toasting to a perfect episode The Other Two style

All of Season Two of “The Other Two” on HBOMax is laugh out loud hilarious, but I think Episode 9, “Chase & Pat Are Killing It” is a perfect episode of the specific type of humor The Other Two excels at: joke filled ridiculous situations that tenderly humiliate the characters while perfectly satirizing American pop culture and celebrity media to ultimately pay off with pathos and and affection for the characters.

It is also an episode with A LOT of sets!

Here are some little behind the scenes moments on some of them in the order they appear on screen.

the episode starts with Brooke and Cary flying First Class from New York City to LA

our challenge was to try and elevate a very old 1970’s plane set into something that could come somewhere in whiffing distance of a contemporary First Class Cabin.

Katie Lobel, the Assistant Set Decorator, and I both worked on The Flight Attendant, so we both knew a little bit about plane sets…but I’ll just say that the budget for The Flight Attendant and The Other Two are not the same at all. Think the difference of ground altitude and cruising altitude (a difference of 33,000 feet yet the numerical difference in budget is way more than $33,000).

Anyways so we had to get resourceful we thought changing some textiles would be a good bang for buck (we reupholstered the flight attendant’s chair, made custom curtains, and used fabric to recover the wall panels, and made custom seat headrests), screens and screen holders, and all the little details (magazine holders, safety cards, headphone cases etc) that make a space a believable plane.

evaluating fabric swatches for the plane cabin in the office.

I’m sure when you look at this photo you notice all the feet and perhaps not the custom curtains that are a nice tonal contrast to the fabric covering that wall or the custom embroidered and cut seat headrest pieces.

This is the crew dressing the set posing for a photo to send to the showrunners so they would see how the scripted feet gag might work.

Next set is the Sauna at the LA Hotel Brooke and Cary are staying at where Brooke runs into Alessia Cara. I can take no credit for the actual LA Hotel they filmed in because they filmed that in LA.

We built this sauna set on a stage in New York, and addition to our fancy sconces getting some on screen time I was pleased some sauna specific details we splurged on (because they are relatively small details they were something of an indulgence for a low budget comedy show) made it on screen!

The luxe sauna bucket and ladle and you can also see the bank of spa lockers we bought secondhand which was the first purchase I made for season 2.

When a set is more spare (like a sauna) each little detail matters sort of how like when you are cooking a simple recipe the quality of each ingredient matters more.

The next run of sets is when Cary visits a bunch of lawyers in LA for help in his photo going viral predicament. We were going to see three different lawyers offices, and while they were all filmed at actual NYC lawyers offices in midtown we were supposed to figure out a way to telegraph LA in the set dressing.

We came up with three different personas for each lawyer’s office based on stereotypes of LA and found artwork and set dressing details to flesh out these ideas:

a hiking outdoorsy lawyer
a health and wellness lawyer
a surfer who is really in to Japanese culture

I’m sorry to say you don’t see on screen much of what we brought in art or set dressing wise to create these personas for lawyer 1 or 2 (they even had real LA Legal magazines on their desks!), but you do see some of that surfer who is really into Japanese culture in this lawyer’s office:

somehow the cactus that was in the hiking outdoorsy lawyer’s office got moved into this set during filming. alas, have learned to try my best to let go once I leave set. anyways I’m sure most everyone like myself was most preoccupied with squealing at the Bowen Yang cameo.

Ok the next set that was super fun to work on was the underwear party nightclub.

To fully appreciate it I need you to go back to March 3, 2021 when most of us in NYC had been confined to our homes for almost a year. The idea of going to a packed nightclub was an exotic forbidden thought or a far distant memory.

In the vacuum of dance parties and crowded venues of fun, we stepped into an empty Elsewhere which had been vacant for a year to set up the LA nightclub set.

what it looked like when I arrived to the location to start dressing the set.

Yes, the stairs in the video are the ones you see on screen here:

The Other Two Season Two LA Underwear Party2.png

Elsewhere provided some in-house technical staff to help us with lighting and etc and we had the fortune to work with the wonderful Dom Chang who indulged us, when I walked into a totally empty nightclub and thought well we should at least be pumping some tunes on their nice sound system while we work in here today.

please ignore my “middle aged mom visits the kids at the club” vibes.

Not only did Dom ask me what music I wanted (Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” being the most appropriate in this situation obviously) HE DID THE LIGHTS FOR US to truly imitate being in a club and it was such a moment of sheer joy for all of us party-gathering-starved-in-a-pandemic-New Yorkers.

We were waiting for the set dressing truck to land, so our locations contact Will, Leadman Bo, and I had some fun. (can you believe that? FUN!)

Ok one last video of our merriment: Will our locations person hamming it up and Dom taking it one step further by enhancing with lights.

Sometimes production work can be a long marathon of stress so whenever there are openings of fun and joy you got to snatch it up and marinate in it.

Our moment of dance club euphoria was such a bright spot in an otherwise pretty glum winter that it almost doesn’t bother me at all that the part of the club we spent the most work on and overcame a logistics feat to dress didn’t even make it on 😐.