Seth Rogen

It’s easy to miss the confidence of Billy Wilder or Frank Capra whenever some brave soul tries to make a comedy that takes America’s temperature by straddling cynicism and optimism. Those Hollywood masters could handily juggle the sweet, sour and satirical and, in Wilder’s case, even leave you believing in a happy ending.

With his writing-directing feature debut, “Good Fortune,” however, Aziz Ansari, who stars alongside Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves (as an angel named Gabriel), swings big, hoping to capture that jokey truth-telling vibe about the State of Things. His subject is a fertile one too: the gig economy fostering our crushing inequity, but also the desperation of the have-nots and how oblivious the wealthy are about those who made them rich. So let’s stick it to the billionaires! Let Keanu help the downtrodden!

Ansari’s high-low morality tale, set in our fair (and unfair) Los Angeles, is a friendly melding of celestially tinged stories (“Heaven Can Wait,” “Wings of Desire”) and body-swap comedies (“Trading Places”). But as agreeable as it is, it can’t square its jabs with its sentimentality. It’s got heart, kind eyes, a wry smile and some funny lines, but no teeth when you really need things bitten into, chewed up and spit out.

Ansari plays Arj, living a serious disconnection between his professional identity — wannabe Hollywood film editor — and how he actually exists: task-gigging for scraps and living in his car. When a garage-reorganizing job for Jeff (Rogen), a Bel-Air venture capitalist, turns into an assistant position, Arj feels secure enough to use the company card for a fancy dinner with occasional colleague and romantic interest Elena (an underused Keke Palmer). Jeff clocks the charge the next day, though (a realistic detail about the rich watching every penny), and immediately fires Arj.

All along, Arj’s sad situation has touched Reeves’ long-haired, khaki-suited angel, whose life-saving purview (he specializes in jostling distracted drivers) is low in the hierarchy overseen by boss guardian Martha (Sandra Oh). Gabriel wants a big healing job to show Arj, with a little role-reversal magic, that being Jeff isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Except, of course, it is. (David Mamet’s line “Everybody needs money — that’s why they call it money” comes to mind.) The newly luxe-and-loving-it Arj shows no signs of wanting to switch back (which is apparently his call to make in the rules of this scenario), leaving out-of-his-depth Gabriel in the position of convincing a sudden billionaire why he should go back to being poor.

Which is where “Good Fortune,” for all its grasp of how Depression-era screwball comedies made the filthy rich mockable, struggles to match its issue-driven humor with its fix-it heart. While it’s funny to watch Rogen’s freshly desperate character suffer food-delivery humiliation, buying the script’s changes of heart — and the film’s naïve idea of where everyone should be at the end — is another matter. That’s why screwball comedies didn’t try to upend capitalism, just have some clever fun with it and let a simple love story stick the landing. Ansari’s ambition is admirable but he’s better at diagnoses than solutions.

His gold-touch move is giving the hilariously deadpan Reeves one of his best roles in years: a goofy meme brought to disarming life and the movie’s beating heart. Doing good can be hard work; understanding humans is harder. Plus, Reeves makes eating a burger for the first time a sublimely funny reaffirmation that sometimes, indeed, it is a wonderful life.

TORONTO — In introducing the Saturday night TIFF world premiere of “Good Fortune,” his feature debut as a writer-director, comedian Aziz Ansari told the audience the three words that are scary in Hollywood right now: original theatrical comedy. But the one word that is never scary is Keanu.

Speaking from the stage of the festival’s Roy Thomson Hall, Ansari recalled that his star Keanu Reeves broke his kneecap early in production.

“I found out he broke his kneecap and I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Ansari continued, Reeves himself standing onstage just a few feet away. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, what is Keanu going to say? Is he going to need some time off? Is he going to drop out of the movie?’”

“And you know what Keanu said?” Ansari added. “Nothing. He just kept showing up to work and never complained, not once,” Ansari said. “He worked through what surely must have been excruciating pain and delivered a hilarious, touching performance, and he is the soul of this movie.”

The film opens with Reeves standing atop L.A.’s iconic Griffith Observatory with a small pair of angel wings on his back. Reeves, in a change of pace from his recent action work in the “John Wick” movies, plays Gabriel, a low-level angel given the task of stopping people from texting and driving. That is until he sees Arj (Ansari), who is struggling to make ends meet while working both at a big-box hardware store and as a food delivery driver.

Hoping to show him the grass isn’t always greener, Gabriel switches Arj’s life with that of Jeff (Seth Rogen), an ultrarich tech investor whose days seem to largely consist of going back and forth between his sauna and his cold plunge.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Arj much prefers Jeff’s life to his own and is reluctant to switch back. The situation becomes more complicated for Gabriel as he loses his job as an angel and must learn the tribulations and joys of being human, while still trying to fix the problem with Arj and Jeff.

For all the film’s gentle humor and quietly humanist spirit, “Good Fortune” is also rife with a palpable anger at the income inequality that motivates its story, the reality that robots are replacing the work of humans and that the excesses of the few seem predicated on the deprivation of many.

Aziz Ansari, left, and Keanu Reeves in the movie “Good Fortune.”

(Eddy Chen / Lionsgate)

The day after the film’s premiere, 42-year-old Ansari is upbeat and dapper in a gray plaid coat, black turtleneck and black slacks as he sat down for an interview in Toronto to discuss the movie and all that led up to it. After the end of his Emmy-winning series “Master of None” in 2021, Ansari had begun shooting a feature called “Being Mortal” that was shut down in 2022 a few weeks into production over allegations of misconduct by its star Bill Murray. Then production of “Good Fortune,” Ansari’s pivot away from “Being Mortal,” was delayed by the Hollywood labor strikes of 2023. Seemingly at long last, Ansari’s debut opens Oct. 17.

When “Being Mortal” got shut down, did you feel like, “Am I ever going to get to make a movie?”

I didn’t feel that way. Steven Spielberg has this story of — what’s the movie he did? “1941.” That didn’t do well and he was like, just immediately throw yourself in another thing. And I really thought about that, and that’s what I did. I just immediately went into “Good Fortune.” I mean, I had a couple of days where I was like,“Oh, no” and it was also so shocking. I think your mind doesn’t process it because it’s not really sinking in that this is what’s really happening. It probably still a piece of me [in which] it hasn’t really sunk in. It was definitely disappointing, but part of me is like, this is what needed to happen. This is the movie that should be out first.

“Being Mortal,” it’s funny, but it’s heavy. The Atul Gawande book, it’s about end-of-life issues. So it’s like, “Oh, OK. It’s another heavy drama thing.” People may have just gotten pissed, like, “What’s this guy doing?” So “Good Fortune” is definitely, to me, if you like those first two seasons of “Master of None,” I feel like what you’d hope I’d do is kind of evolve that style into a feature film and raise the level of it by having Seth and Keanu and Keke [Palmer] and Sandra [Oh], and as a feature film rather than a show.

As sweet and funny as the movie is, there also is a real righteous anger behind it. Where does that come from?

I think I got it from when I was interviewing all these people about the subject matter in the film, when I was doing research to write the Arj character. That attitude seeps in there.

“It was definitely disappointing, but part of me is like, this is what needed to happen,” Ansari says of “Being Mortal,” his first attempt at directing a feature, one that ran into production troubles with its star, Bill Murray,

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

During the opening credits of the movie, you say the line “The American Dream is dead.”

But that’s a frustration a lot of people like that guy Arj feel.

But then, you are a very successful entertainer —

Oh, yeah. Me and Seth are Jeff, no question.

How do you reconcile that? Are you concerned some people might dismiss the movie out of hand for that simple reason?

If you’re writing, you have to be able to write outside your own experience — for someone who’s like Arj, who doesn’t have the platform to tell these stories. When I did “Master of None,” we did an episode called “New York, I Love You.” And there was a segment about taxi drivers, a segment about a doorman and a segment about a woman who’s deaf. And doing that episode taught me a process of interviewing people and figuring out how to get these stories right when they’re not your experience. We did an episode in Season 3 about a woman going through IVF. I’d never done that or anything, and it had never been a part of my life. But I talked to all these people, and from the feedback I got, we got it right. And that’s what I did with this.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but for a movie coming out from a Hollywood studio, Seth gives a speech at the end that is politically radical, about how rich people can’t expect to have so much without others getting angry.

It’s kind of nuts. Some of the stuff that’s in there, I’m like, “Whoa, we really got away with something here.” Some of the stuff that’s in there, and the trailer kind of hides a little bit of that stuff, I think there are people that’d be like, “Oh, s—.”

At the premiere, there was big applause for the line, “F— AI.” Is that your feeling as well?

I’d rather say that I’m pro-human. I’m pro-people.

Keanu Reeves, left, Seth Rogen and Aziz Ansari in the movie “Good Fortune.”

(Eddy Chen / Lionsgate)

The movie is very ambitious in combining the character stories and the attention to the notion of income inequality. Was it hard for you in balancing the characters and that theme? Was the work of that more when you were writing it or when you were editing what you’d shot?

It was both. And that’s the difference between a TV show and a movie. You have a different canvas. But it was a tough thing to do. And it was my first time doing it. I remember writing a second one while I was editing, and it was such a great help because you kind of see a few moves ahead. You’re like, “Oh, wait a second, I should get to this faster.” You kind of can see your mistakes a little bit in an earlier stage because you have more experience. This is another reason I really want to get into it again and start working on the next thing because I feel like I learned a lot from it.

That’s the thing that’s so interesting about doing stand-up and doing filmmaking. Stand-up, it’s so easy to “get to the gym,” right? If I really wanted to go to do stand-up tonight, I could do it. I could go find a club in Toronto and jump on a show. But If I wanted to go direct, that’s a big journey to get to the gym. So you have fewer opportunities to kind of get the reps in.

Shooting a movie is in L.A. has become such an economic and political issue for the city. Was that a consideration in making the movie in Los Angeles?

I wanted it to be in L.A., I felt like this movie had to be set in L.A. Jeff’s not going to be living in whatever place that gives you the tax credit. And L.A. really is the perfect backdrop for the story to me. And it was challenging, but you also get the benefit of working with some of the greatest technicians in the world in L.A. And I also just love being a part of the lineage of films that are set in L.A. I watched that documentary, “Los Angeles Plays itself,” and that was so fun to watch that and just see how every movie has its own L.A., whether it’s “Heat” or “Tangerine” or “Chinatown.”

And I feel like “Good Fortune” has its L.A., and it’s exciting to show some of these neighborhoods, to see people responding to seeing Eagle Rock or Los Feliz. Whenever I was writing the movie, I always thought about that taco place in Hollywood — it’s across the street from Jitlada. I always thought about that place. I thought there was something so cinematic, and it was a hard location to clear. And our guy [location manager] Jay Traynor, he made it happen. And finding Jeff’s house was so hard. But it all came together, and I loved showing Koreatown and that Gabriel works at a Korean barbecue restaurant. Just showing all these parts of L.A.

I want to be sure to ask you about working with Keanu. People are really responding to this role. And I’m having a hard time putting my finger on what that is about.

No, I’m feeling this. Even since [the premiere], I’m feeling it. I knew people would like him, but it’s hitting on another level.

Why do you think that is? What is the alchemy of Keanu in that role?

I was thinking about this when I was eating lunch. If you look at the roles he’s done that are comedic, whether it’s in “Bill & Ted” or in “Parenthood,” there’s this innocence, this sweetness and this kindness that’s in there. And then Gabriel, to me, is the progression of that. And it’s also that you have Keanu at 61, where when I first met him, I was like, “Hey, there’s something about you that people are responding to and who you are as a real person that I don’t think I’ve seen onscreen. And I think you can show some of that with Gabriel.”

It also has all of his comedy superpowers just dialed to the max. And we were just having so much fun. It just became playtime. We were coming up with bits all the time: Oh, he’s never used the internet before. Let’s just write a quick scene where he’s using the internet for the first time. What’s he gonna do? He’s gonna look at photos of baby elephants. It became such a fun joke bag. You could just make him do anything. And it was funny, the guy’s never done anything — if he takes a bite of a taco goes, “Wow!” It’s really the funniest character I’ve ever written for.

Fans are already looing forward to binge watching the enture series

One of the writers from hit show Rick and Morty is bringing ‘chaos energy’ to Netflix in a new animated series fans already can’t wait to fall in love with.

Haunted Hotel is set to be streaming from September 19. Audiences are already anticipating spooky season beginning early as a result.

According to the synopsis released by the streaming giant, the series will follow a single mother of two who struggles to run a haunted hotel. All she has to help her is estranged brother, who is now one of the ghosts haunting the establishment and thinks the other ghosts have some pretty good ideas.

As seen in the trailer, not only does she juggle a son, daughter and a host of ghosts, there’s also a demon trapped inside the body of a boy from the 1700s.

There are also various types of spirits, ghosts and devil like creatures. One even sounds just like the voice of Seth Rogen.

Meanwhile, the main voice cast for Haunted Hotel includes Saturday Night Live alum and The Four Seasons star Will Forte. He’s joined by Scrubs’ Eliza Coupe, one of the stars of new Superman movie Skyler Gisondo, comedian Natalie Palamides, and Jimmi Simpson who many will recognise from Westworld and as one of the McPoyle brothers in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelpihia.

Haunted Hotel is created by Matt Roller, who has previously written for shows including Rick and Morty, Community and Archer. He has also worked on sitcoms Mr. Mayor and The Goldbergs.

Celebrating the series order at Netflix, he said: “I’m thrilled to be working with Netflix and an amazingly talented cast and crew to bring to life the stories of the dead, the evil, and the struggling hospitality workers at the Undervale Hotel,”

Fans are already looking forward to the new show. While it is not yet confirmed how many episodes will consist of its debut season, it’s already looking like a must binge title.

One person, replying to the trailer on social media, commented: “Rick and Morty’s chaotic energy but make it haunted? Yeah… I’m checking in!”

Another added: “t’s giving me Scooby doo vibe!” Sharing a similar sentiment one person posted: “Rick and Morty meets Scooby-Doo energy, but way more unhinged.”

While one person, seemingly excited for Halloween already said: “Spooky comedy just what we need to ease into fall. Will Forte + Rick and Morty creators = yes please”

There were some who spoke with a word of caution. It comes after a year of even more cancellations confirmed at the streamer during 2025. That included many that were only given one season despite reaching millions of views.

Shows such as The Residence, Pulse and Territory all came to a premature end. Fans are already fearful Haunted Hotel will be added to the list.

One person posted: “I can’t wait to fall in love with this show, only to be heartbroken when Netflix inevitably cancels it.”

Another agreed: “Can’t wait to love this show then feel depressed when it’s cancelled on a depressing cliffhanger.”

Haunted Hotel is streaming on Netflix from September 19.

When you gather the creative minds behind six of the most entertaining and acclaimed shows of 2025, the conversation is destined for narrative intrigue. The writers who took part in this year’s Envelope Roundtable touched on social media blackouts, release strategies, runaway production, even the wonder of Bravo’s “The Valley.” How’s that for a twist?

This panelists are Debora Cahn of “The Diplomat,” about an American foreign service officer thrust into a thorny web of geopolitics; R. Scott Gemmill of “The Pitt,” which focuses on front-line healthcare workers inside a Pittsburgh hospital during a single 15-hour shift; Lauren LeFranc of “The Penguin,” a reimagining of the Batman villain Oswald Cobblepot as a rising Gotham City kingpin, Oz Cobb; Craig Mazin of “The Last Of Us,” an adaptation of the popular video game series about survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic; Seth Rogen of “The Studio,” a chronicle of the film industry’s mercenary challenges as seen through the eyes of a newly appointed studio chief; and Jen Statsky of “Hacks,” about an aging comic’s complicated relationship with her outspoken mentee.

Read on for excerpts from our discussion.

The 2025 Writers Roundtable: Lauren LeFranc, left, Jen Statsky, Craig Mazin, Seth Rogen, Debora Cahn and R. Scott Gemmill.

Lauren, you’re making a series that is tethered to source material that’s really beloved by fans. I’m curious what the conversations are like with DC, or “The Batman” director Matt Reeves, when your series has to fit into a larger canon.

LeFranc: I knew where Oz ended in “The Batman.” I knew my job was to arc him to rise to power and achieve a certain level of power by the end. Outside of that, I was given carte blanche and I could just play. And that’s the most exciting thing to me. We both were in agreement that this should be a character study of this man. I love digging into the psychology of characters.

So many people were like, “Do you feel pressure? What’s this like for you?” And I was like, “Am I numb as a human?” I don’t feel that kind of pressure. I feel pressure to tell a great story and to write interesting, engaging characters that are surprising and to kind of surprise myself. I’m not the first type of person you would think who would get an opportunity to write a guy like Oz, necessarily, and to write into this type of world. I think there’s been a lot of crime dramas and a lot of genre shows or features that don’t have the lens that I have on a man like that. So I took that seriously. And I also really wanted to pepper the world with really interesting, complicated women as well. I felt like, in some of these genres, sometimes those characters weren’t as fully formed.

Craig Mazin of “The Last of Us.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Craig, you know what it’s like working with source material, and we knew the fate of fan-favorite character Joel, who dies in Part 2 of the video game. Tell me about your experience of the death of Joel in the video game — playing it — and how that informed what you wanted to see out of Season 2 and where exactly it would fall.

Mazin: I was upset when it happened, but I wasn’t upset at the game. It was, narratively, the right thing to do. If you make a story that is about moral outcomes and the consequences of our behavior, and somebody goes through a hospital and murders a whole lot of people, and kind of dooms the world to be stuck in this terrible place, and takes away the one hope they have of getting out of it, yeah, there should be a consequence. If there’s no consequence or even a mild consequence, then it’s a bit neutered, isn’t it? It made sense to me and it made sense that if we were going to tell the story, that was the story we were going to tell. Sometimes people do ask me, “Was there any part of you that was like, ‘Hey, let’s not have Joel die?’” No. That would be the craziest thing of all time.

How quick were you watching the real-time reaction from fans?

Mazin: I don’t do that.

Rogen: But how do you get validation? How do you know to feel good?

Statsky: Can you teach me not to look?

Mazin: I think I’m looking for validation. Really what I’m looking for is to repeat abusive behavior toward me — that’s what my therapist says. For all of our shows, millions and millions and millions of people are watching these around the world. And if 10,000 people on Twitter come at you for something, that is a negligible number relative to the size of the audience, but it sure doesn’t feel [like it]. So I made a choice. The downside is I do miss the applause. Who among us doesn’t love applause? I’ve just had to give that feeling up to not feel the bad feelings.

Seth Rogen of “The Studio.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

With a show like “The Studio” or “Hacks,” does it feel cathartic to lampoon the industry or show the ridiculous nature of the business and the decision–makers sometimes?

Rogen: What’s funny is, as we were writing the show, we never used the word “satire.” To us, the goal was not to make fun of any element of the industry — honestly, it’s mostly based on myself and my own fears, as someone who’s in charge of things, that I’m making the wrong choices, and that I’m prioritizing the wrong things, and that I’m convincing my idols to work with me and then I’m letting them down, and I’m championing the wrong ideas. That I’m making things worse and that I’m giving notes to people that are detrimental rather than exciting, and that I’m mitigating my own risks rather than trying to bolster creative swings. That was the startling moment where I realized I personally relate in my darkest moments to a studio executive more than I do a creative person in the industry in many ways. And that was kind of the moment where I was like, “Oh, that’s a funny thing to explore.”

Jen Statsky of “Hacks.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Statsky: But it’s interesting when you put it like that, because of the part of showrunning where you become management and you’re much more on that business side [of] running a show. We’re executives in many ways too.

Mazin: I have a question for you. How do you deal with the fact that — as we kind of move through things as writers, we are always comrades, we are colleagues of people. When you become a showrunner, you don’t notice it at first, but there is this barrier between you and everybody, and one day you wake up and realize, “Oh, it’s because they look at me and see someone who can fire them, who can elevate them, who can change their lives for better or worse.” And you start to feel very, very lonely all of a sudden.

Statsky: Oh, there’s a group text you’re not on.

Mazin: And it’s about you.

Statsky: It’s about you. It’s such a hard part of this job that I struggle with very much because as writers, we are empathetic to others, and we are observing the world, and we are trying to commune with people as best as possible. But then you do this thing and you’re like, “I like writing, I like writing, I like writing.” And they’re like, “Great. Now here’s a 350-person company to manage and you become a boss.” I struggle with it a lot, the thinking of people’s feelings, thinking of people’s emotions, wanting to be in touch with them, but then also, at the end of the day, having to sometimes make really difficult management-type decisions that affect people’s livelihood. I find it very challenging. I need your therapist for that as well.

Debora Cahn of “The Diplomat.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Debora, you have a character, a female vice president, who’s been doing the bidding of an older president whose capabilities have been called into question, and spoiler alert, she becomes president. The season launched a week or so before the 2024 presidential election. What was that like? And how is it writing a political drama now versus when you were working on “The West Wing”?

Cahn: Back in “The West Wing” days, we would have people come in, people who worked in the field, and we would say, “What are you worried about that we don’t know to worry about yet?” And that was a pretty good barometer for getting an interesting story that was likely to still be topical in a year. That’s all you want, really, is to not be completely lapped by the news when you’re trying to tell a story that’s not going to go to air for a year. Now, we’re released from any boundaries of any kind. There’s nothing that we can do that’s more absurd than what’s happening. Suddenly, we’re doing a documentary, or we’re doing a balm for what you wish government was like or what you vaguely remember it was like. But we’re trying to stay in the headspace of, “What is the foreign policy community going to be thinking about in the next two years?” and trying to find something that will continue to feel relevant. But more and more it’s like, “What are the conflicts that sane people have with each other in this field? What happens when you can look at two people and you feel like they both have good values and they are kind to children? What do they fight about?”

R. Scott Gemmill of “The Pitt.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Let’s talk about release strategies. There’s the traditional, week-to-week model and the more modern, all-at-once model. There’s a mix of both in the marketplace. Scott, with “The Pitt,” you could just see the way people rallied around every week to see what happened next. What do you like about the weekly release?

Gemmill: I’ve only ever done that. This is my first streaming show, and we are doing it in a traditional drop a week. So I’ve never had a show that was bingeable. I don’t know any other way. At one point, they were going to release three episodes at once, but they only released two [at the start]. I don’t have a dog in that fight. I think my show, just because of the nature of it, would be very hard to binge.

Rogen: As someone who’s been bingeing it, I can attest to that. [To Cahn] Yours comes out all at once.

Cahn: It does. I don’t love that. It’s not what I would choose. I think Netflix offers a lot of other pluses. [It’s] got a big audience all over the world and that’s really nice. But I came up in broadcast television, and the idea that you’ve created this thing and it’s a story that you’ve experienced over time, and then people are like two days and done, it just —

Mazin: It’s weird.

Cahn: And it changes the way that you write.

Mazin: Over the last few years, what’s happening is, for shows that are coming out week by week, people will now save up three at a time. So they don’t want to watch week after week. There’s this weird accordion thing going on, and I don’t know where this is going. I don’t think any of us do. I’m a little nervous about the week by week. I am just hoping that it remains.

I thought for sure one day Netflix would go, “Why are we doing this?” Because I really didn’t understand. I still don’t understand.

Cahn: I have this question every three months.

Rogen: They don’t have an answer.

Cahn: It works for them.

Gemmill: Wonder why they complain about grind. Because it’s not there. Well, it’s because you put it all out at once.

Mazin: But then what I’m worried about is that they’re right. I’m just wondering if people are starting to lose their patience.

Statsky: Attention span. I think they are. I’ve even noticed, because we used to drop two a week. In this season for “Hacks,” we’ve done one a week. I saw a couple tweets where people were like, “Why are the episodes shorter this year?” I was like, “Well, they’re not. You used to watch two.” But I do think the one-a-week model, because now people are so trained [to binge] — like you’re saying, the attention span, it’s scary. I don’t think people want to watch like that anymore.

Rogen: I produced “The Boys,” and we actually went from them all coming out at once to weekly. And it did not affect the viewership in any way, shape or form was what we were told. What it did affect, that we could just see, was it sustained cultural impact. People talked about it for three months instead of three weeks of incredibly intense chatter. It just occupied more space in people’s heads, which I think was beneficial to the show.

Cahn: When they’re coming out one a week, you can repeat things that you can’t when they’re coming out all together. You have to look at them in terms of, did they each have the same rhythm? Are they each really featuring the same characters and storylines? You have to think about it in terms of, “If people do three at a time, what’s their experience going to be?” It’s terrible.

The talk of the town is runaway production and how to stop it. Scott, “The Pitt” is set in Pittsburgh and you did film exteriors there, but principal production happened on the Warner Bros. lot. Talk about why that was important for you.

Gemmill: The show could have been shot in Moose Jaw. But it was important to bring the work here, so we fought really hard to get the California tax credit. The most important part of my job besides writing producible scripts that are on time is to keep my show on the air as long as possible, to keep everyone employed as long as possible. And that’s the thing I like the best about it. This is the first show that Noah [Wyle]’s done since he left “ER” that’s shot in Los Angeles. It’s a shame. There’s more production now, but when we first were at Warner Bros. for this, it was a ghost town. It’s so sad because I’ve been in the business for 40 years and still get excited when I go on a lot. And to see them become unused just because it’s cheaper to shoot somewhere else … and there’s so many talented people here, and it’s hard on their families if you have to go to Albuquerque for six months. I don’t ever want to leave the stage again.

Mazin: We did our postproduction on the Warner Bros. lot, but we shoot in Canada. And I love Canada. But yeah, of course, I’d love to be home. I like doing postproduction here. I’ll take what I get. The financial realities are pretty stark, that’s the problem. If you are making a smaller show, the gap is not massive. If you’re making a larger show, every percentage becomes a bigger amount of money and also represents a larger amount of people to employ. But what’s good is it seems like they’re starting to get their act together in Sacramento. I do worry sometimes it’s a little bit too late, because the rest of the world seems to be in an arms race to see how many incentives they can give to get production to go there.

I’m hoping that at least we can start to move the needle a bit because, listen, that Warner Bros. lot, when I was a kid starting out, I would go on that lot, I would see the little “ER” backlot with the diner and all of it. And I was like, “That’s on TV. It’s here.” And now I walk around the Warner Bros. lot and it’s just a single tram full of tourists and no one else. And it’s so, so sad.

Lauren LeFranc of “The Penguin.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

LeFranc: It’s really heartbreaking. You used to be able to write what you’re doing, produce, do post all on the same lot. You had a family that you were able to form, and you could mentor writers. I would not be able to be a showrunner if not for all the people who came before me who mentored me, and I could walk to set, produce my own episode, and then I can walk to post. It’s so hard now where you’re asking writers, especially if networks aren’t paying for writers to go to set, “Can you pay for yourself to fly to New York?” It just makes it so hard to be able to educate people in the way that I feel like I was privileged enough to be educated. What are we going to do about that?

Gemmill: Mistakes get made. The best part about the whole business is it’s collaborative. But when you’re separated by thousands of miles, sometimes there’s a disconnect.

Before we wrap, please tell me what you’re watching. Jen, we were talking about “The Valley” earlier.

Rogen: Oh, I watch “The Valley” too. It’s amazing. Do you watch “The Valley” aftershow? It’s almost as good as “The Valley.”

Statsky: I’m really worried about Jax.

Rogen: We watch reality television. I see the blank looks on everybody’s face.

Statsky: We’re in comedy.

Mazin: I can’t believe how scared I was when you were talking, and then how good I felt when you’re like, “It’s a reality show.”

Statsky: So, you know “Vanderpump Rules”?

Mazin: Ish.

Statsky: It’s an offshoot.

Rogen: Which is an offshoot of —

Statsky: “Real Housewives.”

Mazin: This is an echo of an echo. Go on.

Statsky: Yes, it’s an echo of an echo of garbage.

Rogen: But it’s so good.

Statsky: But it is the worst indictment of heterosexual marriage I’ve ever seen.

Rogen: Yes, it really is.

Mazin: Oh, so incidentally, the San Fernando Valley is what it’s [about]? It’s about Valley Village.

Statsky: Valley Village. It’s the couples that have moved to the Valley and are having children and —

Rogen: And they are all in very bad places in their lives. It’s amazing.

Statsky: You think [in] reality shows most people are in bad places. That’s sadly what people want to watch. These people are in particularly bad places.

Rogen: And the show seems to be compounding it, I think.

Statsky: Yeah, weirdly, being on a reality show is not helping their problem.

Rogen: I find that I watch reality TV because when I watch all of your shows, I find them intellectually challenging. They make me self-conscious, or they make me inspired or something, which is not how I want to feel necessarily after a long day at work just watching something. And so reality TV makes me feel none of those things. It in no way reminds me of what I’ve done all day.

Mazin: If you make me dissociate, I’m watching.

Statsky: You’re going to love it. But once you start watching, Jax owns a bar in Studio City. We can all go. We can reunite.

Mazin: I’ve gone to that bar.

Rogen: You been to Jax’s?

Mazin: Yes, I’ve been to that bar.

Statsky: Wait, hold on. But everyone else in that bar was there because they watched the reality show. Why were you there?

LeFranc: Out of context, I’m so invested in all this.

Rogen: You’ve got to watch it. … Nothing I will ever make is as good as “The Valley.”