Most television lovers have one: an episode that left an indelible imprint long after the credits rolled. But which made the cut for the six creative minds on The Envelope’s 2026 Emmy Writers Roundtable?
For Megan Gallagher (“All Her Fault”), it’s the series finale of “The Americans.” Jonathan Glatzer (“The Audacity”) selected the pilot of “Breaking Bad”: “When those pants fly up in the air in the beginning, I was just like, ‘What in the hell?’ And I was completely sucked in.”
Others went further back. Andrew Guest (“Wonder Man”) named “Seinfeld’s” “The Marine Biologist.” Bruce Miller (“The Testaments”) praised the pilot of “My So-Called Life.” And Sonja Warfield (“The Gilded Age”) is still thinking about an episode from the third season of “thirtysomething,” which featured the corporate-buyout storyline involving Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) and the spy posing as an office painter to listen in on his plan: “The painter was a Black woman,” Warfield said. “What struck me about that was that she was invisible to him. And in the end, she’s wearing a suit, and he can see that she had all of the information.”
Michael Patrick King (“The Comeback”) dug even deeper into the vault with “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” from “I Love Lucy.” The memory of a tipsy Lucy trying to sell a health tonic known as Vitameatavegamin left such a lasting impression that, while working on “Murphy Brown,” King got his hands on a copy of the script page with Lucy’s slurred spiel: “Lucy didn’t improvise anything,” King said. “The writing on the side is ‘bats eyes, winks, slips’ — it’s all on the side in stage directions.”
Of course, these writers are getting viewers talking with their own work too. Here, they discuss their series, the threat artificial intelligence poses to the entertainment industry, why producing TV shows in L.A. matters and much more. Read on for excerpts from our conversation.
Between the six of you, you’re touching on some powerful and risky themes in the series that you’re working on, whether it’s sexism, classism, delusional power, grief. Bruce, with something like “The Testaments,” what made you nervous about the themes you were exploring with teenage characters?
Miller: What really happens is so much harsher and worse and just unimaginably terrible that you can’t show it on television. … You can’t candy-coat it, but on the other hand, what do you show so that the audience gets the idea without not being able to watch the television show?
There were some scenes of molestation in the first couple of episodes, and the actors worked on it quite a long time. But in editing, we ended up cutting most of it out. The hard part on the show is that if you’re going to deal with these issues, you have to deal with them. You have to do it in a way that you’re not going to — because I’m very squidgy too — look away and just turn off the television, because that’s how we got in these problems in the first place.
Michael, you’ve worked on shows like “Murphy Brown,” “Will & Grace,” “Sex and the City” and “The Comeback.” Was there ever something you were nervous about pitching or seeing how you would tackle a subject matter?
King: It’s always the thing is, how are you going to find your wall, where you stop and think, “That’s too far”? “The Comeback” this season, the scary thought was, “We’re going to tackle [artificial intelligence], which is great because it’s rich and it’s fear-based and it’s comic.” But [in] the middle of the writing room, somebody said to [star] Lisa [Kudrow] and I, “So what’s the moral of the story for writers?” And it stopped me for two days. I was like, “Am I supposed to divine an idea that gets everybody happy at the end?” And so we talked about it, and finally we realized we’re just reporting from the front lines.
How are you feeling about this moment and the debate about AI? What are your fears about this, and what was it like working through some of that in the show?
King: Lisa is a very smart, almost scientific mind, and we didn’t want to go out there pretending something was going to happen, so we got a lot of information. And what we learned was it’s very far advanced, past what we even think. The joke is ChatGPT, but it’s further. But I always think: We thought reality TV was the end of narrative television when we did the first season of “The Comeback.” Then we went on to have what they’re calling the second golden age of television, and reality TV just became this weird, tacky wing on the house. I’m guessing maybe that could happen again where there’s a weird, tacky AI wing that is just that kind of content, but people will still maybe be looking for well-made, handmade things.
Miller: If it solves climate change, it can have my job.
Guest: If AI could do our jobs as writers, it would be doing it. Believe me, there’s plenty of people who are trying to get AI to do our jobs and it’s not working. People look to storytelling for something very specific. And AI is collective information. You don’t go to a story for a collective point of view on the world, you want your point of view. And the thing that’s magical about storytelling is the more specific you make your point of view, the more I connect with it. And that’s something that collective information can’t do.
Gallagher: I heard somebody say something that made me feel a little bit better, which is that no matter how much AI learns, AI doesn’t have any experience.
Warfield: It’s never had lived experience.
Gallagher: Exactly. That’s never going to happen. And if you don’t have any lived experience, and I’m not saying it won’t be a threat to our jobs in some level, in some ways, but … If you haven’t lived through something, how on earth can you tell that?
Warfield: But also, I just have to say, AI is not always right. In fact, it’s very, very wrong. And working on a historical drama, we’ve had people Google things, and in fact they Googled something about Frederick Douglass being at this very important American event. And AI said he was there. Guess what? He wasn’t. In fact, he was literally in Europe. And it’s provable that he was in Europe. So on our show, which is a historical drama, we have a real historian who checks the database, who checks newspapers from the 1800s, and we have PhD candidates who also do that. So AI is not always correct.
King: I have one interesting story that we learned from the researchers, which is that AI only gives you stuff that you’re going to react to favorably.
Guest: It wants you to like it. And to keep using it.
King: It’s only the humans that will kill a baby for a story. It’s only the humans that will say, “This is so painful, you won’t like it.” The AI at this point will only give you affirmations of your own power or things you like.
Glatzer: My own kid is 17 years old, he hates AI and finds it deeply uncool, and I think that is great. AI should find its place in the world and help what it can help. And stay out of what we do because what we do is the business of humanity, of chronicling it, of commenting upon it. And that’s not where it ought to be.
Intuitively, audiences, like my son, are just feeling that. Like, “No, I don’t want to hear about my life or hold up a mirror to my world by a machine that slices and dices and juliennes all of our experiences into some slop.” There’s a real — always will be — genuine desire for authenticity, and that is the opposite of what AI provides. It would be great if it can solve climate change, that would be really, really f— great. Unfortunately, it’s going to make it a lot worse first. … But in terms of the long game, I don’t see it as being a primary storyteller of the human experience. That’s our job.
Jonathan, you watched “Silicon Valley,” which was much more of a comedy-forward satire on this world. And you didn’t necessarily want that tone for “The Audacity” because we’re at a different point with tech. Tell me about what you wanted this show to be and what you wanted it to have us thinking about.
Glatzer: There is an inherent question in our show in terms of, “Do we want these people who are dictating to us how we communicate with each other and how we engage as human beings, how we shop … political beliefs and our religion and everything, all the way to sex and masturbation?” And by the way, they’re watching it all. All of the things that we do interact with, it’s all being recorded. And that’s part of why data centers are so big, is that they will not erase anything. None of that is great for banter between two characters. … These are just these things that, when you’re researching and telling stories about tech, can really weigh on you. And you don’t want to be frivolous about it, you don’t want to be glib about it. So I guess the way forward was to try to remind us of our own humanity, all 7 billion tech users, remind us that we need to hang onto that because otherwise we’re going to lose it. We’re losing it already, the way that we communicate with each other. And of course, the irony is that these people who are notoriously bad at communicating themselves are the ones who are dictating how we in fact communicate to each other.
Sonja, many have said that the Gilded Age is back, with the robber barons of this era being the tech billionaires. In your show, George Russell engages in business practices that are unethical or potentially illegal.
Warfield: That’s not any different than what’s happening right now.
Yet he’s not necessarily portrayed as a villain; he’s very much a family man. What has fascinated you about exploring a man like George Russell?
Warfield: We were very careful in Season 2 when there was a standoff with the union. We drew from history. Because there were robber barons who did engage the militia and have them shoot the workers. [Creator] Julian [Fellowes] said he did not want to do that. And so I said, “Well, let’s humanize these people.” Because that’s the difference. And what George originally tried to do was bring their “union leader” to his house in New York on 61st Street and impress him. And so I said, “Let’s have George go to the worker’s house, the steelworker’s house, and humanize him and see his family and his children and see how he lives.” In that moment in Season 2, when George is supposed to give the order to shoot, he sees the son of the worker and decides he’s not going to. So I think bringing humanity to him — which I don’t know exists in some of the oligarchs/billionaires today; they don’t necessarily see the humanity in their workers — [to] see that humanity is what helps me write for George.
Glatzer: That’s a lot of what we’re dealing with too, is just humanizing the people who are villainized otherwise and reminding them of their own humanity. Also, their fallibility is something that, at least in the Silicon Valley realm, they have lost touch with — the idea that they could make mistakes.
Warfield: Because they live in this bubble where everyone is telling them how fantastic and amazing they are, and they’re all just together and they’re insulated.
Megan, even with the title “All Her Fault,” you’re challenging viewers to think about our own gender bias and how we view things. What were the conversations like in the room about the gender expectations and the way you wanted to subvert them?
Gallagher: God, the gender themes in “All Her Fault” are massively important. And we had a small, intimate writers’ room where pretty much everyone was parents. And so after a few days of getting to know each other, it very quickly devolved into, “G— it, my husband does that all the time,” or whatever, that kind of thing. We also had a lot of men in the room who were really good sports and were great. Pretty much every woman I know between the ages of about 35 to 55 who has kids and is married, every single one of them that I know has dropped their kid off at school and sobbed in the parking lot before going to work. And the sentence I always hear when we catch up is, “I literally don’t understand how this is supposed to get done.” And it’s just this idea that women who are now firmly in the workplace, and more or less expected to be and want to be — I was raised wanting to be into the work world, I wasn’t raised wanting to be a mother only — but we’re still the default parent. Generally speaking, we’re still the ones that know the names of the teachers and names of the doctors, and [responsible] if someone needs to go to the dentist and the soccer uniform has to be clean for Saturday’s game. … Every single woman I knew, pretty much, was in this position. It hasn’t been a front-and-center theme that really has been tackled [on a TV series]. And of course, the kidnapping as a genre motor was a great excuse to break all that wide open.
Michael, in addition to “The Comeback,” you made “And Just Like That…,” which was revisiting the “Sex and the City” characters at a different stage in life. It was interesting to see the conversations happening about these characters because viewers felt like they had a better sense of where the characters would be at this stage than maybe you did or what you gave us. What was that like for you?
King: The result was in a direct contrast to my interest; my interest is evolution. That’s the only thing I’m interested in. I want to see where they are, what is happening. And what happened was, it was really well made, but it wasn’t their Carrie. … The great news is that you created characters that people love, so much so that they want to see them again. And then if they behave [differently], they would say, “That’s not my Miranda.” And I was like, “But it’s my Miranda because I wrote her, but I understand it’s not what you want to see.” It’s an interesting trick, because in order for us to do anything, you don’t want to repeat or freeze-dry anything; why bother if you’re not going to shake it up? But then you have to be pretty aware that you could be shaken up too by the reaction, which is not exactly what you expected. Even though you stand behind it, you go, “Wow, that’s a surprise. I thought that they would be interested in 57-year-old women who still hadn’t figured everything out. And instead they wanted them to be 35 and still allowed to be lost.”
Andrew, how about fan expectations from the Marvel universe — what were you nervous about?
Guest: Working for Marvel comes with a lot of baggage. And you can’t really win no matter what you do. One of the nice things was this character, Simon Williams, was lesser known. So I didn’t feel like there was a ton of feelings about it. But certainly when it came to the tone of the show, being concerned that the fans were going to be like, “What is this show? Why are they doing monologues about Shakespeare for 10 minutes in this episode?” And the truth was the fans were thrilled. They want Marvel to try other things. They’re so excited. And I feel like it shared some DNA with what makes a Marvel show a Marvel show. And allowed us to really just do our own thing, which was really nice.
An issue that’s generating a lot of discussion in the industry is production in L.A. How important is it to you? What are we losing by not having it as a training ground in the same way as maybe when you came up?
Miller: I’ve been on shows that have shot in Los Angeles and I’ve been on shows that have shot outside of Los Angeles. I just think you overshoot a place [as a location]. Growing up, every single show, no matter where it was set, was in Southern California. And the quality of the light and the quality of the hills and all that stuff, it’s just shot out. I don’t think it has anything to do with the crews. I think when you work on set, they’re astonishing. I think as a location, though, it’s pretty shot out. As a place to go on stage, there’s no place better. You can’t get Bastard Amber [lighting] gel at 4 in the morning in Toronto.
Is there something a mayoral or gubernatorial candidate should say about this moment that would make you vote for them?
King: Hollywood works when you let it. I shot “The Comeback” on [the] Warner Brothers [lot]. It was a show about Hollywood in Hollywood. And if you could see the crew coming to work a mile from their house, it was just the happiest crew in the world. … It’s a big industry. And entertainment is almost America’s gross national product. So you better start guarding it better.
Guest: Having just shot in Los Angeles on two different projects, I can tell you that the crews are unmatched. And getting to see them be thrilled to continue to do the jobs they do is just fabulous. And “Wonder Man” is about this town. It’s about people who come here with dreams of doing this job. And for every crew member, every department head, it was personal. It was their story. And they imbued all that into making that show. We got to set a whole episode in Pacoima. When was the last time a Marvel show did that? The other thing about this city is there’s also so many people who may not be working in entertainment who are affected by the loss of work in entertainment. And to me, it’s really sad to see. Because the writing advice I used to give 15 years ago was move to L.A. first and then figure it out. And I don’t say that anymore.
What do you say?
Guest: God. I don’t know.
King: Move to Pacoima.
Miller: When I entered the business was so long ago, it’s meaningless, my advice. How to get into the business? I took a Conestoga wagon out here.
Michael, what advice do you give?
King: That there’s no one who’s going to have your journey, so try to just believe your own unfounded drive and see where it gets you. Because if you look around, everybody’s journeys are completely different. I think it’s tough that there’s no pipeline right now. … There’s no 23 shows on that need 16 writers.
Guest: That go 10 months out of the year.
King: That go for 25 episodes where you always are in the room with — “Oh, there’s 12 people.” Three will survive. It’s like “The Hunger Games.”
Warfield: I just gave someone advice, which was, “Just be open to wherever it’s going to take you.” I know a young woman who is an aspiring writer and she’s graduating this month. And she plans on moving to L.A. And I said, “But be open if there’s a job in New York or they’re building studios in New Jersey.” Because again, 15, 20 years ago, I would have said, “Come to L.A., make relationships,” all of that. But there’s so many different ways that this younger generation can be connected where we couldn’t. We had to be here. Anything’s possible, and you just have to be courageous and see where it takes you.
Glatzer: I think courageous is probably it. Because [it’s] also a little insane to come here … a little delusional. Figure out what your voice is, and that’s the thing that you got to ride. There will always be a thirst for originality and something that hasn’t been done before. And to stay true to yourself along the way. You don’t lose your soul doing that.
Gallagher: If you’re talking about giving advice, you’re usually talking to somebody who’s in their mid-20s or early 20s who’s getting started. I just remember being that age and thinking that Hollywood was this thing that was about who you knew. And 25 years out from that … everyone I know who has sustained a career in this industry wasn’t connected to anybody and didn’t get into some magical party. They just put their head down and worked really hard. Now, the industry is so rough these days, and working really hard is not a guarantee of anything. But of everybody that I know who has managed to sustain a career, it really is just about hard work. And I find that a comfort because it makes me feel like I’m more in control of my situation.
Miller: But the most fun part of it, I think, is work. You sit down with a writer, you say, “I know it’s hard, but every single person you work with, someone said to them at some point in their life, ‘You’re not going to make any money out of this, you should do something else.’” You’ve got a whole business full of people, someone said to them, “I know you’re really good, but you’re never ever going to make a living doing that.” And they said, “Eh, I’ll do it anyway.” I mean, that’s an incredible community of people. You may be nervous about getting into it, but it is the community of people who were nervous to get into it. I love that about our business. It’s just a bunch of people who just decided not to listen to their parents.
The 2026 Emmy Writers Roundtable: Megan Gallagher, from left, Michael Patrick King, Jonathan Glatzer, Andrew Guest, Bruce Miller and Sonja Warfield.