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Inside the Episode
With Executive Producer Cynthia Mort
From the beginning, I knew fertility would be an issue with one of the couples, because I wanted to deal with what failure does to people. Infertility is a fascinating topic, because so many things are involved in it: intimacy, sex, blame, shame; there are a zillion things to explore.
Everybody can understand failure and what that can do to a relationship and to people who love each other. Grief, loss, failure – all of those things are really part of that journey.
Carolyn
I love this character. Yes, she's obsessive, and she's controlling, and she's difficult, but little by little we understand more about her. She's done everything on her own. She never took money from her father, who supports Mason, because she didn't want to pay the price. And she's recently lost her mother, as we find out in later episodes.
Carolyn just isn't capable of just saying I need Palek, I need family, I want family – that's not who she is. She goes about it in a much more defensive way. She's fierce in everything she does: in her love for Palek, in her desire to have a child and her desire to have a family. I like that in a character, and obviously Palek does too. That's a big part of their dynamic.
The first couple of episodes I know some people felt the women kind of led the men, but I always knew that things would change and start to turn. Women do usually initiate those probing kinds of conversations, but we could never do this show if the men weren't as strong and as intense and complicated as the women. It just comes out in different ways.
Dave and Katie
In Rita's birthday party scene, I wanted us to see Dave and Katie socially, and see how, in their friends' eyes, they're the good couple, the great couple. Nobody really sees what's going on in their private lives. I think that's true with a lot of people.
A lot of the quiet moments in the show come from narrative in the script that isn't part of the dialogue. In the script from episode three, there's a line about Dave and Katie at the party: "If you didn't know, you wouldn't know." That line gives all of us, the director, the actors, an idea of what we're playing in that moment.
That's why the vision of the show is what it is. It's unmistakable, for better or worse. People might say it's uncomfortable, or it's hard to watch, or it's relentless. Sometimes it is. But I also think it's funny. I laugh a lot. It's not a comedy, but there are moments of humor. I guess it depends on the mood you're in when you're watching.
The Perfect Place to Mourn the Death of Intimacy
Why a strip club? Where else is Jamie going to go? The least intimate place in the world is where she's going to go mourn her loss. But Jamie has a lot of issues, and for her to see other women as desired when she's not, is painful, even if it's as f**ked up a place as a strip club.
The End
I love the way episode three ends. When Kate says, "But what," it's so beautiful, and Tim and Ally are amazing. I love how they act like he's missing what she's saying and she's missing what he's saying, but they're not. They know exactly what's happening. Him, like a little boy with his TIVO, and her just saying, "But what?" I love when Kate gets up and walks off and Dave is sitting there. To me, their entire relationship is in that moment. And that's what really sends them to therapy, that moment.
Darkness Falls
Our brilliant music supervisor Amanda Demme brought a lot of interesting stuff to the show – The Twilight Singers, The Afghan Whigs, Stereophonics – and we worked a lot together because the music is so important. I knew every end song that I wanted as we were shooting the show. I knew where I wanted people to be emotionally at the end credits.
In episode three, we used The Twilight Singers' Darkness Falls because even though the song sounds kind of melancholy, it says a great thing: Everything is going to be all right.
It's not that I think people should refer to the lyrics and feel that. I just want the music to be true to the moment, then people can take what they want from it.
But it's true: Everything is going to be alright.
Discuss this episode in the Tell Me You Love Me Bulletin Board.
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