For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our article interviewing Vanessa Ramos about Netflix’s Blockbuster from Backstory Magazine’s issue 47 – now available to read! This is not the full article – so, if you enjoy what you’ve read in this free excerpt – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by by subscribing to Backstory Magazine so you can read the rest of the piece and so much more!
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Veteran writer Vanessa Ramos clocks in as showrunner for Netflix’s new workplace comedy about the video chain’s last store.
By Danny Munso
In the pilot episode of Blockbuster, Randall Park’s Timmy proclaims, “Humans need to interact with each other.” It is the thesis of Netflix’s new comedy series that follows the owner and dedicated staff of the last Blockbuster Video in existence as they attempt to turn the extinct chain store into a successful small business. But what the show is really about is the need for human connection and community. It’s the brainchild of the brilliant Vanessa Ramos, who has spent the last decade producing and writing your favorite episodes of shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Superstore, Mr. Mayor, Kenanand others. Blockbuster is her first crack at showrunning, and if the series’ heartfelt and hilarious writing is any indication, it most certainly won’t be her last.
The idea for the series began with longtime producer John Fox, who had previously acquired the rights to the Blockbuster name and logo after it went out of business. He approached Ramos and TV vet David Caspe (Happy Endings) and asked if they would be interested in setting a workplace comedy at the video chain. “Before he even finished the sentence, I said yes, absolutely,” Ramos recalls. “I will figure it out.” Given the series’ overarching theme, it’s perhaps not a surprise that Ramos began crafting the show in 2020 over the course of the COVID lockdown. Like a lot of us, she was processing being separated from loved ones, and that led to what would become the cast of characters that make up Blockbuster. “I live by myself and had just adopted this beagle puppy who was teething and biting me all the time. It was a dark time, but it ended up being good because the characters were birthed out of me missing my family and friends and yearning for that human connection we talk about in the pilot.”
The show’s core relationship is between Timmy, who now runs the same store where he has worked since high school, and Eliza (Melissa Fumero), his high school friend/unrequited love interest who is forced to get a job at the store after moving out of her home upon her husband’s affair. They are supported by fellow workers: older woman Connie (Olga Merediz), aspiring filmmaker Carlos (Tyler Alvarez), his innocent friend Hannah (Madeline Arthur) and over-it teenager Kayla (Kamaia Fairburn), whose father, Percy (J.B. Smoove), is Timmy’s best friend and owns the minimall where the store is located. “I had to think about who would be running a Blockbuster in 2022,” Ramos says. “There has to be a reason beyond just loving movies. He has to have this personal connection to it. So he was my way in, and then everyone else came from me being by myself and wanting to put together a fantasy team of people I wanted to hang out with. Connie is based on my mom, Carlos is based on a guy I grew up with named Antonio, Hannah is based on my sister-in-law, and then I exaggerated them a little bit and looked into what energy compliments them all.”
Vanessa Ramos
Ramos’ deal with Universal Television led to her first pitching the idea to NBC, which bought the project. But after she penned the pilot, the network decided to drop out and Universal began shopping the show to other networks, where it found a home with Netflix, which came with a heavy dose of irony given that Netflix’s rise contributed mightily to Blockbuster’s gradual decline. The streamer immediately greenlit a 10-episode first season, and Ramos brought in her friend Jackie Clarke, who co-created Kenan with Caspe and first worked with Ramos on Superstore as a fellow executive producer. The two began plotting out a general roadmap for season one while working out of Ramos’ new home, which came with an unwanted feature—a man cave, which redeemed itself when the pair turned it into something of a writers’ room and eventually an edit bay. They stocked up the room’s built-in coolers, once clearly meant for beer, with La Croix, and the football jerseys that adorned the wall were replaced by boards filled with cards that charted the budding show’s various plot points and characters.
Having been in enough writers’ rooms to know how she wanted hers to work, Ramos thought already having a roadmap in place was the way to go. “I think some people like the blue-sky element where it can be anything,” she says. “In my brain, I get very overwhelmed. I need some sort of parameters.” While the other writers would participate via Zoom due to the pandemic, Ramos and Clarke hunkered down in person and kept up the big board. “I’m a visual person, so I don’t know that I could have made it without that. I need to see the cards moving around. Having that was essential to making sure all of our characters had balanced stories. That’s something I’m proud of with our show, that each character seems to get a story that they’re leading. Having the cards, I could see that we had a couple Connie stories spread out and a couple of Carlos stories spread out. Everyone got their moment.” Each character getting a proper spotlight is even more challenging considering the season is only 10 episodes, as Ramos and Clarke come from the world of network television, where most sitcom seasons are 22.
The season length became particularly tricky in mapping out the will-they-or-won’t-they relationship between Timmy and Eliza, a saga that is anything but resolved at the end. “With 22 episodes, you’d really have time to build up these characters and fall in love with them before getting them together or not getting them together,” Ramos says. “You have less runway [for that to play out] with 10. I was careful with picking my places to show their dynamic. I think that was the biggest challenge, so I’m hoping people are invested early enough for it to pay off later.” The way the writers handled Eliza’s troubled marriage is a prime example of the series’ high-quality writing. At the end of the pilot, Eliza is inspired by Timmy’s own strong feelings on the divorce of his parents and the negative impact on him to give her husband, Aaron (Leonard Robinson) another chance because they share a daughter. Though the audience is clearly rooting for Timmy and Eliza, her logic is sound. This is further complicated when we see Aaron in a few different episodes. Ramos and the writers made the astute decision to make him—despite his huge mistake—an affable guy trying to make things right with his wife. Ramos credits part of that to the casting of Robinson, which grew Aaron’s role in the season. “We didn’t know how much of him we were going to put in there, but Leonard Robinson is so likable it made us want to write him a little more complex. And you want to feel not as bummed out when she sticks around for her daughter. If he was a bad guy, I think you’d just want her to get out of it. It wouldn’t feel like she’s torn between anything. I think he’s a good enough guy who just made a mistake, and you can see where she’s like ‘Okay, we have a kid together and we’ve been together since high school.’ You get why she tries to make it work.”
The show’s humor is somehow both broad and specific. The writing navigates the feel-good humor that made shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation so watchable while injecting references so random and obscure that if you are one of the few to get it, you’ll be thinking about the joke for days. The first season contains a ton of deep-cut film references—including one about the ’90s comedy Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead—and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references to things that range from the comic strip Cathy to the ’80s computer game Minesweeper. “I worked on shows where you pitch on something and [the showrunner] goes, ‘Okay, guys, that makes us laugh, but is an audience going to get that?’ ” Ramos says. “Now I get to be the one to decide, and maybe that’s a With great power comes great responsibility thing. We just went for it.” The funniest running gag of the season is born out of, as Ramos puts it, “unmerited spite.” In the pilot, Timmy is interviewed by the town’s most famous local newscaster, Remington Alexander (Simon Druker), then in the next episode, during a brief local news clip, the female anchor informs the audience she is filling in while Alexander is on vacation. Each subsequent appearance by a local news anchor in each episode is a different character, and each announces they are filling in for the previous one. It’s basically one giant, season-long inside joke. “When David Caspe read the second episode, he said, ‘Just make sure the newscaster is the same one as in the pilot.’ Just to mess with him, we made it different every time. Some people caught it, and some did not.” The bit pays off in the finale, when Alexander himself returns to the news with a massive vacation tan.
A writer’s ability to pen jokes is the first thing Ramos looked for when hiring for the series. “I love when people think of jokes my brain never would have,” she says. “When I read someone and I see something different or interesting, I want to riff off them. It’s injecting the brain with this thing no one else has.” While storytelling is important to her when reading a prospective writer’s scripts, it’s not as vital as the ability to be funny in a way that is unique to that person, which they will then bring to the show. “I am 10 years in as a writer. I know how to do structure and story, and we have people who have a good handle on that. It’s not something the room is lacking. That’s why jokes are much more interesting to us.” With the show having just premiered, Netflix has not given word whether a second season will be ordered. Ramos is using the time to craft a new series idea, also alongside Clarke, though definitely hoping there will be more Blockbuster ahead. “Right now I’m sort of hanging tight and having anxiety attacks because it’s my first time as a ‘created by.’ I still feel like I tricked someone into giving me a show. Part of me feels I’m about to find out if I’m funny or not.” She’ll likely find out much more than that, as the comedy landscape needs more series like Blockbuster—deftly funny but with something profound to say.
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