 Hi, this is Ella here with CalTV Entertainment. Have you heard about the Berkeley Forum? They're an awesome organization on campus, which hosts free speaker events ranging from politics to medicine and all the way to TV and film. A couple weeks ago, they hosted an online event with Joanna Cowell and Caroline Williams, two TV comedy screenwriters with credits ranging from Bojack Horseman to The Office. But before we get to the coverage of that event, I sat down with a member of the Berkeley Forum to discuss why they decided to host this event. This event is around screenwriting and the entertainment industry. We're going to ask them a lot around the process behind writing, so like what goes on in writers' rooms. I think our goal is always to just give students events they would want to see. When people are interested in meeting these writers, learning more about the media industry and there aren't that many other outlets for it, it's important you provide that. Caroline Williams has written on shows such as The Office, for which she won an individual Writers Guild of America Award, Modern Family, Bojack Horseman and many other shows. Joanna Collow has worked on Bojack Horseman, Girl Boss, she's working on Undone for Amazon Prime. A lot of cool shows. I absolutely love Bojack Horseman, which is why I was so excited to bring her. And Caroline Williams also worked on so many incredible comedy shows. How did you get your start in screenwriting and what made you interested in pursuing a career in this field? I've always been a writer of different kinds of stuff and I ended up studying playwriting in college. I did internships and I was an assistant and basically when I went back to grad school, that was what my focus was, which was writing for film and TV. I was obsessed with movies as a kid, like all of us, but it really was just a thing I loved the most and cared about the most and I would wake up before school to watch movies. Can you give us a brief walkthrough of a process for a typical show starting from when you write the episode to the production of that episode? There's a writer's room and that means it's a group of people that are there who are going to come up with the episodes and come up with what happens in the episodes. Again, that's led by a showrunner, someone who both has the final decision-making power, but also is sort of coming to the table with these ideas and sort of leading the staff to help figure out what goes on in all of the episodes. Then it's usually divvied up, so you as a group figure out what happens in each episode, but then they're assigned to separate writers, they go off, write the episodes, they come back and then as a group we give notes and edit and punch them up. In a collaborative setting, how do you balance different styles of comedy and writing during that process? You fight. Yeah, it can get contentious. Do you think the office would be different if it came out today? Oh, I'm sure it would be totally different. I think the thing that I love about the office so much is that it sort of has transcended time. I mean, the amount of people who discover it who weren't actually born, I think, when it was made is really cool. I've never seen something like that happen. The main thing about the office that I think was unique at the time and would even maybe be unique now is that it wasn't cynical. It was a very uniquely hopeful look and something that could have been very depressing. So the fact that that lack of cynicism is something that feels very unique in today's climate. I don't know that it would get me today. I don't know. I think it would. I think right now, especially people need that. So Bojack Horseman has dealt with a lot of mature topics like abortion, alcoholism, mental health issues, and sexual assault. How have you dealt with writing about a serious concept for a show that arguably presents itself as a comedy? The weird thing about all of it is that we start from a very serious place and then we put comedy on top of it. And I think ultimately that's how we all feel. I mean, as the writers walk around the world, it's like everything's awful and also it's really funny and also there are good things about it even though I know that the world is awful. So I think that is kind of our stance on all these things, which is like, can we just try and laugh about these things? Because they're so awful. So why don't we sort of both feel the pain and try to distract ourselves? I think secretly I always feel like we can connect people through television and I say that as someone who loves television so much and there have been so many times in which it's made me feel connected even just to it. How do you get started in the entertainment industry? What's your advice? And then advice particularly for underrepresented minorities who are trying to get into writer's room. If you want to write, you have to write. And you have to write scripts and you have to put yourself out there and you have to share those scripts with other people and find as many ways as possible to be read and find a community. Having all different kinds of voices in the writer's room is so important because I can't be specific. As far as if I'm writing, I need somebody who's lived that experience to help me with the specifics or to give her specifics because that's not my reality and I want it to be authentic and the only way it's authentic on screen is if it's authentic behind the screen. Berkeley Forum is a non-partisan student-run organization. We host a lot of different types of events. So we will do individual speaker events, panels, and debates and talks. Our events are always free which is like one of my favorite things about this event. We have our own website, theberkeleyforum.com and we also have a Facebook page and Instagram page. This is Ella here with Cal2Me Entertainment and a very special thanks to Joanna Callow, Caroline Williams and the Berkeley Forum for hosting such an incredible event. You can check out the full version on the Berkeley Forum's Facebook page and definitely check out their website as well. Thanks so much for watching and go Bears!