Dan Fogelman
speaker
160 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Dan Fogelman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Everybody stop. He's back. I can't believe you guys have a live audience now. This is amazing.
Yeah, I mean, it was a lot. It was a lot on our writers, I think, and the people that were constantly in charge of distributing scripts. We were so anxious back then. In retrospect, it was probably a little silly. I don't know what we were worried was going to happen that one of the few people who had access to it was going to put it on the internet. I guess that's what we were worried about.
I'm less worried about it now because it's like everything's out there all the time. And so I just remember boards were constantly going down. Our writer's assistants were constantly taking pictures of things. We started realizing that every time we left our office, we were leaving the cards out everywhere that said what happened in the show.
And there were tour groups coming through, and that started freaking everybody out.
They're bringing tours through the writer's room.
I don't think they could go inside the office. But you know, those places are like, the temperature control in those places is terrible in those offices. So we're always having the windows open or closed depending on how hot or freezing it was in there. Because it was from 1892.
Yeah, and so we were sitting and taking such great care to protect the secrets and then realized there were tour groups just driving by with the windows open that could look right in the window and see everything.
It was more, we just really built it out. We knew from the very beginning in those first couple of weeks that it was going to be a house fire, that he wasn't going to die in the house fire, that he was going to die from the after effects of it, that those after effects were going to have been caused by going back in for the family dog. So we knew all that.
And then it was just really a matter of like parsing it out and making sure everything we told up until that point had been delivered at the right time and the right way. And just, it's kind of easy when you know the end. Like it's not as hard as it seems.
The ironic part was, I think, when I came into the writer's room, I believe... I had a couple of scripts. We definitely had the pilot done. And I might have written the second script already. I can't remember. And I kind of, whenever I'm starting a writer's room, I send out a document to the writers that says, here's what the show is. Here's what I don't know yet. Here's kind of my plan.
And I'm pretty sure House Fire was just ingrained from the beginning. Yeah, okay. And all the detail of it, the going back in for the dog and the after effects of it. But I think just it was a decision I made early in that early document that just held. I think I thought...
for a show that was gonna be about a family, that this hinge point being the burning down of their house would be like an interesting way to do it. Sure. I don't think it was something we backed into. I think we had that and then we backed into the steps of how to get there.
The ironic part was that when we made the show, it never occurred to me how big a deal the mystery of Jack's death was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be a small component. And when I'd wrote it out, I'd be like, oh, we'll eventually get to the part where you reveal how it happened and that there was a fire.
it wasn't until like the first episode started screening and people were like, where's the dad? And the second episode, what happened to the dad? And it took on a life of its own. It was always part of the fabric, but I didn't realize what a big deal it was going to become.
And in some ways, I think that became our superpower early on, which was we had this propulsive mystery underneath what was otherwise a very intimate, small family drama. We had this big question and mystery that I actually hadn't planned on being
Yeah, of course. But it was scary at that time because it had taken on a life of its own. Myla had become this character that people were just like obsessed with, like a TV dad, Jack. His name's Jack. Sorry.
Yeah, yeah. Sorry. And so it had become such a big part of our conversation that it was like, it was exciting to discard it and be able to like focus on what comes next. But it was also really, really scary. Was it the most nervous?
No, no, not at all. It was nerve wracking on a global, global sense of like, oh shit, we don't have that thing to do anymore. That magic trick to play where it's like, okay, in this episode, we're gonna introduce the redheaded girl. And now we know we're getting closer to the death.
and Chrissy can't talk cryptically to Sully, Kate can't talk cryptically to Toby anymore about what happened to her father without saying it. So we lost that magic trick on episode 14. And I think a lot of shows might've tried to pull it out longer. And I was of the mind of like, this is where it should happen.
Yeah, there was a moment they even wanted to change our scheduling in the second season of the show. If you guys remember that, when they wanted to put us, change our night. Change our time slot. And I threw a conniption. But the main way we won was by me saying like, no, I have a very specific plan of like, when we're going to do Jack's death, it has to be on the Super Bowl.
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