen, if you are lucky to emotionally mature at a healthy rate, you become less interested in yourself, and you become more interested in other stories. [Laughs] If you’re lucky, honey. And like believe me, I had ODed on myself through Thought Catalog, like okay, like she needs to go. I was really interested in telling a story of firsts and what that would look like through the lens of a 28-year-old gay guy with CP and what would that look like with a woman in her early fifties, because they’re going through the same experiences but at wildly different phases of their life. I thought that was so interesting. I thought oh, what an interesting vantage point, these two different—I don’t know. It was really important to me that it almost play like a two-hander, and you see Ryan and his mom go through very, very similar things but react to them differently because obviously, they’re in totally different stages.
Halle: Do you feel like it’s similar to your relationship with your actual mother, or was this something that felt like something unique or different from that?
Ryan: Yeah, no. It’s definitely based on me and my mom. I mean, my mom is like—this show was definitely an exercise in wish fulfillment, because my mom has always put herself last. She’s the most selfless person I know, and I’ve always been like God, what would my mom do if she asked herself what is it that I want? Because I don’t think she’s ever asked herself that. So this was just sort of—I got greedy, and I was just like I want to make a show about this because it makes me sad that my mom doesn’t really look under the hood and think about her own wants. So yeah, it is very much based on my mom, but I would say that Jessica brought her own brand of cooky warmth to the role. I think as a writer, what you hope for is an actor will come in and do something completely different for the part than you imagined.
Bobby: It’s a really lovely performance. That was one of the things I didn’t know. I knew it was about you, so to see your character’s mom remain such an essential character, I think it was really satisfying and surprising to me. I was like oh, she’s a huge part of the show. That was entirely unexpected to me.
Ryan: Yeah, no. She’s incredible. I mean, it’s such an interesting story to tell. Again, I’m like really, a whole show about me? I’m bored. [Laughs] Also, momma needs to rest.
Halle: I didn’t realize that she was Susan from Friends.
Ryan: Yeah, she’s Susan from Friends.
Bobby: And she’s Paul Giamatti’s wife from Sideways. She has like one really—a couple sad scenes, but like really sweet scenes, and I had just rewatched Sideways, so I was like oh, it’s her.
Halle: I haven’t seen it. It’s probably on Netflix.
Bobby: I don’t think it is, actually.
Halle: Get on that.
Bobby: I wanted to ask about—to go back to gay sex, I want to talk about the sex scene with Brian Jordan Alvarez, who is hilarious and wonderful in his own right.
Halle: So funny.
Bobby: That scene, a friend of mine watched the show, watched Special before I did, and he was sort of like live texting me through part of it, and he was like there’s a sex scene in this that I cannot believe that I’m watching this on television, let alone Netflix. And even knowing that going into it, I could not believe that I was watching it on television, let alone Netflix, when I got to that part. Did putting a gay sex scenes so explicit, not just in terms of nudity and thrusting, but the little specifics of the act itself, was that a hard sell?
Ryan: No. Very easy. People knew that I had a gay agenda, a gay sex agenda. I’m really frustrated by the fact that gay sex has not been normalized and brought into the mainstream. I even go to—there’s so many gay comics now, which is incredible, but even when they try an anal sex joke, you hear part of the audience cringe, and you’re like bitch, we’re in West Hollywood. What the fuck? What is going on? People are just still like TBD about a penis and a butt. I don’t get it. I just don’t understand it. It was really, really important to me that we show Ryan lose his virginity, and we do not shy away, because I’ve talked about it in other interviews and stuff, but I remember seeing Call Me By Your Name and when they panned away to the moon I was like, you must be joking me. I felt like we had been tricked, and I felt like as gay men, we’re so starving for any representation. We’ll take all the scraps, but honey, we got fucked with that. We got fucked in not a great way.
Halle: Like the moon gets to watch it, and we don’t?
Ryan: Yeah, I know.
Bobby: I read in a recent interview—I don’t remember who it was with, but you were like yeah, we see Timmy Chalamet fuck a peach, but we can’t watch him fuck another person. That’s wild. That’s really wild.
Ryan: It’s not okay. I always looked at how Girls kind of revolutionized straight sex in a way, and I was like well, why has that not been done with gay sex? So it was really, really important for me that we show it naturally, and shooting it was kind of surreal because I wrote that part for Brian. He’s a friend of mine, and Brian is such a unicorn in the sense that he has no judgment at all. He’s just literally a free love like whatever. So I was like okay, if there’s anyone that I can get fake fucked on camera by, it’s definitely him, and I was really nervous leading up to the shoot, because you know, this is like my first job acting, so I’m going from like never acting to like literally in a cock suck thrusting, you know what I mean? So it was a lot for me. And Brian was just sort of like my gay sex scene whisperer. He was so incredibly generous and kind. I almost feel like I watched that scene, and it was almost like watching a documentary, because everything Ryan’s going through, I was pretty much going through myself, because it was so surreal to be acting this out. But I knew that when we shot it, I was like this is something really unique and people are going to really respond to it, and I can’t wait for season two, if we get picked up, because I want to go even deeper into gay sex and just again, normalize it.
Halle: Watching that for me, I think there’s a lot—in a comedy, you’re sort of only allowed to do sex if it’s comedic, I feel like to, so to me, having sex where it’s like we’re just having sex, this is not going to be traumatic, this is not going to be a huge, horrible plot point, it’s also not going to be funny, we’re not going to play this for laughs, nobody’s going to bust in the room, to me, it’s like we just do need more of that. Especially with male nudity, I feel like it’s always played for laughs. It’s always supposed to be the punchline. So it was refreshing.
Bobby: It’s nice. And it was one of the shows—I feel like I talk about The OA all the time, but The OA also had a gay character lose their virginity in a recent episode, and maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m being a little overly judgmental, but I feel like gay sex in a lot of things is presented as this sort of like flippant like these gays just need to fucking get out of town and leave the person’s house, but both the Special scene and The OA scene ended with like a conversation between these two adults. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t weird. It was just special. It was nice.
Ryan: Yeah. It’s just like real life.
Bobby: That was insane.
[Clip from Special]
Bobby: Not to go back too many beats, but I’m obsessed with the name Eggwoke, and I want to know where that came from.
Ryan: [Laughs] Well, okay, so I initially called it Millenilol, okay? And no one could fucking pronounce Millenilol. People say LOL, which is disturbing to me. I don’t understand. It’s LOL, so people would be like Millenilol, which doesn’t work. Anyway, whatever, so we’re literally about to shoot. We were like a week out from shooting, and they were like we need to change the name. No one knows how to fucking say this. And then we were just like literally at dinner, and I was just like okay, look, I’m a pun machine. It’s like a true disease that I suffer from that I wish so badly I could be cured from, but I think it’s terminal and like forever. Actually, that’s contradicting itself. Anyway, Eggwoke just came up, I don’t know, from my brain while eating nachos and queso and margaritas and Austin. I think it’s something that actually could be the name of a website, you know what I mean? I could actually see it. I don’t know. It feels real.
Bobby: The line that your boss has, where it’s like okay, sweeties, you’ve got to write something viral, it’s so absurd, but it was taking me back to blogging, and I was like that may never have been said to me, but that was definitely implied to me, where it was actually sort of traumatic to rewatch that, but I also sort of missed it.
Halle: It’s only through that pressure that you do write those things. If it had been up to you to be like I’ll get around to it, but you never would have actually put it down, you know?
Bobby: Yeah. But before I let you go, I wanted to ask a final question. You sort of alluded to it recently. What are your goals for a second season? Where do you want this show to go, if in fact it does get a second season?
Ryan: I definitely want to keep—this is a spoiler, obviously, but Ryan and Karen have a huge fight at the end of season one, and it’s really important for me that they stay separated, that it doesn’t get resolved immediately. Think about family rifts. Literally, someone doesn’t talk to Uncle Joey because he literally gave them the wrong look while they were serving cherry pie in 1986 at Thanksgiving. So literally, family rifts are very real, and so I think I don’t want to resolve it in a way that feels like convenient or quick, so I think I actually want to keep them separate, like not in scenes together. The thing that was most punishing about the 15 minutes—because I come from a half hour, and for season two, I would want to do a half hour. I wouldn’t do 15 minutes again. By half hour, I mean like 22 minutes—is that we didn’t get to dive into Kim as much as I would like. Because when you do 15 minutes, honey, it’s A story, it’s B story. That’s all you have room for. For season two, I’d really love to give a real, emotional arc for Kim, and I also would like to bring back Brian as a series regular. I kind of look at the relationship between Ryan and Shay as almost like Dr. Melfi and Tony Soprano, where they kind of exist on their own island, but there’s something about that Shay where Ryan feels very comfortable and very free to be himself and explore himself. I just think there’s something really unique about that relationship that I would really want to dive into.
Bobby: Well, thank you so much for chatting with us on the phone, and good luck with the second season, good luck with everything else. Enjoy the terrible LA weather and all the new milks, and everyone can watch Special right now on Netflix, all eight episodes. But with that, I think we’re done talking about shows for the week. Halle, thank you for coming.
Halle: Bobby, a pleasure.
Bobby: You’re so funny. I just can’t control myself when you’re around.
Halle: You can see, Bobby has torn this room apart during this. He’s just lost his—it was like a bat was in this room.
Bobby: As usual, call 754-CALL-BOB to share your current obsessions, and we might discuss it on a future episode. Call. Call it. 754-CALL-BOB. Leave a voicemail. You’ve got to leave a voicemail. Then we can play them, okay? It’ll be great. So thank you, Halle, thank you, Ryan O’Connell for calling in. I know you’re not there anymore, you’re living your life, you’re writing season two, I assume. And we will see you in two weeks with another episode of I’m Obsessed With This.
[Music]