Greetings from Los Angeles, and hello in advance to those of you who will be joining me for tonight’s special screening of Prime Video’s The Girlfriend, where stars Robin Wright and Laurie Davidson will chat with me about the twisty, very fun thriller. If you haven’t RSVPed yet, get on it!
I’m back in L.A. after an incredibly fun few days in Denver for the 12th annual SeriesFest, but before I get into that recap — and my long sitdown with Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy star Michael Chernus — I’m very excited to share some news on behalf of our friends over at The Black List. They’ve teamed up with a range of other organizations — including the Van Leer Foundation, Equimundo, The Human Safety Net and the American Institute for Boys and Men — to create The 2026 Black List Parenthood Writers Fellowship, offering mentorship and a $15,000 grant to four writers whose work tackles one of the most transformative human experiences: becoming a parent.
Friend of The Ankler and Black List founder Franklin Leonard says, “I look forward to the projects that emerge, and to the people they’ll change, myself included.”
Submitted scripts can be for film or television, and must focus on the beginning of parenthood, in whatever form that takes. Two of the selected winners will focus on fatherhood — “stories that show that men are wired to care, too” — and at least one project will be set in Europe, where The Human Safety Net is active. Human Safety Net is also the host of the Lights! Camera! Impact! Storyteller Gathering at the Venice Film Festival, where the winners of the Black List Parenthood Fellowship will be invited to attend with their final projects.
As any parent knows, having children can fundamentally change the way you watch film and television, from the stories you seek out to their emotional impact. It’s also one of the greatest stories we humans have to tell, with infinite variations about parents, children and how they transform each other. The Black List has long been the place to find exciting, brand-new stories about big ideas, and now the Parenthood Fellowship shines an even brighter light on maybe the biggest idea of all. As Franklin puts it in the announcement, “This could easily be the most selfish partnership the Black List has ever taken on – were those not some of the most universal preoccupations on Earth.”
Rocky Mountain High
A few weeks after I agreed to serve on the SeriesFest jury for independent drama pilots, I realized I didn’t exactly know what an independent TV pilot is. Even in our age of user-generated content and vertical dramas, nearly every TV pilot we encounter is the product of some kind of formal development process, guided by professionals who know how the system works.
But virtually everyone who now works inside the process started as an outsider, and at SeriesFest the two come together over an intimate and incredibly friendly five days. TV pilots independently produced around the world screen in the same theater as Emmy contenders like Ponies and The Testaments, and indie creators can seek advice directly from the pros during panels and Q&As. Nearly every time a screening let out in the Sie Center multiplex, the panelists who had just wrapped up would be deep in conversation with audience members, hearing pitches and workshopping ideas right there next to the concession stand.
Everyone comes to SeriesFest knowing that filming anything is hard — but it would be even harder to never try at all. That’s what The Testaments star Amy Seimetz emphasized over and over in our panel discussion on Thursday night, following a screening of the Hulu series in which she plays Chase Infiniti’s frigid stepmother. Seimetz is also the writer-director of films like Sun Don’t Shine and She Dies Tomorrow, starting during the digital camera-driven indie boom of the late 2000s, when it was suddenly possible — if, yes, incredibly hard — to make a movie for a few thousand dollars.
Seimetz told the story of how she placed a bet with an early investor, saying she’d surf a famously dangerous wave in Munich if he gave her $10,000 for her first film. She showed up for that early morning surf. The investor didn’t — but they put up the money anyway. As Seimetz and I left the stage, an audience member came up to say he’d broken a rib surfing that exact wave, suggesting that even in the down and dirty world of indie film, there are probably some limits.
In this column, I’m almost always writing about the finished products of Hollywood, the film and TV projects that beat the odds to not just get made, but seen and acclaimed enough to be part of the awards conversation. Maybe that’s why I never get tired of hearing people’s process stories, and the remarkably cheerful way many of the seasoned writers I met at SeriesFest would talk about years of development on projects that never get made. Before my panel with the team behind Littleton Road productions on Saturday morning, the company’s president, Kelly Macmanus Funke, told me of her “4 a.m.” rule: To develop something, you have to be willing to wake up at 4 a.m. every morning to work on it, whether or not it will ever see the light of day. (And yes, she was up at 4 a.m. before our panel, writing.)
That was definitely the level of passion evident in all the independent drama pilots I watched, whether made in Missouri with a statewide film grant or from more experienced Hollywood stars. The category’s best pilot winner, Woodstockers, was the brainchild of veteran actor Corbin Bernsen, who made the show as a love letter to his adopted town of Woodstock, New York, and the former hippies there who still cling to the dream of the ’60s. Co-starring Stephen Tobolowsky, the pilot is funny and emotional and also a family affair — Bernsen’s son Oliver is the director.
There was impressive world-building going on in all of my category’s chosen winners, whether the clever sci-fi of best writing winner Aptitude or the performance-focused drama of In My Blood, starring best performance winner Daniel Diemer as a minor league baseball player who may or may not be hiding a supernatural secret. My fellow jurors and I opted to give a special award for the production design of Neither Donkey Nor Horse, which managed to film a story set in China in the 1910s entirely in Los Angeles.
Being a SeriesFest juror challenged me to watch TV in an entirely different way, and probably more like the development executives, producers and writers who were my fellow jurors. We were asked to judge not just what was on the screen, but what potential might come next, whether in the additional episodes the creators had mapped out or just the spark of an idea that could truly come to life later in their career. It’s still awfully hard to make an independent TV show that gets widely seen, even as distribution models continue to change. But whether or not the shows ever get released as the creators imagine, every single one of them felt like a glimpse of the future — and a bright one at that.
Killer Role
For my Saturday morning panel with the team behind Littleton Road Productions, I had to prepare by watching their latest project, Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy — and like many other viewers, I’m guessing, I saw something I absolutely did not expect. Yes, the name of the infamous serial killer is right there in the title, and it recreates many of the gut-churning moments in which John Wayne Gacy, a seemingly avuncular local contractor in Chicago, lured young men and boys to his home, where they would be raped, tortured and murdered.
It’s a heartbreaking story, and Devil in Disguise doesn’t shy away from it, but also refuses to lean into the horror that defines so much of modern true crime. We never see a murder or an attack, and often don’t spend much time with Gacy at all. Instead, each episode plays out as a short story about one of his victims, from the high schooler with big city dreams to the man who escaped but was forever haunted by it. When creator and Littleton Road founder Patrick Macmanus first pitched the project to Michael Chernus, he said, “I just want to warn you, even though you’re the lead and if your character’s name is in the title, there’s going to be episodes where you’re going to be in half the episode.” Chernus said his response was two words: “Thank God.”
Chernus joked that Macmanus probably had already been turned down by multiple actors who did mind having less screen time, spoken with the authority of a true character actor who has picked up multiple roles at the last possible moment. Though you probably recognize him now from Severance or Orange Is the New Black, Chernus has spent years in the semi-anonymity of so many great New York theater actors: giving titanic performances onstage (he won an Obie Award in 2011) and popping up for brief roles in everything from Law & Order to Ramy. It’s not just that he’s used to making a lot of limited screen time; when it came to putting John Wayne Gacy onscreen, he and Macmanus agreed that less could be more.
“On a purely storytelling basis, I don’t want to see a killer every minute,” Chernus told me over breakfast at the Denver hotel housing most of the SeriesFest visitors. “It’s why the first Jaws movie worked so well — we didn’t see the shark very often. And then Patrick also told me that the show would include vignettes in every episode, showing the backgrounds of some of the victims who cross paths with Gacy. I was very moved by that, not even as an actor, just as a person.”
Even when Gacy receded to the background of episodes, Chernus was the first person on the call sheet for the first time in his career. “I very much felt the responsibility of being the lead on that show and what we were trying to do with it,” he said. “Which was to slightly change the perspective of the true crime narrative drama genre by focusing on the stories of the victims and shedding light on who they were before they ever met the murderer.”
Embodying Gacy, who seemed convinced he’d never get caught and often turned on his charm for the cops, was sometimes weirdly easy for Chernus, compared to co-stars like Marin Ireland, who plays a bereaved parent. But he told me he worked hard to make sure his colleagues didn’t have to spend more time with Gacy than they needed to, turning off the Chicago accent at the crafts services table and releasing the darkness of what they shot in a given day. It was a group effort, Chernus said. “Maybe the thing I’m most proud of is I really felt like we were all there for each other, and we would all check in with each other.”
At the SeriesFest Soiree on Saturday night, Chernus paid tribute to Macmanus and his work with Littleton Road, which includes the partner company Littleton Road Philanthropy that funds social impact projects connected in some way to their shows. In our conversation the day before, Chernus told me freely that Macmanus is “hands down my favorite person that I’ve ever worked with and worked for. And it’s so weird to call him my boss because that wasn’t our relationship. The word that we used a lot was ‘partner.’” Chernus doesn’t have immediate plans to work with Macmanus again — Littleton Road’s next project is another Devil in Disguise installment about the Night Stalker killer, and Chernus is about to head back to work on season 3 of Severance while also awaiting the arrival of his second child with his wife, Emily Simoness. But with Devil in Disguise, which earned Chernus a Critics Choice Award nomination, showing us even more of what he can do, and Littleton Road busy developing many more projects through their overall deal at Universal, don’t be surprised if a reunion emerges eventually. As Chernus told me, “I would do anything for him in a heartbeat.”
