Many are lucky to score one hit series over the course of their career. Alison Brie has three of them! Mad Men and Community are undeniably iconic and even though GLOW’s run was cut short, I’ve got high hopes that it’ll be much talked about and widely loved for years to come. With all three leaving behind quite the legacy, we opted to take a moment to pull back the curtain and get Brie’s thoughts on what makes each series’ showrunner a standout.

While on Collider Ladies Night promoting her latest feature release, Hulu’s Happiest Season, Brie revisited working with Matt Weiner on Mad Men, Dan Harmon on Community, and with Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch on GLOW. She began by noting why this can’t be a one-to-one comparison:

“The first thing that needs to be said as the umbrella statement is, GLOW is the first show I’ve been on as #1 on the call sheet, essentially the lead of the show and when that is your role, I would say that one has a very different relationship with their showrunners. So innately, I’m much closer with Liz and Carly. They’re all so distinct so it’s actually quite easy to compare everybody, but I had a much more personal relationship with Liz and Carly because that’s the nature of a #1 and their showrunners, and I think that has always been the case and I observed it on those other shows with Joel McHale and Jon Hamm.”

From there, Brie went into specifics, beginning with her seven-season run as Trudy Vogel on Mad Men over at AMC:

“Matt Weiner I think is notorious for being very specific and deservedly so. The writing on Mad Men was so incredible. And talk about it being easy to memorize because there’s so much going on, there’s so much subtext written into every scene. Characters who pop in for one scene have a ton of backstory going on. Everything carries weight and meaning. So he was a real stickler for us saying everything word perfect, word for word. Sometimes even gestures were written into the dialogue. ‘She puts her hand to her forehand,’ and you better put it to your forehead right then! [Laughs] So that was sort of a different style of trying to go, ‘Okay, well let me make this movement still seem organic.’ And it should because it makes a lot of sense for what this character would do. But, I loved working for Matt because I love working for someone who knows exactly what they want, and then you know that you’ve got this really self-assured leader and when you’ve hit it, they tell you. Especially in the first few seasons, Matt was on set a ton. He really was always right there making sure that every single piece was perfect.”

While working on Mad Men, Brie got yet another huge opportunity, joining the cast of Harmon’s sitcom, Community. The show enjoyed a five season run over at NBC and then wrapped up with a sixth airing on Yahoo! Screen. As described by Brie, Harmon took a different approach to Weiner when it came to his involvement on set:

“And then Dan Harmon’s the opposite where we wouldn’t see him that much. He was often up in his office, but he had a feed to watch us. So he would sometimes text us notes or things like that. Dan’s got this crazy genius mind. I think it thrives more in chaos. He had a much different battle in terms of - I think Matt having the first scripted show for AMC really got a lot of creative freedom versus Dan Harmon is coming to NBC who has been doing sitcoms since the dawn of TV and Dan’s trying to push against that and make it something different, so there was a sense of procrastination that I think came out of him not wanting the network to have control over what we were doing. [Laughs] So everything felt a little more frantic, frenetic, chaotic. There were times where Dan would come down and maybe we didn’t have the scripts yet for the whole episode, but we had some scenes and then Dan Harmon would come and give us context and be a little more physical. It was a little messier, but it really worked for the type of show we were making, and I think it gave all of us room also to bring our own things to those roles and really bond as a cast and become something else.”

While Brie did commend elements of her time making Community and Mad Men, she described her experience working on GLOW with Flahive and Mensch as her “most favorite job I’ve ever done.” Here’s what Brie had to say about the way the duo approached working with their ensemble:

“And Liz and Carly, gosh, I just adore those women. I would say Liz and Carly bring so much compassion to everything they do, and it certainly did feel different having that female energy, having two women who were really in tune with every character and really wanted to talk to the actors about how they were feeling about everything. We deal with a lot of tricky subject matters on GLOW in terms of very racists wrestling characters and personas in the ring and also things like women in the workplace and abortion, a lot of themes of varying heaviness that we were dealing with. Even in terms of the nudity on the show, they always would meet with women or at least phone call beforehand to give you the context of what the nudity was gonna be in the scene. I’ve never seen it done like that. I’ve never experienced people who were so attentive and in touch with the entire cast in that way, which was really lovely.”

This right here is only a small portion of our conversation on GLOW. If you’d like to hear more about that, Happiest Season, Brie’s first TV appearance and so much more, you can check out her full episode of Collider Ladies Night below:

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