Created and executive produced by Gloria Calderón Kellett (One Day at a Time), the Prime Video original series With Love is a delightful multi-holiday romantic comedy series that follows all of the drama, highs and lows, and trials and tribulations of the Diaz family. With touchstones including Christmas Eve/Nochebuena, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July and Dia de los Muertos, siblings Lily (Emeraude Toubia) and Jorge Jr. (Mark Indelicato) navigate family, relationships and figuring out what they truly want in life, while their love for each other helps guide them and hold them together throughout it all.
During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Kellett talked about how With Love came about, a desire to bring joy and goodness to marginalized audiences, wanting to evolve the LGBTQ conversation in families, telling a story that also includes holiday traditions, balancing celebration and chaos, how much her experience making One Day at a Time meant to her, how she ended up also doing a role in the series, and the possibility of more seasons.
Collider: I love how sweet and messy and drama-filled this show is. What made this a project that you wanted to do? What was the seed that all of this started with? Was it the brother and sister? Was it the rom-com of it all? Was it the holiday aspect? What did you set out wanting to do with this?
GLORIA CALDERON KELLETT: Really, it came out the pandemic. I was home for a year and a half. I have a big Latino family and my husband is the youngest of seven in an Irish Catholic family. So, family gatherings and holidays are really when we see everybody and everyone gathers and we get the gossip for the year, with what’s been going on, what’s happening, who’s mad at who, and all of the great drama. And then, it was really last year that the kernel formed, where I was missing people and I was centering myself in what I wanna say now and feeling that feeling of collective trauma. We’d all been through this thing, where we weren’t able to be with each other to talk it out or hug it out or grieve. That, mixed with my Instagram feed, which was a barrage of Black and brown and queer and Asian bodies experiencing hate and experiencing negativity and, obviously, George Floyd, and all of that heaviness, where I retreat is romantic comedies and comedies. I retreat to make myself feel a little bit of joy, a little spark of goodness, and a little aspiration. Love Actually and When Harry Met Sally, and all of those holiday, warm, yummy romantic comedies are where I go.
I was watching and really realizing, “Oh, man, Christmas is white. It’s white Christmas. There are no Black and brown and Asian people in this Christmas, and boy would I love for that to change.” And then, it became, “What would I say?” and that started with the brother and sister. I’m close to my brother. He’s straight, but we’re very close, so I was like, “What if this is a version of us?” It started there. I really see myself as Lily and Beatriz, combined. I put a lot of my feelings about love and wanting love. I wanted to be the lead of the rom-com movie, and that’s what Lily wants. She’s seen all of those rom-coms. That’s what she wants, and she hasn’t found it. She knows what it looks like. Her parents have it. Her grandparents have it. She grew up with it. But she hasn’t quite been able to find that in her own life.
And then, I wanted to also evolve the LGBTQ conversation in families. The queer people in my family are all out. Maybe they’re not all out, but a lot of them are out. Maybe there are surprises coming. But everyone’s over it. Anybody who had trouble with it does not anymore. With One Day at a Time, I got to have the coming out story, but what is that, years later? I wanted to see, what does it look like when everyone’s fine and they’re all over it? Now it’s just, what’s the next step? And the next step is, “I’m bringing home somebody for the first time. The whole family is gonna see me with a man, holding his hand and kissing him, so are they really okay with it, or have they just been saying that they’re okay with it?” So, that’s Jorge’s journey. It really started with the two of them, and then it was building out the rest of the family and the rest of the friend group, and building in serendipity with Santiago. It was just so joyful. And then, I went to Amazon with it and said, “This is what I wanna do.” And they were like, “Do it!” So, here we are.
I love the character of Sol because, with that character, we get someone who is trans, who is non-binary, and who’s on their way to becoming a doctor. We not only get to see a trans person represented, but it allows for a pronoun conversation, they’re also successful in their career, and they’re loved by someone who’s fully accepting of who they are. What was it like to cast that role? Why did you want Isis King and what do you think Isis added to the character?
KELLETT: We found out from GLAAD that we are the first holiday rom-com to feature a trans love story, ever. That’s crazy. What Isis brought is that she truly is an angel person. She’s just so joyful. She’s just a really, really beautiful person. She’s had it rough. Before America’s Next Top Model came knocking, she was homeless. She is a fighter, and also a very glass-half-full person. Sol is named Sol because they’re the light of the family. They’re the little angel of the family, and I wanted somebody who encompassed that joy. I was really struck by the Maya Angelou quote, talking about how joy is revolutionary. Showing people in joy is the sale and the panacea for the consistent trauma that we’ve all been through.
We allude to the fact that Sol’s parents were not on board and had a very difficult time, more out of fear – out of fear of what that would look like and would their kid be okay? This last year was one of the biggest years for trans murders again. We have to show love to this community. They’re being murdered at an astronomical rate. Showing this character thriving, and obviously very smart and very supported by their family, and having the privilege of being educated and inspired by the trauma of the passing of both of their parents to cancer, and was determined to save cancer patients in the future, worked hard and was supported by this family to do so. That’s what it can look like, for a trans person to thrive, if they are loved. Having that be in the backdrop of a romantic comedy and seeing them fall in love with a cis straight man was really something that was beautiful. And the two of them have such adorable chemistry. We love that love story.
I also love how Sol allows for you bringing in a younger character and a group of friends, which shows a diversity that we also don’t often see with trans, non-binary and queer characters.
KELLETT: Yeah, and we show that not everybody gets along and it’s complicated. That is by virtue of the queer writers in the room. We have an Afro Latinx, non-binary writer, who wrote that episode, and we see the nuance of what they were able to bring to the table with that character and with the character of Charlie as well. That is because I am smart about how I hire. I hire wonderful people and I get out of the way to give them the opportunity to give authenticity to those voices.
I love a good holiday episode of a TV show. I have been known to watch holiday episodes of TV shows that I have not watched any other episodes of just because I love a good holiday episode so much. This show is my dream because every episode is a holiday episode. What led to that decision and how did you pick the specific holidays?
KELLETT: I also, like you, love those types of episodes. It became really clear that there’s so much the dominant culture doesn’t know about Latino holidays, New Year’s being a big one. Whenever I tell people about Latino New Year’s, they’re like, “What? What are you talking about? You guy walk around the block with a suitcase?” These are all real things. I didn’t make that up. That’s real. It’s sad to me that people don’t know that these are the things that we do. These are all of the funny, zany things that we do, that are so fun and are steeped in tradition. How fun to have it as the backdrop of other stuff that’s going on. I get to throw traditions in there. So, the New Year’s one was a no-brainer. I wanted to throw that in. Then, it just became about what other holidays would work. I pitched it originally as 10 episodes. We just couldn’t make them in time because we wanted it to come out at Christmas, so we had to truncate it. It’s a rom-com, so we had to do Valentine’s Day. And then, we picked Fourth of July because it was really more about the independence of our characters and what it was saying about their own independence, thematically. And then, with Día de los Muertos, we were dealing with the ghosts and the post and looking forward. That’s why we ended up choosing those, out of the gate. In the future, hopefully we’ll get to play with some other holidays and big events.
Five episodes is just not enough time to spend with this family. Is the plan to do more? Are you hoping to continue telling their story?
KELLETT: Are you kidding? If I’m doing this show for the next five years, that would be heaven. That’s my dream. Yes, please.
I love that this is a big family. We really get to see what they’re like altogether quite a bit. What’s it like to write and create these big family scenes, and then bring them to life on set? How do you find that balance of celebration and chaos, and still be able to tell a story without losing anybody in the process?
KELLETT: It’s just what feels real. It’s just a gut check. I’m glad you think it worked because you never know. You just don’t. For me, it’s what feels authentic to the experiences that I’ve had. When I go to a family function, the first thing I do is find my cousins and say, “Tell me, what is the [gossip]? Who did what? What uncle did what? What’s the drama? I wanna hear all of the dirt. Gimme the dirt.” And then, we’ll all talk about it. There’s one aunt that’s always gonna tell me I’m fat, so I wait for that. It’s the funny of the expected and the unexpected, and the coming together. Ultimately, it’s about love. So, I tried to make it feel like that. It’s the chaos of walking in, and the barrage of kissing and hugging people, and getting some gossip, and then meeting this person, and having that interaction, and talking to that person. And then, you go back to the cousins and you’re like, “Oh, my God, did you hear about that? This aunt said this.” That’s what it is. That’s what I was trying to capture, in the writing of it and the checking in with everyone. All of that goes back to that.
Folks really loved One Day at a Time, which was such a great show, and everyone was crushed when that show didn’t come back. How hard was that for you? Was it emotionally difficult to move on from that and find some closure with that whole experience?
KELLETT: For me, if they had said, out of the gate, “Hey, you get to make your dream show for four years, do you wanna do it?” I would’ve said yes, in a second. That’s what I got to do. I was so present and I loved every morsel of every moment that I got to make that show. I thought, “Well, if I never get to make anything else like this again, at least I got to do this.” It’s funny because what I said, literally, when we wrapped With Love was, “I thought, after One Day at a Time, I might never love again, and that was okay with me because I loved so hard. And here I am, in love again.”
I love the Diaz family just as much. They’re different from the Alvarez family, but I love the Diaz family. They’re a mess, but they’re also amazing and resilient and so loving. They lead with love. They’re gonna mess up and they’re gonna make mistakes and there’s gonna be misunderstanding, but ultimately those people are about trying to find a way towards each other and trying to support each other and trying to be the best people they can be. That’s what we all should strive for. So, I’m really happy to put them out into the world and have the world see that. These guys are a little better off than the Alvarez’s, but that’s important too, to show middle-class families and people that have been here for a few generations and show them thriving. That’s not something we get to see very often. It’s about seeing people loving hard.
You’re also in the show. Was that something you always knew you wanted to do?
KELLETT: I loved being on One Day at a Time, but this was moving so fast that it did not really occur to me, to be honest with you. And then, I just kept on pitching jokes for Gladys and Andy [Roth], my number two on the show was like, “Well, you’re obviously gonna play Gladys. This is ridiculous. You’ve gotta do it.” It’s small enough, where I could still be at the monitors and still keep my eye on everything, and then just pop in and say a funny thing and pop out. It felt like the perfect size for me to be able to keep my eye on the ball enough, but still get to participate and be a part of the family. It was perfect.
With Love is now available to stream at Prime Video.