GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast, a brand new podcast from the folks at the Peabody Awards and Good Laugh, powered by the Center for Media and Social Impact. I’m Gabe González, a comedian, a writer, and your host, but most importantly, I am a lifetime TV nerd. And I’ve gotta say, it’s been incredible to see the TV landscape change so dramatically in the last decade.
We’re seeing an emphasis on the diversity of authentic storytelling reflected on our screens, and the social issues they feature brought to the forefront. The Peabody Awards is committed to recognizing and elevating these stories. In their own words, these are stories that matter–narratives that highlight our unique experiences while helping us understand our shared humanity.
And the Center for Media and Social Impact is dedicated to studying, spotlighting and producing powerful entertainment that’s a positive force for social good, including comedy through its Good Laugh program. Now, both of these teams came together to create a podcast all about entertainment that disrupts because we love it–entertainment that disrupts stereotypes, outdated narratives, our expectations of what constitutes television entertainment, even the norms of the industry itself.
Today, we’re talking to someone who isn’t afraid to ask questions humanity is still struggling to answer: Damon Lindelof.
Damon is a visionary showrunner, writer, and creator whose work explores human emotion and faith through the lens of collective trauma. Through his co-creation of shows like Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen, and even his most recent collaboration with Tara Hernandez on Mrs. Davis, a very funny and deeply surreal exploration of faith in the age of AI, Lindelof has captivated us with stories that explore how everything from large scale disasters to existential crises can force us to confront our deepest fears.
DAMON LINDELOF: How do you solve for loneliness? The answer is community. It’s about us. I feel best when I feel like I’m a part of some larger collective than that I’m on my own. And I want the stories that I tell to reflect that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Here at We Disrupt This Broadcast, we’ll explore the ways popular entertainment reflects, influences, and challenges our culture. And we’ll do it by talking to the people who understand it more intimately than anyone else: television creatives and showrunners. That’s right, my colleagues and I will be interviewing the disruptive masterminds behind the television you and I love. Occasionally, we’ll even chat with experts about why these shows are impactful in the real world.
Coming up after the break, my conversation with television showrunner Damon Lindelof.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe Gonzales, and I’m lucky enough to be interviewing some of the most notable disruptors around. That’s right, Peabody Award-recognized TV creatives, including writers, who help make the stories we see, creators, who come up with the show ideas, and showrunners, who essentially steer the ship. We’re talking to guests that are such originals they’ve upended expectations and rewritten the rules when it comes to entertainment.
Today we ask: How do we heal from collective violence that reverberates through generations? Are we imbued with purpose or do we construct it for ourselves? How many cigarettes is too many after your neighbors are raptured? And who better to talk us through this than Damon Lindelof, showrunner of Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen, and co creator of Mrs. Davis?
Look, as we live through a decade that was initiated with a pandemic, in the middle of both natural and man-made disasters, Lindelof is somehow the man with his finger on the pulse of what makes us tick, and how feeling our feelings, as a collective, can actually bring us all together as a community.
Damon, thanks so much for joining us.
DAMON LINDELOF: Genuine pleasure. Thank you for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: You’re known for tackling deeply existential topics of humanity and faith in your work, but I want to kick us off today by going back to an early moment in your career, one that certainly had an impact on my life, maybe one of the most impactful projects you worked on for me: Season 3 of MTV’s Undressed.
DAMON LINDELOF: Oh, Gabe.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: If I could be a fly on any writer’s room, it would be that one for sure.
DAMON LINDELOF: Oh my god. Well, there were plenty of flies in that writer’s room, I’m sure. I think we wrote 35 episodes in six weeks, if memory serves. So you know, it functioned, like a soap opera does just in terms of the churn of material into production. And so it was, in all seriousness, just an incredible bootcamp, for speed and efficiency in writing for television, and an immensely invaluable experience.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Oh, I’m sure. I mean, it gave so many writers and actors, I think, an opportunity to cut their teeth. The first show I ever saw Pedro Pascal on was Undressed. And, you know…
DAMON LINDELOF: Oh my God
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Oh, absolutely. Playing a very flamboyant gay man, which I found empowering at the time.
DAMON LINDELOF: I do think that one of the incredible benefits of starting my career in the 90s is that the only way into the industry was kind of writing on a broadcast show, whether that was a comedy or a drama or even a soap opera. You start to understand where the ones and the zeros in the matrix are, and then you can start to say, like, can there be a two? Can there be a three? Like, what if there weren’t just ones and zeros? So I have a lot of affection for my days in Undressed and Nash Bridges and Crossing Jordan before I got to pilot my own ship.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Speaking of upending formulas, I do want to ask you a bit more about your creative inspiration and your process. You’ve mentioned you like to start thinking about stories with a theme, which I think is surprisingly kind of unconventional, right? How do you know when you found a theme that you want to write about? What’s that clicking moment where you’re like, oh, this is something I could tell a story about?
DAMON LINDELOF: What I try to talk about is this idea of the antenna. And an antenna is a way of basically receiving with greater clarity, a transmission that is out there. And so in these periods when I’m quote unquote, trying to figure out what my next thing is going to be, that’s when my antenna is up. And when my antenna is up, it’s basically receiving all of this data from every portion of my life, my personal life in terms of what’s happening, in terms of how I identify as a human being, as a father, as a husband, as a 30-year-old man versus a 40-year-old man or versus a 50-year-old man versus a white man, you know, all of these sort of fundamental ideas of identity.
And then there’s external transmissions that are happening, which is like what’s happening out there in the world right now. And what essentially starts to happen is that I get compelled. An idea kind of gets stuck and it’s like a repeating frequency. And then I have to translate that transmission into the work, whatever it is.
And so, you know, in the case of The Leftovers, that’s a pretty easy one, right? I read Tom Parada’s book, my antenna was up and I was like weeping on an airplane reading this thing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: For those who may not know, The Leftovers was co-created by Damon Lindelof and is based on Tom Pro’s 2011 novel, The Leftovers.
DAMON LINDELOF: That was a time in my life after Lost ended where I was like, I don’t ever want to do television again. And then all I had to do was basically read this novel and I was like, I want to make this show. So that’s an easy antenna.
A more complicated antenna was Watchmen where I was actively resisting the invitation from HBO and Warner Brothers to adapt Watchmen. I was like, no, I don’t want to do that. But because my antenna was up I read, Ta Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. I always feel like I need to caveat that by saying not out of good intentions, but because I wanted to virtue signal. You know, all the white people in Hollywood were reading that book. But what happened when I read it was like, it changed my entire perspective. Because I think he was maybe a couple years younger than I was, but my son was exactly the age of Ta Nehisi Coates’ son in that book. And for those of you who haven’t read it, A, read it please. And B, it’s a letter to his son. And it completely and totally just changed the prism through how I was viewing the world.
Because my antenna was up, I was like, I need to read everything that Ta Nehisi Coates wrote. I read his essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” In “The Case for Reparations,” there’s a paragraph about the Tulsa Massacre. He might have just called it “The Destruction of Black Wall Street.” I was like, I’ve never heard of that. What is that? How could I have never heard of that? And then I went deep down that rabbit hole. And then I was compelled to tell that story.
And it was very clear to me that that story couldn’t be told and shouldn’t be told by me, but if there was some kind of a vessel by which the information about the Tulsa massacre could be delivered. And then I was like, these people keep calling me about Watchmen. Is Watchmen a vessel that could hold a conversation about race. Could I talk about race and appropriation and policing and law and systemic white supremacy and law enforcement through Watchmen? And could it hold this sort of ideology as advanced by Ta Nehisi Coates? And then, we were off to the races as it were.
CLIP: WATCHMEN
Voice 1: Almost a century ago on the very spot on which you now stand, the vibrant and affluent African American community of Greenwood was so prosperous it later it became known as the Black Wall Street. And then, in the space of a single day, it was all gone. The Tulsa Massacre resulted in profound loss of life, not to mention the property and treasure pillage from its victims. For far too long this horrific chapter in our nation’s history went untold and unacknowledged. On behalf of the entire United States government, President Redford offers his sincerest condolences for the trauma you or your family may have suffered. May I have your consent to test a sample of your DNA?
Voice 2: Yes.
DAMON LINDELOF: Those are all themes that were not originated by me. They were originated by other writers and the culture writ large. And then I’ve always viewed myself, maybe somewhat arrogantly, as a DJ. You know, I’m remixing, putting together different tracks, from stuff that I’ve loved in an effort to kind of make something that sounds both new and familiar at the same time.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk to us a little bit about the role that you feel art plays in disrupting these cycles of progress and backlash?
DAMON LINDELOF: I think that this idea of like, how do we create spaces to have conversations that make us feel uncomfortable or even make us feel bad? I think that sort of surrounding this larger cultural idea behind what should be taught in schools or what books should be read by our kids in schools, and that there’s a fiction aspect of that, right? They shouldn’t read Huck Finn or they shouldn’t read material about queer experiences.
There’s just an erasure, a negation, a denial. Like, let us just ban these things and make it so that they don’t even exist. And it’s all under the auspices, it’s all under the idea of safety, right? We’re trying to keep our kids safe. And when we’re not talking about kids anymore, we’re talking about the culture. And I think that there’s this just incredibly insidious idea, particularly amongst white folks, where, Well, why are we teaching slavery? Because it makes us feel bad. You know, why should our kids need to feel bad about something that they have no culpability or responsibility for and it happened centuries ago?
And yeah, slavery happened centuries ago, but Jim Crow didn’t. And we’re not trying to make your kids feel bad. We’re just trying to make them understand why America is the way that it is right now in the year 2024. There’s a straight line from these ideas.
And yet, Nicole Hannah Jones in the 1619 project is like, there’s legislation, literally banning it. Like it’s an illicit substance because it’s just that dangerous. And so I think this idea, when you start to get into the conversation of knowledge or knowledge about history is dangerous. It’s the artists, not just role, but like mandate to sort of say, fuck that, you know?
Storytelling should be dangerous. It’s not a place where safety is a mandate. Now, I don’t want to get into a broader, larger conversation on my philosophy on how art can be triggering. You know. I do have to acknowledge, particularly given the body that I was born into, my race, my gender, etc. that I am less likely to be triggered by certain art, but I do think that this idea that art should be provocative, it should be evocative in terms of conversations that we can have about the world that we live in because it creates a space where we’re talking about the art that maybe makes it a little bit easier to talk about harder topics.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I remember reading so much coverage talking about how non-Black communities learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre for the first time through a television show, through Watchmen. Is that sort of the role that the artist should be playing in terms of educating as well, or is the show maybe inhabiting a gap that we see missing in our education that could kind of evoke something creative or compelling?
DAMON LINDELOF: You have to know the answer to, why am I doing this? You know, why this one? Why this story? Because it is an act of hubris in a lot of ways. It’s in defiance of the gods themselves to say, “I have an idea that I think is so important that millions of people need to hear it.”
It’s just so conceited and narcissistic. And it does speak to kind of writer’s paradox, which is simultaneously believing that you’re garbage and also that you have something worth saying that should be broadcast to the world. That is quite a thing.
So if you’re going to acknowledge the paradox, make sure that what you’re broadcasting has worth. The worth doesn’t need to be educating somebody on some forgotten piece of history, but it should have the worth of making some kind of emotional connection or broadening their understanding of the way that the world works.
There are these areas like grief, for example, which I think is what The Leftovers was pretty obsessed with exploring, both in Tom’s novel and in the show, where it was like people don’t really want to talk about grief. And yet, we should talk about it more because it’s the one thing that is inevitable. There’s no human alive who’s not going to experience grief. And it does feel like we’re pretty ill equipped to deal with grief when it happens to us. And maybe we’d be more equipped if we were processing the potential of grief through story, you know, through television, through movies, through, other medium.
So this idea of going like, Oh, now I know what it means to lose someone you love without having to lose someone that I love, because I’m watching or hearing someone else’s story.
CLIP: THE LEFTOVERS
Voice 1: Because he could come back, right? They could all come back. And if they did, it’d be on the exact spot where they disappeared from. So my son, who doesn’t even know how to crawl, I mean, well, he didn’t. It’s been two years, maybe he’s older now. But he just reappeared in a fucking parking lot. And if I’m not there, if I’m not there, when he comes back, what happens? Do you think he even remembers me?
DAMON LINDELOF: That’s the great thing about this magical box, or now I guess we can just call the magical screens, which is they take you outside of your own lived experience. Most people don’t really travel outside of like a hundred mile radius of where they were born in the world globally. The way that they travel is through the screen of their phone or the screen of their laptop or through the screen of the television or the movie screen that they go to.
And so if they’re going to travel somewhere, make it worth the trip, I guess, is the essential. If you can put some vegetables on the plate, great, but there’s nothing wrong with the delicious cheeseburger either.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Coming up after the break, Damon and I will get into community, grief, and religion. You know, just the lighthearted stuff. We’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m Gabe González. And now more of my conversation with television co creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof.
I want to talk about a theme that I think comes up a lot in your work. Across your shows you write about shared trauma and the kind of arduous non-linear journey to shared healing, if such a thing can exist. In the US I do feel like our culture is preoccupied with the individual. I think we see that a lot in many systems of government and forms of interaction. What interests you about exploring trauma and healing in the collective?
DAMON LINDELOF: My instinctive answer is I’m an only child. Part of being an only child, at least in my experience, is you’re a bit of a lonely child. And that isn’t to say that there aren’t lonely kids who have multiple siblings. But I do think that loneliness is an emotional idea that most of the humans that I’ve spoken to admit to experiencing. And so how do you solve for loneliness? And the answer is not rocket science. The answer is community.
The fundamental idea is that our survival mechanisms, even our hippocampus, requires us to tribalize and find community because tens of thousands of years ago before we formed vast civilizations, we were in these tribes. And if you were exiled from the tribe, you’d get eaten by something, or you’d be exposed to the elements.
You literally needed other human beings. And so there is this part of us that sort of like has a biological survival instinct to be in community. And yet we’re in a technological age that is both bringing us closer and further apart because existential loneliness has never been more rampant.
And so I do think that this slightly kind of corny idea that bolstered Lost, live together, die alone, or that that show was about people who didn’t like to talk about themselves, who led very isolationist sort of existences and were very lonely, were suddenly forced to be in community with one another.
CLIP: LOST
We can’t do this. Every man for himself is not gonna work. It’s time to start organizing. We need to figure out how we’re going to survive here. Last week, most of us were strangers. But we’re all here now. And God knows how long we’re going to be here. But if we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone.
DAMON LINDELOF: And then the moral of the story was, we needed each other in order to transcend both the situation that we were on the island to get off the island, but also to transcend as human beings to find some level of enlightenment. Whatever your faith may be, even if you’re agnostic or an atheist, the sort of idea of like the most transcendent human is the one who says, “It’s not about me. It’s about us.” I feel best when I feel like I’m a part of some larger collective than that I’m on my own. And I want the stories that I tell to reflect that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m really interested in the connection you made too between community and faith. Full transparency, my parents are Puerto Rican and Catholic. I am queer. The community my parents found to raise me in is not the one I stayed in or would have chosen for myself, but I do realize the power that that held in their lives, right?
It’s interesting though, because I do feel like secularism has been sold as this kind of inextricable, important part of what you might call Western values, whatever that means. But in your shows, the theme of faith is inescapable, right? Do you think there is such a thing as separating ourselves as a society from our spiritual or even religious beliefs?
DAMON LINDELOF: That’s the big question, the one that I’m chasing and I’ll never catch. You know, that question is the football held by Lucy and I am Charlie Brown. And it will always, it will always be pulled away and I will always try to kick it.
I have to continue to believe that there is purpose and mystery woven into the matrix of human existence, if not existence writ large. By mystery, I mean we have to fundamentally accept that we will not understand why some people have great lives and other people are afflicted, why some people who perform great goods are suddenly bedridden with cancer, and monsters live to the age of a hundred.
And try to solve these mysteries with these structures of faith. We want to assign some sort of architect in the matrix who is sitting in a room who can answer these questions for us. And say, like, there is a perfectly reasonable answer because the chaos is so upsetting and unbearable to just be like, there is no structure. There are no answers. I literally can’t tolerate it.
And I do think that when we talk about these emotional ideas like grief or trauma, religion is still the only game in town for organizing around. This is what you do when someone dies. Less good when it comes to trauma, this is what you do when an entire race of people is systemically oppressed for centuries, if not millennia. You know, religious institutions kind of look the other way.
Once a religious institution becomes beholden to money power, and the accumulation thereof, then it becomes an oppressive organization writ large. But that doesn’t mean that faith isn’t a wonderful and beautiful thing. And I’ve tended to feel more organically connected to Eastern institutions of faith, like Buddhism and, and less connected to Western institutions of faith surrounding monotheism or the Judeo Christian constructs. That said, they do make people feel better. And therefore, if it’s working for you, I don’t want to knock it.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It really is the kind of ritual that brings you back, even if you’re not an avowed member of it anymore, right? Like you said, the funerals, the births, the baptisms. It seems like it’s the communal element that brings characters in. I’m thinking specifically as well about Mrs. Davis, right? she shows up at this convent being like, I’m not really a believer, but I’d like to wed myself to Jesus. And I wonder, you know, it’s interesting to see these characters come back to the rituals of faith, even if they don’t prescribe to it, the way an institution might encourage them to.
DAMON LINDELOF: Most people don’t want to suffer. And yet, suffering is inherent to what it means to be alive. We fall in love with people, those people get sick and we lose them.
We struggle professionally and personally. Maybe we have mental health issues. Maybe we’re in a marginalized community and treated like garbage. Maybe we are confused about our own identity. Suffering happens. These institutions, these faith based institutions, the local convent in the case of Mrs. Davis are sort of like, we’re going to contextualize your suffering, and then we’re going to give it meaning, and then we’re going to mitigate it.
And in the case of Christianity, this is why Christianity took off and Judaism didn’t, which is they have an avatar of suffering embodied in Jesus who, that’s his brand, is suffering. He suffered for us. And now, it contextualizes and brings about a reason for an explanation of our suffering.
The Leftovers in particular, and Mrs. Davis, another extension thereof, is about the coping mechanisms just to manage. How you bounce back, our resilience, is the most sort of incredible miracle of all. It’s more impressive to me than the parting of the Red Sea is how you recover from losing someone you love. It feels like the world’s going to end.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Sometimes I’ll take a page out of The Leftovers and just chain smoke in silence for a few days. It’s definitely my coping mechanism.
DAMON LINDELOF: You and me both.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah.
DAMON LINDELOF: Oh my God.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. I did also want to touch on this idea of crafting narrative or creating a communal narrative to sort of explain, maybe not justify, but explain suffering, right? And I think this is a theme we do see a lot in Mrs. Davis, which explores the allure and threat of a global sentient AI. Which is treated with almost a god like reverence. And it’s interesting that the show came about just as AI was beginning to feel like a threat in the real world to creatives and workers across industries. How do you think the series’ themes of interconnectedness, faith, and freewill layer into our real world discussions of AI today?
DAMON LINDELOF: First and foremost, I need to both acknowledge and shout out and give flowers to Tara Hernandez, who is the credited co-creator of Mrs. Davis alongside me, but ran the show on her own. I was immensely grateful to be in someone else’s writer’s room for the first time in a couple of decades.
And beyond just Tara, there was an incredible group of writers and also directors and actors, all of whom felt like stakeholders in this sort of thematic playground that you just sort of laid out.
I think that at the time that we pitched the idea, we were still very much in the heart of the pandemic. I don’t think that the idea of Mrs. Davis would have come had it not been for COVID because there was this moment of extreme isolation and confusion.
And Tara or I said aloud, “I wish that there was just an app on my phone that told me what to do.” And suddenly we took this religious idea that you and I have been unpacking, which is like normally the thing that tells you what to do is your church or your rabbi or your Imam.
I think that the next logical leap was like, well, if that app was any good, if the artificial intelligence or machine learning driving that app was sophisticated enough, it would actually beat religion. It would be like Amazon putting brick and mortar bookstores out of business, because it’s just better at it. And so suddenly this app comes along and what if it was gunning for organized religion? Who would the hero of that story be? Oh, 1000 percent a nun. And then Betty Gilpin, playing that nun.
CLIP: MRS. DAVIS
Voice 1: Who is we?
Voice 2: The resistance.
Voice 1: What are you resisting?
Voice 2: Same thing you are. The algorithm.
DAMON LINDELOF: And I think that we wrote Mrs. Davis at a time pre-Chat GPT where we weren’t that worried yet, or we felt like AI was sort of silly and inept, and then suddenly, you know, Mrs. Davis is hitting the streamer, Peacock, at exactly the time that we’re going on to strike because we need clear artificial intelligence definitions. That was not something that we foresaw or was predictive. But I do think that ultimately back to the sort of prevailing theme of our conversation right now, we need salves to make us feel better.
And so if AI, if Chat GPT becomes the voice in our ear that makes us feel better about existing, and it’s a better and less condemning or judgmental voice, then one that the religious institutions are offering, right? It’s more inclusive. It says, you are okay just the way that you are. Then, I embrace it.
I do think that as frightened as many are of what is at the end of the road as it relates to artificial intelligence, I’m also curious about its benefits. Mrs. Davis was about, let’s give a woman who identifies as a nun, but as a very unconventional nun, let’s give her the choice to decide whether or not she’s going to kill God. You know, and this God is an artificial intelligence. Are we better off with it? Or are we better off without it? That’s the choice we all have to make now. And there are a million little decisions that we make every day in terms of whether or not we’re going to rely on technologies, you know, are you going to use a navigation system to get to where you’re driving? Are you going to allow an artificial intelligence to match you with your future mate? We’re slowly but surely ceding a lot of decision making power to algorithms.
That’s happening, whether we like it or not. And the question just basically becomes, should these algorithms be trusted with that innate decision making? Are they acting in our best interests? Lord, I hope so.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: From Undressed, to creative antennas to the revelatory experience of working on Mrs. Davis. Damon Lindelof, thank you so much for joining us today. Before I let you go, I do have to ask, is there anything you’d like to leave us with? Or any advice for our audience?
DAMON LINDELOF: I’d say that the two things that are the most mellowing experiences for a crazy and fraught and chaotic world are a good old made-of-paper book, to just sit and read somewhere. And, you know, the community of friends and family. So, those are my big, great, profound insights.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Perfect. A tangible book, folks. You heard it.
DAMON LINDELOF: Yes. Buy a book. Any book.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Wow, okay, we almost got derailed by Pedro Pascal, but it’s been a joy to wade through the impossible questions of life and the intangible joys of community with Damon Lindelof.
I think most exciting for me was learning what makes a bold and provocative storyteller like him tick. He is someone willing to subvert our expectations in every sense, following bold thematic ideas, upending conventional narrative structures, even questioning the established hierarchies the TV industry has imposed on creatives, all in pursuit of exploring what does or could connect us.
Now, fun fact, the Peabody Awards are decided unanimously, so to close out our episode, I bring you We Disrupt This Broadcast‘s, Unanimous Decision, where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day:
DAMON LINDELOF: There were plenty of flies in that writer’s room, I’m sure.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We hope you’ll join us for our next episode when my dear friend, and We Disrupt This Broadcast correspondent, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, talks to Quinta Brunson about how optimism can be revolutionary.
QUINTA BRUNSON: The world just doesn’t function without optimists. I think most revolutionaries are actually huge optimists.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production, hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Joyelle Nicole Johnson. This show is brought to you by executive producers Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer, Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong. Associate producer: Bella Green. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Dreyer and Tunisia Singleton. From PRX, the team is: Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Morgan Church, Edwin Ochoa, and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.