Michelle Paradise is a triple Hollywood threat in terms of her presence as a writer, producer and actor. She wrote and starred in her award-winning short film, Top Ten Rules: The Lesbian Survival Guide, which is the basis for her new TV series Exes & Ohs on Showcase. Even better, she accomplished this feat without the help of an agent or famous name, making her a full-fledged success in her own right. The series airs on Showcase starting tomorrow night at 10 pm ET/PT and you can also watch the first episode online here.
We chatted with this multi-talented artist about the show recently to hear what she had to say about compiling the rules, filming in Canada and about the anchor character, Jen, whom she plays on the show.
The original short-film Top Ten Rules: The Lesbian Survival Guide was hugely successful. Tell us about the original idea and how it came about?
MP: I had been working on a short film that I hadn’t yet finished, and a few years later I looked for a new project to do that was funny and that was true. I started making a funny list about a girl trying to navigate around these rules to find the girl of her dreams, some of the rules she knows and some she doesn’t. I was living in San Francisco’s Bay Area where there was an obvious gay community and I sat in my friends’ coffee shop and wrote the rules and the script down.
Did you know it would be a success?
MP: In a way I didn’t really reinvent the wheel. These were things I and my friends had noticed, like the lesbian U-Haul joke, that people just talked about. I was the first one to sort of sit down and write them down and compile the ideas around me. They weren’t anything new but would be things that people would talk about. Those were the lots of things I found were interesting as a writer that about the way we interact that are true or poignant, and then I constructed this story around that with this character trying to navigate through them.
How did the idea come about to expand the format into a show?
MP: Logo got a hold of the short film and thought it would be great for a TV show. There were probably about a dozen different characters originally, so for the series we had to pare it down to the main characters. Bill Grundfest (writer/producer, Mad About You) developed the idea and he was invaluable in that process.
But for me it was pretty clear who the characters needed to be from the short film and who had room to grow. There was even a process of paring down after the original process, and there’s even one new character, Crutch.
Tell us a bit about your character.
MP: For me Jen (Jennifer Butler) is a little bit of the every woman. You know, she’s someone who’s struggling in her love life and her career and trying to figure out what it’s all about. She’s just putting her toe back into the dating world. Suddenly she’s getting to that age where people are settling down and she doesn’t realize how to do this. For her, she’s trying to figure out the rules to the lesbian life, find Miss Right and live happily ever after. I think she’s an interesting anchor character because in some ways she’s very grounded, but you also get to see the parts of her that aren’t like we see in the fantasy sequences.
How closely-based are some of the other characters on the show to people you know or your own circle of friends?
MP: I wouldn’t say that they’re based on specific people, not a one to one comparison, but they’re an amalgamation of people I’ve known before. Because Jen really shows the world through her eyes, it was important to choose character types around her that were similar enough the friendships made sense but you’re not watching five of the same character. For TV it was important that all of the characters have different wants and are in different places in their lives.
Some of the episodes were filmed in Vancouver; what was your experience there?
MP: We shot the pilot in L.A. but the other five episodes were shot in Vancouver at a studio as well as exterior shots. We had a really wonderful time, the crews and talent up there is fantastic. I had never been or lived there before and had heard great things about the city – it was more than I could have ever dreamed. It was gorgeous and a perfect landscape to mirror Seattle’s look and the people were fantastic.
What’s coming up for you, any new projects or ideas you can share?
MP: I do have a couple of projects that I’m actively working on and a couple of things that are making the rounds, but stay tuned!