Making the Homecoming TV Series 2: Santa's Hollywood Workshop

October 26, 2018·25 min·2 clips

Alex Bloomberg reveals how Gimlet's first fiction podcast became an Amazon original series through unexpected creative hurdles.

Alex Bloomberg, CEO of Gimlet Media, introduces the episode as part of a four-part series placed in the Homecoming feed documenting how the podcast became an Amazon original series. The bulk of the episode addresses the writing challenge faced by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, who wrote the podcast and became showrunners on the TV adaptation. Their first challenge was the opening call scene between Colin and Heidi: in the podcast, Colin is at a busy airport; they expected to simply transpose this to screen. Location scouts flagged major airports as expensive and difficult to film in; they were offered John Wayne Airport as an alternative and accepted. Then director Sam Esmail and director of photography Todd Campbell presented a 'one-er' concept — a continuous, uncut shot following Heidi through the facility — which would eliminate cuts to Colin and only show him briefly at the airport at the end. Eli objected that the scene was written as a two-sided conversation, not a reveal, and that a brief shot of a man at a regional airport had 'no there there.' This sent them back to the drawing board to invent a new location for Colin that would justify a dramatic reveal cut. The solution they landed on placed Colin in a mysterious room with industrial tables covered in red sludge, workers in jumpsuits, and strange vegetation — evoking a shadowy operation that is explained later in the series. What was expected to take days took months and was only the first scene. In parallel, production designer Anastasia White and her crew were building the Homecoming facility set on Universal Lots 23 and 24, described as the largest soundstage in Southern California. The design brief was a late 70s corporate office park — run by the fictional Geist Group — that had been superficially refurbished for the soldiers by a Tampa interior design firm with limited budget and a fondness for Florida Everglades motifs. This produced the specific aesthetic of drop ceiling tiles beside oversized pop art pineapple prints. Bloomberg witnesses a prop decision in real time: prop master Brad Einhorn brings a phone for Heidi's office that White rejects for looking too new; the second phone, boxy and dull with crossed-out extensions, is accepted because it looks like it was already in the building. Eli and Micah describe the moment they moved onto the Universal lot in January and saw hundreds of people — carpenters, painters, electricians, set dressers — already building every word they had written into physical reality.

As heard by us

A dry, measured look at the point where a podcast starts becoming a physical production.

Homecoming's second TV-adaptation chapter tracks the handoff from script to set. Eli and Micah are still finishing the television version while, a few miles away at Universal Studios, painters, carpenters, electricians, costume designers, and prop specialists start turning the…

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Why you'd press play

You want the episode where a fiction podcast is being turned into a real Amazon TV show, and the set starts to feel uncanny.

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