Four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jason Reitman says “there’s a lot of brave writing happening in television now” and he’s excited to be a part of it.
The Montreal native is an executive producer and director on the Golden Globe-nominated dramedy series Casual, which debuted on Hulu in the U.S. last October and began streaming exclusively on CraveTV in Canada on Friday.
Zander Lehmann created the series, which stars Michaela Watkins and Tommy Dewey as 30-something siblings navigating their way through the world of digital dating.
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“There’s a lot of great storytellers and they’re using television as their medium right now,” says Reitman.
“What it frankly feels like to me is, we’re at the beginning of something that we don’t completely understand. Platforms are changing month-to-month and we’re constantly figuring out new ways to find great storytelling.
“What’s exciting to me is just having yet another avenue, another place to tell stories.”
Watkins plays Valerie, a newly divorced therapist who lives with her frank-talking bachelor brother Alex and her teenage daughter, played by Tara Lynne Barr.
The show marks Reitman’s first foray into television. What drew him to the project was “the voice.”
“At the end of the day, I think that’s what draws me to anything,” says Reitman, who got an Oscar nomination for directing Juno and three more for Up in the Air.
Lehmann admits the sibling relationship in the series was inspired by his close bond with his own sister.
“She’s one of my closest friends,” he says. “We lived together for three years and I wrote this show as a result of her starting to date my best friend.
“She subsequently moved out of my apartment, in with my best friend, and my revenge to her and him was to write this television series about them.”
Lehmann says the first draft of the show had “more of a TV tone.” Reitman and fellow producer Helen Estabrook helped give it more of an indie-movie feel, “which is this marriage of the character-driven, half-hour show that is thematic, real world, not overly jokey, not overly dramatic.”
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“This is a show that never points to the jokes but rather points to the story and the character and the humanity,” says Reitman.
“From the beginning it felt as though we were thinking of the first season as one movie that was broken down into 10 30-minute episodes.”
Lehmann feels that’s a style that’s becoming more common in the TV world.
“I feel the indieish-type project has had a moment in the last year and I think now we’re seeing them more than we ever have,” he says. “There are probably five or six other shows that try to hit a tone like this that hits reality.
“I think that’s maybe a response to the fact that so much TV is ... overly dramatic or overly comedic and I think we’re filling this niche of the missing piece that used to be in movies and now feels like it’s more moving to TV.”
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