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Episode: Bonus Episode: Inside the TV Series "Dirty John" Part 3
Author: Los Angeles Times | Wondery
Duration: 00:10:48
Episode Shownotes
In the last of three special episodes, Alexandra Cunningham, showrunner of the new Bravo series "Dirty John," offers insight into how she approached the writing of the show and its titular psychopath. Jeffrey Reiner, who directed all eight episodes, discusses the creative team’s ambition to transcend the conventions of a
traditional thriller.
Summary
In this final episode of the series, Alexandra Cunningham, the showrunner of 'Dirty John,' examines the complexity of John Meehan’s character, revealing that he perceives himself as justified rather than villainous. The narrative emphasizes that understanding his background does not excuse his behavior. Director Jeff Reiner and Cunningham discuss their innovative approach to storytelling, focusing on subtext and shifts in point of view to deconstruct thriller conventions, especially in terms of Meehan's charm juxtaposed with malevolence. Episode 7's unique perspective enhances comprehension of his motivations, illustrating the creators' intent to provide a darkly comedic yet complex portrayal of the titular character.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Bonus Episode: Inside the TV Series "Dirty John" Part 3) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:07 Speaker_00
To me, the key for writing John and also talking to Eric about John is that villains don't think they're villains.
00:00:15 Speaker_01
I'm talking to Alexandra Cunningham, the showrunner on the new Bravo series Dirty John. The Eric she's talking about is Eric Bana, who plays the title character, who she wanted for the show and fought to get.
00:00:27 Speaker_00
I definitely think that John developed some kind of superiority complex in conjunction with a sort of persecution complex, like that no one's as smart as I am and also everyone's out to get me, and so therefore anything I do to sort of save myself and get what I need is justified.
00:00:52 Speaker_01
From the Los Angeles Times and Wondery, I'm Chris Goffert and this is a special bonus episode of Dirty John.
00:01:12 Speaker_01
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the showrunner is not just the head writer, but the arbiter of a thousand production details, large and small, from casting to costumes.
00:01:21 Speaker_01
Basically the CEO of a corporation that forms for a few harried months and then dissolves. Cunningham's first job in the role was the American version of prime suspect.
00:01:32 Speaker_00
One of the things I loved about the Dirty John material was it was actually an opportunity to write a lot of the different kinds of stuff that I've written in my career. There's procedural stuff in there, law enforcement procedural stuff.
00:01:48 Speaker_00
There's obviously the emotional twisted fairy tale version of it, which I mean, I always, Soap seems to be kind of a dirty word in our business, but I actually think any story that has emotional stakes is a soap. Like, iClaudius is a soap.
00:02:07 Speaker_00
Saving Private Ryan is a soap.
00:02:09 Speaker_01
Cunningham spent six years writing for Desperate Housewives, and she sees parallels with Dirty John.
00:02:14 Speaker_00
When Desperate Housewives was good, it had a lot in common with this story, even though the story really happened in the sense that, you know, here's these women and they're on an emotional rollercoaster tightrope and it's about love and it's about fear and all of the things that this story is about, except this really happened.
00:02:33 Speaker_00
The core of The Sopranos, the greatest show ever, is love and family and murder and fear and all the things that this story has. So like, because maybe everything goes back to the Greeks. I don't know.
00:02:46 Speaker_01
I first met Alex Cunningham at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in L.A. just before she signed on. And from the beginning, we agreed on what I thought was an essential point. The series was not going to try to explain John Meehan.
00:02:58 Speaker_01
It was not going to put him on a couch with Dr. Freud in a search for childhood horrors that might serve to mitigate or justify his awfulness.
00:03:06 Speaker_01
I didn't think of Meehan as a man wearing a mask that concealed a wounded, more vulnerable, more authentic self. I thought of him as only masks concealing total emptiness.
00:03:16 Speaker_01
I thought of the scene in The Invisible Man where the hero peels away his bandages and there's no one there.
00:03:22 Speaker_01
In the writer's room more than once Cunningham made the point that one reason people want explanations for John Meehan is that it gives them the comforting illusion that he's somehow defendable against.
00:03:33 Speaker_00
People want to have John completely explained because they think if they know the reasons behind his behavior, then that will help them avoid a person who behaves like that.
00:03:44 Speaker_00
Except, of course, obviously, you wouldn't know these things about your John if he came to you. and tried to do the things to you that Jon did to women, you wouldn't know any of those things about that person, so it really wouldn't help you.
00:03:59 Speaker_00
I will feel sorry for you up until the point where you injure someone else, when you weaponize what happened to you. And so that was important to me to not feel like that's what we were doing, is trying to
00:04:16 Speaker_00
elicit any sympathy for John, except perhaps as a child, because in episode five, we do do a little talking about how the con artist part of him came from his father, who was very proud of possibly being related to famous mafia figures.
00:04:34 Speaker_01
Episode five of the TV series gives us a glimpse of John Meehan's childhood. It shows him under the influence of his father, a small time crook who ran a card room and introduced young John to a variety of swindles.
00:04:47 Speaker_01
At one point, as they sit together at a restaurant, the dad passes the boy a shard of glass to bite into in a scheme to get money out of the owners.
00:04:56 Speaker_03
You know, so Alex really felt that John was a black hole. And I know you guys really, felt that. But as a director, I couldn't really work on those.
00:05:07 Speaker_01
This is the director Jeffrey Reiner. He's best known for his work on Friday Night Lights and The Affair. He's directing all eight episodes of Dirty John.
00:05:16 Speaker_03
I can't give an actor directions or, you know, play subtext if there's not subtext. So if you're just playing somebody who's an evil person, then you're going to have a lousy performance.
00:05:29 Speaker_03
And so, you know, Eric and I would really discuss a lot, you know, what motivates this guy. And so you have to dig deep for that.
00:05:39 Speaker_03
So when we go back to episode five and we see his past, I think it's all right at that moment in that boy's life to feel sorry for him. But when you go to the future, it doesn't justify his behavior.
00:05:54 Speaker_03
It just gives you, you know, this is what he turned into.
00:06:09 Speaker_01
Director Jeff Reiner says that when he first met Alex Cunningham, their conversation focused on the series' point of view and how to transcend the conventions of a straight thriller.
00:06:19 Speaker_03
The normal approach to this material would be a thriller where the woman's looking over her shoulder the whole time. And that's not something that Alex and I were interested in.
00:06:28 Speaker_03
We were interested in kind of deconstructing it and telling it from different points of view.
00:06:35 Speaker_01
The most striking shift in point of view comes in episode 7, which is told from John Meehan's perspective. Here's Eric Bana, who plays Meehan, describing it.
00:06:44 Speaker_02
We get to see what he was doing for an hour before meeting Deborah on that first date that we enjoyed in episode one. We get to see what he was doing just before stealing the drugs that he was administering to a patient.
00:06:58 Speaker_02
We get to see how many women he was calling before he called Deborah the first time on that. You know, so. It was, it was a pretty raucous, bawdy idea for an episode that, you know, we tried to have some fun with as well.
00:07:15 Speaker_02
And we realized that for those people who, you know, want to embrace the dark humor, that there was, there's a lot in Seven. He's in his RV in the middle of the desert being rejected by other women and packing Viagra into his pocket and doing drugs.
00:07:33 Speaker_02
And it's just, And we see him lying. We see him on the phone lying to people. And one of the things I loved about Seven was, you know, John being on his own.
00:07:43 Speaker_02
And one of the things that fascinated me about this character was, which, you know, you allude to a little bit when you played the audio from the weddings, that he had no friends, which was really fascinating.
00:07:58 Speaker_02
You know, because some people claim to be lone wolves or claim to be sort of loners and stuff. But John, to me, was a true loner in amongst people.
00:08:07 Speaker_01
Reiner, the director, told me he spent a lot of time thinking about Travis Bickle, the violent loner from Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
00:08:14 Speaker_01
Reiner is also a fan of the director, Billy Wilder, and the darkly comic tone he brought to classic noir films like Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity.
00:08:23 Speaker_03
So tonally, I had to make sure that there was a sense of humor, which quite honestly, I got from you, from your, um, from the tone in which you read it.
00:08:35 Speaker_03
I don't know if it was purposeful or not, but I always felt like there was this slight ironic kind of take on the material.
00:08:44 Speaker_01
The real life John Meehan was a con man and a sadist who hurt more people than we'll probably ever know. a creature of malevolence so pure, it's hard to think of analogs in my long experience of writing about very bad people.
00:08:58 Speaker_01
But nobody on the Dirty John series thought it would be interesting to portray him as a glowering paper mache villain.
00:09:05 Speaker_03
So he had to be charming and he had to be funny and he had to be, even in his evil had to be somewhat funny. Yeah, there is this character who might think he's in a Scorsese movie or he might think he's an ultimate villain.
00:09:19 Speaker_03
And so that will dictate what he says and what he does. There's a scene where he goes to meet Toby at the door and Toby calls him out for being a liar. And after take four, I told Eric to eat a sandwich while he's doing it.
00:09:36 Speaker_03
So there was this kind of Cavalier attitude, you know, when he's telling him, he's kind of telling him all this dark stuff, you know, he's chomping on a sandwich. So to me, it just gave the character like that scene suddenly a nonchalance.
00:09:51 Speaker_03
to his evilness, which makes it even more evil. But it does make it somewhat darkly funny. And also, he's a predator having a meal. Yeah. Well, I never thought of that thematically, but you're right. Some film school students will write that essay.
00:10:08 Speaker_03
They might write that essay.
00:10:13 Speaker_01
You can catch the premiere of Dirty John on Bravo at 10 p.m. on Sunday, November 25th. It's a production of Universal Cable Productions and L.A. Times Studios, and this is the last of three special episodes about its making.
00:10:26 Speaker_01
And here's a reminder that before it was a TV show, it was a work of journalism. You can find the original L.A. Times series plus 14 other pieces of narrative journalism in my new collection.
00:10:37 Speaker_01
It's called Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders by Christopher Goffard, published by Simon & Schuster.