Addiction, alcoholism, and sobriety are difficult subjects that often lead to challenging conversations and ongoing struggles, which is most definitely the case for Samantha Fink (Sofia Black-D’Elia) on the new Freeform dramedy Single Drunk Female, inspired by the life experiences of show creator Simone Finch. The 20-something alcoholic is forced into sobriety in order to avoid jail time, but when that leads to moving back home with her mother Carol (Ally Sheedy), who’s giving it everything she’s got to have a life of her own, and having to face all the triggers that lead her to drink in the first place, figuring out who she is and what she wants while sober seems like an insurmountable task.
During this interview with Collider, Finch, along with executive producers Jenni Konner and Daisy Gardner talked about how the series evolved and how they came to be collaborating on it together, following a character who’s rediscovering their life without alcohol, the victory of staying sober, the mother-daughter relationship, and their hope that this show will last for a while.
Collider: How did this come about? Simone, what was it that started all of this? Did it start with the character, or did start with something you wanted to explore?
SIMONE FINCH: It started with the character of Sam, which is my doppelganger. At first, she was a hot mess, and then I got sober and I was like, “Oh, she’s an alcoholic.” As I kept writing it, it’s been through a lot of drafts and it’s had long legs. I just love Sam. I love her now. I didn’t always love her.
JENNI KONNER: I really feel like one of the first jobs I had, when we started developing it together, was to have Simone be more kind to the drunk Simone. I was like, “I’m not trying to be your therapist, but you hate your drunk self so much that you’re really punishing this character.”
DAISY GARDNER: Part of her is so funny and smart and observant, and just drunk. We had to pull that out.
FINCH: That’s how it all started.
Simone, is that something you were aware that you were doing, or did it take having people tell you that you were being mean to your character to do something about it?
KONNER: I literally had to tell her. I was giving her note after note, and I was like, “She’s not taking these changes, but she’s doing the other notes happily.” And then, I was like, “Oh, she hates that side of her. She hasn’t come to terms with her yet.” I told her, “You have to forgive her to make this show.”
FINCH: I actually think I have now.
KONNER: I do too.
FINCH: So, there you go, I got something out of this show.
How did the three of you come to be working together? How did you even know that you’d get along or have the same sensibilities and not fight about everything?
FINCH: The first person that really believed in the script was Phil Traill, who’s an EP and director on the show. He brought it to Freeform, and Freeform bought it. And then, the first person that they wanted to bring it to was Jenni. They said, “She’ll never say yes, so let’s just get it out of the way.” Then, she read it over the weekend, and on Monday, they said, “She wants to meet with you at four o’clock.” I was wearing sandals, jeans and a t-shirt, and they were like, “You can’t meet Jenni Konner in that wardrobe.” So, I had to go to Bloomingdale’s and buy an outfit drive. It was a whole thing. Anyways, I got her to do it with the outfit. That’s what happened.
KONNER: Yeah, exactly. It had nothing to do with the script. I have no memory of the outfit.
FINCH: And then, Jenni gave it to Daisy, and Daisy signed on. Now, here we are.
KONNER: Daisy and I have known each other for a million years and I was nervous to send it to her because no one else had really given us feedback. It had gotten picked up, but it wasn’t like we had shown it to a bunch of people. And so, when Daisy called me and said, “I really liked it,” I was like, “You did?” I was so relieved because I trust Daisy so much. We’re very, very lucky to have her. She built an incredible [writers’] room. It’s just been a very weirdly easy experience that was meant to be.
GARDNER: It’s weird because I have wanted to work with Jenni for forever. Early on, on some of her other shows, I would come in and pitch jokes on the pilot. She’s great. She’s iconic. So, to finally get to work with her has been fantastic. And then, sitting down with Simone for the first time, one of the things that struck me is that she’s just someone who is willing to be an open book and willing to do this hard thing of stepping back, giving her story, and working with it. She’s like, “Okay, what can we use? What can we take? What can we turn into something?” That was inspiring and fun.
One of the moments that stood out the most for me this season is when Samantha climbs onto the lower shelf in the grocery store to sleep there behind the cereal boxes. How did that come about?
GARDNER: It’s so funny because Jenni believed in that moment from the second it was in the script.
KONNER: They kept saying, “No, we can’t do it. It’s gonna be weird.” And I kept saying, “You guys, trust me. This is it. It’s really gonna work. I swear.” One thing we all try to do in the room is go for the weirdest version of everything. I think it was originally toilet paper, but they changed it to cereal.
GARDNER: They couldn’t clear some grocery store items, so it changed.
KONNER: Also, thank God it wasn’t toilet paper because it would’ve been all one color and so much less interesting of a shot. But you’ve gotta give so much credit to Sofia [Black-D’Elia] because she’s really, really good at physical comedy and using her body while she’s being sober or drunk, in a very real feeling way. So, watching her climb in there, I was like, “I told them!”
It seems like one of the most common things for anyone trying to get sober is to figure out how to do all the things that they feel they only know how to do when they’re drunk.
KONNER: That’s right. That’s what Simone’s been talking about since day one. She has to go to a bar sober. She has to have sex sober. She's trying to figure it all out. She’s doing it again for the first time and noticing things she had never noticed before.
How does Sam feel about who she is sober? By the end of the season, is she going to be any closer to knowing what it means to be her best self?
GARDNER: It’s interesting because Sam is a writer and one of the things we wanted to explore in this is the realization that she has never written sober. Normally, you’d just pound two vodkas and get all the little voices in your head that are stopping you from pouring yourself out on the page, out of the way, and she can’t do that. Just having to go through life in that white hot glare of sobriety, where you almost feel naked, by the end of the season, having done that is such a victory. She still doesn’t know where she’s going, but she’s done all of those things for the first time, which is like climbing a mountain.
FINCH: Getting a year of sobriety is such a huge deal. I’m getting emotional. It really changes your life. You’ve done all four seasons sober and you realize that you just don’t need it anymore to live. I think that she is really coming into her own, in that way.
KONNER: Also, you’ve met a goal. For active alcoholics, that’s unusual and that’s special. You said it was gonna be that and it was that, and that’s the beauty of one day at a time. But then, when you really get to a goal that everyone talks about, it must be thrilling.
FINCH: And then, you think you know everything for five years.
There are so many great relationships on this show, with the mother-daughter relationship, the friendships, and the sponsor relationship. I especially love the relationship between Sam and Felicia (Lily Mae Harrington). What do you enjoy about exploring that dynamic and about seeing what those actors bring to it?
KONNER: Oh my God, she’s such a genius.
GARDNER: We can’t take credit for some of it because it’s Lily Mae Harrington and Sofia together and their chemistry. We’ll be like, “Oh yeah, we wanna see this. Thanks, you guys. You did it.”
FINCH: I had a bunch of childhood friends who I drank with quite a bit. Some of them are sober, and some of them are not. I think Felicia is really supportive and fun, but at the same time, she can get drunk and go to work the next day. She’s not an alcoholic, but she has a good time. And she’s a single mom. I think that she’s really good for Sam because she forces Sam to not take herself so seriously and to get out of her shell, even sober. She can have a mocktail, and that’s a wild time. Sam is starting to learn how to have sober, and that’s really hard for her.
GARDNER: One of the things in their relationship that we wanted to explore is that they were party friends. That’s the activity they shared together and that’s what they did, so they’re gonna have to rediscover who they are together without that party there.
FINCH: They bring the party now instead of being the party.
KONNER: Felicia is still the party.
I also love how unexpected the relationship between mother and daughter is, and even sponsor and sponsee. We get this idea of what those relationships are like from other shows, but that feels very different with this show. Was that intentional?
KONNER: This is one person’s story. We’re not trying to tell the story of sobriety, as a whole. We’re not trying to teach anyone anything. We’re telling a version of Simone’s story. We’re not sticking to it because we’re comedy writers. It feels different because it’s Simone’s.
FINCH: Basically, Olivia is an amalgam of the five sponsors I fired, my first year of sobriety. Firing a sponsor is this thing that you do when you don’t wanna listen to someone tell you that you’re wrong. I didn’t know how to have an intimate relationship my first year with anyone, friendship or sponsor. Olivia just says all these things that they said to me when I fired them.
GARDNER: One thing that Simone has always said is that, in the sponsor-sponsee relationship, she wants to make it clear that she’s not her friend.
KONNER: And Sam doesn’t get that. She’s boundary-less.
You leave things at a point where there is some sense of hope and you do feel like you can root for Sam, but people do screw up and have relapses.
KONNER: It’s very fragile.
GARDNER: Going back through our early notes, from when the room was first gathering, there’s so much richness and there’s so much that we didn’t get to do this season that I’m so excited for next season. I hope everybody watches so we can write all those things.
KONNER: One of the most exciting things to me, that Simone was doing in the show, is that we’ve seen a lot of narratives and a lot of them are incredible, about someone really struggling with staying sober. And obviously, Sam is really struggling with staying sober, but we’re not watching a journey of relapse after relapse after relapse. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a story of someone getting sober and staying sober. It feels so fresh and fun to tell that story, and to see someone succeeding and making it that year. It felt so optimistic to me and gave so much hope. I’m really excited about that.
Do you know what a second season of this show looks like? Do you have a plan in mind for how many seasons it would take to fully explore Sam’s journey?
KONNER: Probably 24 seasons. That seems right. No, we don’t have a plan for next year, if you have any ideas. I’m just kidding. We’re gonna pray to get picked up, and then we’ll go hard.
Single Drunk Female airs on Thursday nights on Freeform.