'Forever' creators Matt Hubbard and Alan Yang talk about how they made a show about marriage stand out in a crowded space
By Patti Greco
This article contains spoilers about 'Forever'
By now you’ve probably heard that 'Forever', the new Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph show on Amazon, has a twist. (It’s a show about a bored husband and wife—but there’s a twist!) The mystery was essentially part of the show’s promotion: Creators Alan Yang (Master of None) and Matt Hubbard (30 Rock) wrote a letter to critics asking them to refrain from including spoilers in their reviews, leading to a glut of content that alluded to the show’s big reveal without giving it a way.
In the case of this interview, Amazon requested that Meaww not run it with spoilers until a week after the show’s premiere. That, of course, is today—and so, without further ado (spoilers ahead!): Oscar (Armisen) dies in a ski accident at the end of the first episode; June (Rudolph) dies by choking on a macadamia nut at the end of the second; and six of Forever’s eight episodes take place in the afterlife. Here, Yang and Hubbard, who also worked together on Parks and Recreation, talk about the twist and making a show about marriage stand out in a crowded space.
How’d you decide on the twist—and specifically the one-two punch of it? Because a lot of people are going to assume, after the first episode, that they know the twist. But they don’t.
Matt Hubbard: That’s kind of what excited us about it. The conventional wisdom in TV is you need to understand what the show is about after you’ve been watching it for five minutes, and we’ve said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you’re just following this couple, and then there’s big twist right at the end where Fred gets killed?” And then I think if you’re watching episode two, if you don’t know what’s going on, you’re gonna be like, “Okay, this is a show about Maya in Hawaii and maybe she works on a pineapple farm, meets some handsome guy”—and then she dies and you see Fred again.
Alan Yang: In a lot of shows, you would have taken that first hour, or maybe even hour-and-a-half of story, and put it in two minutes. So instead, we made it longer. We kept saying, “We’re slow playing it.” I just like the idea of someone starting it cold, watching the first episode, being weirded out, watching the second one, being even more weirded out—that was just exciting to us, and it’s a little bit of thumbing our noses at what’s expected.
