A Collection of Beloved Tapes: The Bright Sessions Retrospective

Lauren Shippen talks accountability for violence, Safe House, and the changing arcs of heroes and villains

Lauren Shippen

Warning: The following conversation contains talk of state-sanctioned violence and male violence, as well as spoilers for the series finale of The Bright Sessions, episode 56 (DR. BRIGHT).

The Bright Sessions is an audio drama podcast cherished by many for its positive portrayal of queer characters and mental health issues, both things that were and still are desperately needed across all forms of media. Lauren Shippen, creator of The Bright Sessions and voice of main character Sam, brought to life a tale of super-powered individuals that is unlike the superhero stories we see on the silver screen. The Bright Sessions has long made me think critically about many subjects — mental health care, veteran care, governmental actions, and toxic masculinity, to name only a few — via its sprawling universe. More than that, it was a comfort, a genuine and thrilling tale of relatable people outside the norm trying to hold their lives together and making a family out of the mess.

After the finale aired on June 13th, 2018, I spoke with Lauren for far longer than our Google-calendar-alloted hour. She is as fascinating as her writing. She played along with my desire to talk big-picture societal concerns through the lens of The Bright Sessions and its characters, all while revealing several choice details and stories about the creation of the podcast.

“THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS EVERY DAY.” (Sam, from “Rose”)

When I take a step back to look at The Bright Sessions as a whole now, it sounds like it was written in various evolutionary periods, not all at once. What moments in your life inspired to The Bright Sessions?

I’d been in LA for about a year and I had been thinking about this character of Sam, who I play in the podcast. She definitely came from both the desire to create a character who I could relate to, but was different and separate from me, and also just somebody who is the manifestation of my own anxiety disorder. Eventually she turned into a time traveler in my head, and I wanted her to have somebody to talk to. I remember exactly where I was in my car on Santa Monica Boulevard when I first realized that she was talking to a therapist. Once I had that, then it was, “Okay, who’s this therapist? Who are her other patients?”

I actually sat down and wrote the first script after four to five months of thinking about Sam and her therapist, which became episode one. I’ve changed it very little between 2014 and 2015 — that was the other big evolutionary period where I wrote the first script and then didn’t do anything with it for a year because I told myself, ‘This was fun, but I’m not a writer and I don’t know why I thought I could be a writer and I don’t know what I’m doing and nobody’s gonna want to hear this.’ All that negative self talk that pops into your brain when you’re trying to make something.

In the spring of 2015, I got very ill and had to quit my restaurant job. I didn’t audition for three months. I was so done with just sitting on my ass that I started writing again, and we released our first episode like six months later. I think of those two big points as the inception.

“IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL, WATERCOLOR BLEEDS.” (Frank, from Frank)

The Bright Sessions is a character-driven story, much more so than other superhero fictions. I think a lot about Frank and Mark’s parallels; I can see them as victims of the state and the lack of accountability for what was done to them both in the name of science and service to the country. What went into the characters of Frank and Mark?

I hold the belief that a society is only as good as it treats its most vulnerable members. I love this country, and as a result, I’m very frustrated with this country a lot of the time. As much as I might be patriotic, I do think that America has failed its most vulnerable members, time and time again, and has since the beginning of its existence. I think the easiest way to see this cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy within American society is through service members because we spend so much time lauding and celebrating our military — and then they come home and we forget about them completely.

I think there’s something really beautiful in wanting to defend your people and fight for your country, even if it’s not necessarily how I would want to serve my country. To just completely reject that by not giving them any help when they come home is completely unacceptable, in the same way that rejecting refugees and what’s happening with immigration right now is completely unacceptable. This is just not how we treat other human beings.

In the summer of 2016, before Frank became a voiced character in the podcast, my sister — who’s the psychological consultant for Bright Sessions — and I read a book called Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It’s about soldiers coming home, the societal pressure that they face, and the way that society fails them. The way we treat soldiers is a great example of how our society is a tribe, a group of people that works together to support each other, that has essentially crumbled. It’s a brilliant book. While I was reading it, I knew that I wanted Frank in the podcast.

It ended up working nicely. I’m realizing now, based on your comment, that [Frank] came in at the time that Mark was also free and and dealing with his own trauma. It ended up being a nice parallel, which I wish I could say I did on purpose!

It certainly did! What about Mark?

With Mark, I had a very specific idea. Then I cast Andrew [Nowak, who plays Mark] and I put him in a room with Charlie [Ian, who plays Damien], and I didn’t have anything at all, suddenly. Andrew is just so good at being broken that the inclination as a writer and director is to just . . . break him more. I kept digging, waiting to hit that rock bottom, and it took me so long to find. Frank’s trauma is very concrete: he joined up with the military because of his family, his unit became his family, and then he lost his family, came home, and he had nothing. There’s a very strong arc there, and with my sister helping me figure out how the therapy session would go, I had concrete mile markers for PTSD recovery.

Whereas Mark had this continued trauma of growing up weirdly, discovering why he’s weird, his parents rejecting him because he’s weird, and then getting kidnapped, getting experimented on, getting lost in time for two years, wondering if his sister betrayed him, and then coming back and realizing the person who rescued him betrayed him and is lying to him. There was just trauma after trauma, so it’s not as concrete as Frank’s, right; he’s not losing ten family members in one fell swoop.

There’s also this next level to what’s happening to Frank and Mark, who were experimented on, because we also tend to put, not just the military, but scientific progress above human value.

Yeah, it’s very easy to get into the greater good argument. I remember writing “Wadsworth” [episode 51], and walking through [Wadsworth’s] argument and trying to dig into what it is that this woman really believes. I knew the things that she cared about, and I knew the things that she wanted, but what are the things that she believes? I remember everybody slamming Ellie for all of her beliefs when that episode came out, and I responded, “Oh no, there were some things that she said in there that I don’t disagree with”. I understand some parts and maybe that’s only because I wrote her. It’s easy for me to look at Mark and Frank, and say what happened to them was bad, and we shouldn’t treat people like that.

But when you separate from the individual and think about it purely in theory, you have to wonder: is she right in being worried about this stuff? Should she being doing something to potentially protect vulnerable people? If something has the capacity to kill somebody, but it also has a capacity to do other things, how do you regulate that? With atypicals, yes, an atypical could kill somebody and atypicals have killed people, but that’s also inherent to who they are and they also can use it for good. So do you regulate that or do you trust the people are going to behave well and then deal with the consequences when they don’t? It’s not an easy question and it doesn’t have an easy answer. I don’t even have the expectation that I will ever answer that question in the world for myself.

“I DON’T TORTURE PEOPLE.” (Damien, from “Subject #E-307”)

Wadsworth is one of my favorite villains in audio drama. The conversations that Damien has with her in episode 42, especially when they talk about how they don’t torture people, really resonated with me during my relisten. They’re like two sides of a coin, where you have male violence on one [side], and on the other you have torture sanctioned by the government. Each one is calling the other out: what they’ve done is torture and abuse, but they’re unwilling to face their own actions. Tell me about what you put into the creation of Damien and Wadsworth and their dynamic.

I always wanted Damien to embody white male privilege. What he became was one of the most insidious things about white male privilege, which is that sure, you’re not doing anything actively bad, to a point. Damien eventually does things that are actively bad: he assaults Chloe and tries to kidnap a minor. Those things are pretty clearcut breaking the law, but initially he’s just treating people like objects and assuming that he’s entitled to things. Of course, he does get those things because of the way that his power works. That’s something that’s so casual and the root of so many problems. It’s something that we don’t talk about.

So when he says “I don’t torture people,” the reaction is, “I don’t know, Damien, making somebody want something they don’t actually want or gaslighting them or manipulating their emotions, that kind of sounds like torture to me!” He doesn’t see it that way, because that’s just how he’s always moved through the world, and therefore [he thinks] that must be the reality. Myself, as a white woman, I’ve had to notice that my perception of how the world works and how I’m interacting with the world isn’t necessarily reality. As a queer woman, I have to confront that in certain ways, you’re treated differently because of who you are — but I certainly don’t understand the realities of being a different race. I think cis straight white men in America basically almost never have to confront the realities of the world because they are on top.

Wadsworth is a woman who has had to fight tooth and nail to get to where she is because she’s a woman in science. She’s ambitious and intimidating, the sort of things that we don’t want women to be. Yeah, she’s an asshole, but she’s worked for it. Wadsworth has had to interact with her abuse a lot more, which in some ways makes her worse, because she realized she was abusing people and decided she was fine with continuing to do so, whereas Damien just puts his fingers in his ears and goes, “lalala” whenever anybody calls him out on anything. He’s just able to passively ignore and not engage with the abuse that he is performing.

Here, you get into a sticky place with that in terms of redemption. Yes, Wadsworth engages with her abuse, decides that it’s okay and continues to do it, but then eventually when she’s confronted enough about it, she starts to maybe re-evaluate. Whether or not she actually will change is not answered in the podcast, but it’s clear that she is questioning and doubting herself. Damien has never had to interact with his own abuse because it just happens as a result of his entitlement, so when he’s given the opportunity to change and to engage with it, he doesn’t, because he has no tool kit to do so.

Certainly, I don’t think that either of them, or that any of my characters are irredeemable. I don’t think that anybody’s irredeemable. But I think I think you have to make that choice, and you have to engage with your own privilege in your entitlements and in your past. Whether or not Damien and Ellie are willing to do that is different for each of them.

Logo: Anna Lore

“THIS ANGER — IT’S STRONGER THAN YOU WANT.” (Caleb, from “Safe House, Part I”)

I’m fascinated by a lot of the things in Safe House, like the way that Part Two is twice as long as Part One, where the repercussions are far more complicated than the actions themselves, and how there are two different approaches to male violence taken in the episode. What does Safe House mean to you? What were you thinking about when you wrote it?

Safe House is the climax of the entire series and it was intended to be that way. Safe House Part II, and really the entire next season, are dealing with the repercussions of that episode. So often in superhero narratives or super-powered people narratives, things are happening all the time: buildings are exploding, people are dying left and right, it’s a bloodbath. If you’ve seen Infinity War, you’ll know — it’s sad, but it’s comic book stakes. It’s not about people staying dead, it’s about the emotional repercussions from all of that before they come back and restart.

I love Marvel movies. I love watching things explode. There is absolutely value in that style, but that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. I want to show that in real life, when something traumatic happens to you, you have to deal with that for a while and, depending on who you are and what your relationship to trauma is and what the event is, the ways in which you deal with that might be different and might last for a different amount of time. Initially, the end of season two was supposed to be the confrontation between Damien and Caleb. Damien was not going to survive that encounter.

It was going to take a much longer time to get Caleb back to an okay place, because he was basically going to accidentally murder Damien. That confrontation was always going to be the centerpiece of the show because of the differences of male violence — how Damien’s violence is a very specific, very commonplace everyday kind of violence and Caleb’s is a clear cut from the outside type of violence.

Uh, wow. That’s a very different character arc.

It is a very different character arc! I like to think I would have ended up in the same place, never with the intention of making Caleb a villain but answering the question of how do you deal with the dissonance of doing something really, really harsh in defense of a loved one? And then also: Are you going to report this to the police? Do you just bury Damien’s body in the desert? Nobody would miss him, necessarily. Then, Charlie, in early recording for season 2, said, what if Damien was involved with Sam and Joan’s breakout? And that was an interesting idea.

“JUST BECAUSE WE CAN FEEL WHAT EACH OTHER IS FEELING, DOESN’T MEAN WE SHOULDN’T TALK ABOUT IT.” (Mark, from “Safe House, Part II”)

In “Safe House,” Mark says, “Just because we know what each other is feeling doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it.” In The Bright Sessions, men encourage each other to feel their feelings, whereas most media puts this responsibility on women. Was this very intentional on your part or was it a natural development out of how they grew as characters and the fact that they were interacting in a therapy backdrop?

I think it’s a little bit of both. It is partly just natural result of writing a show that’s all about characters talking about their feelings; at the end of the day, that is the crux of the show. But I also think there was an intention both somewhat consciously and hugely subconsciously of wanting to engage in masculinity. I got to a point in season 4 where I realized that this was the hill I was going to die on. Here it is!

In writing the show, I knew I wanted a story that had complex women and women relationships at its center. On a larger thematic scale, I realized I care so much about masculinity, both the good and the bad parts of masculinity. In creating the character of Caleb, I wanted to engage in masculinity in a very subversive way. Caleb being in love with a man was actually not part of that. That just sort of happened because the moment I started writing him talking about Adam, I realized, Oh he’s in love with this dude!

But him being this jock who had to feel feelings was the subversive frame that I wanted to put him in. Him, Mark, Frank, and even to an extent Agent Green — the way they interact with their own masculinity ended up being more subconscious because I just really care about this topic.

I also think it absolutely finds its way into the female characters as well. Sam, for example, has a lot of masculine traits. One is that she doesn’t necessarily like talking about or expressing her feelings. In their relationship, Mark was probably the one who was stewarding the more serious conversations about what they’ve been through, whereas she would say, “I see you suffering and I want you to deal with this and talk to your sister and to me about it,” but she would shut down the moment that was turned on her.

“IF I CAN’T HEAL THE WOUND, MAYBE I CAN AT LEAST STOP THE BLEEDING.” (Dr. Bright, from “Dr. Bright”)

In the finale, we have Dr. Bright and Sam deciding to work at the AM and try to change an already existing structure. This is an ongoing conversation throughout the show, about how much interaction with the government, and what kind, is needed to create positive change. Can you tell me a little more about the perspectives on things like government oversight and overhaul presented in the finale?

I think it’s clear from the podcast, and especially season four, that I don’t have an answer to this question that we’re asking. I knew that the show was going to end with Dr. Bright and Sam working together, and then in late season three or early season four, I realized that Agent Green was going to be part of this too. It was only in writing the beginning of season four when I decided they’re not going to build their own thing. They’re going to go back to the AM.

This is a debate I’m having internally with myself all the time, especially now. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been thinking, Is it better to just burn it all down and start from scratch or is it better to overhaul existing systems? I don’t know the answer to that. I think that in the real world overhauling existing systems is so much more complicated than it is in The Bright Sessions because you could just wipe the government slate clean and come up with something else. We did that 300 years ago, right? We said, “We don’t want to be part of a monarchy anymore, and we’re going to build our own government,” and eventually the land that we live in right now will have a different government.

The structures that are harder to change, of course, and harder to overhaul are our ingrained societal structures like white supremacy and the patriarchy. There’s no burn it all down and start over option. I mean, you know, the Great Flood, maybe.

With The Bright Sessions, it’s a little bit easier to look at something like the AM and approach it knowing it’s been around for just 80 years. It’s on such a smaller scale, it’s dealing with a much, much smaller portion of population. If the immediacy is, “We want to help people who are in need right now,” building something from scratch is much less practical and much less effective because you don’t have the resources. In the fourth season, that’s what Sam starts to realize: she has a lot of money, but she can’t just throw money at this because you need research, resources, populations, staff, infrastructure.

We’re going to see how well that goes in the spinoff. Like anything in the show, it’s going to be morally gray and continuously imperfect because I don’t think that there’s a way to govern human beings in a perfect way. Isn’t it better to choose the more effective and imperfect thing?

“YOU GET TO FEEL WHATEVER YOU WANT TO FEEL. THAT’S THE WONDERFUL THING.” (Dr. Bright, from “Dr. Bright.”)

I love that you appreciate what your actors brings to the characters and then incorporate it into your writing. I feel like that sort of exchange is really important in audio.

Hugely, yeah. For instance, Dr. Bright is a character that I keep peeling back the layers of. I just keep finding more and more [to Joan] because Julia [Morizawa, the voice actor for Dr. Joan Bright] is such an incredible actress who has put so much nuance and depth into her performance. I think I know Joan, and then we record an episode and I realize I’m still learning who Joan is.

It’s interesting because after working like that for basically three years — where, even though I’m the only person writing the show, knowing how my actors are going to approach a scene, or having an idea and then having those ideas completely caboshed — means I’m writing the spin-off with new characters and I don’t know who they are. Who are these people? What are you going to be like?

I’ve already started building the playlists for them.

What updates can you tell our readers about what you’ve got in the pipeline?

The first book is in its second draft phase right now. I started writing this book alongside the first two seasons of the podcast because I knew I wanted Caleb be a visible character and that I wanted him to feel the emotions of somebody else who was really [suffering] in school.

I wanted to have that person at school be someone who clearly needed connection and to have the person not verbally ask for help, but have Caleb hear the siren call of their emotions. In writing that first set of Caleb episodes and him talking about Adam, who I don’t even remember actively thinking about as a character, I turned to my right and oh, hi, Adam, you’re here and very similar to who I was when I was 16. Now I get to do pining for both sides [in the book]. I wrote fanfiction for my own show — that’s what happened.

Also, now that the finale’s over, I can say that the powder blue tux makes an appearance in a tense moment. Hopefully that will stay in the book now that I’ve said it! The book is through and through a love story. It is just about these two people falling in love and it is the sappiest thing I’ve ever written in my life.

We’re all ready to read it.

I’m very grateful to all of the people that have listened and then have taken so many different things away from The Bright Sessions, read different commentaries on politics and abuse and the government [into the show]. Some of them I did intentionally, some of them I did not. I think that that’s kinda rad. I hope people keep finding it and keep thinking about it because it’s been really, really fun to make.

Cast & crew of The Bright Sessions

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