TV

How ‘Little America’ Turned True American Stories Into TV

We talked to the team behind 'Little America', an anthology series where each episode focuses on a different immigrant experience in America.

by Cameron Williams  11 March 2020
Little America

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In the first episode of Little America, ‘The Manager’, a first-generation Indian American boy named Kabir (Eshan Inamdar) runs a hotel in his parents’ absence after they’re deported.

Executive producer and showrunner Lee Eisenberg (The Office, Good Boys) knew the episode defined the show he envisioned but didn’t expect tiny things would matter so much.

“One of the people who works at Apple, his name is Kabir,” Eisenberg tells me over the phone. “He told me, ‘I’ve never seen my name on TV before!’”

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Little America is an anthology series where each episode focuses on a different immigrant experience in America. It’s one of the best new TV shows of the year so far, and I spent time chatting with the team behind the series about how they brought each true tale to the screen with the great care.

Eisenberg, along with his writing partner Gene Stupnitsky, wrote the best episodes of The Office, which includes, to name a few, ‘The Secret’, ‘Michael’s Birthday’, ‘Women’s Appreciation’ and ‘The Dinner Party’.

Following The Office, Eisenberg kept busy by working on the short-lived Stephen Merchant HBO series Hello Ladies, the sitcom Trophy Wife, and an unproduced script for Ghostbusters 3.

Despite keeping busy, there was always a question mark over Eisenberg’s next project.

“I needed to figure out what I wanted to write next,” says Eisenberg.

“I was thinking about the shows that were exciting me as a viewer … and a lot of it came from an episode of Master of None called ‘parents’ that was basically about Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s fathers and them coming to the States and their kids not appreciating the struggle it took for them to get here.

“I thought: what if there was a show where every episode was like that.”

True Stories

Enter executive producer JoshuahBearman, a journalist whose Wired article How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran was optioned by Ben Affleck and George Clooney and made into the film Argo.

“Lee called and said, can you guys at Epic find true stories and we’ll see if we can build something around that,” says Bearman.

Epic is a digital publication that publishes narrative non-fiction and produces film and television, bolstered by Hollywood adaptations of Bearman’s work.

“I was into it, and I dispatched a decent number of writers and researchers on staff at Epic,” says Bearman. “We sent them out to scour the country looking for interesting stories.”

For over six months the Epic team searched America for stories and then reported back to Eisenberg and Bearman.

“[They] collected stories from parents or friends of friends of friends, sometimes they found stories on message boards or by visiting community centres,” says Eisenberg.

The list of true tales began to expand under Bearman’s watch.

“We had about 100 plus leads and we had to whittle it down and figure out which stories were standing out and speaking to us, and then we did a bunch of interviews. We got it down to about 15 stories,” says Bearman.

Eisenberg and Bearman realised they needed to build a team to help refine the show. Luckily, Eisenberg had two long-time friends, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, who were in the middle of releasing a semi-autobiographical film they wrote together called The Big Sick.

“We went and got dinner and Lee told us it would be an anthology show about immigrants and we were immediately on board,” says Nanjiani.

“It’s so rare that you hear an idea and go: oh my god that’s a TV show I can’t believe nobody has done that!”

A Big Year

Nanjiani and Gordon were in the middle of a wild year.

In 2017, The Big Sick broke out big at the Sundance Film Festival where Amazon bought the film for an estimated $12 million. The film was released worldwide to critical acclaim and became one of the highest grossing independent films of 2017. The experience was wrapped up — to near perfection — by an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Gordon says it was a time where they could have accepted a lot of work.

“There’s this thing where if you have a successful project like The Big Sick, everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts offering you all kinds of projects — so many projects — sometimes they’re bizarre, other times they’re terrible,” says Gordon.

“Little America was the only thing Kumail and I attached ourselves to in that period because it was a show that A) I wanted to see, so I thought I’d have to be involved in making it in order to watch it, that’s fine, and B) I thought it was such a wonderful idea and one that needed to exist, and should have already existed; it’s just so simple and easy.”

Next, Eisenberg contacted the writer who partly inspired Little America, Alan Yang, who joined as an executive producer. The team was complete, and they began to weigh in on which true tales made the cut.

The Anthology Show

“What we wanted most was a hook,” says Nanjiani.

“We wanted people to say, ‘did you see the one about’ and then describe what the story is about because we knew we only had 30 minutes to tell the story and we really wanted ones where the premise was very strong and easy to wrap your head around.

“I grew up watching anthology shows, it’s a very different tone, but Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone are my favourites, and that’s how people talk about those shows — did you see the one where this happens! And we sort of used the same approach by using premises with a strong hook that we could build off characters from.”

Little America offers an eclectic mix of stories and varying tones in its first season. In ‘The Jaguar’, an undocumented Mexican teenager Marisol (Jearnest Corchado) discovers she has a natural talent for squash, and the episode follows the path of a sports film like Rocky.

In ‘The Silence’, the entire episode takes place at a silent retreat where a woman’s (Mélanie Laurent) mind drifts into fantasies about fellow participants.

“Thematically, all these stories had to have surprise, emotion and a way to make the stories connect in a universal kind of way,” says Bearman.

“So Marisol, she’s an undocumented immigrant, but she’s also a teenage girl who doesn’t know what to do with herself — that’s the universal story, right? And you can kind of hang the rest of the story on that. So that’s what we were looking for.”

Eisenberg admits he has a bias towards comedy, but they worked hard to ensure each episode was different.

“When we first conceived the show, we thought they’d be a lot more jokes but once we got into the stories and really dug in, we found ourselves leading with the heart, the hope and the complexities of these stories,” says Eisenberg.

“But we didn’t want it to be treacle-y or manipulate the audience to cry but we felt that these stories had so much layering and texturing to them … we’d rarely see a Ugandan woman front and centre on American television, and that episode in particular [The Baker] is just a story of someone trying to build a business, which you’ve seen a million times but you’ve never seen it with a Ugandan woman.

“The things that I respond to are a mix of comedy and heart … not every story has to be, ‘the President’s son was kidnapped!’”

Turning Stories Into TV

Each episode of Little America is based on a true story and while a lot of the stories were sourced from the team at Epic, there were times when tales appeared organically.

“The writer and director of the cruise episode [Grand Expo Prize Winners] is a guy name Tze Chun, and he came in for a meeting to talk about being a director on the show,” says Eisenberg.

“ … and he was talking to one of our producers and says, ‘oh, you know my mum is an immigrant and we grew up outside of Boston and once when we were kids, there was a blizzard and my mum drove to the convention hall and won a cruise, and we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so that was the first time we ever went on vacation’. So he’s telling this story and then I get called in and we started talking about it and we decided that should be an episode.”

Not every true story translates well into becoming a TV show and there’s a skill to adapting true tales, which is always on Bearman’s mind as someone who has made non-fiction storytelling the focus of his career.

“I think about it a lot especially considering I wrote the article about Argo that was then turned into a movie, which was very close to the true story and very authentic, and I realised right then how valuable authenticity is in adapting true stories — for the most part — I think there are a few exceptions,” says Bearman.

“And true stories are more exciting, as we know, truth is stranger than fiction, and if you’d made up a story like Argo, for example, people would be like: bullshit, that’s not true. But because it really happened, it allows you to go along with an outlandish premise because it’s real. Otherwise, it would feel like a James Bond movie, which defeats the purpose.”

The Big Sick

If anyone has a claim to the surreal experiencing of seeing their life reflected at them on the big screen, it’s Nanjiani and Gordon.

The Big Sick is loosely based on a real incident where Gordon went into a coma while she was dating Nanjiani. Shortly after her recovery they got married. Nanjiani and Gordon were encouraged to tell their story after producer Judd Apatow saw the potential in the true tale and agreed to co-produce.

“All Kumail and I brought from our experience with The Big Sick was this understanding that the truth isn’t always the most cinematic thing,” says Gordon.

“That doesn’t mean that embellishing makes the show less, it just that the truth is sometimes not the most dramatic thing. At times when the truth didn’t feel cinematic, our job was to find what was important about that moment and then find a cinematic way to explain that moment in some other way.

“So, we had all this knowledge of taking our own story, which was very precious to us, and making it into this fictionalised thing that was and wasn’t our story, and that’s what we brought to Little America. It is a process, and sometimes it feels odd but sometimes it feels quite liberating.”

Storytelling as a form of self-liberation and pride comes through a lot in Little America. So much care and attention are given to the emotional nuances of each episode. Gordon worked as a therapist before pivoting to writing and producing and she used narrative therapy a lot with her patients, and the same logic applies to the way Little America works to process real experiences.

“I do think in general, telling your story, and a version of your story that you’re comfortable with, and that you feel proud of, and that you acknowledge as your pain, your successes, your losses. If we don’t stop and let ourselves formulate a story, whatever that story that is playing in our heads is dictating what we’re doing and dictating how we’re feeling about ourselves,” says Gordon.

When Eisenberg began developing Little America he had to go in search of stories. Now, the stories are coming to him. A second season is already in development so the process of sourcing episode ideas has begun.

“Episode are coming from everywhere,” says Eisenberg.

“There’s an episode being planned for season two that came from an Uber driver I had in Los Angeles. These stories just come out of the woodwork and that’s what’s exciting. What you realise with a show like this, and now the show is out there in the world, is how much it resonates and that there’s so many people who want their stories heard and that they’re excited because they’ve never seen anyone like them on TV before.”

It’s a small world after all.

Little America is available on Apple+ TV.

Cameron Williams is a writer and film critic based in Melbourne who occasionally blabs about movies on ABC radio. He has a slight Twitter addiction: @MrCamW.