As season one of Bravo’s Certified Fresh series, Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, comes to a close on Tuesday, Rotten Tomatoes talked to showrunner Marti Noxon about her own divorce, dating disasters, and the feedback she got from her sister-in-law, Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan. [Season one spoilers within!]
Sarah Ricard for Rotten Tomatoes: Now that season one is behind you and you have a season two in the works, can you talk about if you were feeling any pressure about doing Bravo’s first scripted series?
Marti Noxon: In truth, I didn’t — and maybe I should have because everybody asks. I didn’t feel any more pressure than you feel any time. The pressure was that this was my first time creating my own show. That’s an enormous amount of pressure on its own. I’d worked on things that had been conceived under somebody else’s watch [Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel]… but this is very close to me in so many ways, so that was the pressure. I was just like, ‘My ass is hanging out on this one.’
RT: We often find your characters in torment. Do you ever feel responsible for their happiness?
MN: Interesting. Yes, in the sense that, if you were to take the long view — that is, if we were to have multiple seasons and if I were lucky enough to know when the show was ending — I would want to give people the lives I think they deserve. Depending on who they are. But the trick is having enough happiness for your characters that they don’t seem like total loser downers. At the same time, you can’t give people exactly what they want. That would be boring. [They need] obstacles and conflicts to overcome. And they do, and then you drop them in a pit.
RT: Well, one thing that you’ve managed to do in time for the finale is break our hearts over Abby and Jake. I can’t help wanting them to get back together. Will there be any resolution these characters this season or next?
MN: Here’s the thing that someone very smart told me when my husband and I split up that I found to be incredibly true: you don’t get divorced once; you get divorced over and over and over. When you have children, it’s a constant relationship with each other until your kids are grown and taking care of themselves. Your kids are constantly saying, ‘Why? Why aren’t you married?’ So you’re always explaining it to your kids and you’re always explaining it to yourself. There are ups and downs, so I don’t know about resolution yet. I hope so.
RT: About halfway through the season, Abby really seems to have the point of view that says divorce can be good if it wakes you up and inserts you back into living. Was that your point of view at the beginning of the show?
MN: Divorce is only good if two people have worked on it and it’s not going to change. The unhappiness is systemic. I know a lot of people who’ve gone through hard times and come out the other side, but I think when you’ve got to call it — the body’s been dead for a while — that is good. People are really afraid of change and it can keep you in a situation where nobody’s happy. My experience was, of course, it’s still really hard when I see that it makes my children unhappy sometimes — and those were really hard decisions — but I also don’t know that they’d be super-happy with two crabby, constantly miserable parents. So you do your best and, for me, it was incredibly difficult but eye-opening — and continues to be. It doesn’t stop, but I do treasure my life now in a way that I didn’t before.
RT: While you’re talking about how your personal experience informed this show, I’m wondering which dating disasters we see were plucked from real life.
MN: The funny thing is that one of those things that people pointed out as being unbelievable, like, ‘Who would do that?’ was that I did have blind date where the guy showed up with a cane and sunglasses. It actually happened to me.
RT: Well, he must’ve scored points for trying.
MN: Oh, he was ‘trying,’ but I don’t know exactly what he was trying. The really funny thing for me was that I kept going out with him. Like, I went out with him for a little while even though that joke didn’t work for me.
RT: One thing about the show that I love is the look is fabulous.
MN: When we got the team together for the pilot, Jerry Fleming was our set designer and I’ve never worked with anybody with his level of talent. It’s pretty stunning. With almost any other show, you’d come on set and you’d be like, ‘Oh, OK. Yeah, we can work with that.’ But with Jerry, it’s always like, ‘Oh, you elevated this whole thing way beyond my expectations.’ He built a version of Abby’s house on a stage in Vancouver and I really feel like it’s difficult to tell the difference between the location and when we’re on the stage. That’s not easy.
In addition, I think we do a pretty good job of making Vancouver look like L.A. and that’s all Jerry and his team. They just all get it. They’ve lived in L.A. and they know what it looks like. But it’s just a taste level that made me like, ‘You have to always work with me!’ And the same with Cynthia [Summers], the costume designer, she just gets it. Usually, with costumes, it’s always drama — and not the good kind — and on this show, it’s mostly just love.
RT: Let me ask you about your own girlfriends because I have this fantasy that you and Jill Soloway and Jenji Kohan are always at some fabulous Los Angeles restaurant, planning world domination.
MN: We’re all together right now. We mostly carpool from meeting to meeting.
RT: I wouldn’t expect anything less.
MN: And then we go to our Korean day spa.
RT: Do you ever have any conversations like, ‘Hey, look at what we’ve all been doing on television. It’s pretty cool.’
MN: Jenji’s been doing it for a long time and she opened the door for a lot of women to create much more interesting and layered female characters. She, in a real way, was a trailblazer and continues to be. Orange Is the New Black is radical television. It represents a lot of women who don’t get to be on television. She does that seemingly effortlessly. It’s the material she’s drawn to.
I’ve been as much an admirer as a sister-in-law all these years. I remember reading Weeds when it was still a pilot and I turned to my then-husband and said, ‘This is the one.’ And, apparently, she turned to my brother and said, ‘This is the one,’ when she read Girlfriends. ‘This is a hit.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, God. Knock wood.’
It’s pretty neat to be in relation to somebody who has that kind of perspective and we both know not to take it too seriously. Obviously, it’s incredibly gratifying to have something that you’ve made that people feel, but you’re not saving any lives. It really isn’t brain surgery.
And I’ve known Jill for years and we have hung out. There’s been hanging out! But we haven’t had a moment yet to get the three of us together and go, ‘Wow. That was quite a year.’
Season one of Girlfriends Guide to Divorce is currently Certified Fresh at 81 percent. The season finale airs on Bravo on Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 10/9c.
