‘State Of The Union’: Nick Hornby On The “Chaos” Before Marriage Counseling, And Writing 10-Minute TV Episodes

The new SundanceTV series State of the Union has gotten a fair amount of buzz for a number of reasons. One, its ten episodes are only about ten minutes long. Second, it stars Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike as Tom and Louise, a couple who is attending marriage counseling. Third, the show isn’t about the counseling itself, but what Tom and Louise talk about in the pub across the street in the ten minutes before they go to their appointment. Anyone who has been through couple’s counseling knows this time well: the game-planning, the blame games, the emotions that are triggered by very minor things. It’s a raw time for a couple, and the show’s writer, Nick Hornby (who executive produces the series along with Stephen Frears, who directs all ten episodes), communicates that rawness in a very realistic manner.

Decider sat down with Hornby to talk about the series, what influenced him to try his hand at short episodes with a beginning, middle and end and why the minutes before the counseling appointment are so chaotic. And, just for fun, we asked him what Rob Fleming, Hornby’s record store-owner character in his 1995 novel High Fidelity, would be doing now in the world of Spotify.

DECIDER: How did the idea of doing a show about what couples talk about before they go into marriage therapy pop into your head?

NICK HORNBY: I think with all these things there’s a long chain of little bits of ideas. I’ve had counseling myself … There is that. But I wanted to write about counseling for a while. Whenever I thought about it, I thought it felt a little bit too on the nose to actually go into a therapist’s office and have a therapist ask questions and then try to answer them more or less directly or not say anything at all. Whereas that time before struck me as having the potential for a great deal of chaos and miscommunication, and lots and lots of talk because people are on their own. The couples are on their own and liberated from all the constraints of a therapist office. It just seemed like a lot of fun to write about.

The game-planning seems to be very true to life. “What’re we going to talk about when we get in there?” In your experience, have you and other couples that you know, have they discussed that?

I think it’s something that you intend to do, maybe, is to have an idea, but of course, life gets in the way. As they keep saying, its talks about talks, and something happens in the previous day that knocks the agenda askew.

A lot of stuff happens in that walk between the pub and the office. Where did you get that idea the plot thickens or changes in that one-minute walk between?

Well, one of the things I wanted to do with the show is for the show to have a story over the ten episodes, but for each episode to have a beginning, middle, and an end. The way it was set up, then the end of the show was frequently going to be crossing the road, but it also stiffens the sinews, as it were, knowing that you are about to knock on the door so that last minute is particularly pressured.

With this kind of story how difficult is it to tell that arc in a way that you are eluding to events in it but not saying it outright because they are not talking about it in therapy because you are not seeing that part? They already know what’s going on in their lives but the audience doesn’t.

That’s the challenge of the fun of the challenge, I think, is to make it appear that they are talking to each other completely naturally while at the same time you are imparting information for the audience. It’s kind of a cool way of writing and I enjoyed that any time anything felt a bit contrived or the information being part of it as contrived, or felt bad in any way or in error, then it got the chop. All I can say, really, it was absorbing and it was fun to do.

What’s an example of something where you had to rework something so it sounded a little less contrived?

Well, I suppose, you know, the way it set up. The first episode I had two or three steps with that, so that when [Louise is] telling us that she’s actually slept with someone else in a way that feels natural to them and, hopefully, feels to an audience. [Tom is] asking her how many times they slept together. It certainly conceivable that they might not have had that conversation until that point because the fact is that she’s been unfaithful, and he suddenly finds he wants to go to the nitty-gritty. And, I think there were two or three occasions like that throughout the series that it, like he’s … How do you announce that he’s moved out; she puts his underwear on the table and it tells you what you need to know.

It seems like Tom is taking the black and white view on Louise’s infidelity, and Louise is taking the more nuanced view, and that’s were a lot of the conflict is. How difficult is it to not blame one person or another in this kind of situation?

Well, it was built into it for me, but what I wanted to do was portray the character of the marriage. The best analogy [is that a marriage is] like a child, a creation of both the husband and the wife. It was something stands in between them, they’ve created it and it’s separate from themselves. I didn’t want to write about who’s right and whose wrong, particularly; I wanted to make sure that it felt reasonably balanced. That she’d been unfaithful but had been, as it were, driven demented to the point of infidelity. It’s clearly a six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other [type of] case. [Tom is] trying to take the moral high ground which is his method of attack. He can never really do it.

Was there any piece of character development that you couldn’t get to because either the format or the time constraints?

Well, I guess the thing that kinda gets cut out of the format is their life as parents and the children are not in the piece. And I didn’t particularly want them to be in the piece, but parenthood is, you know, is brutal [Laughs]. It does brutal things to relationships. I guess without the kids there, it’s harder to see that. You could only report that, which I didn’t want to do so much. But I really didn’t want to get right outside the room. You know, the whole point to me was to keep everything in the part, and that meant, for me, keeping it to the problems between them.

The arc seems largely positive, but you know and I know that arc doesn’t naturally go that way. Was there an instinct to end the season differently than the way you ended it?

Did I have an instinct? No. The instinct was to give them and anyone else who feels they are in a permanent state of crisis some reason to be optimistic about their lives. I mean I think that isn’t an ignoble ambition for a writer, obviously; but I think that it acknowledges complications and difficulties, and the place they end up is sort of about trying to live within the rather shaky foundation of their marriage. So it’s kind upbeat without being ridiculously optimistic.

Why do you think people do that? They decide to stay in a marriage that is problematic and has had flaws; whereas, some other people decide that “We can’t do this anymore”?

It’s a very interesting question, and I think that the whole subject of marriage is so rich and complex because even now it’s like lots of people stay married even though it’s relatively easy not to be married. I can only think that we set roots so deeply which then become entwined around each other. It’s very hard to imagine an equally fulfilling life without the other person in it because you’re uprooting everything.

So it’s not complacency but just the fact that you’ve created this life around this other person?

Yes, definitely not complacency. Not just of the other person but other people, as well. You know, obviously you share children, you get involved with each other’s extended families. By the time you get to a certain point in marriage, all friends are shared friends. It’s a very complicated eco-structure which, I think, can seem to offer enough consolation to see it through.

From what I’ve read, when you saw the web version of High Maintenance, that was your clue that you could do something that has a beginning, middle and end, and arc and heavy dialogue in ten minutes. What was it about the show that let you know that, hey, this could be done?

Well, simply the length of it and the satisfaction that it provided. They did a beautiful job with getting inside lots of different worlds and giving you a glimpse of those worlds. Obviously, my show’s different because each of those was complete, and I want to write a series which had an arc and ended in a certain place. One thing that the internet has done is making you realize, really, that all the forms that we thought were natural in some way, that it’s deeply permeated into us that TV shows are 30 minutes or 60 minutes, and that books are 300 pages, and that record albums are 40 minutes, but then they became 70 minutes because of CDs. All of this is really just technologically decided and now we’re in this situation that all of these things have been taken away. It’s kinda interesting and exciting.

I’ve always had this idea that if you ever have a bus journey that you could watch one or two episodes on the way to work.

Since the episodes are all dialogue it’s actually more advantageous to you as a writer. Does that speak to the novelist in you more than the screenwriter in you?

Yeah, at that point I would not have to distinguish between them. Certainly the novelist part in that there is no one there to stop you. No one tells you when you are writing your novel that a three-page scene is too long. If they are enjoying it then they say write some more or write as much as you want, and so that instinct could keep something going is novelistic, I guess. It’s weird, but the 10-minute format allows you to cut loose in a way you wouldn’t have imagined.

Give me an example of an episode where you were never been able to do something in a writing movie or a normal TV show where the scene changes, and set changes and things like that.

Well, it’s hard for someone who had written a show in which someone spends some time in an episode trying to fill in a crossword on a wet piece of paper; and I don’t think you are going to see that in many movies anytime soon.

And that led to the discussion of their newspaper and it spun out from there. In your mind how do you structure that where it starts from something simple and it escalates out into a referendum on their marriage?

I wing it. The crossword was kind of a running theme. [Tom was] always waiting to have some fun with the crossword [at the pub]. Now he’s not, he doesn’t have access to the paper any more, the family paper, anyway; and then because you have these short periods of time I need to get from where they’re talking about what they need to be talking about again, and I need to get that pretty quickly from talking about the wet paper to the marriage. I can’t remember how quickly it came but it, I guess, with that couple it’s always underneath. You know, there’s always the subject of what their talking about.

What made you think that Stephen Frears, whom you’ve worked with him before, would be the best producing partner and the best choice to direct the episodes?

Well, what I love about Stephen is that he responds only to script, and he’s made such a wide range of things and everything is to do with writing and character, and it doesn’t matter to him whether you’re sitting in a train traveling 300 miles through the old west or whatever, or it’s two people sitting in a park. He doesn’t have, in his mind, he doesn’t have the distinction between what’s reasonable and what isn’t reasonable. He loves that truth and he knows what to do with faces, and he made such good use of what little space and variety he had available to him, and because I knew he would be interested in trying to do that. He’s such an interesting man, I think.

How big of a challenge to Chris and Rosamund was the volume of dialogue?

I figured it’s funny, you send them the script, and you know actors kind of flip through and see, “Where is me, where is me?” And their initial response [to this script] is, “Whoa, I’m there! Whoa, I’m there!”, and then they [realize that they have] 50 percent of the script, and there’s nothing else. But the reality of when you’re seven days in, and you’re doing ten pages a day [Laughs]… it was a big challenge for them. They had to remember big chunks and be fluent with the big chunks, and they’re brilliant at it. It was hard work, and it was really the hottest three weeks that it’s ever been in England in my life. We keep them cool. It was, I think, fun for them.

What is the biggest thing you learned from doing this, as far as, what you might want to do going forward?

I think you learn something every time anything gets made, actually. I think I learned that it could be done, and I have, I obviously had doubts. I didn’t know whether people would want to do it. I think a lot of actors are not as hidebound by convention as I had suspected they would be. So it would embolden me to try anything different, actually, on the assumption that if the actors liked it well enough they’d do it. I want to do a second season of this with two different actors, and it’s given me the courage to try that.

I’ve been a big fan of High Fidelity, both the novel and the movie, for a long time now. I actually quoted you in a long-ago essay I did about why making mixed CDs aren’t as fun as making mixed tapes. Do you think if you wrote the book now, how different would it be? What would Rob be doing? Would he still be working the record store or would it be some other thing, would he be reeling in something else?

Very interesting because I’m helping out with the TV series that’s being made now a little bit, [the one] with Zoe Kravitz and it’s set now, so they’re taking all that stuff on board, the whole kind of Spotify, Shazam-type thing. Yeah [record stores have] sort of been surviving and whenever I thought about what Rob was doing in the time since, I could never think that he was working still in music. I don’t think that the shops have lasted, most of them. I mean, obviously, you got Amoeba Music and things like that, but I think the sort of place that Rob had would have gone by the end of the ’90s. God knows what he’d be [laughs]. He’d be going mad trying to make a living. If he had any money or got any money put away, he probably could make another go of it now.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.