The Other Two Creators Have a “Sibling-esque” Relationship

You’ll notice some stark differences when The Other Two—a sitcom about a brother and sister with some seriously famous family members—returns for season two on August 26th after an unintentional two-year hiatus. For starters, it no longer airs on Comedy Central, where it debuted in 2018. The show was scooped up by HBO Max during the shutdown.

“We did not expect that,” said co-creator and co-showrunner Sarah Schneider, one half of the creative force behind The Other Two, along with her writing partner Chris Kelly. “That was a very nice silver lining to happen in the middle of last year.”

The pair met in 2011 as new writing hires at Saturday Night Live before ascending to head writer status in 2016, revitalizing the show, and leaving just one year later to make their critical darling comedy series The Other Two. A new network isn’t the only change the duo have in store for viewers. Case Walker’s Chase Dreams—a Justin Bieber-esque tween sensation and little brother to Cary (Drew Tarver) and Brooke (Heléne Yorke)—has seemingly overnight grown into a college-bound young adult. And Molly Shannon’s mid-western mom, Pat, takes center stage as the new star of the family with a daytime talk show aptly named Pat!

The DNA of The Other Two has remained intact in its second season, combining devastatingly awkward situations with sharp cultural satire, taking on everything from HGTV to Hillsong. In a Zoom conversation with V.F., Kelly and Schneider spoke about the unexpected challenges that befell them while making season two, the “Rihanna-fication” of Chase, and their own “sibling-esque” relationship.

Vanity Fair: It’s been a long journey to get from season one to season two. You were filming the new season and then got shut down?

Sarah Schneider: Yeah. We were about four episodes-ish into the second season. The actual day we got shut down we were shooting in Central Park, comically shooting in the middle of the most people ever. We were shooting a music video with Pat that we have later in the season, and in between these big music video setups with dancers and Molly Shannon singing, we’d be like, “Ok, this isn’t looking good. We think we’re gonna shutdown for two weeks.” And then we were down for a year.

We made a little announcement that day being like, “Thanks so much. We’re just going to shut down for two weeks. We’ll reach out to you guys in a couple of Fridays. Enjoy these two weeks off!” [laughs] Such little babies, we had no idea what was coming.

In that year where were your heads at? Were you working on the show constantly or were you more like, “I’m on vacation?”

Chris Kelly: Yeah, I’d say the global pandemic was sort of just like a vacation [laughs]. We weirdly didn’t work on the show at all because there was weirdly nothing to do. We had already written all of it, and we shot out of order so we couldn’t even really edit episodes because not one episode was fully done. So we just sort of stopped for a full year and washed bags of chips before we ate them [laughs].

What was it like starting back up again?

Kelly: Everyone was very excited to have work to go to, and we were very excited to finish it. But it also was very weird to be like, “Wait, what is this show and what did we do [already]?” We had shot scenes where they, like, walk into a restaurant and then a scene in a restaurant, but we still had to shoot the scene where they walk out. It was literally like, “Okay, they’re all one year older. What did their hair look like?”

Schneider: Because we had shot pieces of it, we felt that we couldn’t really change a lot within the scripts. So we had to have a lot of talks on how to accomplish our show, which happens at a lot of events and on a large scale. So much of the reason the show works and why you believe the legitimacy of Pat and Chase is that they are at that level. The idea of having a big event where there are ten extras spread out was not in the cards. So it was having some logistical conversations about how to accomplish the scale of our show within the new confines of how to do it safely. It was definitely a new world.

Maybe it’s due to the past year, but tonally, it feels like there’s been a lot of growth between season one and season two. It’s a little darker, a little more mature, and the familial relationships, particularly the central one between Brooke and Cary, have gotten deeper.

Kelly: We do always talk about the pop culture jokes and the comedy and, like, the zaniness of it. But we do think of it as a family show. And we do want it to feel grounded. And we do want the human beings at the center of it to feel real. So I think we just kind of try to push ourselves to think of other ways to explore their relationship. In season one, the main thing was that [Brooke and Cary] were the other two to their little brother. And now we wanted to make sure it wasn’t just, “Now they’re the other two to their mother!” But as they change and grow and make progress in their own lives, how does the dynamic between the two of them change?

Schneider: [Chris and I] both have two sisters. I have a younger brother. We definitely have seen our dynamics with our siblings shift and change and evolve. We’ve gone from hating them to leaning on them so heavily. So we know and appreciate and love those sibling relationships, and we understand that they’re ever-changing. Neither of us have a popstar brother or a talk show host mother, but those kinds of sibling relationships definitely we’ve taken from our own [lives] and from Chris’s and my relationship, which is rather sibling-esque. We know how these two characters vibe because we live it every day—sometimes for many, many hours a day [laughs].

You two go way back, having been writing partners since your SNL days. Do you find yourselves drawing from that skill set for The Other Two?

Kelly: I find it way harder to do this, but I think mostly because at SNL, you wipe the slate clean every week. Every hell that you’re in or anything you’re stressed about or anything you’re trying to perfect or you’re overthinking it’s like, Saturday at eleven thirty, it’s pencils down. Game over. To live with something for two, two-and-a-half years can be exhausting. But SNL prepared us in a lot of ways because, you know, it’s such a writers’ show. If you get a sketch on the show, you’re in charge of producing it. It allows you to kind of oversee every part of the process, which kind of prepares you to help run your own show.

Schneider: SNL trained us to care about every single aspect of what we were making, from hair and costumes, the sets to, obviously, the script. And so now we still care about that, but it’s for five hours of content.

Speaking of content, season two sees pop star Chase Dreams really move away from his singing career and enter a new echelon where he’s so famous that he doesn’t have to sing anymore. We really see the “Rihanna-fication” of Chase.

Kelly: [laughs] We were like, “If she comes out with another goddamn album before this show comes out we’re going to be so pissed.”

Schneider: We have two weeks, Rihanna.

Kelly: We were like, surely she’ll come out with music in two and a half years, and, no, she said, “No.” We actually had an alt just in case. We were like, “we can make him like Rihanna… until last month” or “until recently.”

— Love Is a Crime: Inside One of Hollywood’s Wildest Scandals
— A First Look at Clerks III (Spoiler: They Still Don’t Like You)
— Why The White Lotus Was Always Going to End That Way
— David Chase Has Some Ideas About Our Continued Sopranos Obsessions
— Why Doesn’t the New Gossip Girl Feel Fun?
— Aretha Franklin: The Little-Known Traumas That Fueled Her Music
— The Unhinged Brilliance of SNL’s Cecily Strong
— Fight Club: How the Movie Foretold 9/11 and Trump
— How The Boys Became 2020’s Most Urgently Political Show
— From the Archive: Selma Blair’s Transformation
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of “Awards Insider.”