Kevin Spacey's future; 'Bob's Burgers' writers Lizzie & Wendy Molyneux; Alynda Segarra

WENDY: I think something being tremendously stupid is the heart of it. Just so dumb like, "Maxi Pads, large apartment rental," I know was one from one of our episodes. It's so stupid that it turns a corner from being like a pun into being also a very bad idea. I think the storefronts are usually like terrible ideas for stores.



LIZZIE: The more complicated the pun, too, sometimes is fun. Like it takes you three seconds and then you [say], I don't get it ... oh, I get it!



WENDY: And also if it makes no sense like, I remember one of Lizzie's was, "A ton in the oven for plus-sized babies." There's no such thing, that's just a larger baby. You just would go up a size. So I think the the less sense it truly makes, the more you think about it, the better that is as a storefront.

WENDY: You've got to stop and see all the storefronts, and a lot of them are throw-aways. Like when we did the food truck episode, I think there were so many food trucks in the background.



LIZZIE: Oh yeah, that was fun.



WENDY: That was a intensive pitching episode on titles of food trucks.



LIZZIE: Yeah, and we've just done so many throughout the years that it's hard to remember if we've said ones before, if there are people on the Internet [who] have been keeping better track than we have.



WENDY: Yeah, thank god for the Internet. For shows right now, that's such a boon, you can go look up ... there's an extensive "Bob's" Wiki that we don't keep, we don't maintain it, but we've frequently been, like, What is that tiny little character's name from that episode? And someone is maintaining that! And they're so helpful to us.



LIZZIE: They're incredibly detailed.



WENDY: We should send them a brownie basket.

LIZZIE: We were looking for a way to do an episode that was a little bigger and a little different than what we've done. We've had such a great relationship with our fans and it just seemed like to include them in some way would be the most fun and most rewarding way to do it. And so Lauren came up with that and then we got just so many submissions. We had a whole room in the office just filled with artwork and you just walk around like in a museum and just look at everything. There were so many amazing things and it was hard to narrow it down. Some of it came down to, Can we animate that in a way that will work for the show? But there's a couple that we didn't [use]that I just want to save. I need to go find them and get them framed.



WENDY: Yeah, yeah. That's my issue — in my house and in my office, I've bought a lot of "Bob's Burgers" fan art. We all like the fan art. Lizzie and I had an episode that featured the posteriors of animals that Gail draws and I found them on Etsy [laughs] ... I found some of the paintings on Etsy and I bought them and then I got a note and it was from the painter's mom like, You bought my daughter's paintings on Etsy! It was really cute. She was so proud that her daughter had painted these and that someone from the show had bought them. And it was really funny. They're up in our office.

LIZZIE: Yeah. I get a lot of that too, just like tags on either Instagram or Twitter. Of actual art that incorporates anuses and someone will just like tag me in it like, Hey, look, it's real. You'll like this.



WENDY: You love anuses.

WENDY: Yeah, I was a TV promo writer for NBC for many years ... It was more like I worked in what was called "special projects," so we would launch shows. We would see the new shows and I remember shows that no one else remembers because of that, like "LAX" with Heather Locklear. My only other real TV job was I worked briefly — and this actually wound up getting incorporated into "Bob's" a lot — both my husband and I were staffed on Megan Mullally, [who] briefly had a talk show. It was only on the air for about six months, but we got a nice working relationship with Megan and with her husband, Nick Offerman, out of it. And both of them have been on the show. Megan plays Gail, so it all kind of wound up being incorporated. But, yeah, Lizzie and I started working together when she graduated from college and we originally thought we would write screenplays, which we did.



LIZZIE: Yeah, they exist somewhere. We're not going to show them to anyone.



WENDY: But, yeah, originally that's how we started out, working on screenplays because we are both obviously working separate jobs and that was a lot easier to bounce them back-and-forth. But then, yeah, we got to interview for "Bob's [Burgers]."



LIZZIE: Yeah, we wrote a couple of TV specs as well. I think [that's] how we started getting that going. And then someone gave our spec, I guess our agency probably. I think that's how it works. We're still not really sure.



WENDY: Yeah, we don't know how the industry works.

WENDY: Literally shoulder-to-shoulder!



LIZZIE: Yes!



WENDY: We tie our hands together at the beginning of the day.



LIZZIE: Well, we we make a lot of jokes about that. Our mom writes all of our scripts and that we we live in...



WENDY: We live in a cabin and where we have bunk beds and in the morning we go down slides into our kitchen where our mom has already made us food. So that's fun.



LIZZIE: I think we have ... almost just like a shorthand that makes it easy to write together and to do things even separate, and then when we put them back together we sort of understand what each of the other is going to do.



WENDY: And I do think, like, within a family — because there are five kids and then my parents, they're not in entertainment in any way — we had to forge our own path. But they love TV and movies and so I think what helps is growing up watching the same movies and the whole family knows all the jokes. And so it's like there's just that kind of shared sensibility. I think other writing partners, I don't know if it's true, might have more trouble agreeing on what is generally funny, but will always, I think, for the most part find agreement really easily.

WENDY: We haven't had to prove ourselves on "Bob's." I mean, it's an incredibly positive environment for women there, and we've been there for eight years. In terms of the larger world, there are times ... like, we do a lot of punch-up rooms, where we [work on] another show or movie ... there was one recently where it was all dudes except us. And we went to the bathroom at one point and we were both like, What is happening? Literally, we're saying stuff and then someone else would repeat it like three or four minutes later. It was as if it was being absorbed into this big sponge of the male writers in the room and then spat back out to acclaim. But when we said it, it was almost like we didn't exist, like there was an assumption we were there as tokens. And that was weird. That was a weird room but it's usually not like that. Honestly, I feel most of the time we have a pretty good time.



LIZZIE: Yeah, I mean, as a woman in any field or just in life, yeah, there's probably going to be a couple instances every month of somebody being a little strange to you or just not caring about your opinion or validating you in any way. But we're so lucky to work on "Bob's" and have a great environment there, that when we experience it in other projects we do, we can take it a little easier because we're, like, Well, we can go back to our great community that we have at work.



WENDY: And it's also nice to have somebody else there because, when that stuff happens ... we can look at each other like, What is happening? This one male movie producer said to us, You guys could write for television. And it's like, We are! Like he was so astonished that we had made jokes that he liked. That's the kind of low level hum that can be super irritating, but we also just don't give a crap, so it's fine what people think or say. But it is a low level irritation I would say.

WENDY & LIZZIE: I believe it's 2020.



LIZZIE: We have just sort of started talking about it at work and working on it.



WENDY: Loren Bouchard and Nora Smith [are leading it] Loren created the show and Nora has been on the show since before the show existed ... And so they're kind of taking point on it and eventually all of the writers will work on it as well.

I learned how to play music not only from my father when I was younger, but I really started to play music when I was a traveling kid. A lot of other street kids I knew were playing folk music. They had acoustic instruments because they're easy to carry and they would all busk on the street. I only knew about playing in the subway from growing up in New York. But in New Orleans, playing on the street was just [getting] to be out in the fresh air.

I really wanted to get in touch with what it meant to grow up constantly searching for the underground and the invisible world that was happening. It also was me really trying to get in touch with what it meant to be a Nuyorican woman, what it means to be a part of the diaspora.



So I created this character, Navita, who is really me when I was 17 and who was so stubborn and could not be told what to do. Creating Navita really helped me because I felt like I needed to teach her a lesson. So when you create this character and you create a storyline, you got to teach that character a lesson and you end up teaching yourself.

It's a channel for me to remind people every night about the people of Puerto Rico, because I feel so much fear for the people on the island. And I feel so much rage about how their humanity is just getting forgotten in the aftermath of the hurricane. And it really reminds me of how I felt watching New Orleans really struggle to get back on its feet.

When I was in high school, I really just loved poetry so much. It was my outlet. The poem "Puerto Rican Obituary" [by Pedro Pietri] was really important because it was talking about the struggle of Puerto Rican people to assimilate to this idea of The American Dream. And here we are with the island being so devastated and we're still not seen as American citizens — full American citizens who have fought in so many wars, who have contributed so much and built this country.

To communicate with their Latin soul. That to me really speaks to my journey with making this album. I felt like I, finally — as a 30-year-old Nuyorican woman — was able to speak to my Latino soul.



I feel like I'm speaking to the many different people that brought me to where I am today and paying my respects to them and also talking about the future of where we're going to go as a people.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for Anthony Rapp as an actor. I'm beyond horrified to hear this story. I honestly do not remember the encounter, it would have been over 30 years ago. But if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior, and I am sorry for the feelings he describes having carried with him all these years.



This story has encouraged me to address other things about my life. I know that there are stories out there about me and that some have been fueled by the fact that I have been so protective of my privacy. As those closest to me know, in my life I have had relationships with both men and women. I have loved and had romantic encounters with men throughout my life, and I choose now to live as a gay man. I want to deal with this honestly and openly and that starts with examining my own behavior.

That seems unlikely. I'm not sure entirely at what exact stage in the production season six is. My guess is it's fairly early, but I think by stating that the sixth season was going to be its last, Netflix was basically saying that they felt that it was still okay to go ahead with the production as is, and then just call it quits afterwards.

I think when you point out a logline like that there's obviously a very unfortunate parallel to the circumstances going on in Mr. Spacey's real life, allegedly anyway. And so it's hard to believe that this movie is going to see the light of day at Netflix — and perhaps not anywhere else either.

That's going to be the challenge for any project that has Kevin Spacey attached. They face a very real risk that the publicity firestorm that this has ignited would completely overshadow any such production. Does that mean that these productions never see the light of day? I'm not entirely sure, but I think we will find out probably in the next 24-48 hours what's going to happen.

I cannot imagine any human resources department at any company not experiencing what has gone on in the past few weeks and saying, Okay, how do we do our jobs in a way where we don't even have to encounter something like this? And the truth is there's probably nothing that will be foolproof. And yet I think any company would be remiss in not exploring what additional steps can be taken.

Anthony Rapp's story is deeply troubling. During the time I worked with Kevin Spacey on "House of Cards" I neither witnessed nor was aware of any inappropriate behavior on set or off. That said, I take reports of such behavior seriously, and this is no exception. I feel for Mr. Rapp and I support his courage.