‘Briarpatch’ EP Andy Greenwald On Gender-Swapping Rosario Dawson’s Character And Going From Critic To Showrunner

Andy Greenwald isn’t the first TV critic or entertainment journalist to move to the other side of the fence to write for TV, but he’s one of the highest-profile critics to do so. His erudite observations of Peak TV at Grantland quickly put him among the most popular TV critics on the interwebs, and when he jumped to a TV writers room four years ago, it wasn’t just for any show: It was for Noah Hawley’s Legion. Now, he’s a showrunner, having adapted Ross Thomas’ Briarpatch into an anthology series for USA Network.

In the first season of Briarpatch, which Greenwald produces with Mr. Robot‘s Sam Esmail, Senate investigator Allegra Dill (Rosario Dawson) returns to her hometown of San Bonifacio, TX, to bury her sister, who was blown up in her police cruiser. While she tries to get to the bottom of her sister’s death, her boss –whom she has an “interesting” relationship with — orders her to get her friend Jake Spivey (Jay R. Ferguson) to flip on the gun running operation he had in Iraq with his supposedly-dead partner, Clyde Brattle (Alan Cumming). The show takes its time to give us a sense of what San Bonifacio is about as well as work through the murder mystery at its center.

Decider sat down with Greenwald to talk about why he gender-flipped Rosario’s character when adapting the novel, who his influences are, and, because he’s still talking about TV on The Ringer podcast The Watch, what he thinks about what I call the “B-plussificaton” of today’s prestige TV.

DECIDER: Had you always been a fan of the novel and Ross Thomas’s work, or was there some other way that the novel came to your attention?

ANDY GREENWALD: Ross Thomas is my favorite writer, bar none, and if nothing else comes out of this hopefully the fact that more people might get a chance to discover him and enjoy his books as much as I did that would be, as my people say, dayenu, that would be enough.

I discovered Ross Thomas probably about 15, 16 years ago. I had just realized my love of crime fiction, and his name was one of the many that I remember seeing on the cracked spines of the paperbacks that my parents kept in the basement, as opposed to the fancy hardcovers they kept upstairs for people to see. Once I read one I just went nuts and back when I had more free time, had an incredible adventure over the course of a year, basically, discovering all of his books in used bookstores all over the country, and buying them, and buying a bunch of old weird editions, and loving all 25 of them desperately.

Briarpatch actually wasn’t my favorite, but I remember at the time thinking that it was, in many ways, potentially the most adaptable, because — and again, for him, this is saying something — but it was, for him, probably his most straightforward novel. It had a spine that was very universal and recognizable, in the case of the book. A man returns to his hometown to settle old scores and seek revenge and answers, and I remember at the time thinking that it would be worth adapting, but even then I knew that if I ever had the opportunity I would want to tweak it and gender-swap the lead, and maybe take some more chances with it.

Fast forward 12 years or so. I had just moved to LA at the end of the summer of 2016, and was ready to make the jump from being a critic to hopefully being a creator. About two weeks after I got here I sat with my agents at UTA, and they said, “We need a new sample from you to reintroduce you, because everyone here knows you as a critic. Why don’t you just take one of those books you’re always talking about and just do it? Don’t worry about anything just do it,” and so Briarpatch had always been at the forefront of my mind, and I took three weeks and I just wrote it, and it was the best writing experience of my life, maybe because I wasn’t worried about rights, or expectations, and later we found out about the rights, but it all worked out in the end.

This is after you got the job with Noah Hawley doing Legion or was this before?

No, it’s after. Noah called me about working with him on adapting Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle right after he appeared on my podcast in September 2015, and the timing was great because I was about to leave Grantland, and then they did me the favor of shutting down the site anyway. So I came out to LA, did two of weeks of work with him and another writer, Brian Brown — who ended up on my writing staff for Briarpatch — on Cat’s Cradle. At the end of those two weeks, he moved us both over to Legion the first part of 2016, and those are kind of the kicks that I needed to move the family out here to pursue it for real.

That always helps when you actually have a job to move out there with.

No, actually I didn’t. Those jobs ended in March, and so it was kind of a leap, but I was still doing the podcast for what is now The Ringer, and that was out here, so I knew I could always just…I knew I could keep doing that at least.

The idea of gender swapping the main character and adding… was the senate investigation case, is that more your addition or is that more the novel?

No, that’s all the book. That’s all the book. Dill works for a senator. He does not have an S&M relationship with the senator but works for a senator with presidential ambitions who is trying to play Clyde Brattle and Jake Spivey against each other. That’s all from the book. The zoo animals, the second explosion, the character of Eve Raytek, the whole plot of Packingtown and all of that, characters of Lalo and Cyrus, those are all invented.

What was the thought about swapping the gender of the main character? 

It was twofold. As I said initially, the idea of a man returning to his hometown to settle old scores was a very familiar story, for good reason. It’s a great story. I thought just instantly we never get to see women do that. It’s always a man who returns to the town, so immediately just from a story perspective, I thought that would make the story more interesting, and maybe find some originality within it because one of the goals with the project really was to update noir tropes and put them in the hot sun instead of the dark corners of the bar and just kind of see what happens when you let other people play in the sandbox.

The second piece of it was more personal. I’m just generally more interested in female protagonists and watching them and writing them. A relationship between sisters, particularly sisters who are slightly estranged, was interesting to me. It was something that I haven’t seen very much of, and also something that was interesting in my own life as an only child who is now the father of two girls, so I was interested in that phenomenon.

Finally I just… In general, and I feel like this was true with my criticism as well, I just am a big believer of diversity in the industry, and it’s not just because it’s better for our society and better for our politics, and all of that. It’s just selfishly, it’s better for story. The story changes when Freddie Laffter, the old reporter, says “How come he treats you like a white man,” to white man Ben Dill in the book, to when he says it to a woman of color Allegra Dill in the show, and I was pretty interested in what would change and what would stay the same.

When writing Allegra Dill, did you want a Rosario Dawson, or is it more like “It would be great if we got Rosario Dawson, a Rosario Dawson type?”

I mean, coming at this whole thing the way that I did I never presumed that we could get anybody, so writing the script I actually… And I went back and looked at it recently, the first draft that I sent to my agents in October 2016, and I didn’t describe any of the characters at all, physically, really. The only thing about Allegra I noted was something about her eyes being like day-old ice, which is how Ben Dill’s eyes are described, and it was intentionally because I didn’t want to presume or commit.

Then when we were having conversations about people who we could go out to, when Rosario’s name came up that was absolutely, I mean, a pinch-me moment but I also did not believe in any way we had a chance. And then the next thing I know we’re sitting with her for two hours, and then the next thing I know we’re in Albuquerque and I can’t imagine ever working without her. Later when we had the series pickup that was when I was able to dream a little bit bigger, and when I created Eve Raytek… I mean, in the room we were talking a Kim Dickens type, but I still didn’t think we could get Kim Dickens. We did. I mean, it was a series of pinch-me moments and I still can’t believe it.

Rosario plays Allegra very reserved. Obviously, there’s anger there, there’s bitterness there, but through the whole series, I’ve always noticed that she’s just seething below the surface angry. Is that how you wanted Allegra to be, or is that something that she brought to it?

Anything that you see on the screen is something she brought because her talent is just outrageous, but what I’ll say is from a casting perspective one of the things I knew was going to be so challenging is that Allegra is really what I’d call an iceberg character. You’re only going to see the tip of it at the beginning but you have to have confidence in the performance that there’s more under the surface to be revealed. And Rosario just has a power, and a charisma, and a strength that is undeniable, and she’s also just a star. I mean, the camera loves her even more than I love her, and so you just want to watch her and see what she’ll do next. The success of the show is really built on her performance.

When I started writing the first script, the first few pages that I wrote were pretty verbatim from the book and I paused and reread them, and I asked myself why is Allegra being so cold, emotionally, about this news, and then I paused again wondering why I was asking that question that I didn’t ask of Ross Thomas’s hero, Ben Dill. I realized it was because of my own prejudices and biases about how women ought to be, and ought to respond to things, and that really kind of flipped a switch in my head. I was writing it during the backdrop of our last nightmarish presidential election and when I was watching a confident strong woman basically exist in a box where if she showed any emotion, whether it was anger or laughter she would be pounced on.

Then as I continued writing I realized that the story that I’d boxed out for the pilot there were no female characters other than Allegra, and so I kind of steered into it, and this is a woman who has existed, and even thrived, in a land of wolves, and she knows that to show anything is weakness and she knows not to do that, and so that’s something that I think Rosario zeroed in on early, but she also was always so focused on the emotional truth of the character and where she was in relationship to her sister.

I really can’t say enough about her, because if you’ve ever met her or watched her in person she cannot sit still. She is the most warm and exuberant human being in the world to the point where when she was trying on costumes and they were trying to take Polaroids they couldn’t get her to stand still to show me what the costumes looked like, and so for her to be able to slip into this role the way she did it’s amazing.

The only time that she really breaks down is at her sister’s funeral. It’s a great contrast to the over-the-top characters Jay R. Ferguson and Kim Dickens play. The only other character who’s really kind of low key is Singe (Edi Gathegi). He’s kind of on the same wavelength as she is.

Yeah, which I think helps with their relationship. I think it’s interesting to note, one of the things I told Jay and Rosario about their first scene in the pilot is that you guys haven’t seen each other in 12 years. You know each other so intimately that it’s both wonderful and scary because you could undo each other in a moment, and you’re facing each other across this table wearing the suits of armor, or I guess it’s better to say the superhero costumes that you built for yourselves, because they were both poor and they had no models, and it says something that Jake is allowed to be big, and exuberant, and ridiculous, and Allegra has to be composed and contained to be taken seriously in this world.

With Jay R. Ferguson, we’ve seen a lot of him over the last 10 years, especially starting with Mad Men, and then going through, and now he’s on The Conners. What are you seeking from a guy like him, who you know is versatile but is familiar to people?

The Jake role was… I knew going in was going to be the most challenging to cast, because the more I thought about it the more I just came to the conclusion that we, as America, don’t make actors like that anymore. I was trying to think of who could I find who can be both physical, and intimidating, but also charming and charismatic, who could be funny and sexy, who could be all of the different colors of this character and make it plausible. And the thing about Jay is that he’s just… I just think he’s a classic American actor. I think he’s capable of all of it. He can be emotional and dramatic as easily as he can be sly and comedic, and the other thing about him is as you said, people have seen him, but I really think he’s an undervalued asset.

I think that when I was first talking about him and meeting with him when I mentioned his name to every woman in my life, and honestly quite a few men too, people got the goofiest smiles on their face. People love him just in their bones. Mostly from Mad Men, in my experience, and I think Jon Hamm, obviously, gets a lot of the heartthrob spotlight, but I think Stan is right up there with Don Draper, in terms of people’s people passion and ardor. So I was just so thrilled to work with him because he’s a wonderful guy, but also just to give him a chance to do so much because he’s capable of so much.

How much insight did being critic give you as far as getting what you want to get out of these actors and the characters they play? Do you think it gives you a leg up, or does it put you at a disadvantage?

It gave me an advantage, I think, in the sense of I’m pretty keenly attuned to how much stuff there is out there and how much it’s really a buyer’s market, in terms of content in this day and age, and so it was at the forefront of my mind in making a show was always to make something that was entertaining. I don’t want to waste people’s time. I don’t want to drag people down the particular rabbit holes that only obsess me only to discover that rabbit hole is actually my own navel.

I think that people want to be entertained, and I think they want to be surprised, and I think they want to see things that go for it. If I had a chance at bat I didn’t want to bunt. I know I’m mixing a lot of metaphors here, but… And that’s something that was also really imprinted on me by working with Noah Hawley, and Sam Esmail: Go for it. Go for the bigger choice, go for the thing that you’re scared of and try it out, because you’re not guaranteed a second chance at it.

I think audiences want to be taken on a ride, so I think that that definitely factored into the decision-making and the attitude that I brought to it. Also, I guess, I think the advantage of coming into an industry from being sideways was just that I really was excited to be there, and excited to collaborate, and I really wanted to work with great people. Great talents, of course, people whose work is like a magic trick to me, and I feel that way about the actors and the sound mixers, and everyone in between. But I really didn’t and don’t have any patience for the difficult genius, so we had a pretty robust “no assholes” policy in all aspects of production, and it worked out. I think you can have a happy time and do the hard work.

Would you be considered the showrunner of this show or did you have a veteran that helped you out with that?

No. They dropkicked me into the deepest part of the ocean and I’m very grateful for it. I was the only showrunner and the only EP on set.

Of what you knew about showrunners from being a critic what was the difference between what you thought you knew and what your experience was?

Well. I knew they were either more gray than I was or more bald than I was and now I understand why. Again, that was another great advantage I had was from cultivating professional relationships, and then later more personal relationships with people who have done this job who I really admire. I was able to get some perspective, so before I even put together a writer’s room obviously I was talking to Sam, but I was also talking to Damon Lindelof and Mike Schur about their experiences and their perspectives.

One universal thing was you can’t know what it’s like until you do it, and that’s 100% true, but one of the main things was just it’s actually impossible to hold in your brain how challenging it is, how many things there are to keep an eye on, and so to approach it, I think, with some humility, and seek out the opinions of others and just try to keep a level head. Because every day there are going to be five things that you could absolutely lose your mind over, and four-and-a-half of them probably aren’t worth it, so that was great to have that perspective.

But honestly, it was…and, in the end, I loved it but it really was the kind of thing that I think if you would’ve told me with great specificity what I was in for I may have run screaming. Not because it was unpleasant but because it’s just very hard and very demanding, and we’re not done. I’m still in post on the show, and it’s basically been nonstop since we started scouting the pilot in July 2018.

Was there any moment where you stopped and said, “Holy shit, I’m responsible for all this?” Was there any moment where you realized the enormity of it?

I think it’s happening right now. Thanks a lot. [Laughs] That’s constantly a drumbeat, but I have to say from the very beginning, from Sam championing the script, and trusting me to enact my vision for it, to everyone that I work with at the studios, and at the network. I’ve been so incredibly fortunate for any number of reasons, but one of the main reasons was, at no point during this process did I think that I was making a show that was different from the show they wanted me to make. We never had any disagreements on that, and I know enough…not from my own experience, but from being around, how rare that is, so that was incredibly fortunate and also helpful.

So much of the job is about scale. You can’t worry about how the show is going to be received when it’s released when you’re just scouting a pilot. You can only work on today’s work, and when we’re in the writer’s room you can just work on putting one script in front of another and moving onward, so learning what you can and can’t control in the moment is a big part of it.

The moment that I refer back to a lot from this crazy year that’s just past was there was a moment in the midsummer when I was… It was like six in the morning and I was at LAX because I had just flown back to LA for a day to do another pass on an edit of episode two because we were preparing it for the Toronto Film Festival, and we were in the middle of block-shooting episodes five and six, which were the most difficult block of the year, and we were prepping seven, and I was rewriting eight and nine, and writing 10 all at the same time, and I had a moment at six AM and I thought “This is too hard. I can’t imagine anything worse than this,” and then I paused, and I said, “The only thing worse than this moment, doing all of this, would be not doing it,” and then I sort of held on to the realization and it got me through.

The show, in a lot of ways, has a lot of Vince Gilligan influence in it, plus Sam, plus some of the other folks that you might have seen in your critic days. Who do you think your influences are?

Oh, that’s a good question. I don’t fully know. I mean, in terms of my creative influences for the show, the thing that made me think about art differently, and made me obsessed with television was watching Twin Peaks when I was in middle school. I in no way presume to be even able to imitate that show, but that’s always fueled me as an influence. Reconsidering all of the noir that I have digested, whether it was the novels of Raymond Chandler, or a movie like Touch of Evil, which was a big influence on the show, those all kind of filtered into it.

In terms of TV, I think it’s different than one influence as it is just accumulative education of what I like to watch and how I like to watch it. Fargo season 2 being a big influence in a lot of ways, in terms of the ambition of a contained story, but also shows like… I mentioned Mike Schur earlier. The thing about Mike Schur shows is that you love them in a pure way like you used to love TV shows when you were growing up because they’re about community and spending time with the people that you like and love, and I love characters, and I love every character on our show and I wanted to make sure they all were represented even if they were really relatively small in the scheme of the larger story.

So trying to create that sense of a place was really central to it, and I think a lot of the shows that I love best, whether whether it’s Friday Night Lights, or whether it’s Top of the Lake, created a dynamic and specific sense of place, and then made you feel excited to be there even if what was going on there wasn’t all that pleasant. So a lot of that was rattling around in my head while I was making it, but the one thing that I learned pretty quickly is when you’re actually in the trenches of making [the show], you don’t have a lot of time to think about things that you liked or loved. You just have to sort of exist in the moment as the sum total of those things.

In your previous Decider interview you admitted that some of your TV pet peeves may have made their way into scripts for Legion, just via the collaborative writing process. As a showrunner now have you thought about that more, saying, “This is the type of stuff that I really hated when I was a critic but we have to do it here because otherwise, I can’t crack this particular writing problem any other way?”

I think I’m proud to say there’s nothing in the show that I hated. There’s nothing in the show that I resent or feel bad or feel embarrassed about. I think that there are just logistical issues. If you’re making a murder mystery there’s a constant dance of revealing information and withholding information, and that can be tricky. I feel really strongly that if we did our job right finding out who killed Felicity Dill won’t be your motivating reason for watching the show by the end of the show, but I also want people who deeply care about mysteries and love watching straightforward mysteries on television to be satisfied here, so I think doing the logistical dance of that, of giving, and withholding, and entertaining, and also finding room to do the weirder, potentially more emotional or surreal stuff that really motivates me was a balancing act and sometimes a challenge. We’re not making an instruction manual on how to kidnap international supervillains. We’re making a show about flawed emotional people interacting with each other and that has to be serviced first.

By the way, I like how you have Alan Cumming in this immaculate suit and his best Good Wife American accent in a crappy RV and talking to teenagers in a burger shop and at other cheesy settings. What was the idea behind him playing Clyde Brattle?

He’s another one I was like, “Well, we can’t actually get them,” and then they say, “Well, maybe,” and then I write him a letter, and the next thing I know he’s interested, and you kind of can’t believe your good fortune. The role of Clyde Brattle is… There’s not a lot to him in the book. He kind of swings in and out as needed. What interested me about the character was really starting from Jake, and Jake as a character who has no modeling, no parents to speak of, and who is he trying to be, so who is his kind of bad dad, his broken father figure? And instantly after we did it in the pilot I knew that Jake had this vision of wealth and success, and what that meant to him, but it was all kind of tacky because he doesn’t really have class or anything to model it off of, and so what I wanted for Clyde was someone who was effortless; he’d be someone who instantly when you saw him on screen you’d be like well, Jake is try-hard and he’ll never achieve that.

So we were looking for someone who was slick, and ruthless, and pristine, and patrician, and kind of made even the worst behavior seem polite, so obviously Alan ticks all of those boxes, and then the thought of putting him in the circumstances you described and putting him up against Rosario and Jay it was just too good. It was just too good to be true.

The idea is that this is an anthology, so this first season is a close-ended story. Am I correct?

Yes. That’s right. We solve the Felicity Dill case. We are moving on from San Bonifacio.

If you were fortunate enough to get a second season, would it be all-new characters or same characters, some same characters? What’s the thought?

I can’t comment too much on it, because I don’t know if we’ll be lucky enough to do it, but it’s something that I’ve given a lot of thought to. I’ve had great conversations with the network and studios about. It’s an anthology series. We would continue to do a completely new story start to finish in a completely new place. Everyone on this show has a one-year deal, so there are no… We’re not hiding anything, but I do love shows that create a larger tapestry, so if we were given the chance I definitely would love to explore something along those lines, but yeah, we’re…but the short version is I would love to find another seedy little pocket of fictional America in an upcoming season.

And it doesn’t necessarily have to be one of his, one of Ross Thomas’s novels, right?

It doesn’t have to be, but there are a lot of them to choose from.

In this era, it feels like there are a lot of a lot of B+ shows, not a lot of A or A+ shows. Ones that you can’t say stink, but they maybe aren’t compelling enough to keep watching for 10 episodes, or they’re just not the Mad Men’s or the Breaking Bad’s or The Sopranos. What do you think the mistakes that either the services that are buying these shows or the showrunners that are creating them are making to make these B+ shows instead of A, A+ shows?

AG: Well. I think there’s a lot in play. I mean, obviously, with so much in production it’s just that… It’s an arms race, not just for content libraries or streaming services but for the best writers, and the best actors, and the best all the way down the line, the best line producers, the best costumers. There simply aren’t…There aren’t as many A+ scripts as there are slots to fill on these sorts of ambitious services.

I think that we are at a time when service’s appetites for taking chances and big swings seems to be a little bit in decline. You know, the shows you mentioned, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, really exist [because] they were passed over by, as you know, every network, but AMC needed to make a splash and they needed to be noticed and they had nothing to lose, so they greenlit things that were basically just being used by the creators as samples for other projects. So that moment of risk-taking is a glorious one, and there’s a reason why people compared that moment to the ‘70s in American cinema pre-Jaws, and now we actually have Jaws, but in terms of The Walking Dead, changing the paradigm for what numbers could be, but also we have literal giant sharks eating everyone, in terms of Apple, and Disney, and Netflix, so it’s just a very different landscape out there.

But that said, in the past year things like Fleabag and Succession, I think, are just absolutely A+ and are brilliant, and transcendent, and lift me up, both creatively and critically in a way that’s so exciting, and stuff still gets there. I think it’s a question of people using leverage to really challenge themselves, and I said this to Damon’s face, so I’ll say it again here: Watchmen was exhilarating and inspiring even when it didn’t connect, even when it didn’t always land because look what he was doing. He was taking IP, he was taking superhero stuff, he was taking all of the instruments that are basically used today and then just making something so risky, and personal, and political and it was thrilling.

So stuff still gets made, and maybe it’s just harder to see it through the scream of the 200 other B- shows that are crowding the margins. I just left the podcast studio and I was just talking about The Outsider on HBO, which I think is just so excellent, just in terms of the filmmaking that we’ve come to expect from this current era, but also I find it very emotionally gripping and really creative, and there’s a mastery at work, especially when you have someone like Richard Price involved, that I find really exciting and inspiring. It’s a close-ended adaptation of a book. It’s not going to be the next Breaking Bad but it’s pretty exciting that HBO can still just reach into its pocket and toss that out on a Sunday night and deliver.

And also, I’d imagine the fact that we do have all of these B+ shows instead of A+ and C shows is a lot better overall than what we had in the, say, the ’90s or the 2000s.

Honestly, yeah, and I said this before on the podcast probably. I don’t think viewers are complaining. It’s like when you go to an all you can eat buffet and people go there, they’re like great. I can’t wait to eat all of these things. It tends to be more of like the other cooks and chefs, and restaurant critics who are like maybe this too much stuff.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

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