James Lafferty and Stephen Colletti on Crowdfunding Their New Series ‘Everyone Is Doing Great’ [Exclusive Interview]

While at the ATX Television Festival earlier this month, we had the opportunity to see an advance screening of the Everyone Is Doing Great pilot. Afterward, I was able to speak with James Lafferty and Stephen Colletti, who co-created, co-wrote, and co-starred in the series.

Everyone Is Doing Great is a series about two actors, Jeremy (Lafferty) and Seth (Colletti), who were formerly the stars of a hit teen vampire drama called Eternal, in the vein of The Vampire Diaries.

With their careers stalling in the aftermath of the superstardom afforded to them by Eternal’s dedicated fandom, the show follows the ups and downs of the two young men’s lives as they attempt to reorient themselves and figure out what to do next, professionally and personally.

Lafferty and Colletti are close friends in real life, having previously co-starred on the hit teen drama One Tree Hill. According to Colletti, it was Lafferty who originally came up with the idea and approached him about working together to help create and star in the show.

“We share an interest in different types of comedy and some of that kind of humor, and what better way to actually be able to put yourselves in something like this than to go out and do it yourselves?” he explained. “From there, we obviously know the environment and circumstances of being in Los Angeles and being in the entertainment industry very well, so naturally, that’s the best jumping off point. And there’s a lot of stuff that we have to pull from.”

Tonally, the show is a dark comedy, and the co-creators were inspired by a few specific existing series “that find humor in really small nuanced moments.”

“We love shows like Doll and Em on HBO, Steve Kugen’s The Trip, Catastrophe, Fleabag,” Lafferty said.

“High Maintenance,” Colletti chimed in.

Obviously, there’s a “meta” quality to the show, as Lafferty and Colletti starred on a hit TV show geared towards teens that ended years ago.

“Last year, we were at this time in our lives when people were reaching out to us to just remind us that it was five years since One Tree Hill had ended,” Lafferty recalled. “It just seemed like an interesting time that we were at in our lives, but it could have been even more kind of scary if we hadn’t put ourselves in the position to continue pursuing our careers outside of acting. We both worked very hard to develop as writers, develop as directors and producers. But we both thought that there’s probably some humor to be found in a couple of guys who didn’t do anything at all to set themselves up for the next phase of their lives after something like a big hit teen show.”

That said, Everyone Is Doing Great is a complete work of fiction.

“The world is a super-exaggerated version of our world,” he continued, pointing out that the show-within-a-show Eternal was much more of a “massive sensation” than the “more quiet, kind of intimate” experience they had coming off of One Tree Hill in real life.

Lafferty and Colletti were extremely hands-on behind the scenes, and filming the pilot was a collaborative effort (though Lafferty received sole directing credit). Both also credited their executive producers, Ian and Eshom Nelms (aka, the Nelms Brothers), as instrumental in the creation of the first episode.

“I had some experience directing episodes of One Tree Hill, but it had been a while since I had been both an actor and a director on the same project. Fortunately, on Everyone Is Doing Great, me having that sole director credit is a little bit deceiving, because I do feel like the creative process on set was so, so collaborative. I was on camera so often, Stephen had to be there, at the monitor, being my eyes and ears [as a director],” Lafferty explained.

“Then we had our producing partners, the Nelms Brothers, who are directors by trade. They were this incredible influence throughout this creative process. They really helped us believe that we could pull this process together the way that we did, and then we trusted them completely with quality control,” he continued. “There was always this steady rotation of creative influences that we all trusted as part of our team to be watching and keeping tabs on things and making sure we were staying in the right direction.”

The Nelms Brothers were familiar with Lafferty’s creative process because they’d worked with him previously.

“This is our fourth project with James — the first three of which we were the directors and he was an actor who we just loved working with time and time again. He is so incredibly talented and now, to have the tables turned with him at the helm, we’re excited to collaborate with him in a different way,” the Nelms Brothers previously said in an interview with Us Weekly.

One of the more intriguing — and ultimately rewarding — creative choices the team made was the decision to forego a traditional script in favor of semi-improvised dialogue.

“One of our influences is Drake Doremus, who directed Like Crazy. It is one of those movies that makes you feel like these people had no idea that there was a camera on them. You really feel like you’re just watching people try to figure each other out and try to kind of stumble through life. And one of the ways that he achieved that is by not fully scripting his films, and we wanted to try that out,” Lafferty said.

“As it turns out, the Nelms Brothers had tried that with a successful short film that they had. They pulled us into their process, and they taught us these rehearsal exercises where we would all get together with a bottle of wine, and we would just throw motivations and scenarios into a hat on little pieces of paper, and then we would all pull them out, and we would start just basically acting like the character that it said on the card. And the next thing you know, you have all these different motivations flying off of each other, bouncing off of each other in the same room, over the course of ten minutes, and eventually the story kind of forms itself,” he continued.

The actual lines of dialogue that wound up in the final version of the pilot were all left up to the actors. Lafferty believes that they “kind of struck gold with that process,” which allowed for comedy to come out of “these genuine little awkward moments as opposed to relying on jokes.”

“It was definitely liberating to try this aspect of it. Logistically, you gotta script out some phone calls and some things, and there’s some words and suggestions, just because you need to hit specific points,” Colletti added. “But for the most part, to have just a little roadmap of motivations and a beginning, middle, and end of a scene but just go out and have at it — yeah, it was pretty interesting.”

While Lafferty admits it was “really scary sometimes” to go into filming a scene without dialogue, it definitely paid off in the end. Two of their favorite scenes ended up being ones that they were particularly unsure about while in the process of filming them.

Lafferty and Colletti have been screening their pilot on the festival circuit. So far, it’s the only episode they’ve made of the series. The remaining five episodes have been written, but the Everyone Is Doing Great team is relying on crowdfunding via Indiegogo to produce the rest of the season. For the co-creators, it was the best way to retain full creative control over their project.

“Doing this thing independently, completely independently, with our little filmmaker family and no other support outside of that, can be really scary. But every time we took one of these steps, it really seemed to pay off for us, and we seemed to learn so much. Then this whole process, and this whole thing, just meant that much more to us,” Lafferty remarked.

“We realized that crowdfunding was going to be the best way to really preserve the ownership we had over this world, and the creative integrity we have in this story. It was our dream to be able to execute an entire season the way we felt like we executed our pilot. And the best way to do that is to own it completely and crowdfund this thing so that we have the budget and we keep it kind of insular,” he continued.

Additionally, they believe crowdfunding will help to establish a fanbase for the new series ahead of time.

“The fact that we could build a community around our show before we even air our first season is really enticing to us. Crowdfunding allows you to reach out and connect with people personally, and build a family, build a little community around your project, and then that way, once you release it, out of the gate, we’ve got this core audience, we got this core of support out there,” Lafferty added.

If you’re interested in seeing a full season of Everyone Is Doing Great made reality, you can contribute financially via their Indiegogo campaign here before it ends on July 20th.

The end of the pilot finds our two leads, Jeremy and Seth, at a “crossroads where they’re going to have to face some harsh realities, and they’re going to have to lean on each other.”

Over the course of the season, as it’s been planned, they’re going to be taken “through the wringer” both professionally and personally, in their romantic relationships and friendships.

We’re also expected to see the two characters in flashbacks to their teen vampire drama Eternal, which means Lafferty and Colletti’s characters “sitting on set in their full makeup with blood coming down their faces.”

“It’s a coming-of-age story, so we’re going to take you on their journey of trying to grow up and come to the realization of exactly where they’re at in their lives,” Lafferty said.

On the red carpet with James Lafferty at the ATX Television Festival:

Check out all of our coverage of the ATX Television Festival right here.

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