I was like, ‘What’s that sound?’ As a New Yorker I was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s birds. I woke up the first morning I was here to birds chirping. At different points in the conversation, she apologizes for her shaggy mullet (“It’s for a job”) and her own train situation: “It’s a freight train that goes by my house about 20 times a day, so that’s what you’re hearing. She is sitting in the glow of her laptop in a dimly lighted corner of her home in upstate New York.

“I want the kids to have it,” Lyonne declares, in her sandpaper voice, about finally releasing the new episodes after a three-year gap. Hollywood’s most influential showrunners talk with The Times about how they broke into the business, the shifting TV landscape, their writing process and more. Television Running the Show: The writers behind your favorite TV shows explain how they made them Before long, Nadia - and eventually Alan - find themselves traveling back in time, bouncing among decades and coming up close with their family histories while delving into mortality, existentialism and inherited trauma.

The new season picks up four years later, days before Nadia’s 40th birthday. Time is still on a loop in Season 2, but it takes the 6 train to the past. In other words, as she later quips: “No, my mother did not give birth to me on the subway tracks at Astor Place station while I was time traveling.”Ĭreated by Lyonne, Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, the series spent its first season pivoting around Lyonne’s Nadia Vulvokov, a scraggily East Village video game engineer who is fatally struck by a cab the night of her 36th birthday party and gets stuck in a “Groundhog Day”-like time loop, reliving the night in new and more bizarre ways - and meeting a fellow time-loop pal, Alan (Charlie Barnett), in the process. The only thing I could tell you about my family is that there’s such extreme character studies that I think, as a writer, as a director, as an actor, as a producer, it’s given me a huge window into the human condition more than I think I’m exorcising personal demons through my work.” “ It has been my life experience that there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t talk about or that we’re ashamed of, family histories, stuff like that, and it’s actually not as rare as we like to pretend. “One of the stories about the show is how much it’s me, personally,” Lyonne says, alluding to her chaotic childhood and history with addiction. The correct spellings are Charlie Barnett for the actor, Lizzy for the character and Allison Silverman for the writer. ApA previous version of this story misspelled an actor’s name, a character’s name and a writer’s name.

Trailblazers by Yvonne Doll