From creator Yulin Kuang and based on the 2014 digital short of the same name, the musical comedy series I Ship It (which started out on CW Seed and is now airing its second season on The CW) follows Ella (Helen Highfield), a fangirl and aspiring writer who writes fan-fiction for her favorite TV show, Superstition, while dreaming of doing the real thing. After delivering a flower order to the showrunner of the series, Ella jumps at the chance to get herself a job as a writer’s assistant, quickly quitting her job at a boutique shipping agency to live out her fantasies.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, executive producer/writer/director Yulin Kuang talked about wanting to make a series that could provide escapism and happiness, what inspired the original idea for I Ship It, completely changing things up for Season 2, going from fangirl to fan fiction writer to creator of her own material, navigating network notes from The CW, dealing with the opinions of fans, how much her own life inspired her main character, why she created a show bible for the show within her show, how the musical element came about, developing Jade Palace for New Line, and where she’d like to take her career next.

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Image via The CW

Collider: This show is so delightful and so much fun!

YULIN KUANG: My general philosophy is that there’s two types of media in the world. There’s the version where everything is awful, so watch this, in order to be ready for fights to come. And then, there’s the version that’s escapism and happiness. I think you definitely need both, but I definitely feel I’m more the second one.

How did I Ship It originally come about? What was it that sparked the initial idea? Was it something that you’d been thinking about for awhile?

KUANG: This project started in 2014, as a short film. At that point, I was like pretty actively involved in YouTube, and that kind of world, and I knew that I wanted to do something with the world of shipping, where people are rooting for people to get together. At that point, I was more interested in it from the YouTube angle, so it was about two YouTubers that get together. And then, when we sold the project to CW Seed, which was for a web series version, they were mostly gravitating towards the musical aspect of it. So, we did a nerd rock musical, and that was definitely a different take on it, but it was still fandom and fangirls. I had the chance to tell a more complete, shippy romantic story. I was in my, “I wanna deconstruct a love story phase,” but then, after watching that season, I was like, “Oh, I don’t like deconstructing the things I love. I like building them.” So, when they asked me to do it again, this time with the hope that it would become a limited series for The CW, I was like, “Yeah, I would love to do it, but let me change the whole thing.” Then, I looked at the name and the germ of the thing that first attracted me to the idea, and I was like, “Okay, I wanna tell a love story, and not a deconstruction of a love story. I want it to have shipping,” which is rooting for fictional characters to get together. Every version has been this fangirl fantasy, and has been the story about a fangirl, but it’s never really been my story as a fangirl. I wanted to step away from the wizard rock and the nerd rock of it all, and lean into fan fiction. When I was a kid, I wrote all of this fan fiction for stories that weren’t finished, like the Harry Potter series. It was like creating on training wheels, and I wanted to explore that a little bit.

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Image via The CW

When The CW tells you that there’s this potential for your show to air on the network, and then you tell them,”Okay, but I want to change the whole thing,” were you ever worried how they would react to that?

KUANG: Honestly, I think I was just young and plucky and dumb enough to not even think about it. Now, I’d give them exactly what they wanted. When we were first pitching the limited series version, I was 26, going on 27, and I was just like, “The other version was not what I wanted to do. I think this version is better. Why wouldn’t they think it’s better?” So, I think I was just young and dumb enough to do it.

Having previously been a fan fiction writer, yourself, how, how did you come to find out about fan fiction, as a thing?

KUANG: Oh, god, you’re really taking me back now, probably to fifth grade. There was a girl in my Chinese school class who was like, “Have you heard of this thing called fan fiction?” And I was like, “No.” And then, she introduced me to a website called fanfiction.net. You had to be 13 to register for an account, and I was 12, so I was like, “Well, in China, they believe that the first nine months you’re in the womb count,” so I was like, “Okay, I’m 13,” and signed up for an account, illegally.

That’s amazing! How did you go from fangirl to fan fiction writer to a creator, in your own right? When did you realize that you could actually translate a love of something like that into a career?

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Image via The CW

KUANG: I loved writing, when I was a kid. I wrote fan fiction, all through high school. And then, I stopped for awhile ‘cause I was like, “I need to figure out what a real job might be.” So, when I got to college, I thought I was gonna become a political journalist, and I went to journalism camp, and I studied international relations and politics. And then, on the side, I was always reading screenplays, taking these creative writing classes, and hoping, “This would be a cool thing.” At some point, in journalism camp, I realized that print journalism is a little bit dead, and that it was gonna be a really hard life, no matter what. So, I was like, “If I’m gonna struggle, no matter what, I may as well struggle doing the dream that I actually want.” That’s when I decided to double down on screenwriting. And then, while I was at college, which was at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, they don’t have a film program, so I was writing all of these screenplays and handing them off to other people to direct, and those guys kept fucking it up. So then, I was like, “I’ll try directing myself,” and I really fell in love with it. And then, once I moved out to L.A., I kept doing like short films and things like that, and I was sending them off to film festivals, where the average age of the audience was in their 60s, and my stuff was always geared towards a younger female audience with titles like, The Perils of Growing Up Flat-Chested. At some point, somebody I met told me, “You should go to VidCon,” which is this convention for online video, so I went when it was in Anaheim, in maybe 2012 or 2013. It was just this sea of screaming teenage fangirls, and I was like, “Oh, my god, my people!” That’s when I created my YouTube channel, and I created another one, as well, and it went there.

You had done short films and web series, prior to doing I Ship It, so you had an idea of how this all worked, but what was it like to actually work for and with The CW, and figure out how to navigate their opinions of things?

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Image via The CW

KUANG: It was really different for me. I’m a people pleaser, so when we first worked together on the web series, with any of their notes that I got, I was like, “I’m gonna try this. I’m gonna try to make it work.” And then, at the very same time, I would look at the feedback I had gotten on the short film, on the internet, and I would take that feedback and put it on an equal weight with the feedback I was getting from the executives, to try to please everybody. What I learned from that experience on the web series was that it doesn’t always lead to me being happy with the end result. I am happy with the web series, but it’s a very different show than what I initially would have made, completely on my own. So, going into Season 2, having had that experience, I was trying a little bit harder to be like, “What’s a story that I would like?,” and navigating executive notes and any feedback that I got on the last iteration from fans online. I had to like temper my reaction to those reactions.

How hard is it to not just have network opinion, but also hear what everybody has to say about what you’re doing, especially with Twitter?

KUANG: It can be something that drives you insane, I think. In the beginning, it was just thrilling. I remember the first time I ever posted a YouTube video, and somebody I didn’t know was posting about it on the internet. I was like, “Oh, my god, who are you? Where did you come from? How did you find our stuff?” I was so excited and super engaged with our fans. But then, it gets to a point where you’re almost writing for the fandom, and that doesn’t always lead to good storytelling. What’s cool about Twitter is that it makes creation a two-way street, where fans can talk to creators and it’s more of a dialogue. But what can be bad for is that creators and showrunners are human, too, and I’m always fascinated by what other people are saying about me. If you tell me that I can just Google it and find out, why wouldn’t I? But, that’s a trap. I don’t think you should tune everything out because, if so many people have a certain opinion about something, then your show and you may have tried to do something that didn’t quite work. That can be a positive thing. That’s when the show takes on a life of its own. And that’s a theme that we explore, since it’s such a meta show. It’s a weird time to be a creator, right now, with the internet, but I think it’s also an exciting time.

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Image via The CW

Are there ways that your main character is inspired by you?

KUANG: She’s definitely inspired by my fangirl life, writing fan fiction and also being an ambitious fangirl, where I didn’t want to be on the outside, and I wanted to go through the looking glass and start creating, but her backstory is different from mine. When I first moved to L.A., I thought I would go from being an NBC page to becoming a writer’s P.A. to becoming a writer’s assistant to a staff writer, and slowly work my way up that way, which is the dream that they sell you when you’re in post-grad. I really wanted that for myself, but it just wasn’t happening. I fell into the YouTube of it all, instead, but I wanted to give Ella that fantasy. I also wanted to provide a roadmap for future fangirls to follow. My path has been so bizarre, and they can find out about it, if they Google me hard enough. But in general, this is the path that they teach you, to go become an assistant somewhere and put in your dues for awhile, and then someday you’ll get rewarded. I wanted to give her that L.A. fairytale story.

You also went so far as to create a show bible for your show within a show (called Superstition). Why was that something you decided to do, and how did that help you, throughout the season, while you were telling this story?

KUANG: Honestly, it was just fun. I wrote Ella’s fan fiction, too. I like to dive, wholeheartedly, into these worlds. I was like, “Oh, we’re gonna have a show within the show? Then, let me make a show bible for this. What’s the backstory of these characters?” In the pilot script, I wrote something like, “Beautiful, in a way where she has a tragic backstory,” so I was like, “Well, what’s that tragic backstory?” I wanted to know, so I dove in a little bit more.

Did you ever think about doing any full episodes of Superstition, or was that something that just wasn’t possible because of time and budget?

KUANG: At one point in our writers’ room, every episode ended with a, “Next time on Superstition . . .” We were gonna shoot little clips of episodes you’d never see, but those got cut because we had to set a budget. It was definitely a time constraint type if thing. I would totally love to do a full-on episode. It would be so much fun, but alas . . .

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Image via The CW

How did I Ship It also become a musical, and is it hard to weave that into the story you’re telling?

KUANG: Honestly, I think anything that’s a little bit fantasy-ish lends itself to being a musical. There’s a heightened aspect of who Ella is, and fandom, itself, is so heightened. The emotions you feel, as a fan girl, are always in all caps with exclamations, or all small lowercase. It’s a world of extremes. So, I think it actually did lend itself to the fantastical world of musicals, as a result.

Ideally, what would you say the next step is for you, beyond this show and doing more seasons of this show. What have you thought about, as far as what you want to do next?

KUANG: I would love to do, something in the world of lit, but as comedy. I’ve always loved movies, like What We Do in the Shadows, where they play with genres and do a heightened mash-up type of thing. I also love comedy of manners types of things, like The Importance of Being Earnest or anything by Jane Austen. That’s a world that I would really love to play in. Basically, I just want to keep doing fanfiction-y thing.

When you work is a writer, director and producer, do you want to keep doing all of those things, or do you see yourself drawn more to certain aspects than others?

KUANG: I think of myself as a storyteller, however that figures itself out. I love the lifestyle of a writer. I like that I have time to dream and think and figure out these stories. As a director, I love being able to stand in the worlds that we’ve built. Nobody else really gets to do that. You create these stories, and then people watch them, but it’s really only as somebody who’s involved in the production, that you get to actually physically stand in the space, which I really love. So, I like both of those things, and I’d like to continue down the path of doing those things.

Back in February, it was announced that you had signed on to write Jade Palace for New Line. Where are things at with that project?

KUANG: Yeah, I just turned in the first draft, and I’m about to start tackling the revision.

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Image via The CW

What was it that made you want to have a hand in telling that story?

KUANG: I wanted to tell a story that was more about the Chinese restaurants that I grew up in, which is not the Chinese restaurants that a lot of people think of, when they think of them. A lot of America thinks about fast food take-out Chinese restaurants, and I grew up across the street from a Chinese restaurant that was really big. They had these Lazy Susans, and the food was more fine dining-ish, but Chinese fine dinging. It’s a really different world that, outside of the community, not as many people are aware of, so I was really excited to get a chance to tell a story from that world. And I love comedy. I think gritty indie dramas are a great way to tell stories, and so many diverse stories tend to come from that world, but I want to believe that Asian Americans can have comedies, as well. I just liked that it was a chance to explore this world, but from the world of funny.

I Ship It airs on Monday nights on The CW.

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