[Editor’s note: The following includes spoilers forZoey’s Extraordinary Christmas.]
From creatorAustin Winsberg, the feature-length filmZoey’s Extraordinary Christmas(available to stream for free on The Roku Channel) continues the story after two seasons ofZoey’s Extraordinary Playlistby exploring how Zoey (Jane Levy) is doing on her first holiday without her father (Peter Gallagher). However, attempting to recreate the magic of Christmas is no easy task for someone who not only still hears everyone’s inner thoughts manifest in song form, but is also trying to explain to her boyfriend Max (Skylar Astin) that his new and identical powers are not as easy to handle as he thinks they are while also helping her mother (Mary Steenburgen) navigate a possible return to the dating world. And through it all, Zoey learns that forming new traditions with her loved ones, instead of forcing something that isn’t meant to be, might just be the best path forward.
During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, executive producer/writer Winsberg talked about the emotional roller coaster of the series getting canceled and then returning in movie form, how quickly they had to pull the entire thing off, the biggest challenges in finding the right story to tell, the importance of having Steenburgen tap dance, balancing the holiday songs with pop songs, and whether there could still be more Zoey’s in the future.
Collider: You thought the show would be picked up by NBC for another season, but it wasn’t picked up. And then, you thought it might go to Peacock, but that didn’t happen. And now, here you are at Roku with a Christmas movie. Was there an emotional rollercoaster that went on, through all of that? Was there a real moment where you thought that was truly it and that you wouldn’t have closure? What was that emotional journey like?
AUSTIN WINSBERG: It was whiplash. Honestly, not to sound too dramatic, but for me, it was like a death.Zoey’sis so close to my heart and it’s been my entire life for the last three years. Producing this musical TV show and writing it, coming from my own personal experience and just trying to do a new musical every eight days with the levels of challenges and everything, it just was all-consuming. We had no awareness that we were not gonna come back. There were no signs of anything. So, when it came out, just like that, it was like the rug had been pulled out from under me. I went through what I can only call mourning. I don’t know if acceptance is the right word, but I finally got to a place where I was trying to make my brain be okay with it when the possibility of this movie started happening. So, yeah, it was a devastating blow and hard to process, and then Roku came in at literally the 11th hour, or 12th hour, as the salvation for us.
Was there ever a moment where you worried that it wasn’t real and that Roku was kidding?
WINSBERG: Once Roku said okay, I’m pretty sure we got greenlit off of a four or five line notion from me on July 22nd. And then, it was like, “You start shooting on September 14th, in order to make our air date and be on the air in December.” I was like, “I’m sorry, what? You want us to make an entire movie, literally from start to finish, in less than four months?” Once we got the green light, then it was just all hands on deck. It was, “How can we make this as good as we possibly can, as quickly as we possibly can?” And then, being very grateful that we even got the opportunity.
Does it also feel like the fans ofZoey’shelped will this into being because, if Roku didn’t know that fan base was there, this probably wouldn’t have happened.
WINSBERG: I don’t know exactly how the decision-making process happened at Roku, but I do know that I do know that the fans were a huge part of it. The fan support and the fan interaction, and all of the Twitter energy, and all of the Save Our Show voting campaigns, and all that stuff, was so undeniable. I thought it was undeniable. SaveZoey’s Playlistwas trending on Twitter for a few days. There was so much fan outreach, and I think that was definitely one of the things that Roku seized upon, for sure.
How challenging was it to tell a story with this movie that people could come to without having seen the show, but that also satisfies fans, and also tells a full story, in case this is the last time we see these characters, and also still leaves things open, so that it could continue?
WINSBERG: You literally just said all of the challenges at once. And I would say the last added challenge was going from breaking the stories in a six-act network way to approaching it like a movie with a three-act movie structure. I had to re-orient my brain to break it as a movie and not as a super-sized episode because I really wanted it to feel like a movie. That was the other challenge, on top of all the challenges you said, which was the challenge of how do you make something feel standalone, how do you bring it in for audiences that have never seen the show before and it can just work on its own as a holiday film while still continuing the story, especially answering the cliffhanger stuff, and making it feel relatively closed-ended, but not so close-ended that there couldn’t be the possibility for more. That was all of the challenges.
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Was there a list of things that you absolutely wanted to do with this? Did you have like a checklist? Was there anything that you couldn’t get to because you just couldn’t figure out how to make it work, this time around?
WINSBERG: The main thing was, for sure, making sure that we were following through on the cliffhanger that we ended Season 2 on. I knew that a lot of my plan for Season 3 involved the romantic comedy of Max and Zoey dating, and what does it look like when you’re dating somebody where both of you knowing exactly what’s going on in the other person’s head? I had a bunch of ideas for how that was gonna play out over Season 3, and we had to encapsulate a bunch of those ideas and have that work as its own story within the movie. Truncating the season-long journey of that and making that a movie story was one of the challenges and one of the things that I wanted to do.
The hard part with anything with this show is that there’s so many talented people on it and wanting to give everybody their moments, and having to balance that with trying to tell this personal family story in the movie, and then dealing with everybody’s schedules because everybody’s schedules had changed since they were no longer contractually obligated to the show. John Clarence Stewart was doing a major recurring part on another series and we only had them for four days total. Once I’d learned that, that had to alter the plans that I have for Simon’s character in the movie. And finding that we could only get Peter Gallagher for two days because he was doingGrace and FrankieandGrey’s Anatomy, at the same time, it was about figuring out how to work Peter Gallagher in that quickly. I just knew there were certain things with Maggie that I wanted to explore. I always had this idea of her wanting Zoey to help her with her dating profile. We were gonna start to get into dating stories in Season 3, so I wanted to be able to explore that a little bit in the movie. It wasn’t in as detailed of a way, but we were definitely able to explore some of the notions that I would have had for Season 3 in the movie.
I love that we get to see Mary Steenburgen tap dancing. How did that come about? How hard was it to come up with a plausible reason of why she would be doing that?
WINSBERG: You’re hitting on some great questions. From the very beginning of the show, Mary had said to me that she could tap dance and asked if we could figure out a way to work it in. We came close in the number “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” in Season 2. It was important to Mary to be able to tap dance on the show, so I was like, “Okay, Mary, to have you feel good and excited about the movie, one of the things I’m gonna do is figure out a way to get you to tap dance again.” And then, I went through a whole bunch of iterations of, is she doing it in a Zoe-ality way? Is she doing it in a real life way? Is she doing it with Bernadette Peters, as a duet? Is she doing it alone? How do we make it plausible? When I came up with the idea that it was an old thing that she had done and used it as her arc, like maybe she would start to take up tap dancing again, it felt like it could be true to her character, and be organic and cute and charming, and not like something that you’re trying to shoehorn in . . . And Mary is such a perfectionist and wanted it to be great, so she worked really hard on it.
How much did it mean to you to get to include Peter Gallagher in this? You have this entire episode really dedicated to wanting to keep his memory alive, so would it have felt wrong if he hadn’t been involved in some way?
WINSBERG: I think so. I feel like anytime we have Peter as part of the program or the movie, his presence just adds so much. Because the show is so personal to me, my father’s birthday is Christmas day and Christmas was always an interesting day in our house. Even though we’re Jewish, we would celebrate a little bit of Hanukkah and really celebrate on Christmas morning with my dad for his birthday. Christmas and my father had become synonymous, so that first Christmas that he was gone, it was so emotional and challenging and complicated. I feel like even though people are gone, their presence is still there, so I felt like, to be able to see him and not just talk about him, is part of theZoey’sworld now. It was very important to me that he was a part of it.
I love all of the different types of musical performances you have in this. I love the big song and dance numbers, but I also love the more like intimate performances that you have with Zoey and her family at home. And then, there’s the mash-up between Zoey and Max, and the duet that they have. How hard was it to figure out how to work in so many different kinds of musical performances in this and to prepare for them all, with such a short amount of time?
WINSBERG: That’s a couple of different questions. The first question is, to me, figuring out different kinds of numbers and ways to do numbers is one of the fun things that I always loved about the show and also in the movie too. It’s about how we can constantly surprise, vary, and differentiate between the numbers. I always knew that I wanted to start with a really big musical number, and how great for the movie, if we could start with like a showy oner. That’s where “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” came from. It was like, “Let’s just do a giant oner, big number at the mall.” And then, it’s always about trying to find the balance between the different kinds of numbers to show the variety of things that (choreographer) Mandy [Moore] can do and that we can do, and that hopefully emotionally help tell the story.
The hardest parts of the movie was figuring out how many songs in the movie should be holiday songs versus known existing pop songs. And then, realistically, we had to think about what we could do with the time that we had. I gave Mandy Moore such a challenge She had two weeks of prep or less, to do 12 musical numbers. The actors were only there for four days working with her, before we started shooting, and then we had three and a half weeks of shooting. What Mandy pulled off was just monumental during that time. There were a few moments in there, for a few of the numbers, where we were worried about whether we could actually pull it off. So, the challenges were not so much in figuring out a duet versus an intimate. It was more about, how do we execute it and what was the balance of holiday songs versus other songs.
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Now that the cast is no longer under contract or the show, how much more complicated does that make the possibility of moreZoey’sin the future? Do you have any actual concrete ideas for stories you’d still like to tell?
WINSBERG: As far as the cast goes, it’s definitely complicated. Anybody, any day, can get other projects. Kapil Talwalkar is already a regular on the newNight Courtreboot on NBC. Our other actors are very in demand and are being offered stuff, left and right. I don’t think there’s any guarantees, going forward, that people will be available to us necessarily. I think with a movie schedule, it probably makes it easier to get people because it’s a more limited amount of time and a shorter commitment. So, if people wanted to make more movies, that might be easier to achieve than doing another season. It just depends on availability.
As far as my head with that stuff, before the movie, I was in such a series headspace of, “It’s gotta be more episodes.” Now that we’ve done a movie and I see how we can execute a movie, I have several ideas for more movies in my head. I’d be grateful for anything, if Roku or anybody else wants to do more. I’m open to any conversations. But I think now more than before, I’m even more open to the movie idea of it all because it seems like something tangible that, with the actor contracts and also just with ideas that I have in my head, I could wrap my head around a fewZoey’smovies.
You were also a creator and EP onAcapulco. Do you have any other TV shows up your sleeve? Are there more shows that are coming?
WINSBERG: It’s not in the press yet, but I did sell another show with actually the writer’s assistant fromZoey’sto Hulu, that I’m really proud of and that we’re working on right now. We’re just working on the pilot. And I am about to sit down with Lionsgate, the studio, and with the Tannenbaums, my producing partners, in the next couple of weeks, and I have 15 new ideas that we’re gonna talk about. But I’m reluctant to get too far into new stuff until I see howZoey’splays out. BecauseZoey’sis so personal to me and because it mixes everything that I love – comedy, drama, musical, emotion – and it checks so many boxes, it’s hard to imagine, off the top of my head, another show that will satisfy all of those things for me.Zoey’sis still my baby and I’m still hoping that there’s a life to be had there.
I love a good holiday episode of television. I have been known to watch holiday episodes of TV shows that I don’t otherwise watch, just because I love holiday episodes so much. So, I greatly appreciate that this was a Christmas movie and loved every second of it.
WINSBERG: That’s awesome. One of the things with the series was that, because we premiered in January and we never knew exactly our air dates, there was no way to do a holiday episode. There was no way to do a Halloween episode. Even Valentine’s Day was tenuous because we didn’t know if we were gonna be on after Valentine’s Day. Finally, we were not only able to get to do a Christmas thing, but it opened up such a lane for us to use all kinds of songs that we couldn’t use before. It was really exciting. The other piece that was really exciting was that, by giving Max the powers, it easily opened the door to allow Jane [Levy] to sing and dance, and she’s so good when she does it.
