Fireside Chat, Interview
Darren Star: From "Sex and the City" to "Younger": Coming of Age on Television
- Anticipated 90210 would fill a gap in television by addressing realistic teenage emotional issues, sexuality, and drug use rather than existing condescending formats, though the creator now feels too distant from that era to write such a show today.
- Planned Melrose Place to explore the transition from college to adulthood, expecting it to evolve from a serious drama into an outrageous soap opera driven by ongoing character stories and a "juicy" villain, with production demands met by filming two scripts simultaneously using two crews.
- Predicted that networks would permit increasingly outrageous content after perceiving a hands-off attitude, anticipating that audiences would prefer sensationalism over earnest issue-of-the-week formats and that the show would generate such suspense that reruns would be unnecessary.
- Intentionally filmed a censored kiss between two men to create pre-episode controversy, believing the public would know a kiss occurred regardless of broadcast cuts and intending for the character's gay identity to be one aspect of a broader, non-defining storyline.
- Expects Sex and the City to function as a smart, New York-based, R-rated comedy similar to an independent film rather than a commercial sitcom, anticipating cultural influence on workplace fashion and drink trends while empowering women to speak independently without marriage as an ultimate goal.
- Planned Younger as a binge-worthy streaming series utilizing tiny cliffhangers to ensure addictive storytelling, with a narrative focus on the generational divide between 40-somethings unfamiliar with social media and the Instagram-literate millennial generation.
- Projects that the current media landscape offers an ideal environment for writers to take creative risks due to a high appetite for diverse material and the ability to tell stories that were previously considered too commercial or niche for traditional broadcast.