Write On: 'Good American Family' Co-Showrunners Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland

“One of the things we talked a lot about in the room is that very
rarely do people set about their day saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to
go do some evil.’ But for most people, we’re all sort of the
leads in our own stories and we’re all crafting the narrative of
who we want the world to see us as. And we do start to believe
that. You tell yourself these stories about yourself that you
want to be true and you move through the world and you make
decisions based on that narrative. And I think that one of the
things that as writers, we really try to do is get into the shoes
and the heads of the characters that we’re writing and really try
to break down why they’re doing what they’re doing and make it
feel as real and true as possible. The things that these
characters believe – or convince themselves that they believe –
have to feel really real and grounded to us,” says Katie Robbins,
co-showrunner of Good American Family, on writing flawed
characters who prefer to live in fantasy, not reality. 


On today’s episode of Write On, we speak to Katie Robbins and
Sarah Sutherland, co-showrunners on the explosive limited series,
Good American Family. The show tells the story of a midwestern
couple who adopts what they believe is little girl with dwarfism.
Soon they are in the midst of a battle fought in the tabloids,
the courtroom and ultimately their marriage. The show is based on
the real-life story of Natalia Grace that made many headlines.


Robbins and Sutherland talk about the unusual yet brilliant
structure of telling various episodes from different characters’
points of view, and how the tone changed when they got to the
episodes told from Natalia’s perspective. They also talked about
the messiness of writing a dysfunctional family while still
keeping the story grounded. 


“We all know family is this wonderful, beautiful thing, but it’s
so complex. And I think that it’s really hard to talk about the
complexities of family because we’re afraid to undermine the
sacredness of it. It’s my view that if we are actually more open
about what is hard about coexisting as a unit who loves each
other, but also what’s not perfect, it would make us all better.
And I think that that’s true both for family but also even for
our enemies. We’re not writing autobiographies, but I think that
we take those very real emotional experiences that we all have
and then put them into a story that is cinematic, that is more
interesting than our lives, but that is deeply steeped in those
real moments of heartache and joy and confusion,” says
Sutherland. 


To learn more, listen to the podcast but be aware there are
SPOILERS ahead.