When I set out to create my award-winning prestige drama The Family, I wanted to test the boundaries of what television could be. I already knew I wanted to push the envelope by hinting at incest, having every other word of dialogue be “fuck,” and showing a character die in a gruesome manner five minutes into the first episode. Yet this didn’t feel like enough. That’s when I realized that I shouldn’t just push the envelope; I needed to flush the envelope down the toilet.
The Family was inspired by three literary masterpieces: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and Tarō Gomi’s quintessential contribution to the canon, Everyone Poops. Some critics have called the bathroom scenes in my masterpiece “gratuitous” and “weirdly and unnecessarily recurring.” But my characters are human. They cry when they are hurt, they bleed when they are cut, and they need to evacuate their bowels after eating a big burrito. By shoehorning toilet-themed tableaux into every episode of The Family, I am representing the beauty and depravity of the human experience.
For example, do you think the scene where Kathleen admits her betrayal of her brother (and maybe lover) Tyrone would have had the same emotional gravitas if she hadn’t been sitting on the crapper? Or what about when Cousin Marcus makes his impassioned plea to Tyrone not to cut him out of the family? Even though we had already seen Marcus relieving himself in the woods earlier in the episode, the fact that this explosive argument took place while both men were standing at urinals only heightened the drama. Frankly, the actor who plays Marcus should have thanked his urologist in his Emmy acceptance speech.
Of course, I should address the proverbial elephant in the restroom: the season two episode “The Bathroom.” It was heavily influenced by Quentin Tarantino’s cinematography and by a commercial I saw for Febreze Small Spaces Air Freshener. Some viewers thought we went too far by airing an episode that takes place entirely in Marcus’s guest bathroom, but who among us has not been trapped in an olfactorily unpleasant water closet and had to rise like a phoenix from the ashes to survive? Marcus’s transformation, from stinking up the bathroom to being stuck in the bathroom to finally getting out of the bathroom, is a hero’s journey of which Joseph Campbell would be proud.
I require a minimum of five toilet-related incidents or discourse per episode. I encourage our writers to play around and draw inspiration from their own lived experiences. For example, our head writer’s personal struggle with constipation inspired the intense, single-shot episode where Kathleen goes to Target to buy Ex-Lax. I know viewers were on the edge of their toilet seats, wondering if she would finally get some relief.
I also like to sprinkle bodily functions outside the toilet paradigm when appropriate. Take season one’s “The Barbecue,” where Marcus becomes violently ill with food poisoning and vomits sixteen times, including all over one of Tyrone’s children. This episode won a Golden Globe for best dramatic writing, a true testament to our writers’ commitment to embracing the full spectrum of disgusting human by-products.
Now that we’ve been fortunate enough to be renewed for a third season, I promise I will not take my foot off of the scatological gas pedal any time soon. The next ten episodes of The Family will be even more gritty, poignant, and explicitly icky than ever before. Expect the premier to pick up where the season finale left off—a close-up of Kathleen taking a home pregnancy test. Will Kathleen have the baby? Is Tyrone the father? And why, for the love of God, is this show so obsessed with showing someone using the bathroom, and, oh my god, is she peeing again?! The new season will keep you guessing. Well, not about the peeing. There will be a lot more of that.
I feel so fortunate to be able to tell the saga of The Family, and to be raking in accolades despite grossing out our viewers week after week. Now, I guess it’s about time I flushed and got ready for the People’s Choice Awards.