There are two kinds of road trips: The ones you take for fun, and the ones where you have to move an entire Panavision package through Mexican customs.

For cinematographer Ludovica Isidori, Dreams in Nightmares was very much the latter (with a sprinkling of the former). Shatara Michelle Ford’s indie film follows its characters on a sprawling journey from New York through Iowa and Kansas and eventually to Oaxaca, Mexico, and Isidori and the production actually filmed in those locations rather than dressing one part of America to look like another.

“We wanted to shoot every chapter on a different support,” Isidori says of their initial ambitious plans. “We wanted 35 millimeter for certain things and 16 millimeter for others and shoot anamorphic.”

The reality of an independent production, however, intervened.

There was only so much film stock and equipment that could be dragged across a continent. The production shot in segments: New York first, followed by a week moving through Iowa and Kansas, then a hiatus before the crew reconvened in Mexico, eventually ending in Los Angeles. They worked with East Coast and West Coast crews, and Isidori, along with the line producers and another producer, even took the entire Panavision package through Mexican border customs twice.

“Road movies are extremely romanticized in terms of the making of it,” Isidori says. “I loved every single moment. Did I enjoy every single moment? That is different.”

Once the practical realities were established, the cinematography became an exercise in working backward from the movie’s emotional destination: the friends all reunited in Mexico.

“We knew that Mexico was a place of joy because it was, in a way, a place that was chosen,” she says. “It was a place that turned into home.”

Originally, Isidori wanted to shoot the entire movie on 16mm. Not because film looks good—although it does—but because of what she describes as the medium’s “impertinent” quality. “There’s something imperfect about it, which is what makes the place alive,” she says. “Which I think is what makes Kel’s experience honest.”

Ultimately, shooting the entire film on 16mm was too ambitious. Instead, Isidori reserved it for the characters’ introductions. The rest of the visual language was built around that idea. The cinematography team used Panavision vintage lenses, an Alexa Mini, and the colorist’s work to emulate some of the qualities they loved about the film format. They used Primo lenses for New York, while the Panavision vintage lenses returned in other sections, particularly for their warmth.

The goal wasn’t to assign a visual gimmick to every character. It was to make the environments themselves part of the storytelling.

“What is hostile? What is welcoming? What is dissonant?” Isidori says. “We kept those few thread lines visually.”

That distinction becomes particularly important in the Midwest, where the visual language becomes almost oppressive. One sequence set in Iowa takes place in a Gothic house during a thunderstorm, while Kel’s well-intentioned but bigoted parents’ home has the flat, repressed quality of a place where history has accumulated without being confronted.

For Isidori, getting that environment right required more than looking at a mood board. She had to learn a visual vocabulary that wasn’t inherently hers.

“I don’t know what the Midwest is,” she says. “I don’t know what the Black American experience is. I don’t have that as a visual or experiential vocabulary.”

Ford helped guide her through that process, including conversations about the way Midwestern houses are built and lit. Isidori remembers walking into the house they eventually used and hearing about how little natural light enters these spaces.

“You walk in, and you can barely tell what time of day it is,” she says.

That physical quality became a way of expressing something much deeper: how a place can imprint itself on the people who inhabit it, and how the architecture of a past that no longer has room for someone can become emotionally suffocating.

For Isidori, that’s ultimately the point of cinematography.

“If I shoot your movie the same way, then I’m doing something very wrong,” she says. “The camera and the atmosphere need to be witness of the truth that is told, not of us.”

It’s a deceptively simple philosophy in an era when cinematography can sometimes feel like a competition to swoop the most. For Dreams in Nightmares, the camera has a different job: to listen.

Or, as Isidori puts it, “It’s not about” making the prettiest image possible. “That’s literally beyond the point.”

And after all those miles, border crossings, lens changes, film formats, and diners, there’s one more thing Isidori remembers most fondly from the journey: “Hot sauce and spice” became her favorite culinary through-line across America.

Which is kinda what Dreams in Nightmares is all about: Begin somewhere familiar, keep moving, and discover that things can get considerably more interesting along the way.

There are plenty of reasons not to spend four years filming lions in Kenya. The hours are brutal. The animals are unpredictable. You have to work from a car. And if you’re lucky, you might get to spend the day just watching “bellies just gently rising and falling,” as cinematographer Sophie Darlington puts it.

Darlington, however, isn’t complaining. She has been obsessed with lions since she saw Born Free as a child and fell in love with the idea of a lioness lying on her camp bed. At 23, she began managing a camp for legendary National Geographic cinematographer Hugo van Lawick, who had won eight Emmys and eventually mentored her for seven years.

“And one of the first things I worked on was lions,” Darlington says. “And that’s it. I promise you, you’re hooked. Can’t get enough.”

For National Geographic’s four-episode, four-years-in-the-making Lion, that lifelong obsession became all-consuming as the production followed a pride through the Masai Mara. And while wildlife filmmaking has changed dramatically since Darlington started—particularly with the arrival of drones—she was determined not to let the technology become the story.

“The tech was there to tell the story, not to be about the tech,” she says. “It was about having the best, absolute best image to work with.”

That meant maintaining a consistent camera package over four years. The crew worked primarily from vehicles fitted with specialized low-mount filming rigs, putting the cameras down at the lions’ eye level. They used Arri Alexas 35s and RED V-Raptors, with the latter mounted on gimbals, while long lenses provided the intimacy necessary to follow the pride without intruding on it.

“We didn’t want that to change,” Darlington says of the camera setup. “Both are absolutely brilliant for what we want.”

The biggest technological evolution happened in the air. Drone operator Anthony Njuguna started the production with smaller drones and eventually moved to larger Inspire models capable of carrying long lenses. But before those drones could become part of the visual language of Lion, the lions themselves had to be introduced to them.

“He spent the most amazing amount of time with the lions,” Darlington says. “Acclimatizing them to drones, getting them used to it.”

That includes giving the animals time to become bored with the equipment. The crew had to introduce the technology slowly and allow the pride to decide that the strange flying object was simply another uninteresting part of the landscape.

The same philosophy applied to the gigantic Cineflex and GSS systems mounted on trucks. The lions had never encountered those, either. Rather than forcing the animals to behave around the cameras, Darlington’s team waited until the technology disappeared into their environment.

“You’re in their world,” she says. “We were trying to let everything be organic, the grade organic. Nothing pushed, nothing forced, just like you were in the Masai Mara.”

The Masai Mara’s beauty remained, but it wasn’t scrubbed of its reality. Darlington points to footage of high cirrus clouds rendered in rainbow colors by the Alexa and the way the RED V-Raptor captured sunlight passing through the grasses as examples of the natural spectacle the cameras could find without embellishment.

“It’s a dream,” she says. “It’s an absolute dream.”

But capturing that dream requires a remarkable amount of calculation. Darlington worked with specialist film driver Sammy Munene, who has more than 40 years of experience. In the field, the two operate almost as a single unit, with Darlington watching through the lens while Munene handles the vehicle.

The production ultimately consisted of 52 shoots, ranging from drone and Cineflex work to night time-lapse photography and, most importantly, long-lens shoots. Darlington personally handled around 18 or 19 of them. The long-lens work was where the intimate storytelling happened: subtle shifts of focus between animals, allowing the viewer to understand relationships without anyone having to explain them.

The shoots could last anywhere from 10 days to a month and a half, with many running about a month. Darlington would often wake at 4:30 in the morning and return around 7:30 or 8 at night. But even after 35 years of filming wildlife, she doesn’t seem remotely tired of it.

And perhaps the greatest compliment the lions could give her was that, eventually, they stopped caring that she was there.

Darlington recalls filming one lion from a distance when she felt a nudge. She was so focused that she hadn’t noticed one of the animals behind her.

“It just nudged me on the bum,” she says. “Just gave me a little like, ‘Hiya.’ The biggest compliment you can get from a lion,” Darlington says, “is to not bother them.”

All four episodes of Lion are now streaming on Hulu/Disney+/however you subscribe to that whole thing.

A movie about Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev spending two days sitting across from each other in a tiny house in Iceland doesn’t scream “cinematic spectacle.” Christopher Nolan is not gonna make this movie (though that may be because Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbecheva have significant roles hey-o!). Mostly, The Brink of War is about two very famous men talking and then one of those men talking to a less famous man about those conversations. For cinematographer Magdalena Górka, that was precisely the problem—and the opportunity.

“Two men sitting at the table,” Górka says. “Just extreme close-ups, and just give them room to play, because when you have a brilliant actor, people are going to get engaged.”

That approach was essential to The Brink of War, which recreates the 1986 Reykjavík summit between Reagan and Gorbachev at the actual location where the negotiations took place. The production shot in Iceland during the same time of year as the real summit, a historical-detail decision that made Górka’s job considerably more complicated. In October and November, Iceland does not exactly offer a generous daylight package: By mid-November, she says, “it’s getting light at 10 a.m. and getting dark at 3 a.m.”

So the first challenge was figuring out how to make a movie that could appear to unfold over normal working days at a time when the sun emphatically refused to cooperate.

Her solution was to essentially manufacture daylight outside the windows. And because Iceland is notoriously treeless—Górka explains that the island’s relentless North Atlantic winds and sideways rain make trees a rare commodity—the production had to secure enormous lighting equipment and physically anchor it against the elements. “Most of my budget went to how to tie six Ks,” she says, referring to 6K lighting units, “that I had two of those, into the Manitou,” a heavy piece of equipment used to position the lights.

And those windows presented another problem. The real Hofdi House, where the summit took place, is no longer sitting in the same isolated landscape it occupied in 1986. A major highway now runs nearby, with cars passing constantly—and in Iceland, vehicles are required to use headlights during the day.

Górka couldn’t shoot around the problem and fix it in post thanks to a tight budget. “We had to time it with the lights,” she says. “The red lights were 2 miles away when we had a lot of cars, and just shoot the take with Reagan when we had a window behind him.”

She also had to find a camera position that simultaneously preserved the ocean horizon, avoided the modern highway, and maintained the illusion of the 1986 location. “It was just such a mathematical precision of how we can make it happen,” she says.

That mathematical precision extended to virtually the entire production. Almost everything was filmed inside the original house, with the basement transformed into a KGB facility and another area adapted to represent Gorbachev’s boat. The cramped spaces meant lighting, camera, actors, and equipment were constantly competing for the same few square feet.

“It was like a Rubik’s Cube,” Górka jokes.

The answer to the movie’s potentially static setup was not to fight the limitations but to embrace the actors. Jared Harris plays Gorbachev, while Jeff Daniels plays Reagan, and Górka was willing to put the camera extremely close to both men.

“Just point a camera on extreme close-up at the actors of this caliber and this age,” she says. “And they would not be scared of this. They were like, ‘Bring it on. You wanna shoot my eyes? You wanna shoot my twitches? Bring it on.’”

Harris, in particular, refused to let meticulous preproduction dictate his performance. Górka and director Michael Russell knew where they intended to put the camera for every scene, but Harris routinely arrived with a different idea.

“All this preparation would go out the window because he just wanted to try something else,” Górka says. “And we let him. And because most of the time he was right, he needed the room to play.”

That flexibility paid off in a scene between Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, played by Branka Katić. Harris wanted the couple to move together as they did in life, turning the scene into something closer to a dance. Górka responded by abandoning the established visual plan and pulling out the Steadicam—one of only two times she used it in the entire movie.

“It was one of those times,” she says. “And we shot this scene in this tiny little room that was somehow exciting because those two people hold your interest.”

Hope Davis had only one day on the movie as Nancy Reagan, but Górka knew exactly how to make the performance land. Rather than simply photographing her in a room, the cinematography uses the frame to emphasize Nancy’s peculiar absence from the central diplomatic drama, even as her influence hangs over it. Górka recalls Davis sitting at a desk and, with almost nothing more than a facial expression, making it clear that Nancy was “gonna go for a kill.”

The whole production was made possible partly because Górka had a personal connection to the history. Born in Poland, she spent 11 years living under a communist government and remembers the summit. That connection helped convince Russell that she was the right cinematographer for the job, even though the studio had initially selected someone else.

“He had to convince the studio that I’m the best choice because of everything that I just told you,” Górka says. “And that was, like, an amazing battle that he went on, and he won.”

The result is the kind of cinematography that can be easy to overlook precisely because it works. Watching The Brink of War, you aren’t necessarily thinking about what went into holding your attention beyond the performances or that every location was filmed inside The Little White House.

Which, as Górka points out, is almost always the assignment.

After the New York premiere, Daniels—who had not seen the film before that screening—sent Górka a note telling her, “You hold my attention with your cinematography throughout this movie.”

For a film in which the camera spends much of its time watching people talk, there may not be a better review.

Magdalena Górka is a cinematographer whose credits include Paranormal Activity 3, Doom Patrol, and Into the Night.

I don’t have to answer to anyone but my bartender. Which means stories that once lived on a maybe-someday list don’t require explanation or defense. Welcome back to Leftovers Are Today’s Special, a closer look at older films and series I want to know more about.

I’m writing this while housesitting in Bronson Canyon and watching House Hunters, and both situations are increasingly bleak the longer I think about the world (and apartment) of Peter Hujar’s Day.

Peter Hujar’s Day came and went last year, and not enough people saw Ira Sachs’ slice of artsy New Yorker life circa 1974, in which Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall recite verbatim a transcription of queer photographer Hujar narrating a day in his life to Linda Rosenkrantz. The film could be an actorly exercise; instead, the production design elevates it into something almost mythic. (Is it any wonder the movie entered the Criterion Collection?)

In Peter Hujar’s Day, production designer Stephen Phelps (Anora) makes you believe that 1974 New York is just outside the frame. The key to the set was its very eclecticism. “In 1974, in New York City, it’s not like it’s this curated apartment,” Phelps says. “It just looks like a real, lived-in space.”

That’s key, considering the entire movie takes place within the one apartment over the course of an afternoon. Whishaw and Hall can hold our attention; the apartment has to hold our gaze.

Phelps began by looking at photographs of Rosenkrantz’s actual home from the time. But rather than attempting to reproduce the apartment, he used those images as inspiration, combining them with the details Hujar describes during his day. The goal was for the world outside the apartment to feel just a door away: the restaurants, streets, and downtown haunts of 1970s New York that Hujar talks about should feel as though they exist just beyond the frame.

The practical challenge was considerably less romantic. Because the movie takes place almost entirely in one apartment, Phelps and cinematographer Alex Ashe had to find a location that could accommodate an entire feature without becoming visually monotonous. “We just wanted to make sure we had enough space to block it in a way that kept you there, with them, without it being stale,” Phelps says.

They found it at Westbeth Artists Housing, in a top-floor space that was being used as offices. The production moved those offices down the hall, then transformed the space into Rosenkranz’s apartment. Phelps was even able to dress it early, leave it in place while another production occupied his time, and return later to add more details.

Peter Hujar’s Day began life with the mindset that it might be a short film, so instead of chasing expensive, pristine midcentury furniture, Phelps went for pieces that felt affordable and accumulated. Phelps, art director Ryan Scott Fitzgerald, and set decorator Christopher Phelps essentially grabbed a truck, headed upstate, and hit antique shops, furnishing the apartment in about a week (aka a dream gig).

For Phelps, period design offered an advantage: The eclecticism could be messy, imbuing the space with a sense of imperfection that connects the production design to the movie’s visual references. Phelps looked at photographs of Hujar and Rosenkrantz, archival material about Hujar’s life, and a Hujar exhibition he visited while preparing the film. He also pulled from films and DIY footage made around the period, including work that captured artists and friends in their own environments.

And because the movie unfolds in essentially real time, everything had to be in place from the start. Phelps describes the process as getting the space ready and then “babysit[ting] it” throughout the shoot.

Even the production’s occasional breaks with chronological time ultimately served the same philosophy. The filmmakers sometimes prioritized a beautiful moment over maintaining an absolutely logical progression of daylight. Phelps remembers one sequence when it goes toward dusk and then returns to daytime, but the emotional rhythm of the scenes mattered more than strict continuity. “Beautiful moment to beautiful moment seemed more important,” he says.

And isn’t that also a perfect summation of a bygone era of NYC?

Lucky comes together in truly glorious fashion in its finale. The best show of 2026 sticks the landing, blowing everything else out of the water. And part of the beauty of the final episode is how it craftily builds on what came before, from Vegas casino chases to cosplaying as a SoCal wine mom to drunken breakdowns at hotel bars.

So there’s a full Lucky editing story, with the entire edit team, coming to Crafty. But in deference to the SEO gods who shove Crafty into the faces of those eager for answers, here is a very specific, “Lucky Finale Explained: What Happened in Episode 7” story with editor Jennifer Barbot and Doug Emmett. Because honestly, the finale earns its own feature. And thus: Spoilers.

For Emmett and Barbot, Episode 7 was less about delivering the biggest action sequence of the series than about making all of Lucky’s accumulated tensions—its secrets, betrayals, and reversals—collide in exactly the right order. Emmett, who shot Episodes 2 and 3 as well as the finale’s pivotal gas-works material, says the team obsessed over where Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Priscilla (Annette Bening) would have a final showdown with the shadowy asshole calling all the shots and demanding Lucky’s death. The location was a huge gas refinery in Santa Clarita, giving the filmmakers a giant visual sandbox for the confrontation. It was also, Emmett notes, an alarmingly toxic sandbox. “Every time the wind would blow, they would have a meter,” he says. “And they go, ‘Ooh, the levels of toxicity are going up.’”

But what’s a little toxicity compared to an epic battle royale that solidifies Lucky as the best sun-drenched neo-noir since The Grifters? The gasworks aren’t merely a cool place to stage a showdown; they make Lucky look very small in the middle of an industrial landscape designed for bad decisions and worse outcomes. Barbot describes the location as having “huge amounts of scope,” which allowed the audience to understand just how alone Lucky was as she waited for kingpin Wayne Whittaker (William Fichtner) to arrive.

But the episode’s tension doesn’t begin with guns. It begins with patience.

Barbot came onto the series specifically for the finale, having seen the pilot and possibly Episode 2. That gave her an unusual perspective on Lucky’s journey: She essentially jumped from the beginning of the character’s story to its end. “I wanna see what her arc is, how she transitions emotionally from episode one to Episode 7,” she says. By the finale, Lucky is physically battered and emotionally transformed, making the payoff feel earned rather than merely explosive.

The trick was not to announce what was coming.

One of Barbot’s first decisions was to remove a shot that would have tipped the audience off too early. The opening originally contained a reflection of Lucky walking away that hinted at the pool area. Instead, Barbot let the audience hear children playing and water before revealing where Lucky actually was. The series had another flashback available, too, but she removed that because she wanted to “stay in the story” and “stay in the moment.”

That philosophy carries through the drive toward the gasworks. Lucky and Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) are simply sitting in a car, but Barbot deliberately refused to cut the scene as though it were an emergency. “There’s almost a peaceful feeling to it,” she says. “But there’s a huge sense of threat over it.”

Barbot describes that final confrontation as an editing puzzle, particularly the sequence in which Lucky gains the upper hand while Rand simultaneously realizes that her boss is in cahoots with Wayne. The script called for those events to be intercut, but the finished version evolved in the edit. That became especially important with Priscilla.

Annette Bening gives the character enough different shades from take to take that Barbot had a wealth of possibilities when constructing the final revenge sequence. She describes Bening as someone who “never gives the same performance twice,” with each take containing some new variation. That made cutting her reaction to Wayne—and her ultimate decision not to shoot Lucky—particularly delicious.

The filmmakers also deliberately preserved some ambiguity around that decision. There was originally a rack focus to Priscilla’s watch, a callback to an object that had been emphasized earlier in the season. Barbot ultimately removed it because it made the point too explicit. Without it, Priscilla’s choice becomes something to interpret: Is she consciously choosing Lucky? Is the memory of her son influencing her? Or is she simply recognizing that Wayne is the real problem?

The answer, of course, is: yes.

And then there is the ultimate reveal of Lucky’s backstory, where her grifter father ordered her to jump into a swimming pool as a distraction, despite her inability to swim.

In retrospect, water has been threaded through Lucky’s story from the beginning, and Barbot became increasingly conscious of how often the finale’s imagery returned to it, as Lucky narrates one last twist via a stuffed animal from poolside, explaining to her father why she fucked him over (and why he deserved it). Barbot had to work with Lucky’s recording as voiceover while moving between flashback, present-day material, and an earlier point that evening. “It was a very, very fun and interesting, challenging puzzle,” she says.

For Emmett, the thing about watching the finished finale is that cinematographers rarely get to experience their work the way an audience does. They are thinking about lighting, blocking, camera placement, lenses, and logistics while everyone else is thinking about whether Lucky is gonna get out alive. But in watching the finale, Emmett saw the instincts that went into choosing the gasworks and figuring out how Lucky and Priscilla occupy that enormous space confirmed.

And Lucky needed that convergence because its whole identity depends on the collision of enormous set pieces and tiny human moments. Barbot points to scenes as small as Lucky bandaging her father in a crappy motel room as examples of the show’s ability to find intimacy between the explosions. Director Jonathan Van Tulleken could go from extreme close-ups of two people quietly talking to the gigantic gasworks sequences without making either feel like a different show.

That’s why the finale episode works so well, from the pulse-pounding confrontation to the quiet devastation unfolding in the front of Timothy Olyphant’s pickup truck. The last episode doesn’t suddenly become bigger than Lucky. It just becomes more Lucky. Every revelation, gunshot, unblinking look, and rollicking car ride prepared us for the end. But it manages to shock us anyway.

Honestly, what more could you want from television?

Costume design is often about creating the illusion that everything happened exactly as planned. But we, sophisticates wise to the rigors of production, know better. Sometimes the costume department is operating on a matter of hours. Sometimes the star’s size changes at the last minute. Sometimes a costume has to fit both Kevin Hart and a much taller actor. And sometimes the director calls the day before shooting to say, essentially, Remember that thing we decided not to do? Let’s do it!

That was the reality of making 72 Hours, the action comedy directed by Tim Story, and Stop That Train, Adam Shankman’s exuberant, drag-filled fantasia. For costume designer Salvador Perez, the two movies couldn’t have been more different—and that’s precisely what made them so much fun.

“I’ve known Tim Story for 20 years,” Perez says. “And as you see from my career, I’m known for dressing women. The Mindy Project, Pitch Perfect, Veronica Mars. So when Tim calls me up and it’s an all-boy movie, it’s like, ‘Yay.’”

72 Hours presented a particularly delightful costume-design problem: a drug lord’s closet that needed to contain clothes capable of dressing a wildly disparate group of men. The script simply said that the characters opened the drug lord’s closet. Perez’s initial thought was Versace—bright, colorful, extravagant—but getting enough Versace in the necessary sizes and time frame proved impossible.

His backup was Barabas, which turned out to be considerably more accommodating. And then the movie changed the rules.

Perez immediately called Barabas, which put the garments on a plane. The clothes arrived roughly two hours before the cameras rolled, leaving Perez just enough time to make some hems and get everyone dressed. The suits ultimately became so important that they wound up on the poster.

The joke, of course, is that these aren’t supposed to be fabulously dressed men. They’re broke guys staying in an Airbnb. Perez couldn’t suddenly turn them into a luxury fashion campaign. “They weren’t supposed to be the cool guys,” he says. “So I couldn’t make them too fabulous.”

The casting itself made the closet even more complicated. The identity of the drug lord changed repeatedly—from Angela Bassett to Danny DeVito to Benicio del Toro to Nicolas Cage to Dwayne Johnson—before Andy Garcia was cast just three days before shooting. Perez had to find a way to make the clothes work, no matter who ultimately wore them.

Garcia solved part of the problem himself. Rather than wearing the clothes Perez had initially selected, he suggested that the character wear his dead father’s clothes. The joke worked and stayed.

Then there’s Stop That Train, which operates in an entirely different register. If 72 Hours required Perez to solve logistical puzzles at speed, Stop That Train gave him permission to indulge every deliciously campy impulse.

“Adam Shankman was so inspiring,” Perez says. “He just pushed me. We didn’t have a lot of time and a lot of money.” Shankman would call with another request—sometimes something seemingly impossible—and Perez’s response became some variation of, “Yes. Yes, you can.”

The train attendants’ uniforms were deliberately retro, with Perez aiming for what he describes as a 1970s Waffle House/Alice aesthetic. He admits they were probably “almost too nice” and should have looked a little more threadbare, but the costumes still needed to feel like movie costumes while serving the world of the film.

And they couldn’t merely look good. The performers had to sing and dance in them.

The skirts were constructed with zippers in the slits so they could open up during movement, while the fabric had enough stretch to allow the performers to move without becoming spandex. “Just make it stretchy,” RuPaul told Perez. “I’m like, not everything can be stretchy.”

Then came the drag queens, including RuPaul, whose costumes presented a rather different fitting process: There wasn’t one.

Perez met with Zaldy, got measurements from RuPaul’s custom mannequins, and went off to build five outfits without a fitting. “He will just make it work,” Zaldy told him. Perez, understandably, remained skeptical. “I’ve heard that my entire career, and then it’s a disaster.”

The first suits worked. Then came the black catsuit.

It arrived the night before shooting, with sleeves Perez thought were too short. He sent it back to the seamstress to add a cuff. It came back—and somehow, thanks to Perez’s gut feeling, fit perfectly.

For the drag performers, the costume department wasn’t simply responsible for making clothes. Perez wanted to make sure the performers had everything they needed to get through a demanding shoot. He ordered multiple pairs of tights and supplies, anticipating snags and mishaps rather than reacting to them afterward.

“They were not used to being taken care of,” Perez says.

His crew went even further. Performers accustomed to handling their own costumes suddenly had Perez’s team bringing them their shoes, fastening buttons, and helping them into their clothes. “They just stood there like Michael Jackson and got dressed,” he says.

That’s the less visible part of costume design: the preparation for things the audience will never notice. 72 Hours had sequined Chandelier Club dancers whose costumes were used throughout the club, while Perez says a significant amount of material ultimately disappeared in the edit—including these gold lamé briefs.

“There was a whole half an hour that was cut out,” Perez says of 72 Hours. Among the casualties was a planned reveal of Hart’s character’s closet—an elaborate piece of costume storytelling that would have made the clothes themselves part of the narrative.

Of course, the genius of great costume design is that the clothes are already part of the narrative.

There are plenty of recognizable sitcom homes. There are far fewer that make you want to move in.

That was part of the challenge facing production designer Francoise Cherry-Cohen and set decorator Ann Shea on Netflix’s Leanne, the Chuck Lorre comedy starring Leanne Morgan as a newly divorced Tennessee woman rebuilding her life. The show needed to feel like a believable Southern home, but it also had to function as a multi-camera sitcom set—and, perhaps most importantly, it had to feel like a place where you actually wanted to spend time.

“I just wanted it to be a happy, pretty place that people would enjoy visiting,” Shea says of Leanne’s house. “Obviously, we weren’t really decorating for the real-life Leanne; we were decorating for the character Leanne.”

That distinction was important. Rather than simply recreating Morgan’s real-life home, the designers built the house around what viewers might imagine her home to be: warm, polished, cheerful, and distinctly Southern, without becoming precious. “I think we all endeavored to make it very pretty and warm and inviting and not at all pretentious,” Shea says. Cherry-Cohen adds the key ingredient: “And lived in.”

Not only did they succeed in crafting the kind of sitcom living room set that almost operates as a beta blocker, but they scored an Emmy nomination for their work on Season 1. (Season 2 premieres August 27.) Getting there started with research into Knoxville. For the pilot, Cherry-Cohen dug through real estate listing photos to understand the scale and architecture of homes in the area. The production also supplied its own references, giving the designers a starting point from which to build the show’s world.

But Leanne presented an unusual sitcom-design problem: the main floor of the house is largely open.

Initially, Cherry-Cohen designed a wall separating the kitchen from the living room. Then Lorre suggested taking the wall out entirely.

“The set is large enough that you could still play in the different areas and have private conversations,” Cherry-Cohen says. Lorre also wanted a step up into the kitchen, which gave the actors different playing levels while keeping the entire space visually connected.

That openness makes the house feel contemporary, but it also subtly reinforces the show’s emotional architecture: Leanne is almost never alone. More practically speaking, the space also had to accommodate a lot of bodies. Cherry-Cohen notes that the furniture had to be large enough for the family to sit together, while also taking into account the height of its stars, Morgan and Kristen Johnston. The sofa, for instance, needed to allow the actors to sit back comfortably while still reading properly on camera.

And then there is the stuff.

Set decoration is often about the objects that barely register consciously but tell you exactly who lives somewhere. Shea approached Leanne’s home with that in mind, filling it with the kinds of details that make a character feel as though she existed before the cameras arrived.

Leanne’s house was also given real materials wherever the production could use them. Cherry-Cohen points to the real tile in the kitchen backsplash, as well as the fireplace, patio, and porch, where the production used real stone. “For me, it just makes it that much more real,” she says.

The result is a house that feels aspirational without looking like a showroom. It is colorful, textured, and feminine, but neither “fluffy” nor “frilly,” as Shea puts it.

In direct opposition to her parents’ home, which smells like Criso even through the TV screen. Inspired in part by homes Shea knew growing up in Illinois, and by relatives’ homes in Arkansas, it is more cluttered, dated, and untouched by renovation. Older backsplash tile and counters help sell the idea that this is a house that has accumulated decades of life rather than one designed for a catalog.

The production had to solve the same problem on locations and swing sets. An FBI cafeteria, for instance, could easily have become visually anonymous. Instead, architectural elements including a staircase, columns, and a distinctive back stairwell gave Cherry-Cohen and Shea something to build around. The same went for a church set, where the designers refused to surrender to the blank walls that can make institutional spaces look like, well, institutional spaces.

Cherry-Cohen ultimately gave the church gorgeous stained-glass windows, while artwork and other details provided visual texture even when those elements had to live behind actors’ heads. That is another deceptively complicated part of designing a multi-camera show: the environment has to look good while remaining functional from every camera angle.

For Cherry-Cohen and Shea, the pleasure of Leanne seems to have been partly that they got to build a world that was softer, more colorful, and more overtly feminine than some of their previous sitcom work. The two have worked together for more than two decades, dating back to Two and a Half Men and including The Big Bang Theory.

So Leanne gave them an opportunity to do something different: create a sitcom world full of vivid colors, textures, and Southern charm, without sanding away the characters’ personalities.

And perhaps that’s why the house works so well. It doesn’t merely tell us that Leanne is a woman with good taste. It tells us what kind of woman she is, where she came from, who she wants to be, and—perhaps most importantly—how much room there is in her life for everyone else.

Which, for a sitcom about a woman figuring out what comes next, is a pretty good place to start.

Francoise Cherry-Cohen is an ADG-winning and Emmy-nominated production designer whose credits include The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and Bob Hearts Abishola. Ann Shea is an ADG Award-winning and Emmy- and Set Decorators Society of America-nominated set decorator whose credits include Psycho Beach Party, Mom, and Bob Hearts Abishola.

There are many reasons to watch Netflix’s Ransom Canyon: the scenery, the soapy plots, Patricia Clarkson, Minka Kelly as a lavender farmer, the romance. But let’s be honest. There is also the extremely compelling question—requiring two seasons of research to answer—of how many shirts a man can reasonably remove over the course of a day.

For creator April Blair and costume designer Olivia Miles, the answer appears to be: “One more.”

“Generally, a lot of our costume decisions are based on how much clothing we can take off of the men,” Blair says, which I believe is what Coco Chanel originally meant. This is not a new philosophy for the pair, who have worked together for roughly 15 years, beginning with All American. Back then, Blair was already lobbying to get football players out of their jerseys during practice, despite the minor logistical complication that, as the football consultant pointed out, the jerseys help hold their pads on.

“Suspension of disbelief,” Blair argued.

The philosophy has only flourished in Ransom Canyon, where the male cast has been exuberantly, enthusiastically on board.

Season 2 brought what Blair calls a “little between-season glow-up” reveal for Josh Duhamel, and Miles reports that the actors themselves have become eager collaborators. “There’s a healthy competition between the guys,” she says. “They’re all really into their fitness routines and their gym workouts, and now we have eager volunteers when we talk about having a shirtless scene. Hands [go] up all over the room.”

This is how a show ends up with what the production team called the mantage: an extended sequence devoted to the male body. Performing acts of community service, of course! (It’s Season 2, Episode 7 for those inclined to take on additional research.)

“The mantage was the greatest day in entertainment history as far as I’m concerned,” Miles says.

Naturally, the mantage required discussions about what shots to include, the rhythm of the editing, the… well, I’m sure there was more. Blair, recognizing the potential for career-ending quotes to emerge from such a meeting, wisely stayed away. Although her favorite moment wasn’t even the carefully constructed beefcake. It was Duhamel stopping and shaking his head in an unscripted reaction shot.

“We had to put that in,” Blair says. “It shows that we’re in on it. We’re in on the joke. We think it’s funny.”

That distinction is crucial to Ransom Canyon. The show isn’t accidentally horny. It is deliberately horny.

In Season 1, Blair recalls, a camera operator looked at her after filming a particularly sensuous shot of Yancy (Jack Schumacher) hosing himself off. There were four cameras running, two of them in slow motion.

“This is the most gratuitous thing I’ve ever shot in my entire career,” he told her.

“Thank you,” Blair replied. Welcome to the female gaze, brah.

If this all sounds like a rather unusual approach to costume design, consider that Miles is also doing the considerably less salacious work of making sure the characters actually look like people who live and work in Texas. That means aging. Lots and lots of aging.

The show has a dedicated aging-and-dyeing department, normally consisting of just the extremely talented Marcus Montoya. Miles’ instruction is often simple: “Beat it to hell.”

That means sweat, manure, engine grease, and the general abuse clothes endure when worn by people who actually work on ranches. The goal is to make the clothes look as though the characters aren’t magically receiving a fresh wardrobe every morning.

Yancy, for instance, arrives in town with a duffel bag, meaning his wardrobe is deliberately limited. Duhamel’s character similarly rewears his work vest and layers pieces in different combinations. Much of his clothing is Ralph Lauren’s RRL—but, Miles emphasizes, “beaten to hell.”

The department has its own taxonomy for this. There is “the Quinn,” which means taking the newness off something while keeping it pristine. There is “beat to hell.” And then there’s dilettante rancher Sam Kirkland (Brett Cullen), who is supposed to look like he shops at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, so his clothes get considerably less abuse.

But when the shirt comes off? All bets are off.

Garrett Wareing, who plays Lucas, was already lobbying for nudity in Season 1. (“He loves to be naked,” Blair says.) When he found out Lucas would go swimming in a lake, his immediate response was: “Can I be naked?” A few episodes later, he had a follow-up question: “When do I get to be naked again?”

Blair’s favorite Miles creation may be the outfit Lucas wears while streaking after the homecoming party: camouflage-print briefs, boots, and a homecoming sash.

“It sounds reductive,” Blair says, “but it’s not.”

The lone obstacle to the nudity? Occasionally, somebody has to wear a shirt because the scene is actually serious.

During a fight scene involving Lucas and brother Kit (Casey Johnson), Blair’s writer called from set to report that Wareing and Johnson both arrived expecting to be shirtless.

“Somebody’s gotta wear a shirt,” Blair said.

Miles’ solution was a tank top because sometimes costume design is an exercise in restraint. That extends to the local police force, all of whom wear the appropriate uniforms, as befits a lawman. These are just tailored to be “tight as shit.” Put a dime in one of their shirt pockets, and you could see the date it was minted.

And apparently that restraint extends to the craft table. The actors are disciplined before shirtless scenes, while Schumacher is described as a “craft service junkie” who raids the spread after his shirtless scenes and takes the food home. (Of course, as he’s said in interviews, he’s definitely earned it.)

Blair and Miles, despite putting enough muscle on display to get Henry Willson’s attention from the grave, are keeping some secrets, though.

“We know carbs are delicious,” Blair says.

“The guys don’t know about that,” Miles replies.

“Don’t tell them,” I say. After all, hopefully we’ve got a Season 3 on the way.

Before CGI could conjure entire worlds with a click—yes, even Christopher Nolan’s movies do this, you VFX deniers—filmmakers painted them. Today, those painstaking glass matte paintings are museum pieces. And for Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma, production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland found out just how hard it is to resurrect museum pieces.

“The people who do this for a living either aren’t alive anymore, or the industry just does not support the workflow,” Hyland says. “We had to reverse engineer it. We read books, went on blogs, and found archival imagery to meet them where they were back in cinema history.”

“It was a big swing,” Tonner-Connolly admits. “It could have gone either way.”

The gamble pays off in sometimes mystifying ways as Hannah Einbinder’s writer-director, Kris, falls deeper into the world of former slasher movie star Billy (Gillian Anderson, riffing on her stage performances as Margo Channing and Blanche DuBois).

Painting emotional landscapes

The matte paintings aren’t visual gimmicks. From Schoenbrun’s earliest conversations with the designers, they were always meant to represent protagonist Billy’s interior world.

“We talked about these older pre-CGI techniques,” Tonner-Connolly says. “Not just because it would be fun. It was to bring the audience into the emotional landscapes of the characters. Kris gradually gets deeper and deeper until she’s fully absorbed into Billy’s painted landscapes and fully absorbed into Billy’s world.”

So realism was never the goal, as anyone who has seen the film can attest.

“We did not seek to make photorealistic illusions,” he says. “We wanted a much more illustrative and painterly and romantic feeling. It was important that it be tied to a character and an emotional state—not just a flashy thing.”

Glass mattes only function from one exact camera position. Move the lens an inch and the illusion collapses.

“We didn’t know until the crew rolled in that day,” Hyland says. “Hannah walks up in costume, we have practical snow around the building, we pop this piece of glass in front of the camera—and we didn’t know until that moment whether it would actually work.”

Inventing 14 movies that don’t exist

If the matte paintings were one impossible assignment, the opening credits offered another.

Schoenbrun wanted viewers to believe the Camp Miasma franchise was entering its fifth decade as a beloved slasher franchise before the story even began, using the opening credits as a capsule history of how it saturated pop culture.

Tonner-Connolly created what he calls the “Miasma Bible,” charting 14 nonexistent movies complete with directors, taglines, and evolving creative eras.

“There was the early Miasma period where they still kinda cared,” he says with a laugh. “Then the middle period where it’s a cash grab. Then late Miasma, where they’re in space, they’re time traveling—just straight-to-video insanity.”

One week before shooting, Tonner-Connolly, Hyland, Schoenbrun, and cinematographer Eric Yue locked themselves in a room: “Nobody’s coming out until we’ve designed this sequence.”

Every bobblehead, VHS sleeve, and piece of fake merchandise had to be fabricated from scratch. “They don’t sell those,” Hyland says dryly. “Everything takes runway.”

Billy’s trauma, turned into art

The production designers also had to imagine decades of artwork created by Billy, the franchise’s traumatized survivor now living on the campground where she filmed the first film.

“It became clear that Billy’s artwork is a way for her to process the trauma of her experience on the original Camp Miasma,” Tonner-Connolly says. “She’s repeating this concentric square shape in different mediums, trying to unravel that experience.”

Instead of relying on scenic painters, they recruited artist Joel Rodriguez to become Billy’s hand. “He was always trying to make a 12-foot sculpture,” Tonner-Connolly jokes. “I’d say, ‘Can we just start with an 8-by-10 drawing? We shoot in two weeks.’”

The centerpiece became a massive canvas designed with carefully measured colors and geometry to create an almost hypnotic vortex. “We wanted it to pull you in,” Tonner-Connolly says. “Almost give you seasickness.”

Snow? Snow.

As anyone who’s seen the movie knows, shifting weather plays a surprisingly large role in the story.  And that meant a lot of snow, both practical and VFX. “The way that Jane holds priorities is we shouldn't be working for efficiency,” Hyland says. “We should be working for the final image and to make sure that we're putting everything we've got on screen.”

So the team started with practical snow, aided immeasurably by special effects supervisor Kyle Moore, “a total maestro” who understood exactly what was needed and how to achieve it. “He was a true expert and helped us navigate the fact that this movie isn't just fake snow, quote-unquote,” Hyland says. “There's a dozen different kinds. Sometimes we'd have to apply it and remove it on that same day. Sometimes we'd have weeks to apply it. Sometimes it's falling, sometimes it's not. You name it, they're all different recipes.”

The carpet that had to exist

Perhaps nothing better captures Camp Miasma’s design philosophy than the carpet inside Little Death’s subterranean lair.

The room’s fleshy walls went through countless iterations inspired by everything from anatomy textbooks to Freddy Krueger’s burned skin, and plenty of “squelch” measurements. But the floor proved surprisingly elusive.

Nothing felt right until someone suggested the loud patterned carpet from an old movie theater—or better yet, a neighborhood video store. The resulting custom carpet became one of the production’s most expensive purchases and had to be rush-ordered.

“Everybody kept asking, ‘Are you absolutely sure you need this carpet?’” His answer never changed: “Yes.”

(So you can imagine both Tonner-Connelly and Hyland’s delight when I ask specifically about it.)

Remembering movies instead of copying them

But none of this works if the film doesn’t have a firm grasp on the genre it’s both paying homage to and satirizing, from Friday the 13th to Nightmare on Elm Street and Sleepaway Camp. At one point, Tonner-Connolly says, he probably could have identified a sequel from a photograph of a cabin wall. But imitation wasn’t the assignment.

“We wanted it to feel like the memory of watching those movies,” he says. “Not necessarily look exactly like them.”

Like the slashers that inspired it, Camp Miasma and its matte paintings ask audiences to believe in something obviously artificial.

The remarkable trick is that we do.

“Do me a favor. Don’t tell me what happens,” cinematographer Doug Emmett tells me at the start of our interview about his work on Furious and Lucky.  

“I shot the first two [episodes of Furious], and then I shot five and six. And I deliberately did not read the last two episodes so that I could come home a year later and watch it on the sofa with my wife, which is what we’re doing, and I’m so happy I made that choice. I did future Doug a favor.”

There is something so apropos about a cinematographer deliberately refusing to see the whole picture, and even more so considering these two shows’ twisty, rewarding plots and characters. After all, Emmett spends his days thinking about how much information to give an audience, what to hide in shadow, what to reveal through a reflection, and where to put the camera so that a tiny movement suddenly becomes meaningful.

On Furious, that meant building a visual language around people who are constantly concealing things from one another. On Lucky, it meant creating a world of transparency, observation, and visual clues. Emmett shot both series back-to-back, and the contrast between them became one of the most interesting parts of the job.

Furious began with a trip back to New York City movies of the 1970s and ’80s. Emmett and director Brian Kirk kept returning to Taxi Driver, particularly its wet streets and heightened nocturnal photography, as well as the work of photographers Philip-Lorca DiCorcia and Saul Leiter.

The result sits somewhere between realism and theatricality. Furious is recognizably New York, but a heightened version of New York, one where the streets seem perpetually rain-slicked, and every window offers another opportunity to obscure somebody’s face.

“There’s something really interesting about reflections,” Emmett says. “This idea that a reflection is not necessarily the true representation of someone.”

That became more than a visual trick. The characters in Furious are all presenting versions of themselves, and Emmett wanted the cinematography to acknowledge that. Shooting through glass and incorporating reflections allowed the image itself to question what was real and what was performance.

That same restraint extends to the show’s many car scenes. Emmett knew that putting two characters in a car and filming them talking could become the visual equivalent of wallpaper. The answer wasn’t to manufacture movement for its own sake, but to let the tension in the writing determine the camera.

“The tension is in the scene, and so the tension is leading my photography,” he says.

For one scene between Alice (Emmy Rossum) and Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstein), Emmett used two opposing cameras outside the car, shooting on extremely long lenses and slowly pushing toward the women. The movement is almost imperceptible, allowing the conversation itself to generate the momentum.

“You don’t need a lot of shots when you’re shooting to dialogue that is that compelling to listen to,” he says.

That philosophy also explains why Emmett is wary of the kind of procedural camera movement that exists simply because someone decided the camera should move.

“There are certain TV procedurals out there that might just aimlessly move the camera around and around, and you’re like, ‘But what is it doing for you? What feeling is that giving you, and what story is that conveying?’”

His answer is to make every movement specific. In Episode 6 of Lucky, a semi bottle episode that largely takes place inside an FBI office, the production team had to find ways to keep a single location visually alive without resorting to empty flourishes. So they designed the space around the camera.

The production designer rearranged an existing office set at LA Center Studios, adding panes of glass and conference rooms that could be filmed from multiple angles. Cubicles were built at specific heights so Emmett could shoot over them with long lenses. The team even sourced darker blinds rather than standard white ones, allowing them to disappear more naturally into the compositions.

“We were able to still maintain some subtle camera movements and zooms and reflections, all sort of the same language that we had been building up to at that point,” he says.

Light became another way of creating depth. The conference room was kept relatively neutral while the bullpen outside leaned cyan and green. Blue daylight, warmer interior light, and a differently colored background created layers within a set that could otherwise have looked completely flat.

“All of a sudden, you’ve taken what could’ve been a more generic flat image, and you’ve now stretched the depth by changing color and by changing light,” Emmett says.

But then again, in almost every way, Lucky was a very different playground.

Emmett shot Episodes 2, 3, 6, and 7 (the finale), including the desert-set Episode 2. That episode covers a lot of ground—emotionally and physically—as it jumps between the desert, a crash site, a house, a convenience store, and other locations, but Emmett says the geography helped make it feel cohesive. Most of the locations were within a short drive of one another around Lancaster.

The real connective tissue, though, was time.

The episode gradually moves from afternoon into sunset and blue hour, with Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy) walking through the desert, FBI Agent Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) searching for her, and other characters occupying different spaces in the same shifting day. Even when locations were technically separate, the light had to make them feel as though they belonged to the same temporal continuum.

That meant obsessing over the sky, the color temperature, and the exposure outside the windows when cutting between the desert and the house, which had been rebuilt on a stage. So that also meant: logistics.

The desert shoot involved four cameras, a Technocrane, a drone, a second unit, and hundreds of feet of dolly track. Emmett describes the process as like conducting a ballet, with cameras on long lenses moving between actors and picking up different pieces of action.

Luckily, “I get really excited about charting out which camera goes where and who pans where,” he says.

At one point, the team needed to get a Technocrane up an 18-percent incline to capture a sunset shot. The crane made it up the hill, then its batteries failed. Meanwhile, the sun was disappearing, and Emmett needed to get another scene at a café before the light was gone, and all of this stress was for a minute of footage in the episode.

Earlier, during the location scout, Emmett noticed a beautiful reflection in the glass and knew he wanted to incorporate the sunset into it. That meant getting the camera into position at precisely the right moment.

“We literally got the camera on the crane and got him walking out,” he says. “I just felt, ‘Oh my God, I’m making this Tarantino film right now.’”

Part of that cinematic feeling came from the vintage C-series anamorphic lenses Emmett was using.

“I look at modern-day anamorphics, and they don’t have the same soul for some reason,” he says. “I know that sounds woo-woo, but there’s something there.”

There is, in fact, something wonderfully old-fashioned about Emmett’s approach to both shows. Not because the images are nostalgic, but because the photography is driven by a belief that every visual decision should have a reason. On Furious, a massive 180-foot translight surrounded the FBI office set, providing a New York backdrop. But not every section of the backing looked equally good from every angle, so the crew would subtly reposition it depending on the shot. (So yes, maybe some different windows afford the same view.)

“You would never want the interior and the exterior to be exposed the same way,” Emmett says. “It might feel a bit fake.” Instead, he deliberately overexposed the exterior slightly, reproducing the way the outside world actually feels when you’re inside a building.

Then, because they were working on a stage for weeks, the team could start playing with weather and time. For one sequence, Emmett created a sunrise inside the FBI office with a large tungsten unit dimmed down to produce a warm, hard beam of light. In another moment, the team could decide that a scene should feel rainy or dusky and build that atmosphere directly into the set.

“How do you mix it up?” Emmett says. “If you’re just on the same location all the time.”

Emmett’s answer isn’t to make everything bigger, stranger, or more elaborate. It’s to find the visual detail that changes how a scene feels.

As Emmett discovered while deliberately keeping himself from reading the final episodes of Furious, there’s something valuable about experiencing a story without knowing what’s coming. For a cinematographer who spends so much time constructing the audience’s experience, getting to become an audience member again can be its own kind of reward.

“You’re really not getting the full effect until you’re sitting on your sofa at home and watching at home,” he says. “It’s like getting to see something reborn in a way.”

Doug Emmett is a cinematographer whose credits include Bachelorette, The One I Love, I Care a Lot, and His & Hers.

In this house, we love The Traitors. How much? When my parents arrived in Los Angeles for their very first trip here, we had lunch and promptly went to my apartment because I got day-of episodes a few hours before they premiered on Peacock. And, as it happens, the episode we sat down to watch was “The Black Banquet,” which landed production designer Stuart Frossell an Emmy nomination.

In addition to the Emmy nomination for production design (which includes art directors Luke Fuller, Georgia Picton, Alex Robertson, and Rosie Westwood, and set decorator Celina Hodge), the show earned nominations for editors David Moon, Patrick Owen, Matt Pratt, and James Seddon-Brown (for “The Death Conga” episode) and DPs Siggi Rosen-Rawlings and Matt Wright for the season as a whole, as well as nods for reality series, host, and directing.

There’s just something about The Traitors! Especially its editing and production design, both of which are packed with details that may or may not signify something. For the editors, the job means finding details. Sometimes, they drive the story; sometimes—and this happened repeatedly throughout Season 4—those details are just the eccentricities of a bunch of reality TV stars playing a game in a Scottish.

@grubwithgibswas this episode sponsored by hard boiled eggs?? #traitors #robrausch @Traitor US World #robertrausch #robloveisland #thetraitors @Robert Rausch

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For editor Patrick Owen, that observational quality is one of the pleasures, because how can you not react to behavior when it’s as bizarre as Michael Rapaport holding his plate to his mouth to shovel food into his gaping maw or Rob Rausch spearing a hard-boiled egg on a fork and eating it in a single bite?

“A lot of those things, we know that they're gonna be” noticed, Owen says of the contestants' eccentricities. “Once you see someone eating eggs a certain way, you go, ‘Oh, that's interesting.’ And then you notice it more, and then you go, ‘Oh, let's make a thing. Let's keep that in.’”

Not that the editors are using every oddball moment to make it seem like the contestants are weaving a conspiracy from them. Sometimes the thing is simply funny and goes uncommented upon, which is a huge joy of The Traitors. But often, the behavior becomes fodder around which to build an entire storyline.

Owen remembers the nominated episode’s infamous Porsha Williams moment, when she appears to have outed herself as a traitor. Except… she’s not a traitor. She just, inexplicably, said “we” when talking about them.

Moments like that are particularly useful on a show where the editors have to manage a frankly absurd amount of information. Each episode generally has a principal editor, with the finishing editors jumping in during the later stages as notes arrive and sequences are refined. Owen worked on the Round Table in the nominated episode, among other sections.

“Oh, absolutely,” Owen says when asked if it’s thrilling to discover something like Porsha’s offhand remark. “Completely. Obviously, worst nightmare is nothing really happens, and they go because they don’t have any other ideas. So anything like this is great.”

Owen calls the Round Table “the culmination of the episode,” particularly because the celebrity cast is almost powerless to prevent themselves from producing high-octane confrontations. The challenge is figuring out how to build that tension while keeping everyone distinct.

The production design does a similar balancing act in creating a world elaborate enough to support the show’s over-the-top tone while retaining its slightly ridiculous sense of fun.

Frossell, who works on both the BBC and Peacock versions, says the American series has a particularly glossy, heightened quality. “I think it’s shot almost like a prestigious thriller,” he says. “There’s a lot more gloss.”

That approach reached its peak with the Black Banquet, the biggest event of the season outside of the missions. Production took over a local church that hosts its larger moments and transformed it with a full lighting grid, elaborate set dressing, and a complete banquet installation. What's most memorable about the final product is that it doesn’t pale in comparison to what happens during the episode; it is more than able to withstand the frankly outlandish behavior that takes place within it, all those poison amulets and fights over antidotes and Dorinda being accused of murder for being a good hostess.

That dedication to executing serious craft for inherently ridiculous material is basically The Traitors in a nutshell, and one reason it remains compulsively watchable.

Frossell’s team also populates the castle with Easter eggs, including oil paintings as well as the contestants’ portraits. Those are perhaps one of the series’ most complicated tasks, requiring a dedicated graphic artist to make them look unified despite the source images arriving as everything from professional headshots to an iPhone photo.

Then Alan Cumming gets to smash them while delivering a pithy one-liner.

“I always wince, but in an evil way,” Frossell says. “I love seeing the reactions of the contestants when that happens. They're always shocked.”

For Owen, that theatricality is one of the reasons the show remains such a pleasure to cut. “It's just a pleasure to edit the show because it allows you to do many things in one,” he says. “You get to be quite over the top, which you don't get to do with a lot of other shows.”

And sometimes, that means including a shot of a grown man eating an egg in one bite.

How do you solve a problem like a Westeros battle? On the smaller, more intimate A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, you bring in the mist.

At least, that’s how the climactic Episode 5 battle royale played out, earning cinematographer Gustav Danielsson an Emmy nomination for his visceral work that plays with point of view and the terror of not quite knowing what’s coming at you and when.

“You can’t see whoever gets killed over there, and you can’t see who’s coming towards you,” Danielsson says. “It’s a dark shape coming towards you in the smoke.”

That disorientation was central to Danielsson’s approach to the series, which occupies a somewhat unusual place in the Game of Thrones universe. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is smaller and funnier than its predecessors, following wandering knight Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and his young squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) rather than an army of competing kingdoms.

“The show starts out, it’s quite a happy show,” Danielsson says, before immediately correcting himself. “Not happy. But if you compare it to other shows in the Game of Thrones universe, it’s lighter. It’s humorous. And it’s more intimate.”

That intimacy gave Danielsson and director Owen Harris room to let the camera move with the characters in the show’s earlier scenes, often using dollies and cranes. But as the story moves toward its brutal fight, the visual language changes with it and so does the world, becoming dirtier, grayer, and increasingly claustrophobic.

“When you move into this fight, the story slowly changes to something much darker and much more foreboding,” Danielsson says. “And it gets really dirty, gritty, and messy when you move close to our hero with handheld cameras in the dust, in the mist, and in the very, very gray morning light.”

It was also, perhaps, a slightly perverse way to shoot a big fantasy battle.

The sequence took roughly two weeks, split between the main unit and stunt unit, with hundreds of people working to coordinate fighters, horses, smoke, mud, lighting, and the intricately choreographed action. And because Danielsson wanted the whole thing to feel like it was happening in a murky morning haze, they had to maintain that same atmosphere across multiple days.

The smoke was practical wherever possible, with the special-effects team using long, flat tubes with holes in them to pump smoke across the field. This worked beautifully until Northern Ireland did what Northern Ireland apparently enjoys doing.

“The wind changes,” Danielsson says. “So it goes from side to side, and then you have too much smoke there and nothing there.”

The solution involved a crew of as many as 10 people constantly moving around the set with smoke units, while visual-effects supervisor Aaron Roebuck monitored the results alongside Danielsson.

“There was smoke in every shot,” Danielsson says. “But VFX did a really nice job cleaning it up, making it look perfect.”

That practical-plus-digital approach was partly aesthetic and partly pragmatic. With a smaller budget than the later seasons of Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon, Danielsson and his team needed ways to make limitations work for them.

“The smoke also adds to this whole claustrophobic, chaotic feeling of this fight,” he says. “Especially when you go inside his head.”

That becomes particularly important when the audience experiences the battle through Dunk’s point of view, including shots through the narrow slit in his helmet that reveal just how little a knight can see in the midst of a horseback battle. No wonder the victors were routinely thought to have a higher power on their side; there’s no other explanation than luck.

Then, in the middle of all that grime, the episode cuts to an extended flashback, and it’s like someone hosed off the screen.

“We wanted to have a different look,” Danielsson says. “But we chose to do it with lenses and camera style rather than to put a different LUT on the footage.”

For the main show, Danielsson used Panavision Ultra Panatar anamorphic lenses with a 1.3 squeeze on the Alexa Mini LF. For the flashbacks, he switched to Panavision T-series anamorphic lenses, designed for Super 35, and used them on the larger Mini LF sensor.

The result was a more pronounced optical character: softer falloff toward the edges, darker corners, and a natural vignette.

He deliberately shot the flashbacks almost entirely locked off, using only a 50mm lens, making the material feel like a memory pinned in place.

Danielsson’s broader approach to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was similarly grounded in naturalism. Much of the series was shot outdoors in natural light, which sounds lovely until you remember that it was filmed in Northern Ireland.

“We had a feeling we were a bit lucky with the weather,” he says. “I kept saying that. ‘My God, we are… the gods were on our side.’”

But then there were the nights. The Game of Thrones universe has always had a complicated relationship with darkness, but Danielsson wasn’t interested in slaughtering everything in bright moonlight and calling it a night.

“It was really a balance trying to make these nights dark but rich,” he says, “and never lose details where you want to have them.” So Danielsson revived a trick he leaned into while filming the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror (look for a Crafty dedicated just to that episode soon).

That instinct to make fantasy feel tactile and real runs through Danielsson’s work. For A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the strategy rendered the world lived-in enough that the increasingly strange events and sudden twists and reversals could feel organic within it.

As Danielsson puts it, “If it feels like it’s set in a very grounded real world, then there’s more of a buy-in with the audience.”

Gustav Danielsson’s cinematographer credits include The Glass Dome, A Nearly Normal Family, and Brave New World. His go-to at craft services? “ I never eat candy on set, but I drink a lot of coffee, and they had really lovely cappuccinos. Having a nice cappuccino when the Irish rain is pouring and it’s windy, that’s really nice.”

There’s something special about well-executed comfort food, which, in the year 2026, includes multi-cam sitcoms. Maybe it’s the comforting rhythms or the cheery sets, but when shows like Leanne come around, they’re worth celebrating. And for Season 1, that celebration encompasses Emmy nominations, including one for editor Russell Griffin, ACE.

Then again, knowing me, maybe Leanne really stands out because this is an era where streamers (and Jason Sudeikis) seem convinced that half-hour comedies should aspire to the runtime of The Brutalist. Instead, Leanne embraces the soul of wit: brevity.

Some episodes barely make the 20-minute mark (and that’s on commercial-free Netflix), a choice that comes straight from uber producer Chuck Lorre.

“He’s brutal in terms of, if we don’t need it, don’t bore the audience,” Griffin says. “‘Just give me a great meal that’s satisfying and delicious, and then I’ll come back for the next meal.’”

But Griffin’s biggest initial challenge wasn’t trimming scenes. It was helping shape a sitcom around someone who had never really acted before.

Leanne Morgan arrived with impeccable comic timing honed from headlining stand-up shows but little understanding of television production. Told to go “back to one” or “open yourself up to camera,” she’d readily agree and then turn to co-star (and sitcom vet) Kristen Johnston and ask what it meant.

On and off-screen, their pairing is one of the show’s secret weapons. Another is a writers’ room embracing Morgan’s strengths almost in real time in the scripts. If early episodes protect the first-time sitcom lead, by the finale, Morgan is carrying emotional scenes that anchor the series.

The editors were making discoveries, too. “In the beginning, she was having some timing that felt like it was on a large stadium-style show,” Griffin says. “We were like, ‘OK, we need to move a little faster.’”

So they subtly tightened pauses, nudged performances forward, and helped Morgan transition from commanding thousands with a microphone to performing in front of a live audience as a character. And that audience is as integral to the pace as a well-timed punchline.

“I consider the audience laughter the score for a sitcom,” Griffin says, a deceptively elegant way to think about multi-camera editing.

“When you’re editing, you have to mimic that [rhythm] and adjust your timing,” he explains. “If a joke didn’t land as well as you thought, maybe they waited too long, so you pull that up a little bit. Or sometimes a joke lands longer than expected, and you have to let the audience laughter organically leave.”

Thinking of laughter as score also reframes one of television’s oldest clichés. Those pauses actors take before delivering the next line aren’t interruptions but rests. If a conductor waits for the orchestra to resolve a phrase, then sitcom actors wait for the laugh to crest before continuing with the scene.

“When it works in concert with the audience,” Griffin says, “that’s when it really sings.”

That philosophy reaches its fullest expression in the Emmy-nominated season finale, where Griffin was tasked with losing emotional loops.

“I wanted to take us through a journey that wrapped up the storylines we’d been following throughout the first season,” he says. “Whatever journey each of those characters has gone on, we wanted to illustrate that this is an arc they’ve moved across.”

The finale leaves the audience satisfied while quietly opening doors for what’s next—exactly what a sitcom finale should do. And luckily for audiences, what’s next arrives very soon: Season 2 of Leanne premieres on August 27.

Russell Griffin, ACE, is an ACE Eddie Award- and Emmy-winning editor whose credits include the Frasier revival, How I Met Your Father, and The Upshaws.

I don’t have to answer to anyone but my bartender. Which means stories that once lived on a maybe-someday list don’t require explanation or defense. Welcome back to Leftovers Are Today’s Special, a closer look at older films and series I want to know more about.

Southern California circa 2004. What a time to be a teenager! Nothing but neon lights and stained glass windows, class wars, and an annual murder mystery for a plucky blonde gumshoe to solve. At least that was life in Neptune, California, for the characters of Veronica Mars, one of the all-time great teen shows. (And maybe life for you, too; I don’t know your past, Reader.)

And the show retains its cult status decades after its initial three-season run, subsequent movie, and misguided revival series. Even its costume designer, Salvador Perez Jr., has started rewatching.

“I’ve literally spent the last week re-watching it,” Perez says, laughing. “And it’s so weird. It’s been 20 years!”

Two decades later, the show remains remarkably recognizable—not just because of Kristen Bell’s Veronica and her sarcastic voiceovers and ever-expanding corkboard of teenage murder mysteries, but because Perez’s costumes captured a very specific moment in Southern California fashion. Rewatching the series, he can see just how thoroughly the early-2000s zeitgeist infiltrated Neptune High.

“My puka shell budget was ridiculous,” he says. “And I look and I’m like, oh, my God, every single person’s in flare jeans. But it was the 2000s.”

That realization is part of what makes revisiting Veronica Mars such a strange pleasure. The clothes feel like an unintentional time capsule because that’s what they are; Perez was shopping the San Diego stores where real teenagers shopped, places like Wet Seal, Abercrombie, and Lucky Brand.

“I would go into Wet Seal and Abercrombie, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re shopping for your daughter,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m buying this much clothes for my daughter every week.’”

The result is a wardrobe that functions as an archaeological dig of 2004. Flare jeans. Striped shirts. Beachy casual board shorts. Plus, of course, Veronica’s seemingly endless supply of leather jackets.

“She was broke, but she had fabulous clothes,” Perez says. His ingenious backstory explanation? Veronica thrifted it all.

Not to mention Perez had to differentiate between teachers and students (often when the actors weren’t that far apart in age), execute huge high school events, and do it all on an almost laughably small budget. “I think I probably had $20,000 an episode, if that much,” he says. “And we’d do proms, we’d do the graduation. There was always something big and giant to do.”

And then there were Veronica’s two love interests.

One of the more deliberate costume choices came when producers became concerned that Teddy Dunn and Jason Dohring looked too similar. The solution was simple: separate color palettes. Dunn got blues; Dohring got what he bluntly called “rack colors”: “The colors that were left over on the rack ’cause nobody wanted them.” And though he’d don a puka shell necklace, Dohring resolutely refused to wear a belt, no matter how many Perez left with his costumes.

The show had a plethora of now-major stars (Tessa Thompson, Max Greenfield, Jessica Chastain, Taylor Sheridan), there is only one that I ask about specifically: Lisa Rinna. Turns out, Veronica Mars was the first of three times (so far) Perez has dressed Rinna.

 “I remember we had the scene where she's in the pool and the boys are all playing poker, and they see the mom in the pool,” Perez says. The plan was always to have a body double performing the scene, but “they brought in a 40-year-old bikini model, and I'm like, ‘Oh no. This woman does not have Lisa's body. I've seen Lisa in her underwear. You get me a 20-year-old bikini model.’” After some pushback, they did, and Perez earned a permanent place in Rinna’s good graces.

Not to mention a brief interaction years later between the two on Season 2 of Running Point. “I was telling her, ‘I'm not gonna see you next week when you shoot because I'm leaving to go do this RuPaul movie,’” Perez says, referring to Stop That Train. “And she's like, ‘I wanna be in the RuPaul movie!” So I told [director] Adam Shankman, ‘Hey, Lisa Rinna wants to be in this.’ And he cast her!”

As usual, Lisa Rinna shows us the way: Ask for what you want. Even if sometimes you look back later and wonder, “Why the hell did I want so many puka shells?”

All four seasons of Veronica Mars are available to stream.

There are two ways to watch America’s Got Talent.

The first is the way everyone else does. A singer hits an impossible note. Simon Cowell winces, Terry Crews beams, someone gets a Golden Buzzer, and America starts arguing about it online before the confetti has even settled.

The second is Sue Moyer’s way.

She hears a crowd erupt and mentally notes exactly where the energy shifted. She clocks the contestant waiting backstage, the parents crying in the wings, and the judge who leaned forward half a second before everyone else. She’s already picturing the finished episode before the footage ever reaches an edit bay.

After more than two decades with America’s Got Talent, Moyer—whose official title is supervising producer but whose responsibilities center on post-production—has become fluent in seeing every performance twice: once as an audience member and again as a storyteller.

“Post on a show like this is its own unique challenge,” she says. “And I think that’s what I love about it.”

Each spring, AGT films nine or 10 days of auditions that eventually become nearly three months of television. Those taped episodes demand meticulous editorial construction, with every contestant woven into a larger emotional narrative before the show pivots into live TV.

“The taped shows are almost like their own entity,” Moyer says. “Then we get into live shows, which are a totally different process.”

The distinction is everything.

During the audition rounds, editors have time to discover the story buried within hundreds of hours of footage. By the live shows, the luxury of reflection disappears.

“You don’t know what the story is necessarily going to be,” Moyer says. “It really is the contestant arriving, and it’s what their journey is and what’s happened in that week. Suddenly in live shows, you’re telling stories on a very quick timeframe.”

That shift—from carefully sculpting narrative to reacting in real time—is one reason America’s Got Talent has managed to survive for 21 seasons without feeling trapped by its own formula.

“It’s no longer just about the person standing on that stage and performing for 90 seconds,” Moyer says. “It’s really about getting to know them backstage and what that journey looks like.”

That evolution has been driven as much by technology as editorial philosophy, but even after 21 seasons, the show can surprise the people making it.

“You feel you have seen every dance act imaginable,” Moyer says with a laugh. “Then this season we had a Golden Buzzer, this amazing dance troupe from Canada. You’re thinking, ‘Oh, they’re a good dance act.’ Then all these dogs run onstage and perform with them, and it just took it to another level.”

Unlike many post supervisors, Moyer is on set throughout auditions, sitting in the Pasadena audience while simultaneously thinking as both viewer and producer.

“You know what works,” she says. “You know what that audience is reacting to. You can feel it in the room.” And that instinct becomes invaluable when it’s time to build the episodes.

This season also presented an entirely new editorial puzzle.

For the first time, AGT has inserted a Judges’ Callbacks round between auditions and the live shows, giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look at how Simon Cowell, Mel B, Howie Mandel, and Sofía Vergara decide which acts deserve one more chance.

“We have so many acts that are great TV,” Moyer says. “But there’s a limited number of acts that can actually go to live shows.”

The solution was to follow each judge as they invited selected contestants back for another performance before making their final decisions.

“It’s added another layer of complexity and scheduling and editing,” she says. “But I think it’s going to be fun for the audience to really see what that decision-making process is.”

For post, of course, “another layer” is an understatement, since every new round means another narrative to construct and another mountain of footage to organize. And then come the live shows.

If the audition episodes are a marathon, the Tuesday-Wednesday turnaround is an Olympic sprint.

The Tuesday performance show ends, and producers immediately begin assembling the elaborate seven- or eight-minute recap that opens Wednesday’s results show. To do so, editors work through the night, and there is no margin for error.

“It’s usually delivered within 15 minutes of air,” Moyer says. “But it gets there every week.”

That miracle depends on preparation as much as talent, and Moyer credits the show’s longevity not to technology or format tweaks, but to the remarkable stability of its post-production team. Some editors have been there since Season 1, creating the kind of shorthand that only comes from spending years hitting impossible deadlines together.

“I think they’re the best editors on Earth,” she says. “They go from cutting a variety act to a magic act to a singer to an emotional act. They never know what they’re going to be thrown.”

America’s Got Talent Season 21 airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC, with episodes streaming the next day on Peacock. The second and final Judges’ Callback episode debuts August 11.

Maura Corey, ACE, is the first member of Crafty’s three-peat club. That’s how good she is. (And how delightful.)

We’ve talked about finding romance and comedy and L.A. in equal measure for Nobody Wants This and navigating the tonal tightrope of a superhero satire with Gen V. So when Peacock’s The Five-Star Weekend became the streamer’s biggest hit ever—and just scored a Season 2—there wasn’t much question that Corey would be getting another call.

At first glance, The Five-Star Weekend looks like exactly the sort of glossy beach-read adaptation you’d throw on after a day in the sun: gorgeous Nantucket homes, fabulous women, chic costumes, and enough secrets to empty a magnum over. The surprise isn’t that it’s escapist, but that it’s funny.

That’s where Corey came in.

She wasn’t initially part of the production. Instead, she arrived after much of the series had already been assembled, with a deceptively simple assignment.

“They had this really beautiful show that was very sad,” Corey says. “I came in as the, ‘Hey, is there a way to look at these episodes and pivot them into the space where the grief feels real, but there are moments that are funny?’”

Which doesn’t mean adding jokes so much as reaping what a very funny cast already sowed.

One of Corey’s favorite examples comes in Episode 1. D’Arcy Carden’s Brooke arrives at Jennifer Garner’s house (compound?) and repeatedly loses her oversized sun hat. The original sequence played longer, with additional dialogue introducing the character. Corey realized none of that was necessary.

“‘Actually, this is just about how funny it is that she keeps losing her hat,’” she remembers thinking. “Keep it rhythmic. Keep it popping.”

It’s a tiny editorial adjustment that says everything. Brooke is flustered, awkward, and just a little out of step with everyone around her, but she’s also lovable. The audience isn’t told who she is; they discover her through behavior.

One of the smartest choices in The Five-Star Weekend is revealing Gigi’s (Gemma Chan) affair almost immediately. A lesser melodrama would save that revelation for later, turning it into a season-long guessing game. Corey was thrilled the show resisted that impulse.

“I loved that they revealed the affair right away,” she says. “That could be a red herring that you just... drag out.”

Instead, the emotional centerpiece becomes the fallout, particularly a tense sauna confrontation between Brooke and Gigi.

“I feel for Gigi,” Corey says. “She’s like, ‘I’m in pain, and I don’t know what to do.’ It’s not cut and dry. There’s no evil stepmother. It’s just people working through what people work through.”

That refusal to flatten anyone into heroes or villains carried into the edit itself, and the performances gave her plenty to work with.

Jennifer Garner arrived remarkably consistent from take to take. Chloë Sevigny, Corey says, barely needed multiple attempts: “She was just there.”

Carden, meanwhile, became an editor’s secret weapon. Because her character constantly talks to herself, she’d continue improvising under her breath between scripted lines.

“I could take a lot of those pieces and build in some of her comedy,” Corey says. “To make it feel like she’s thinking, processing things—but verbally.”

Regina Hall supplied something different: endless variations in expression from take to take, allowing Corey to subtly reshape the emotional rhythm of scenes through reaction shots. Chan’s Gigi, by contrast, remained laser-focused and consistent, which Corey says perfectly matched the character’s emotional reserve.

Then there’s Nantucket itself, which may look effortlessly idyllic, but Corey laughs at the idea that audiences see exactly what the cameras captured.

“A lot of those skies are sky replacements,” she says. Not to idealize Nantucket; instead, it was a story-driven choice to make Nantucket feel like another character, so that when the weather—and the relationships—turned stormy, the environment shifted with them.

Even in a relationship drama, visual effects are everywhere. Corey routinely uses split screens to perfect comic timing or subtle morphs to combine performances from different takes.

“I don’t think people understand how much VFX goes into even the simplest comedies,” she says.

That’s true of editing, too. When The Five-Star Weekend works—and judging by Peacock’s viewership, it really works—the audience doesn’t notice the cuts. They notice Carden doing battle with her hat or how Hall can shut down an entire conversation with a perfectly deployed side-eye.

In other words, they notice exactly what Corey and editors Ryan Denmark, Nena Erb, Robert Komatsu, and Bjørn T. Myrholt want them to notice. And if history is any indication, Corey’s gonna be the founding member of the four-peat club. She’s already five stars here at Crafty.

I need this story to be really good.

Partly that’s because Emmy-nominated Hacks editors Peggy Tachdjian (now a member of Crafty’s two-peat club!) and Jon Philpot are as funny and as engaging as you would hope anyone working on Hacks would be. But partly I need to kill it because 10 minutes into our conversation, I said, “Guys, remember how I was joking about my professionalism?” Then I hit a button, and that’s when the Zoom lady announced, “This Zoom is being recorded.”

Reader, I forgot to hit record for 10 minutes.

Shit happens, I know, but Deborah Vance would never let it go. Nor should she. So you see, I have every reason to make this one as good as possible. Luckily, I have great material to work with.

As Hacks became a cultural behemoth—first a comedy for clever people and industry insiders, then a comedy for literally everyone once they caught up—Tachdjian and Philpot came to the last season from opposite directions. Tachdjian fell in love with the series during the pandemic. Philpot has been helping shape Deborah and Ava’s world since Season 2. But neither expected to end up editing the final season.

Philpot thought he’d be unavailable because he was working on a feature. Tachdjian had never worked on Hacks at all. Then television did what television does. Schedules shifted, the comedy gods intervened, and suddenly Tachdjian was creating the season’s most visually ambitious episodes while Philpot found himself assembling the series finale.

They both ended up with Emmy nominations.

Ask either editor what made Season 5 different, though, and they don’t start by talking about the ending. They start by talking about relief.

“I had to live through Season 4,” Philpot says, laughing. “Watching the Reddit threads was giving me deep anxiety.”

Fans hated watching Deborah and Ava tear each other apart, even if everyone making the show knew the conflict was leading somewhere worthwhile. Thank god Season 5 finally let the audience exhale.

“This is actually how they are in real life,” Philpot says. “They are actually friends. They do love one another.” And that shift changed everything in the edit.

The tension didn’t disappear; it just got harder to cut because the story was rooted in love instead of competition. And Deborah’s cancer diagnosis carries a different emotional weight than the power struggles of earlier seasons.

“It was the most that I’ve cried during an edit,” Philpot admits of the final episode. “It was emotional because of the content, but also it was the end of everything.”

He was carrying two impossible assignments simultaneously: make audiences laugh but also fashion a fitting farewell to characters they’d spent five seasons loving. Fortunately, Hacks had already taught everyone how to do both.

Deborah in a Box

If Philpot sweated through the ending, Tachdjian had to handle the season’s most technically insane installment.

Episode 8 strands Deborah inside a transparent cube suspended high above Las Vegas during a citywide blackout. No one is putting Jean Smart in a box in mid-air, which meant a lot of VFX. And what looks effortless onscreen was anything but.

“There was a lot of back and forth,” Tachdjian says. “Make the box smaller. No, bigger. Change the perspective.”

The production storyboarded every shot before cameras rolled, but matching performances to plates still became an elaborate puzzle. Tachdjian found herself assembling temporary composites herself before sending them to producers, occasionally asking her husband—a former VFX artist—to check the perspective.

Even then, the shot everyone obsessed over wasn’t the cube. The shot that caused the most debate was the shoe in the corner. If you’ve seen the episode, you know exactly why.

“We talked so much about how to start that scene,” Tachdjian says. “Do we start on the shoe? Is it too gross?”

More than any visual effect, the shoe became an editing problem. Start there, and the audience wonders whether Deborah actually relieved herself. Hide it too long, and the joke loses its sting. “I think you made the right choice,” Philpot tells her. And the shoe remains open to interpretation.

Fifty Years in 40 Minutes

Tachdjian’s other episode, Episode 4, needed to convey TV history from 50 years ago. No problem, that’s what flashbacks are for. After all, flashbacks are routine television grammar. But Hacks hadn’t really done them to this degree, so: “We were trying to figure out how we were going to incorporate flashbacks into a show that’s never done them before,” she says.

That meant creating an entirely new visual language while simultaneously convincing viewers they’d been watching Deborah’s history all along.

The production team met the challenge with almost ridiculous attention to detail. Smart was digitally de-aged for publicity photos that appeared on fake posters. Television memorabilia stretching back decades filled every corner of the frame.

“It was really cool,” Tachdjian says. “All the costumes, all the everything.”

Paris Is Just Another Two-Hander

Then there’s the finale. You know, the one that partially filmed at The Louvre.

For a while, nobody was even sure they’d get inside. The Louvre staff were on strike until the day before filming. Backup plans involved Versailles, while production calls from France regularly interrupted post. Then everything fell into place.

“They shot the Louvre scene with just eight people,” Tachdjian says.

Philpot laughs remembering how much gorgeous footage never made the cut: “The amount of B-roll I didn’t use is off the charts.”

And it all boils down to one moment. One very Hacks moment, because it’s two brilliant, funny women looking at the Mona Lisa. More importantly, for a show as much about fame as talent, it’s one of the most famous paintings in the world. And then Ava says: “Kinda mid, no?”

That’s Hacks. Build the most glamorous sequence imaginable, then puncture it with exactly the right joke. Edited at exactly the right rhythm.

That rhythm came into play very literally during the club sequence in the finale, when Deborah and Ava let everything go and just dance. Philpot needed alternate versions of the song—including a remix—to stretch lyrics across the choreography in exactly the right places, stressing about the cut all the way through.

“It feels seamless when you watch it,” Tachdjian says, reassuringly. And correctly.

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t take my recording mishap too seriously. I was talking to two funny, charming editors who know better than anyone how to make people forget the thing that almost went wrong. If they’re juggling everything they juggle in a single episode, I should at least be able to hit record. Or, and I hope I did, show why they’re so good at making the impossible look effortless.

The scariest thing about editing a documentary on Mel Brooks isn’t finding enough material. It’s deciding which version of the same story to use.

After decades in the spotlight, Brooks has told the same stories hundreds of times, to late-night hosts, talk show legends, journalists, audiences and, for The 99 Year Old Man, director Judd Apatow. The challenge for Emmy-nominated editor Joe Beshenkovsky, ACE, wasn’t simply organizing an avalanche of archival footage. It was recognizing that Brooks wasn’t repeating himself.

“He wasn’t just telling stories,” Beshenkovsky says. “They’re routines.”

Rather than choosing a single definitive version of Brooks recounting his childhood, his military service, or the making of Blazing Saddles, Beshenkovsky stitches together performances separated by decades, illustrating that Brooks has remained unmistakably himself across every stage of his life.

“It felt like a fun way to put the thing on its feet and play a little bit,” Beshenkovsky says. “Even at 100 years old, the guy is timeless. You could cherry-pick from any age, any dimension, and it would still feel very much like Mel.”

That philosophy extended to every decision in the film. Brooks’ movies aren’t simply referenced; they’re treated as their own miniature narratives.

“You have to find the right pace,” Beshenkovsky says. “Each of those pods—each film—is a short film unto itself.”

That’s particularly important because not every viewer arrives already knowing The Producers, Young Frankenstein, or History of the World Part I. So the clips have to work both as reminders for lifelong fans and introductions for newcomers, while also reflecting where Brooks was emotionally and professionally when he made them.

The documentary also had another embarrassment of riches: interviews.

“There was no shortage of interviews,” Beshenkovsky says with a laugh.

The abundance allowed the filmmakers to search not just for information but for the funniest delivery and the sharpest timing. For those, editing became less about chronology than comic rhythm.

One of the documentary’s most satisfying discoveries isn’t simply Brooks’ influence on comedy, but his legacy as a producer who championed ambitious filmmakers through Brooksfilms, backing projects like The Elephant Man, Frances, and The Fly.

By cutting between decades as though time were just another punchline, Beshenkovsky reveals something remarkable: the jokes still work because the worldview behind them never changed.

When asked what stays with him after spending a year immersed in Brooks’ life, Beshenkovsky has one thing locked and loaded.

“Be kind to one another,” he says. “Just be kind. Try and make people laugh and leave the world a better place.”

In 2026, that’s still more radical than it ought to be.

Joe Beshenkovsky is an Emmy- and ACE-winning editor whose credits include This American Life, Jane, and George Carlin’s American Dream.

I don’t have to answer to anyone but my bartender. Which means stories that once lived on a maybe-someday list don’t require explanation or defense. Welcome back to Leftovers Are Today’s Special, a closer look at older films and series I want to know more about.

There’s an alternate timeline where At Home with Amy Sedaris never went off the air.

In that universe, every aspiring trad wife, lifestyle influencer, and chaotic home cook has watched Amy Sedaris flirt with Paul Rudd at New Year’s, serve deeply suspect hors d’oeuvres, and do battle with neighborhood frenemy Chassie (Cole Escola!). In that timeline, the TruTV series is celebrated as one of the great cult comedies instead of a fond memory for the people lucky enough to catch it.

We don’t live in that timeline. But we do live in a timeline when editor Jon Philpot got hired to cut the show’s final season because Sedaris dreamed about him.

“I still don’t know what the dream was,” Philpot says with a laugh. “They were getting behind, and Amy emails me, and she’s like, ‘I had a dream about you. Can you come help on the show? And I was like, ‘Yes.’”

It’s the most At Home With Amy Sedaris story possible.

Philpot had edited the first season before moving on to Search Party. When production shut down during the pandemic, Sedaris called him back, handing him what would become one of the series’ most gloriously unhinged episodes: the New Year’s Eve special.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” he recalls. “‘Not only did you have a dream about me, and here I am, I get to work with y’all again, but this is a great episode.’”

At Home with Amy Sedaris is a mishmash of genres, comedy styles, and personalities, all filtered through a singular, offbeat sensibility. Crafty yearns to be the same. Every episode of its three seasons riffed on classic Hollywood movies (Key Largo! Picnic!), daytime lifestyle television, and homemade crafts in a way that felt both meticulously constructed and completely unhinged.

Rather than sanding down the show’s strange edges, Philpot leaned into them, trusting that the rhythm of a scene didn’t have to resemble conventional sitcom timing if it felt true to the world.

“I wonder if people couldn’t understand that it’s not self-serious,” he says. “It’s OK if it’s a little bit off. The show is about crafts and homemaking and doing things with your hands. And the show was also created that way.”

That’s why the series still feels unlike anything else. Every gag, awkward pause, and lovingly absurd cutaway feels built rather than manufactured.

Which makes its disappearance all the more frustrating. Today, At Home with Amy Sedaris is available only to buy on YouTube. Gentle reader, have you ever purchased content on YouTube? I’m genuinely asking, because maybe it’s just a blind spot for me? But for a show that anticipated today’s obsession with aesthetic domesticity, performative homemaking, internet oddballs, and Cole Escola, its absence from a major streamer feels especially strange—at least until one remembers that it used to stream on HBO Max.

Culture has finally caught up with Amy Sedaris. Now it just needs to catch up with the rights owners.

The scariest room in the Bowdens’ luxe, sprawling Savannah home in Cape Fear isn’t the one with blood on the floor. It’s the one behind a sheet of construction plastic that everyone has learned to ignore.

Production designer Jamie Walker McCall understood early that the Apple TV thriller couldn’t rely on jump scares alone. The terror had to be embedded in the architecture itself so that, long before Max Cady (Javier Bardem) stalks the Bowden family, their house is already keeping their secrets from one another.

“I really wanted this cat-and-mouse,” McCall says. “You don’t know who’s lurking around the corner.”

That philosophy guided nearly every design decision. While Amy Adams moving through rooms saturated in jewel tones might spring to mind first, McCall’s production design is quietly doing something even more unsettling: showing you a beautiful Southern home that is as secretive as the family living in it.

The exterior belonged to an Italian Renaissance Revival house, but McCall built the interior on a stage to design a floor plan that served the story, creating long sightlines that let characters—and viewers—see movement in the distance without ever feeling secure.

“When you walk in the door, you could see all the way down to the back of the house,” she says. “The set was big enough that you could have those creepy moments of those shadows walking by.”

The most unnerving element is the unfinished wing of the house, a years-long renovation stalled behind plastic curtains and boarded-up doorways. It’s a perfectly plausible bit of domestic inconvenience that slowly becomes one of the show’s greatest sources of dread.

“When I first read that I was like, ‘OK, how am I gonna...,’” McCall says. “I have to tell myself stories as well.”

Her solution was rooted in the mundane reality of home renovations: In her backstory, the Bowdens had hired and fired a few contractors, leaving work dragging on for years. Each room reflected a different stage of abandonment: one nearly finished with drywall, another stripped to insulation and fresh wiring, and a final library left dangerously exposed, complete with old knob-and-tube electrical systems and holes in the floor.

She even consulted her construction crew to verify that boarded-over doors would be realistic.

“They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we put boards across doors for people not to go into certain areas all the time.’ I was like, ‘Great. Done and done.’”

The house isn’t the only illusion McCall built: She also had to make outdoor Atlanta look like outdoor Savannah. (Northerners, those cities are in the same state but they are wildly different.) And recreating coastal Georgia meant rebuilding an entire ecosystem, beginning with one of the South’s defining visual signatures: Spanish moss.

That’s why McCall’s first phone call after accepting the job wasn’t to a decorator or construction coordinator: “It was to my greensman.”

She knew Guy Covington Jr., a longtime collaborator, could pull off the impossible. The team sourced already-fumigated Spanish moss, only to discover another problem. Once treated, the moss turns brown.

“So we had to paint all of the Spanish moss that we got before hanging it throughout all of Atlanta,” she says with a laugh.

The crew developed oversized wire hooks to suspend the hand-painted moss from trees across entire neighborhoods. Add extensive wet-downs, rolling fog, and storm-soaked streets, and Atlanta disappeared beneath a convincingly humid Savannah.

That humidity shaped the show’s visual identity from the very beginning, with McCall’s rich jewel tones turning the thriller into something sweaty and visceral. And if Adams seems particularly suited to her character’s home, well, there’s a very good reason for it.

McCall keeps photographs of actors on her office wall while designing, studying skin tones as carefully as floor plans, so Adams’ red hair became another color in the composition.

“I knew she was gonna pop off of that set no matter how dark I thought the show should look,” McCall says.

That’s the thing about Cape Fear—no one ever gets to just disappear. Everyone has to step into an unavoidable final showdown, no matter how frightened, drugged, or sweaty they are.

Jamie Walker McCall is an Emmy-nominated production designer whose credits include Schmigadoon!, Doctor Odyssey, and Candy. Her craft services go-to? “Usually there’s a chocolate chip cookie that’s delicious. I gotta get that.”