The new web series Bitter Homes and Gardens – premiering on March 24th – written by Fielding Edlow (who also stars) – follows the sometimes-toxic and always-hilarious bickering of a Hollywood couple (Edlow and Larry Clarke) struggling to get their acting/writing careers going. She is a “snack blogger”, who says she wants to “vlog”, too. She writes scripts on spec, but can’t seem to get anything going, despite her nonstop agitated hustle. He is an actor whose career thus far has featured roles like “morgue attendant” and “cop on the left” etc., but he has the inflated ego of an A-Lister serious actor. In any “show biz” circles, you meet people like this. But it takes a writer like Fielding Edlow to turn it into something hilarious and compulsively watchable.
Fielding Edlow, creator and star of Bitter Homes and Gardens, has a busy career as a playwright, actress, and standup comedian. She hosts a monthly comedy show at Hollywood Improv called “Eat Pray F*ck” (the name makes me laugh every time it comes across my news feed). An award-winning writer, her wit is sharp to the point that it hurts – you can’t believe some of the things her characters say to one another – but she balances that sharpness with a humanist ability to laugh at – and have affection for – the absurdity of human behavior. Her dialogue is unstoppable.
Larry Clarke is a busy actor, who has appeared on The Mentalist, Grey’s Anatomy, Law & Order, Shameless, The Bridge, and more. He is also a member of the cast of the new Twin Peaks, premiering in May. He’s worked quite a bit with Steven Soderbergh, appearing in The Informant, as well as appearing as Kate Winslet’s Hazmat-suited partner in disease-control in Contagion. I saw Larry in the Broadway revival of David Rabe’s Streamers at the Roundabout and it was such a memorable evening. Larry played a character who had no idea how tragic he was, how lost, and it was heartbreaking. He’s a wonderful actor.
Fielding and Larry are married in real-life, and have a daughter. Full disclosure: I have known the two of them for years, and have long admired both of their work!
Executive-produced by Jim Leonard (who produced Dexter, The Closer, Major Crimes), with Dave Rock directing, Bitter Homes and Gardens started with one episode titled “DVR,” which premiered at the Palm Springs Festival and won “Best Comedy” at the New York Short Film Festival. Bitter Homes and Gardens launches its first season (8 episodes, all directed by Rock) on March 24th and has already received raves, as well as a clamoring online audience wanting to know what happens next with this unpleasant – and yet totally relatable – couple.
Larry Clarke & Fielding Edlow
I was so happy to speak with Larry and Fielding over the phone recently about Bitter Homes and Gardens.
Sheila O’Malley: I wanted to hear about the idea for the first episode “DVR” and how you developed it from there.
Fielding Edlow: I’ll take that one. Because “Hashtag Lean in”. We had a friend who was helping Temple Israel put together an evening and the theme was Forgiveness. So Larry was like “Just write one of our typical fights and how we get over it.” So I wrote about our fights about the DVR. And we got to the Temple and we were doing a quote unquote run-through, and we heard other scenes where people were talking about the IRA and re-uniting with the family who housed them during the Holocaust, and stealing your grandmother’s morphine… I said to Larry, “We gotta get out of here.” But to our delight, it couldn’t have gone better! Our scene went up in the middle of this gut-wrenching night, where people were like, “My grandmother’s writhing in pain and I’m high as a kite!” The head rabbi came up to us afterwards and said, “I relate to that! I read my sermons to my wife and she gives me notes and it’s so annoying.” So I thought, Wow, okay so this is relatable.
I brought it to my writer’s group and they were unanimous that we should keep going. My group is littered with show-runners and producers and a couple of them said, “We want to produce you, we want to give you money, and we want to make this a web series.”
Larry Clarke: Jim Leonard, our producer, is the guy who really set this whole thing up. Jim said, “Listen – we want to empower writers without having executive producers over their shoulders trying to take away the funny.” Jim really believes in Fielding’s voice. He said, “We want to keep your voice as pure as possible.” They didn’t spend that much money, so no one was having a heart attack. Those writers’ rooms and executive producers can destroy humor. When you have too many people in the room with comedy, it starts to go away.
SOM: Fielding, how many drafts do you go through? Do you run through it and riff by yourselves and tape it? What’s the process?
FE: A huge part of my process as a writer is hearing it out loud. So I’ll write a rough draft and then I’ll bring it into a group and hear it out loud or Larry and I will read it to each other and immediately I can hear which jokes don’t work – I can hear where it’s singing, where I’m overwriting.
LC: Developing it was something that was a process, even when we got into the physical space and we were about to start shooting. We had a lot of ideas and right before we shot stuff, we were like, “What am I DOING in this scene?” And that would be the last thing we would add, that’s how we found a lot of that spark, where the magic is. Me arranging pillows on the couch, her re-arranging what I did. Whatever. It has to be smart and structured to begin with, and when we start filming we let it all go. We got into a rhythm where it was intense but funny. It was intense on set, don’t you think, Fielding? It was a driven set. We didn’t have a lot of time.
SOM: How long does each episode take?
FE: It’s about a couple of hours for each episode. The goal was two a day. And sometimes we wouldn’t get to it. For me, the whole thing was having alacrity – speed – with the dialogue. There’s a lot of words and it’s got to be quick, you’ve got to be a little bit ahead of the audience.
SOM: Can you talk a little bit about developing the season-wide Arc?
FE: I started as a playwright but I know TV and webisodes, and I thought: What do we leave people with? What are we working towards? It seemed a little cliched to me to end with me being pregnant but I feel like if we kept our voices and do it in our acerbic vituperative way … For example, I, in my real life, was completely obsessed with my gynecologist when I was pregnant. I’d wear my wedding shoes to appointments. I got on her Instagram. When I actually had the baby I didn’t even care about the baby I just wanted her to think I was pushing well. So we’re looking towards Season 2 thinking we might add the gynecologist, and I thought, I can make this exciting for myself.
And certainly, I pitch ideas to the executive producer. It’s never just me, it’s about collaborating, it’s our project. Our director, Dave Rock, is also an amazing editor, and editing is so important for comedy. He cut this trailer and it’s a mini-masterpiece. We feel so fortunate. We all have very different energies. He’s not effusive, which makes you work really hard. He is a brilliant director who controls our energies perfectly. And probably needs a spot of therapy after every shoot with us.
Left to right: Producer Jim Leonard, line producer Ryan Willis, director Dave Rock, Writer/actress Fielding Edlow, actor Larry Clarke, DP Nico Navia
SOM: This relationship is how married couples appear to me, as a total outsider to that whole scene.
FE: There are those couples who never fight. Or who won’t fart in front of each other.
SOM: That’s just not sustainable.
FE: Married couples spend a lot of time on the couch. Larry and I got really into Breaking Bad, for example. When the show ended, I felt like, “Well, what’s the point of staying together? All we had was Breaking Bad. If I can’t watch whatshername sell meth overseas, then what’s the point anymore?”
SOM: I love the moments of sentiment you found between the characters. It felt genuine and yet you still feel like, “Who else would be with these people?”
FE: That’s a very perspicacious comment.
SOM: Wow.
FE: It’s a very good word, right? No, but literally Larry will look at me about once a week and say, “Just so you know, nobody else would put up with you.” And he means it. And he’s right. That was a note we’ve consistently gotten all the way through, though: Where’s the love? We’ve got to have the vulnerable moments. It’s so important.
SOM: I’m still laughing about that random line: “The Bolsheviks … NAFTA…”
LC: We used to say to each other, “We don’t talk about current events enough.” At one point we challenged ourselves to read the whole NY Times first section and then have a talk about it. Which we did. “Hey, on page 7, there’s something happening in Libya with the ambassador.” Trying to talk about things that aren’t just gossip or our careers. And it’s hard to do in this world.
SOM: I can distinguish between you two in real life and the characters, by the way.
LC: I’m not quite that selfish in real life.
SOM: I know, but it’s this exaggerated quality of something that feels very true. Like, when your character said you’re doing Equus with a “Malibu collective,” I want to cry. Saying it’s a “collective” doesn’t make it better, Larry. It’s interesting to see a couple who are both struggling with what kind of career they will have. If they will have ANY kind of career.
LC: The characters are too self-involved to do well. They are the ultimate Hollywood self-obsessives. They’re a little lost. And of course that’s how it can be in Los Angeles. There’s a tragic element to it. But it’s so much fun to play. I remember when I first met Jeffrey Tambor – he became my great teacher and friend – and I asked him “How did you get to Hank [in the Larry Sanders Show] as an actor? How did you DO that?” It’s a flawless characterization and it’s funny on so many levels. Jeffrey has taught me a lot about comedy and acting – and he said, “Before every take on the Larry Sanders Show, I said to myself ‘He is the loneliest man in the world.'” I think there’s something to that. Those sad clown characters I’ve always gravitated to. I think there’s a lot of that in Larry in Bitter Homes and also in Fielding’s character. If something doesn’t happen for them, it’s the end of the world. There’s nothing to hang onto – and YET. We can go to CVS and it will save our marriage.
SOM: It’s strangely sweet.
LC: Jim Leonard felt: Here’s a cool young writer who has a unique voice we haven’t heard before. He was intrigued by it. He was intrigued by Fielding’s style of comedy and her ability to write dialogue that is sarcastic and poetic at the same time. He really wanted to create something where her voice could be heard without censors. They gave us so much freedom. That freedom was so important.
Season 1 trailer of Bitter Homes and Gardens
//Fielding Edlow: I’ll take that one. Because “Hashtag Lean in”. // Bahahaha!
hahahaha right?? She’s so funny.
She is hilarious!
“All we had was Breaking Bad.”