If you’re anything like me, you were gutted when VH1 canceled Hindsight after the last episode of its first season aired— and after the finale had been shaped by the fact that the show had initially been renewed for a second season.

In the slightly-more-than-two years since that last episode, the unresolved cliffhangers have continued to nag at me. I’ve had my fingers crossed every time an unlikely revival is announced or a story breaks about something like Twitter creating a Rhianna/Lupita Nyongo movie, hoping to see something similar about Hindsight. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing Hindsight actors appearing in new roles in new shows and decided to see if I could convince the show’s creator, Emily Fox, to tell me what happened when the elevator doors opened on Becca (Laura Ramsey) just before the series cut permanently to black.

Good news, fellow Hindsight mourners: She said yes.

What follows is my conversation with the delightful Ms. Fox about the couple of cliffhangers I haven’t been able to let go of, the things the show did so well and more.

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Leona Laurie: I can’t tell you how excited I am that you said yes to letting me ask you these questions.

Emily Fox: It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to talk about the show, so I’m excited, too.

LL: Have you publicly answered questions about how the cliffhangers in the last episode were resolved?

EF: I haven’t. I guess I still have been holding out hope that I would get to do a book.

LL: I’ve been holding out hope for that, too!

EF: I think at least 85 people are really hoping that there will be a book. I could probably give you a couple of answers without spoiling everything.

LL: I have two questions that I am desperate to ask you, and it’s fine if you are not able to answer them, but I’m just so delighted to even get to ask you anything.

EF: OK.

LL: OK. What year is it when the elevator doors open?

EF: It’s the present day.

LL: So! Becca’s back in the present in season two?

EF: Yes. But we weren’t going to stay there. The idea was to see the outcomes of the timeline that she was living in season one.

LL: Ah! I would love it if the book could come out.

EF: (Laughs)

LL: Question two: Does it take her 20 years to make up with Lolly (Sarah Goldberg), or do they get to make up sooner?

EF: It’s interesting, the idea of 20 years, because in that world, 20 years can go by in a minute—in a blink. We had so much fun playing around with time and the passage of time and sort of leaping through time, that it was a real mind bender. But, no—they are forever intertwined, and there was never to be another situation where the two of them were not together.

LL: Oh my god, you have given me the kind of closure I never expected to get about this! Thank you!

EF: These are questions a lot of people have asked me, especially in the immediate aftermath of our being canceled. There was sort of an outcry, mostly from my friends who were like: “What happened?? You can’t do that!” And I was like, “I didn’t intend to do it!”

When we cut the finale, we knew we had a second season, so we said: “OK, let’s not wrap it up. Let’s create a mystery. Let’s do something that’s going to leave people wanting more and leave us the opportunity to explore more leaping around in time.”

It was never supposed to be a show about the 90s. It just happened to end up set in the 90s, and that all grew around it, because we realized once we were there that: “Oh my god, it’s the 90s. How fun is this? We haven’t been here in ages!”

Everyone got on board with that, but as I’ve often said, it really started out as a show about a person. It was her story, and I think that’s why it resonated so much was because it wasn’t just like, “Oh, let’s take a nostalgia trip through this decade.”

Instead, we wanted to see what it’s like to have a second chance at living your life. She could have been anywhere.

LL: I think that’s why it was such an effective nostalgia trip, because it wasn’t like she landed in 1995 and only wanted to go to a Spice Girls show or do all the big things of that moment. It felt more realistic—like what it would actually be like if you dropped back in time 20 years into your own life. If that happened, would you really be tuned into the “important” things happening in the world, or would you get excited about a jacket you regret getting rid of?

EF: Yes. It was always intended to be a very personal story. It was meant to be the wish fulfillment and the fantasy of living your life over, but also the sort of weird “ghost story” that that becomes, where you do find that old jacket… and your old husband.

LL: I love time travel. That genre is my sweet spot, and I’ll try any time travel show or movie or book, just to see how they do it, and most of them are terrible. In particular, the ways they tend to deal with the space-time continuum are so weak. Through the whole season of Hindsight, you did such a good job of showing how quickly the ripples of your actions in the past would become visible. In the beginning, she wakes up in exactly the 1995 she remembers, but by the end of the first episode she’s seeing things that didn’t happen in the original timeline. She’s already made changes and recognizes them. You created a world in which our heroine is kind of unwittingly engaging in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” version of her life.

EF: Right. We had a lot of fun playing with the notion that everyone believes that they have perfect knowledge—that they know exactly what would happen if they chose B instead of A, because they’ve spent 20 years thinking about B, and they’ve knit for themselves this huge fantasy of what would have happened. But the truth is that a lot of the big decisions we make in our lives are the spontaneous little throw-aways. You don’t think at the time that you’re making a big decision, and then it reveals itself later in your life like: “Oh! That was the moment that I went left instead of right, and I ended up here.”

We had a lot of fun with saying that yeah, everything was going to be different—like really different. There’re going to be some things that are fundamentally similar, like some birthday party would be on the same night, but then there was the tantalizing temptation for Becca to go back to Kevin (Steve Talley), and explore something that never worked out. He was her kryptonite.

LL: I have a real problem with the “love triangle” trope, and how common it is in media for there to be someone who has the impossible problem that too many wonderful people want to be with them, and they can’t decide between them. I wish that was a problem we all have in real life, but it doesn’t really happen. But even though there was a love triangle element in the show, I kind of forget about the guys. I liked them, and I still like them, but you did such a good job of making a love story about best friends—making the relationship between Becca and Lolly the heart of the show.

EF: A lot of that was inspired by real life—I mean, not precisely, but just how important those friendships are in your 20s, how much you are exploring and experimenting with who you want to be, and figuring things out. That time in life is fascinating. A lot of people keep those friends with them for life, and sometimes those friends kind of vaporize when you get out of your 20s.

It’s like you were in a war together—you were in the trenches, and then afterwards it’s like that person is always dear to you, even if you don’t see them or talk to them a lot. That was the idea—that you could go back and find that person that had been so dear to you in your 20s, and then something had come between you and you had lost each other… To go back and find that again? That was the love story: Can I get it right this time with this person I loved and lost?

I mean, there were boys, and they were important, but they were nowhere near as important as the girls.

LL: I love Lolly. Instead of her being the cliché “best friend” who’s just a tool to flesh out the lead character, she’s so three-dimensional. Even in her earliest moments when she’s being a little scatterbrained, she has such substance.

EF: I love that character so much. Lolly is a sublime Frankenstein version of every wacky party girl who is also really intelligent and well-read and thoughtful and… I could tick off on both hands the number of friends I feel like I could go to and say, “I’m here from the future,” and they would just believe me.

They would just believe me! They’d be like: “Yeah, OK. Now what do we do?”

That, to me, felt like a defining trait of a truly excellent friend—that it’s someone to whom you can say, “I’m here from the future,” and they say: “Sure. Great. Now what?”

They’re not like, “You’re crazy!” or, “What are you talking about?” They’re like, “Yup. You’re here from the future, and that is what’s happening.”

We caught some heat from that, because some critics were like, “Why was she so instantly on board?” And I’m like: “Watch the show! It’s so obvious. She’s that person.”

How lucky for this girl, Becca, to have that person, and how tragic that she had lost her, and what a miracle that she kind of gets her back. That’s the whole point. She’s that friend.

When we were auditioning actresses, I’d seen Sarah on tape—on my phone, the size of a postage stamp, and I was like, “That’s her.”

It was really early in the process, and the network was keen to see a wide range of actresses for that part, and they wanted to keep looking. I was like: “Great. Sure. That’s her, but I’ll play ball.”

So, we saw a bunch of other people, and we cast Laura Ramsey as Becca, and we were circling around all these ideas for Lolly, and I kept sort of raising my hand and saying: “It’s Sarah. I think Sarah’s the best one for it.” I just had a feeling about her.

Finally, the Friday before we were supposed to start filming the pilot, they said, “OK, you can hire Sarah.”

She and Laura were so great together. You really believe that relationship because it was real.

LL: I think Sarah’s performance is what grounds the reality of being in the 90s. She does such a good job of being so completely present in that time that I would forget that she was pretending to be in 1995. Sarah would make it SO real—like in the moment where Becca’s trying to explain what an iPhone is, and Lolly is looking at her wireless landline phone like she just does not get it. Can you even imagine what it would take to convince anyone you didn’t get what an iPhone is at this point?

EF: She was very convincing in that moment. That was such a fun scene to shoot because, to me, that’s their relationship in a nutshell. The effort we made to make sure that neither of them felt stereotypical… it was our number-one goal to make you feel like you knew them—like they were real. That they were not just tropes.

A lot of the inspiration for Lolly, which I realized retroactively when I caught a little bit of Singles on TV, was Bridget Fonda’s character in that. She was so spangly and spidery and all arms and legs, and she had a sweetness to her. She was utterly delightful, and she had a similar look and a similar haircut. You can see that Lolly would have seen that movie and felt like that character was her “spirit animal,” and she could have seen herself in that situation with that guy, trying to figure out if he’d be more interested in her if she had bigger boobs.

Sarah brought something to that part that was personal. One of the nice things about writing for TV, writing a series, is that you can lean into who your actors are and what they’re bringing to the part, because you’re sort of writing knowing who they are. The pilot you write in a vacuum, because you don’t know who your cast is going to be, typically. The concept can change as a result of casting.

LL: Another thing I think you and the series deserve so much credit for is the set dressing and the costumes. I am very sensitive to careless anachronisms.

EF: Me, too!

LL: Like, if you look at Mad Men, they would choose a modern song sometimes or throw in a newer model of a typewriter than was technically on the market in that year, but it was always on purpose, and you could tell that. It drives me crazy when you see something—especially if you’re just taking us back as recently as 20 years ago—where they’re careless about background players or things in the homes, and I loved how immersive the world you created was and how you got those details so right.

EF: We were such sticklers for it, because if something is incorrect, it will throw the whole thing off for me, and I can’t even get back on board. There were moments when we had to make a compromise or suspend some disbelief, but I tried hard to be faithful to the true look and feel of the time.

Our production designer and our props master and our wardrobe department were like magicians. They understood. We did vision boards, and we had Pinterest boards and we got out old Sears catalogs to look at what moms and dads would have been wearing. And the actors were all really into it—like really into it. They were so excited to wear big floral pants, or to do the hair and be authentic to the time without making it look like a costume.

Both Laura and Sarah were obsessed with the clothes and were very involved with the process of choosing everything. We would put on music and go into the wardrobe department and strip down and start trying stuff on and dancing around. It was so fun.

I had told our costume designer that it was important to me that the silhouette be correct, and she went to a warehouse in Atlanta where they have dollar-a-pound clothes, and she pulled out the real deal. That stuff wasn’t like she’d gone to Nordstrom’s and gotten something from their 90s Collection. You could really tell, because it felt authentic.

The girls didn’t want to tailor anything. I mean, they tailored it so it wasn’t falling off of them. Laura is especially petite, but she wanted the high-waisted jeans and the bulky sweaters… all of them were more keen to be authentic than they were to necessarily look good, which was so great. They loved it.

We had great fun with that, and with putting together the video store, decorating the parents’ apartment to make it look like a 90s apartment, making the parents look so 90s in their own way… It made us realize how few options there were for guys. Guys were either in thermals and jeans or in like rugby shirts and jeans… or a flannel. They didn’t have a lot of choices.

LL: Here’s a true story. I don’t remember which episode of Hindsight it was, but I was watching it late at night on my DVR, and when it was over I spent about two hours looking at Doc Martens online, thinking about buying some. Then I remembered how bulky and heavy they actually are to wear and wound up buying a pair of the Vans I used to wear in the 90s instead. Then, in December, I remembered how much I’d loved the Payless knock-off combat boots I’d owned before I could afford Docs and decided to see if the 90s revival had brought them back, and it had. So, thanks to you and to Hindsight, I wear Vans all the time again and I have a pair of combat boots in my closet.

EF: Oh my god, my heart just grew three sizes.

I didn’t ever have Docs. I had some motorcycle boots that I bought in New York in 1994, and they had steel toes, and they were ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS, which was money I did not have. I don’t know what I gave up to get those boots, but whatever it was, it was worth it. They ended up at Goodwill, and I’ve never gotten them back or anything like them, because they were never appropriate for my look, and now they really aren’t. But you remember those things all your life.

LL: I felt like you made this show for me. I would like to time-travel back to the mid-90s and experiment with trying out the Choose Your Own Adventure version of my life.

EF: It’s definitely a powerful fantasy, and even when we were pitching this project originally, our opening question was, “If you could go back and change something in your life, what would you change?”

And everybody has an answer. Some things are big, and some things are small and every so often you’d find someone who would say, “I wouldn’t change anything,” and you knew that person was B.S.ing, because everyone—everyone—has something. But then, of course, there’s the fear that if you changed one thing, you’d end up changing too many things and then your life is changed beyond recognition.

That’s why we didn’t have Becca have a child. She wasn’t a mother yet, so we weren’t dealing with, “Oh, but then this person wouldn’t exist.” Because that gets too creepy when people are going away. Like in Back to the Future when the kids start to disappear from the photograph? We were like, “Let’s not do that.”

That’s not what this is about. It’s about the choice she made to get married, and that she married a guy she loved but couldn’t bear to be with. If you had the opportunity not to marry your first husband, would you do it—even though it might put you on a path that is totally unrecognizable and scary, but at least you’re not married to that guy?

The whole thing was fun. We loved thinking about it, and loved the stories that came out in the writers’ room of people’s experiences and all of the things we had done in the 90s. No one really wants to relive it, but it certainly was entertaining to hear what people had gotten up to.

LL: I was trying to find words for what it is that I loved so much about Hindsight, versus other shows I’ve loved, like Mad Men or The Americans, and I think it’s that you created a world I’d actually want to step into—that this is a version of time travel that’s close enough to home that you can think, “Yeah, that’s probably what it would actually be like if I did it.”

EF: Yeah. What was nice was that there wasn’t anything particularly heroic about Becca—in the sense that she wasn’t back in time to kill Hitler. A lot of people asked what she was going to do about 9-11, and that wasn’t what this was about. What we were really aiming for was to recreate the living room of your youth so you can go back and see it.

People say that sometimes you dream about your childhood home, but it has extra rooms. It’s a dream thing that means something—that you’re exploring something unexplored from your youth, and I thought of Becca’s world as my extra room. Like it was a dream where I could explore the unexplored.

We all thought that. That was the allegorical meaning of all of it: What would you go back and look at if you could look with the perspective you have now? It would really be the ultimate luxury of the human experience—to have future knowledge and come back and look at things and know what to value and what to pay attention to and people that you would miss seeing. You would get your best friend back.

The intention was always to create a world that would feel so familiar, that would make you feel wistful and give you a pang of desire in your heart to be there again. But also to have a sense of relief that you made it through—that you survived your 20s.

LL: Thank you so much for your time and all of this great insight into the show. If you’re ever ready to stage some kind of comeback for Hindsight, I’m ready to help in any way I can.

EF: It would be amazing. It would be really fun. I think it was a shame we didn’t get to keep telling this story, because I think we had some really exciting things planned, but there’s a silver lining in having one perfect season. We’re in good company with My So Called Life. You tell a story like this with a beginning, middle and an end, and it sort of stays gold.

Emily Fox has been busy executive producing programs like Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce and A Series of Unfortunate Events. When the pilot gods smile on her, we’ll get another original series, and if the revival/crowdsourcing/Twitter gods smile, maybe we’ll get to learn more about what happens in Becca’s life. In the meantime, Hindsight is available on Amazon to rent or own, so you can travel back to 2015 and pretend season two is right around the corner.