WithSoulmates, creatorsBrett GoldsteinandWill Bridgeshave set up a fascinating playground for telling stories about love. The first season of the AMC series is set in a world where a newly invented test can scientifically determine your perfect match — an opportunity which leads to no shortage of romantic chaos for those faced with the choice of taking it. ItsBlack Mirror-esque approach can be traced to the fact that Bridges wrote two episodes of the British anthology series, but Goldstein and Bridges had been collaborating as writers for years before now, fascinated by an idea that might feel like science fiction, but is really about real life.
This includes episodes about ordinary couples whose marriages are upended by the test, how the test might affect those in open or polyamorous relationships, and even at least one episode (Episode 2, “The Lovers”) which plays more like a thriller.
Via phone, while doing location scouting for the already greenlit Season 2, Goldstein and Bridges talked about how they started working together on the series, the different kinds of storytelling the premise enables, how they plan to approach that second season, and what it means when a story about romance to have a happy ending.
Collider: To start, I’d love to know how you guys ended up collaborating together on this.
GOLDSTEIN: So me and Will were writing a film years ago calledSuperBob. And while we were writing that film, we were talking about relationships. We both love writing about relationships. And at the time we were at very different stages of our lives. Will was married, about to have a first babies and I was… probably dating the wrong person, is the best way of putting it.
And we were talking about love and what it means, and we came up with this idea of what would happen if that were an actual test you could take. And we made a short film and then just sort of explore the idea. And then we got excited about it and then we showed AMC the film and they said “we want it to turn into a TV show” and we were like, yes, please, and here we are. It sounds so simple.
One aspect I really found fascinating is that at least in this season of episodes, there’s no question as to whether or not the test is accurate. That seems to be the number one principle of the premise.
BRIDGES: Right. Yeah, sure. It’s yes, it’s a hundred percent accurate. Right every time. Totally infallible. We thought that it was important to do that because that’s kind of the key to the show. We wanted to tell a story about relationships and we were talking about true love, and we asked well, if true love existed? How would that affect modern relationships? And so that was it.
We decided to carve the idea to test so we could explore how that would affect our own relationships. So it’s very important to us that it was science and not like an algorithm or anything that exists now. Because if it’s science fact, then when it is an absolute, it allows you to kind of apply that to all different types of relationships.
With anthology shows, there’s always like the question of do you have to watch in order? How do you determine the order? Charlie Brooker has said that he approachesBlack Mirrorseasons like a band making a track list for their album. Was that similar for you guys?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting because we called it a mixtape. We really care about the order they’re in. I mean, ultimately, sure if anyone wants to watch them in a different order, they can, and we’ll not be angry. But we definitely put this in order. Part of that is building the first one, which very clearly sets up the world and roots the world. And then the second one takes it in a different direction. And every week we’re hoping to… I don’t want to sound pretentious, but like a prism, every episode we’re turning it and turning it; and so you’re looking at this idea from a different angle, with a bigger angle, with a wider angle and a stranger angle. So it’s not a mistake that they’re in the order they’re in. It wasn’t random.
BRIDGES: Right. Yeah. We wanted to explore every kind of relationship, and it would be wrong to think that monogamy is the only kind of relationship. As long as we can keep doing seasons, we’ll keep trying to find new and interesting ways to look at those relationships.
I mean, the thing that I really appreciate about the show is the fact that this is, it is a prettyBlack Mirror-ish premise, but it is one that definitely feels like it has potential for countless stories.
BRIDGES: When we were pitching it to AMC, you always get asked when you’re pitching shows, how many seasons has it got? Our answer was simply as many writers as there are that have got an opinion, I’d love it because that’s as far as you may go. Everybody’s got a different idea of what love means to them. And we are actively looking for different kinds of different kinds of stories without with our writers that we bring onto the show.
GOLDSTEIN: We’re already on Season 2. We’re very excited. We’ve met more writers and we’re hearing more stories. If you ask the right question, I believe everyone has an amazing story. They’ll tell you such a unique, specific love story from their life and they’ll blow your mind — everyone has a different take on it. It’s really fascinating.
In the pilot you have at least three actors who are not Americans, but are playing American. Why is it important thatSoulmateslargely features American characters?
BRIDGES: It’s an American show to start off with, and our plan is to take it global as well. And we wanted to tell different kinds of stories in America to begin with in Season 1. And we’ve got a way to open it up in Season 2 to say this is a global thing. So it’s not that we specifically wanted to tell all American stories. It’s just that with the kind of budget we’ve got, we tried to make our money go as far as possible. This sort of comes with certain limitations, but we wanted to open out in Season 2, basically different places. There wasn’t a massive plan to kind of keep it as American stories. It just so happened that those were the stories that we became interested in.
Gotcha. In terms of constructing the episodes, I want to ask about Episode 2, just because it feels like the one where the test is maybe less important than it is for the other episodes. Talk to me a little bit about kind of conceiving that episode and developing it.
BRIDGES: Well, what we wanted to do with two, we started with how would you approach telling a story, a short story, with this test as part of it. And that became kind of an interesting conversation. And we ended up, well, what happened if someone just came up to you one day and told you that they were your soulmate? And they’re not going anywhere until you fall in love with them? And that just became an interesting question. What kind of person would that be and why would it be happening to them? So we started that way around.
Sometimes you start with a character, but this time it was like, ooh, a thriller episode is really interesting. So once we started asking this question, we quickly found an interesting character and an interesting way into it, but it was kind of a conscious choice to kind of take a look at it that way.
GOLDSTEIN: And we were talking about like, there was likeFatal Attraction, and we were like,Fatal Attractionis a very dangerous film because of how it treats Glenn Close’s character. We were almost like, how do you tell a story like that, from the other point of view.
I think that was the starting point — we’re kind of redressing the balance of that kind of story where it isn’t the man is the great hero. That was, I think, one of our starting points.
Looking at all of the episodes, there isn’t much in the way of happy endings. And I feel like when you talk about the concept of soulmates, people might expect that. Is that something that just kind of happened as a result of the stories you wanted to tell?
GOLDSTEIN: I would, with all due respect, slightly disagree with them as unhappy endings.
BRIDGES: I would say that, we’ve seen the happy ending, right? We’ve seen that in many, many stories and we know that relationships don’t work like that. They are complicated and they keep going. You have happy moments and you have low moments and we’re exploring all of those different things from the different stories. So you could take it to someone and carry on that story and find a happier ending, for sure. But we wanted to tell stories that leave people asking questions and having a debate about it afterwards.
Yeah, I read an interview with Judd Apatow once where he was saying that the ending ofKnocked Upis only happy because he ends it when it ends.
BRIDGES: Yeah. That’s why romantic movies end with people running to the train station saying, I love you, or a wedding. But I would say that the sequel sounds like the much more interesting story.
GOLDSTEIN: I do think, as much as the episodes had darkness in them and did take turns into dark places, I do think most of them end on a creatively hopeful note.
To wrap up, especially now that you’re working on Season 2, how much are you thinking about ways to make this make every episode feel like part of this unified whole — while also still telling these individual stories?
GOLDSTEIN: Hmm. A lot. We do want all the stories to fit within the same world. It is a unified world and, yeah — we still want to tell individual stories in different places and from different voices, but that’s part of the challenge for us, is making sure no matter how different a story is, it still exists in the same world that we created.
