“I think of myself, first and foremost, as a television fan. I tend to notice that my interest, no matter how much I love the show, tends to dwindle after three or four seasons. I just didn’t want to overstay the welcome,” she said. “I wanted to keep the story feeling fresh and fun without it, you know, falling like way too far past credulity. I didn’t want to have to make those circumstances so fucking crazy that you would be sitting at home going, ‘I mean, well, now she’s taking it too far.'”

“I had only meant to homage her in Judy’s style and her kind and altruistic, almost angelic, ethereal kindness. That was very much my friend,” Liz explained. “So I imbued that into Judy from the beginning. I really didn’t think that one day I would give Judy cancer. It really didn’t come to me until halfway through Season 2, because I was thinking of what I wanted to see for these characters.”

Liz elaborated, saying, “So if those are the themes I’m exploring and the message that I’m trying to subtly put out there is that everybody will go through grief at some point and it might be because you lost a friend or you had a major change in life or lost a job or went through a crazy pandemic, if you live long enough, and you love hard enough, you will go through loss, and it’s okay and it’s a part of life. Nobody wants it to happen, nobody’s looking forward to it, but it just means when you’re in that grief, it means whoever you loved was worth it.”

“In wanting to heal those characters and wanting to heal Jen and help her come to terms with a form of acceptance that everybody dies, this is how I felt we could do that,” she said.

“Obviously with Jen and her pregnancy, which is a huge surprise to her and clearly not something she is planning or even wants, we felt that was certainly a confrontational — but a really powerful — way for Judy to reconcile what she didn’t get,” Liz said. “And what she didn’t get, in her mind, was this family she had been longing for. But, I think, as you watch the show, you’ll see that she really did actually gain a family. She really is a mother. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but she has mothered those boys and it definitely fulfilled her calling in that way.”

“Life is sometimes crazier than anything you could write,” Liz reflected. “A week before we finished with production, I found out my wife was pregnant. After nine years of trying, so if you had told me back then that I would end up becoming a mom six weeks ago, six weeks before this final season was gonna air, I wouldn’t have believed you. Life has a way of giving you twists and turns that you don’t see coming.”

“I feel like in one take they didn’t quite get a line right, but then they ended up starting to talk about his penis. It was so funny and not something I would ever have written, you know? It was just so funny that I said, ‘Okay, take the scene up to that point. Do it as it is on the page, but then just start talking about his penis,'” Liz said. “They just riffed on his penis and it was so funny because it felt so real. It felt like two friends. I feel like that was the first time that it really landed. I was like, Okay, that’s something that we should do. We should make time for them to go off script and bring their own magic to it. They’re both excellent improvisers, as is James Marsden. So, there’s a lot of improv in the show. Some of my favorite moments are improv.”

Liz said, “There were just moments that we all found together. I come from an improv background too. We kind of just play together. Like the ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘It’s okay’ runner was something that we came up with in the moment. It wasn’t scripted. James and Linda were doing this scene and I just kept hearing it in my head. So I popped in and was like, ‘Say, “I’m sorry,” and say “it’s okay,” and find a few other places to do it.’ It just became this whole runner in the show.”

Liz recalled, “Christina and I had been developing another project before I came up with Dead to Me. We both agreed that it wasn’t really the right thing because it was a political show and Trump had just been elected and it just felt like we wanted to avoid the topic.”

“I didn’t write the show with any actresses in mind. You know, I always sort of keep people in the back of my head, like a muse, but almost against that person’s will because they don’t know I’m doing it,” Liz said. “Maybe I had sort of been writing it for Christina all along and I didn’t even realize it.”

Liz said, “So, I finished writing Dead to Me, and I showed it to our casting directors, Sherry Thomas and Russell Scott, and literally the first person they brought up — the first name — was Christina to play Jen. It was just one of those moments where I was like, Of course!  Once we cast Christina, I knew that I wanted whoever was going to play Judy to feel different, to look different, to just bring a whole different vibe.”

“I think it was actually somebody at Netflix [who] suggested Linda. Linda was somebody I was actually thinking about to play Jen initially,” Liz said. “I thought of her more as this sort of dark, dramatic kind of actress. I really knew her from Bloodline. I was a big fan of hers on that show and I knew less of her comedic work. So I thought, Oh that’s really interesting. I thought Jen was going to be the more dramatic character and Judy was going to be the more classically comedic one. It just goes to show you, hire a good casting director. They’ll make better choices that you ever would.”

“They had never met. I was there the first time they met. We all had lunch. It was one of those moments where you just cross your fingers and you’re like, ‘Please, god, let this go well. There’s no going back,'” Liz said. “Within a matter of, I would say, four minutes. They were just leaning across the table and connecting. I was just watching two people fall in friendship. I’m really lucky that it happened that way.”

“We had shot scenes from all 10 episodes by the time the news came in and there was no going back,” Liz said.

“We were stuck with the story that we had to tell, but also that’s the story Christina wanted to tell,” Liz said. “She chose to finish. We did it on her terms and nothing in the script changed really at all. We did whatever we needed to do to accommodate her in terms of blocking.”

Liz said, “It was a really incredible experience to shoot that finale. It’s bittersweet because I knew it was the last thing we were shooting. The goodbye scene was a night on our set that I’ll never forget.”

“I directed that episode. I’m always sort of there on set for everything, but I was really in it with them, and I cowrote the episode. Watching it back, their performances are so good,” Liz said. “Of course, by now, Linda and Sam McCarthy, they have a bond off camera, and that goodbye gets me every time. I’m sitting there in editing, I’ve probably seen that same scene in various iterations, I don’t know, 248 times. It gets me every time. I just think both of their performances are so tender.”

“Honestly, we were just looking for somebody to play Linda’s mom,” Liz said. “And I thought, Holy shit, Katey looks more like Linda than Christina! And what are the odds of that?”

She said, “Season 2 was completely written, so we knew we weren’t gonna have her and Christina in a scene together. But once that season was done, and it came out, and we saw how fun it was to have Katey on the show, it was a no-brainer. It was like an out-of-body experience watching Katey and Christina together on screen again. Jen being this fiercely protective mom, with a capital M, it just felt like such a fun dynamic to put them together. Anytime I can put Jen in a scene with somebody who has higher status than her, who’s even more powerful, edge, and unpredictable, it’s just fun to watch.”

“We had to have this moment because also there’s a lot of thematic stuff with mothering in the show. It felt like both of these women, sort of, became each other’s best version of what a nurturing mother might have been like, but neither of them got to really experience that, especially as an adult,” Liz said. “Unfortunately, so many adult women lose their mothers. Just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you still don’t need that person to hold you and tell you everything’s gonna be okay. Eleanor is certainly not that kind of mother for Judy. She never was.”

“That is so Linda, by the way,” Liz laughed. “By the end of the series, they have to get rid of everything. Just to watch her, walking around our fake backyard, being like, ‘Is anybody taking this patio furniture? Because I have a patio, and I need some furniture.’ It’s perfect.”

“To me, compelling storytelling is if you set something up, for the most part, it’s always great to pay it off,” Liz said. “This show definitely thrives on repetition and pattern. Just like in life how certain things just keep surfacing. So, you can call it a coincidence or you can call it grand design, but I’ll just say that everything you see is deliberate.”

“I’m really proud of the finale in general, just because it’s so hard to end a show,” she said. “There’s so much pressure and no real roadmap on how to do it well. You’re just, sort of, on your own. I feel really grateful to my writers, Kelly Hutchinson and Cara DiPaolo, who really helped me figure out that episode.”

Liz said, “I think, in some ways, as a creator, writer, director, person, I’m really proud of the scene where Jen returns to the church and opens the doors and sees what she sees. You’ve got the Holy Harmonies doing their thing. That scene, to me, feels like it captured a lot of the soul of the show. It’s heartfelt, it’s funny. There’s like this weird death magic throughout, and I was really proud of how that scene turned out.”

“It was a tone that I was longing to see because it feels like a reflection of the way that I look at the world, which is that shit happens. You can’t avoid tragedy, everybody goes through some trauma in life. But for me, the way that I get through those things is with a sense of humor. If you can laugh on your darkest day, then it’s not as bad as it could’ve been,” Liz said.

Liz said, “When I came up with the premise for Dead to Me, I realized that this could be that. I initially just came up with the premise, but then it was actually my manager, Christy Smith, who was like, ‘You should lean into this and let yourself make it serious when it wants to be serious. If you’re really going to let yourself write about loss and death, let yourself go there.’ I think with that permission, I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this whatever I feel like it should be.’ Because sometimes, in any given week, it’ll feel like a tragedy, the next day it’ll feel like you’re in a slapstick comedy, right? And then another day, you’re like, ‘Somebody rang the doorbell, and they left and all of a sudden I’m in a thriller.’ I just wanted to make a show that felt like life, except a little more heightened, because it’s still TV.”

“It’s not really something I ever dreamt of doing. It wasn’t necessarily on my bucket list. I think what we sort of realized is I work with [Linda and Christina] so closely anyway and we change a lot of dialogue on the set. We’re very present and iterative, and, like, This works. Let’s add this word and they will add their little bits. So, it was really a natural progression for me to direct and with their encouragement, I did it,” Liz said. “It’s already hard enough to be a showrunner, it’s like 11 jobs in one, so I always thought why would I take on one more job? But I really enjoyed the experience. It really challenged me to look at things in a different way than you do as a writer. You can put anything on a page, but then you now have to be the one who makes it happen. Hopefully it’ll make me a better writer knowing what it actually takes to get it on its feet.”

“Christina is truly a comic genius and anytime there’s room for her to just do whatever the hell she wants, I just leave that room,” Liz said. “And Linda is hilarious, and they work off each other so perfectly. It was just sort of us playing around with the balloons and them switching places and us playing around like a bunch of, you know, idiots really. And Silver Tree, who directed that episode, she and I are pals, so it was like a bunch of friends hanging out pretending to be high.”

“There’s this motif of boats throughout the season, and certainly in the finale. When we showed up to shoot at the location, there was the single sailboat that was just anchored 100 feet off shore. We didn’t put it there,” Liz said. “We didn’t have any idea of whose boat it was, it was just there. Because of the nature of what Judy talks about in the episode, where things end up, I thought that is so amazing and strange. What a blessing to have this symbol floating out there. So, we used it a lot. We made sure to focus on it at certain times where it felt like it was helping the story. It really felt like a gift from beyond that this boat was just there because it really, I think, ended up giving us some really beautiful moments that were not scripted. And then, I swear to God, once we had shot all that stuff, once we moved inside the house where you weren’t going to see the boat anymore, it left and never came back. That’s some weird Dead to Me magic stuff. We’ve been really lucky in some ways, obviously unlucky in others, but there’s been some really magical alchemy that has struck this show. That was a good example of it.”

“If I had wanted you to know what was written, I would’ve showed you,” Liz said.