As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is once again diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.

The Scene: American Vandal Season 1, Episode 5, “Premature Theories”

Two years after escalating the true-crime fad with the docuseries Making a Murderer, Netflix decided it was time for a little self-mockery. The parodic American Vandal had all the elements of a modern-day, peak-TV true-crime story: 10 episodes, elaborate crime-scene recreations, somber music, and intimate access to the crime’s major players. The crime itself, of course, has become a rallying cry for the show’s legion of fans: Who drew the dicks?

“Created” and “directed” by Hanover High School sophomore Peter Maldonado, in association with the school’s TV department, American Vandal investigates the titular misdeed: the phallic imagery that an unknown vandal spray-painted onto 27 different cars in the school’s faculty parking lot. Like the real true-crime sensations before it, Peter’s documentary gradually becomes a meta pop-culture phenomenon. As the show wears on, leads pour in over Twitter; a teacher gets fired for what he said on camera; and, perhaps most importantly, Peter and his co-producer, Sam Ecklund, finally become popular.

Dylan Maxwell, the student widely believed to be behind the crime, also becomes a minor celebrity, and is eventually exonerated—though clearing his name comes with more complications than expected. When the show’s first season ends, there’s no clean resolution to the crime at its center, though a likely culprit has emerged—along with a funny, sometimes surprisingly touching portrait of teenage life in the Internet age.

The most realistic installment of all may be episode 5, “Premature Theories,” thanks to a showstopper sequence known simply as “Nana’s party.” Leveraging his newfound fame and access, now that his documentary has gone viral, Peter painstakingly assembles social-media footage taken during a wild party thrown by one student at her grandmother’s house. When stitched together, this inane collection of Snapchats and Facebook Lives—the kiss cam, the documentation of “Ming’s first beer,” the mocking of a kid who got his head stuck in the banister—inadvertently reveals a conversation between Dylan and his friends that initially seems incriminating. When that lead goes nowhere, Peter and Sam turn their attention to a red spray-paint can—“the murder weapon,” as they put it—pilfered from Nana’s shed and later used to draw the dicks.

We spoke with the episode’s actual director—American Vandal co-creator Tony Yacenda—as well as Jimmy Tatro, who plays Dylan, and co-writers Seth Cohen and Amy Pocha,—in an attempt to re-create the genesis of Nana’s party in meticulous, Maldonado-worthy detail. They told us about arming an entire professional camera crew with iPhones, the extra who made a $4,000 mistake at the end of a 14-hour shooting day, and the tape of a real high-school party that inspired it all.

Much of American Vandal was inspired by true high-school stories from the show’s writers’ room—including an especially huge party that took place in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1999.

Tony Yacenda: The idea of Nana’s party came from a staffing interview.

Seth Cohen: We interviewed, and they asked us, “Do you guys have any crazy stories from high school?” And we started pitching stories, and one of them was, “Well, there was this party called ‘Nana’s party.’ There was this girl whose grandmother went away, and she threw a party at her nana’s house. Literally the entire school showed up. The house got destroyed—we broke the front door off. The cops came twice; windows were smashed; there were hundreds of people in the house. It went on for hours. And my buddy, he had video recorded it.” When we actually started working on the show, I said, “You guys have to see the real Nana’s party.”