The Best Man's Ghostwriter Ep. 1: Don't Mess With Exes
The Best Man’s Ghostwriter is out now on Audible!
As promised, I’m here to give you a behind-the-scenes look each week for each episode. And I can take one *Twisters*-sized guess what the majority of you are here to read about: PILOT STORY STRUCTURE.
Just kidding. Even the elephant in the room is like, “Do you know Glen Powell? cAn YoU gIvE hIm My PhOnE nUmBeR?” For that, I can’t help you. No really, I can’t.
I do want to share one of the first interactions I had with Glen that really sold me on him, both as a partner in this and as a person (not that I wasn’t sold from the get go). It was supposed to be an easy follow-up conversation after our initial meeting to discuss some of the finer points of the script. It was a weekday morning. I was nervous/excited/going a hundred miles an hour, and I launched right into work talk. “I think we have to start with this...I’d love to hear your thoughts on that...Do you have any feelings about this...” In my head, I didn’t want to waste a second of his time/our time getting this show where it needed to go and it all had to be figured out right now. Glen very calmly, in the absolute friendliest way he could responded, “Good morning.”
My pulse slowed.
The birds started singing again.
It reminded me that even though we have so much work to do and this is all very exciting, we can still be people to each other. I’m forever grateful to him for that.
I bring this up now because this how I feel again talking to you all about this show. I finally get to talk to you about it! I have so much I want to tell you! I’m taking in too much air!
Don’t Mess with Exes
Each episode is titled/themed after a different one of Nate’s rules for best man’s speeches. I always knew that the pilot was going to be “Don’t Mess With Exes”. This rule is simple: In your wedding speech, don’t bring up anyone that the bride or groom has previously dated. In the same way that I was freaking out talking to Glen early on, it’s extremely easy for a best man to get overwhelmed when asked to talk about their best friend. They don’t know where to start and there’s so much to say and let’s just start with the most obviously embarrassing topic THE EX SHE WAS CRAZY RIGHT? I’ve been to so many weddings where this happens. What I think a best man is hoping to do when they bring up an ex is underline how special the bride is while also embarrassing their best friend.
STOP DOING THIS.
Here’s why you don’t mess with exes:
1) The bride doesn’t want to be compared to anyone else on their wedding day. They especially don’t want to be reminded that the person they’re about to marry got detained by campus security for having sex in a car in a parking garage.
2) Mentioning an ex breaks the agreement we’ve made as wedding guests.
As Nate says to Gary, our first Best Man of the Week played by Zach Cherry:
“The fairy tale that every wedding guest wants to support is that these two found each other and today their lives are beginning.”
The audience *knows.* They know the bride has exes. They know the groom has exes. They’ve stood next to the exes in family photos. They’ve shook the ex’s hand at Thanksgiving and then admitted that they hated them when they heard that they broke up before Christmas. They’re still friends with the ex on Facebook even after the break-up.
The agreement we make with the bride and groom is that we pretend. We pretend that we’re okay sitting by our friend’s longtime boyfriend who stormed the Capitol. We pretend to not be conflicted when the DJ plays R. Kelly. We pretend that this is the beginning of a beautiful story for these two people, even though we know how many times they’ve broken up and gotten back together. We pretend because we love them. So when a best man reminds everyone that the groom used to date an insanely hot dancer who stole his car, they’re breaking the agreement.
3) Talking about the ex has nothing to do with the best man’s friendship with the groom. More on this in a little bit.
All of this is the B-Story of Episode 1. Okay, I teach a pilot-writing workshop, so yeah, I’m gonna nerd out here a minute, but I promise it’s all gonna come back together. I’m sure I’m stealing this quote from Scriptnotes or something, but the pilot isn’t the beginning of the story, the pilot is the template episode of the show. Every episode of The Best Man’s Ghostwriter, more or less (get ready for Episode 8), follows a simple structure:
A Story is Nate working with Dan.
B Story is our best man of the week illustrating this week’s Don’t.
C Story is Nate’s personal life.
In a best man’s speech, you have to open by explaining to the audience who you are. A pilot is no different. People won’t feel safe to laugh until they understand who they’re listening to.
The cold open of the pilot is Nate commenting on the world’s worst best man’s speech, expertly played by Jon Gabrus. There is one simple truth that this whole show is built on: A bad best man’s speech can ruin a wedding. Truly, I can’t stress enough how excited I was when Gabrus agreed to play this role because I knew that we had a performer who was going to show, without a doubt, just how bad a speech can go.
WEDDING GOSSIP: To Gabrus’s credit, he gave one of the best wedding speeches I’ve ever heard at our mutual friend Justin Tyler’s wedding, which is one of the best weddings I’ve ever attended. Justin and Mollie celebrated their 10 year anniversary recently and I’m still talking about that wedding. Mazel tov! Justin also contributed as a writer for this show, and you can hear him briefly in episode 1 getting hit in the face with a pickleball.
The music you hear under the cold open is composed by Matt Rubano (Taking Back Sunday, Angels and Airwaves, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, UCB TourCo). I gave Matt the impossible task of “Write something that’s as catchy as ‘September’ by Earth Wind and Fire” and he was like, “No problem.” Any music you hear that is non-diegetic, meaning scored or not within the world, Matt created. I love the vibe he brought to our show.
My favorite pilots are the ones that are completely jam-packed: The West Wing. Veronica Mars. Brooklyn Nine-Nine. My nerdiest dream is that at some point, somewhere, someone makes an overly-complicated graph mapping out the story of something I wrote.
Here’s all of the business we get done in Act One:
We meet Ash (Ashley Park) as Nate is proposing to her.
We meet Jordan (D’Arcy Carden) who is offering Nate the biggest job of their careers to be involved with the wedding of Tyson Moore (Lukas Gage) and Lulanola (Gracie Lawrence).
We meet Tyson as a guest on Q and Picante, our fake Hot Ones hosted by the very real Josh Horowitz.
We get the idea of Xavier, i.e X (Alex Wolff) but just a little hint of it.
After doing all of that work, we finally get to meet Dan (Nicholas Braun) playing pickleball against Sydney Battle and breaking Justin Tyler’s face.
Nate and Dan meet and Dan immediately wants to talk about Tyson’s exes.
We meet Gary, our best man of the week who can’t stop talking about exes.
WEDDING GOSSIP: Josh Horowitz is one of the best red carpet hosts around, and gave me one of my first writing gigs writing for his extremely funny Comedy Central digital series where he somehow managed to convince the biggest stars in the world to do absolutely bonkers sketches. Here’s a link one of the ones I wrote starring Josh, Kevin Hart, and Tiffany Haddish.
All of this business though is really just set-up so that Nate can ask Dan one simple question: “Why is your best friend your best friend?”
This is a good place for any person tasked with writing a best man’s speech to start. Most guys have never thought about it before. This is said a lot in the show, but for most guys, their best friend is just someone who is doing the same thing at the same time in the same place as them. If you ask a guy who their best friend is, they can probably give you an answer fast. If you ask them why, I bet you’ll be waiting for a while.
Why are guys so goddamn awkward around each other when trying to talk about something real? Act Two is all about Dan dodging this question and Nate getting pulled away because he got engaged.
We get to meet Rhys (Lance Bass), the bartender at Nate’s favorite bar, The Greenwich Kettle.
Nate also gets pulled away by his older brother Cookie (Zach Braff) and a drunk phone call from Ash who is out with her best friend Lydia (Monique Moses) and her best friend’s boyfriend, Brent (Jeremy Bent).
He has another rush of memory of Xavier.
All of this is just getting Nate to a more and more frustrated place.
On the page, it was fun to strike a balance because Nate and Dan have to get to know each other without actually talking about anything, but it really took off once Glen and Nick joined. They have amazing chemistry, and we were lucky enough to have some days where they able to record in studio together, but this wasn’t one of those days. Part of that was because of time constraints. Part of it was a creative choice because I figured recording them separately would help highlight how rigid they are around each other at their first meeting. The way they kind of half-bond over each having strong opinions on public bathrooms, it’s like, “Are we really building a friendship on this?” And the answer is yes. That might be all it takes for two guys to become friends.
In a best man’s speech, you have to be honest about your friendship. Nate talks about this with Best Man of the Week Gary, and I want to take a minute to underline this moment. A question that Donald Glover has talked about discussing in the writer’s room for Atlanta is some approximation of “What can our show do that no other show can do?” Getting to see Nate hold Gary, and eventually Dan, emotionally accountable is not something I ever see one man do for another. A big part of why most best man’s speeches are terrible, I think, is just that men don’t practice this skill anywhere else.
WEDDING GOSSIP: Getting to cast Zach Cherry in the first episode of this show was a dream come true. The best feeling of creating a show is getting to create it with people you love. You probably know Zach from Severance or Fall-Out or Great American Bake-Off or Shang-Chi, the list goes on, but if you went to Harold Night at the UCB Theatre in the late 2010s, you would’ve seen us performing together on our team Mermaids. Fins up! Zach is a brilliant performer, an amazing person, and a good friend, except no, he won’t tell me anything about Severance Season 2 which is unfair.
By the end of Act Two, Dan has way overstepped with Nate personally, and worse, he’s proven that he won’t take answering the question about why Tyson is his best friend seriously.
Nate’s rules are going to get broken on this show. As much as he tells everyone else not to bring up exes, he’s realizing that getting engaged means he’s going to have to deal with the fall-out from his friendship with Xavier ending.
We’ve reached the biggest reason that best man’s speeches so often bring up exes. Talking about an ex spares the best man from having to address any of the real emotions around his friendship. What does it mean to be someone’s friend? What is it okay to expect of them? Why do men ask so little of their friendships? Dan takes an honest look at his friendship with Tyson, which wins Nate over. They’re going to figure this out.
There’s a speech at the end of every episode, and I love this one. Zach’s performance is just fantastic, and also a credit to our editor/sound designer Ben Lapidus, who I think did an especially good job combining different takes to help build this performance. Gary still mentions exes in the speech. The point of this show is not that speeches have to follow the rules. The point is that every friendship is unique, and should be celebrated.
The main reason I wanted to start with Don’t Mess With Exes is to signal to you as the audience that this is a show about friendship. A lot of times friendship is defined by its proximity to romantic relationships, or treated as less than romantic love. This isn’t a show about guys avoiding talking to each other while they try to score with chicks. This is a show where friendship is front and center. There are moments that will be emotional. There are moments that will be uncomfortable. There are moments that will be downright stupid. These are all the things that make friendship difficult and wonderful.
Again, there’s so much to say, but there’s also 9 more episodes to write about, so I’ll leave you here. Next week is Ep. 2: Don’t Copy and Paste featuring Best Man of the Week: GEORGE TAKEI! Excited that you’re here and to go on this journey with you. CHEERS!