‘Breeders’ Creators Take Us Inside The Anger, Anxiety, and “Extraordinary Actors” of Season 2

Breeders just wrapped up its second season on FX here in the US, and if you’re not caught up, do so now. These 10 episodes elevated the show from a dramedy about the frustrations of parenting to an emotional and insightful series about so much more — but also yes, the frustrations of parenting. Note: spoilers for Season 2 are ahead!

Many have found this series to be particularly cathartic in pandemic times, though if you were hoping to watch how Paul (Martin Freeman) and Ally (Daisy Haggard) handled lockdown (and the UK had several), Breeders made the wise decision to implement a time jump for Season 2, bringing in new, slightly older actors to play the roles of Ava (Eve Prenelle) and Luke (Alex Eastwood) as they grew from being children to pre-teens, bringing with them all the joys that come along with that age bracket. Though this was filmed in the fall of 2020 during the pandemic, the show’s creators confirmed the time jump wasn’t to ignore the pandemic, but that it had simply always been the plan.

“We’d thought about it from the get-go,” Simon Blackwell said over Zoom last week. “It was mainly to stop the danger of repeating ourselves, we didn’t want to get into a rut or do the same stories for another season. Sometimes it’s good to make it tricky for yourself creatively, with changing the dynamic of having kids who can now talk back and they’re going through different things.”

Chris Addison confirmed, “It did make it difficult. Once we got back into the writers’ room, we realized that we had two new characters, particularly with Ava [now 10 years old, and Luke 13]. We had established certain things about Luke that we were able to develop in season two, but with Ava, it was more or less a blank canvas. It definitely made things trickier, but it got written before the pandemic,” as he also noted that the time jump was agreed upon since the creators’ second meeting they ever had about the show.

The new actors were a welcome addition into the mix, as Haggard said from her blue couch at home over Zoom, “They were fantastic. The children in the first season were amazing, but they’re a very different age. So you could throw challenges at them this time around, like three to four-page emotional scenes, which to be fair, quite often they would know better than me. They were able to take on chunkier scenes and heavier emotional storylines whilst knowing what they were playing, so it was really lovely to do that to work with young actors who were so clever and many times much cleverer than me, which is a bit annoying but I’ll forgive them.” And while their talent is undeniable, Haggard also noted that her on-screen daughter Prenelle had an advantage each day at work, as she “Doesn’t have a three-year-old that loves to sleep right there!” holding her hand over her face to the spot where her toddler snoozed the night before.

It wasn’t just the time jump that was discussed early on, but also the pervasive issue of anger, which escalated to new, unexpected, and quite heartbreaking levels this season. The series began with a scene of Paul shouting at his kids, which came from a dream Freeman had and served as the inspiration for the entire series. While that first scene was played more for laughs, or at least a relatable nod and chuckle, that same anger that has now led Paul to the decision that he should spend some time away from his family in order to not trigger Luke’s anxiety. “Paul’s journey is working out that he can’t be that kind of parent anymore,” Blackwell said. “Maybe he should never have been that kind of parent, but you can’t parent teenagers in the same way you do when they’re small. We wanted his realization of that and we wanted also some redemption for him at the end, which I think we get in Episode 10 of this season, where to an extent, he’s redeemed even though he’s said some vile things to Luke and he’s provoked Luke into [punching him].”

“Anger was always the driver of the whole show,” Addison stated. “When we set out to make it, the idea was, there’s nothing in the world that you love more than your children, and there’s nothing that can make you angrier than your own children. The weird dichotomy in the middle of that is where the show sits. But of course, as you progress through it, you have to kind of turn the dials up slightly, and you have to explore that more.”

The three men began by sitting down for development meetings, also known as sushi and therapy meetings, and as Blackwell explained, “They were all done over very nice lunches and they felt like we were getting pre-therapy because we were saying things that we might not have said before. Men tend not to talk about stuff.”

“British men, certainly not,” Addison added. “I remember, the second or third meeting that we all had, I put down my chopsticks and said, ‘I’ve never spoken to people about this.’ It felt incredibly, weirdly freeing and I suppose the fact was that we didn’t sit down with the intention of talking openly about our parenting, we sat down to try and think about how you would make a TV show. And in the process, we ended up talking in a much more open way than we ever have before. That whole spirit has been imported into the writers’ room. I do think the writers’ room is creatively one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever been, because we have a room full of people who are almost all parents, but all have had issues around the kinds of things we’re talking about in the show. Everybody is extraordinarily open in terms of how they talk, how we talk to one another, and I think that’s why the show feels so honest.”

“There has to be a lot of trust in the room as well for everyone to talk as openly as they do about themselves and their children and their parents as well,” Blackwell said. He’s also worked on shows such as Veep, The Thick of It, and Back, but noted of this experience, “The writers’ room grew organically into a kind of room that I have not been in before, of starting from an anecdote, and then leading up to story.”

Of course, it’s not just parenting that Breeders captures so well, but the marriage between Paul and Ally, which felt especially authentic and even lovely at many times this season, despite the ups and downs of their relationship. They’re people you like and you root for, which is not always the case on TV shows. “You often see couples on TV [and think], ‘You wouldn’t have known each other, you wouldn’t have been together for 10 years. You’re both attractive people, but I still don’t buy you as a couple,'” Blackwell said. “We absolutely buy Paul and Ally now. And in season two, they seem even closer. I think it helps that there’s been in the show’s timeline, six years of them becoming the parenting unit you become when you’ve got kids of a certain age.”

“We obviously we put Paul and Ally through the wringer a bit more in season two,” Addison said, “But we wanted to make sure that this felt as universal as possible. In other words, the idea that you couldn’t look at the situation that the Worsley family are in and go, ‘Well, that’s their problem. That’s why they’re having trouble with raising children.’ We wanted it to be that no matter how steady you are, there is stuff that is going to be a problem for you. This is something that you will recognize. That’s why they’re sort of boringly middle-class and normal. They’re so straightforward as a family. No one’s got a drinking problem, nobody’s suddenly unemployed. The key component of that is to make Paul and Ally a couple who are totally together and you entirely believe in them as a unit.”

“They make each other laugh as well,” Blackwell said. “That’s how we show that they’re a unit is just in tiny moments, they share a laugh, and I think you get that these people are together.”

“What really appealed to me about the show is that I really like them as a couple,” Haggard said. “They’re a really good couple. They take the stuff that’s thrown at them and deal with it and they seem to really like each other and that’s what keeps them together.” However, there were enough moments throughout to convince me as a viewer that they would ultimately be okay and Haggard agreed. “I think so too. I don’t think it will be easy, like real life, I guess.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they’ve got two of the most talented actors around in these roles. “They are the most extraordinary actors,” Addison stated. “What’s great about them is the detail. You can feel when you’re directing the best, they will give you the precise thing that you just described to them. Their abilities are remarkable. One of the things that’s really key is that Daisy and Martin have known each other for years, they get on really well. They’re from the same gang of friends, they have a lot of people in common. So their ability to perform off each other is extraordinary. We’re really blessed with a cast who are just so exceptional. You can ask them to do very subtle things and you can ask them to do a greater range of things than you might be able to ask other people.”

That doesn’t just help on set, but also in the writers’ room, as Blackwell explained, “Then you become more ambitious as a writer because they can do anything.” For her part, Haggard said, “It’s a really lovely thing going back to do another season because even though we knew each other before and were mates and there was an ease there, you then know how to work together. It is like putting on something that you’ve worn before. A scene doesn’t feel like you’re acting with each other, it feels like you’re just talking. If you’re comfortable the first time, you’ll be more comfortable the second time because you have this understanding.”

“They make choices that feel completely natural, but at the same time you go, oh, wow, I would never have thought of that,” Addison explained. “I often find that with Joanna Bacon, who plays [Paul’s mother] Jackie, there is no scene where there isn’t at least one line where I go, I would never have thought to say it like that and she twisted it into something exceptional.”

From her perspective, Haggard, who was recently nominated for a BAFTA Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance said, “There are quite a few of those moments that Simon and the team write. They’re a gift because you just have to listen and react. You just have to be in the moment and then the scene takes you on a journey you can’t not go on. There are quite a few scenes like that where it has really gritty, juicy moments where you think, I’m pretty lucky to be able to do this.”

The show took on a variety of important topics this season, including teen anxiety, those formative year friendships, infidelity, and of course, technology. But in a nice touch to the show, it is the eldest generation that shows the most desire to learn new technologies, including how to work their new TV, and the youngest generation that perhaps take a misstep or two with their familiar devices.

“We wanted to avoid the trope of the teenager staring at a screen all the time,” Blackwell said. “It happens, but it’s sort of boring to show that because we’ve seen that. So we wanted to have their relationship with technology to be slightly different. When Luke is caught trying to buy some weed because he’s signed into his dad’s music account, that’s a thing that’s quite close to home for me. Happened a few years ago. We wanted to make it interesting, the use of technology. We like the idea that Jim [Alun Armstrong] and Jackie don’t want to give up on that stuff because it’s easy to and they want to know how the new TV works and they think Luke and Ava should have phones because why shouldn’t they?”

Not many shows have explored anxiety in a character as young as Luke at age 13, but also through the lens of not just how he copes alone or within his friend group (or lack thereof), but with parents that are compassionate (in varying degrees) in wanting the best for their child. “We were also interested in how you deal with your child and labels,” Addison explained. “Whether you want your child labeled, because it’s helpful to have them labeled or whether that feels like it’s a restricting thing or some kind of defeat. We also wanted to make sure that we weren’t doing a broad-strokes version of anxiety or something that didn’t ring true.”

And as Blackwell said, “The thing about this generation of kids is that they do have the vocabulary to be able to talk about their mental health in a way that I don’t think my generation did. You might be called shy or introverted or whatever, but the vocabulary of mental health is there for the kids to use now, and schools are much more in tune with the mental health of children. Then we explored in the room just how we had dealt with anxiety ourselves and among our children as well.”

While the show has not officially been picked up for a third season, Addison and Blackwell reveal that they have started knocking around some concepts should it come to be. “We’ve had some writers room meetings, and we’ve got into that organic process and we can now get to the good stuff more quickly,” Blackwell said. “But it’s still just chatting, chatting, chatting.” He was also sure to note how this process and is both different and conducive to this specific show, rather than previous rooms he’s been in where the writers are more concerned with topping each other’s jokes, rather than simply arriving at the best one for the show. “That’s not a very creative way of working,” Blackwell said. “It’s much better to have a more intercollegiate way of building on each other’s ideas to get the ones that end up being in the show.”

Plus, they have the added bonus of actually working together, in the same room. “Everybody was just thrilled to be back in the room, as always, and physically back in a room with people who weren’t our families,” Addison said. “It was fantastic to be in a place where we felt like we can actually do something creative. It reminded me of the benefit of all being in the same space.”

“Not to sound like a hippie,” Blackwell prefaced, “But there’s a sort of vibe in the room that you just don’t get virtually.  We’re all socially distanced and everything but we were so glad to be in the room and feel the vibe.”

And one person they can count on to be enthusiastic about reading everything that vibe produces is Haggard. “I just look forward to reading the next season if we are so lucky and we get another chance to tell more stories,” she said. “I never have any expectation of what that might be, I just have this sense of, oh what are you gonna give me?” she said excitedly. “I can imagine it jumping forward at some point. I don’t know anything about what they have planned. I just look forward to reading the scripts when they come because they’re always so good.”

And while Blackwell teased that a potential time jump to show what Luke would be like has a father has “not been not discussed,” Haggard is using the current scripts as a bit of a preparation manual for what may lie ahead for her children, who are slightly younger than her on-screen kids. “When I first auditioned for the first season, I had a newborn baby in a car seat that I was rocking with my foot,” she recalled. “And it was about having children that were three years older than mine and I thought, oh god, is this what it’s gonna be like? Now I’m sort of at the stage of the first season. So I’ve always used it to look ahead and think, ‘Oh god. Is that gonna happen? Ok, be prepared.’ But I don’t think you can ever really be prepared, you’ve just got to ride the waves of parenthood. Take it as it comes and try not to completely screw it up.”

So while the season has just finished airing here in the US, Season 2 will begin in the UK on May 27th, and Blackwell is ready to watch the show as it airs. “I will watch them, I like to do that because it’s fun to see it on actual TV,” he said with a smile. “Yeah, I’m gonna sit down with a glass of wine and make everybody shut up and watch it.”

Stream Breeders on Hulu