Speaker 1: Creating a TV show. Getting to make a TV show
Speaker 1: is very much like a far fetched dream, is what
Speaker 1: it feels like, because how many people are trying to
Speaker 1: do it versus how many people get to do it.
Speaker 1: I think the last time I looked, like three percent
Speaker 1: of book authors are Latino, which is crazy, like three percent.
Speaker 2: From Fudro Media and PRX. It's Latino Usay, I'm Maria
Speaker 2: Ino Josa. Today writer Shay Serrano and his journey from
Speaker 2: school classrooms to TV sets. Say Serrano is a Mexican
Speaker 2: American author born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He
Speaker 2: is the co writer of Miguel Wants to Fight, a
Speaker 2: movie that was released last year.
Speaker 3: Miguel, have you ever gotten into a fight? Yes, it
Speaker 3: was me and that one dude. We're both aggressively hugging.
Speaker 3: Does that count? Oh my god.
Speaker 2: He's also the creator of the TV series Neon streaming
Speaker 2: on Netflix.
Speaker 1: We're Moving to Miami, I Love You, the biggest eight
Speaker 1: thumb show in the world.
Speaker 2: And he's also the author of Primo, a semi autobiographical
Speaker 2: comedy that got a stunning one hundred percent rating on
Speaker 2: Rotten Tomatoes.
Speaker 4: How many uncles are that five? It feels like fifty
Speaker 4: most of the time. Now, look still, guys, we don't
Speaker 4: have all day.
Speaker 2: But if you think that writing a TV series was
Speaker 2: Shay's biggest dream, well you're going to be absolutely surprised.
Speaker 2: Today Shay is going to take us from his first
Speaker 2: job in construction to the unexpected encounters that, paired with
Speaker 2: his talent, allowed him to create and run his own
Speaker 2: TV shows. In his own words, here's Shay said Reno
Speaker 2: on how he carved a space for himself in an
Speaker 2: industry where Latino representation remains pretty scarce.
Speaker 1: My name is Chay Serano, and I write about things
Speaker 1: for a living. So far, I've written four New York
Speaker 1: Times bestsellers, created a couple of TV shows, co wrote
Speaker 1: a movie, and started an independent publishing company that I
Speaker 1: now run out of San Antonio, Texas. So I worked
Speaker 1: for this construction company called Ryland Homes, and this was
Speaker 1: in Houston, Texas in the mid two thousands. It was
Speaker 1: a first job that I got out of college because
Speaker 1: my brother in law he asked if I wanted to
Speaker 1: come work, and I thought, oh cool, Yeah, I want
Speaker 1: to learn how to build houses.
Speaker 3: And like that seems like a fun thing to do.
Speaker 3: It was awful.
Speaker 1: No, I did not get a ton of muscles from
Speaker 1: doing that job. I just got bored and sunburnt. I
Speaker 1: wasn't out there for twelve hours a day like those
Speaker 1: guys are put in the brick or painting the houses
Speaker 1: or land tile or whatever. I was doing like customer
Speaker 1: service calls. So if something went wrong with a house,
Speaker 1: they would send me out there.
Speaker 3: I would go.
Speaker 1: I would figure out what the issue was and then
Speaker 1: try to get it fixed.
Speaker 2: Shay soon realized it wasn't the kind of job you
Speaker 2: wanted to get stuck with. So after two years.
Speaker 1: I had intentions or dreams of being a middle school
Speaker 1: teacher with a job I had wanted to do since
Speaker 1: I was a kid, And so while I was working
Speaker 1: at Ryland, I started taking night classes and weekend classes
Speaker 1: to get an alternative certification to be a teacher, and
Speaker 1: then eventually left to do that. It seemed like an
Speaker 1: important job to have because when you're growing up you're
Speaker 1: in a teacher's classroom. That's like the ultimate level of authority.
Speaker 1: You get to go to work every single day and
Speaker 1: you have the chance to make an impact, like a
Speaker 1: direct impact on somebody's life. I applied at all of
Speaker 1: these Title I schools, which are schools that serve the
Speaker 1: like a poorer population is how they describe it. And
Speaker 1: it was important to me to work at a school
Speaker 1: that was predominant le people of color. Growing up in
Speaker 1: San Antonio, that was all that I saw that I
Speaker 1: got a job in South Houston as Scho was ninety
Speaker 1: seven percent of Hispanic, started teaching there, started coaching all
Speaker 1: of the sports.
Speaker 3: It was great.
Speaker 2: Both Shay and his wife, Laramie, were middle school teachers
Speaker 2: early in their marriage, and that's when they found out
Speaker 2: they were going to be having twins.
Speaker 1: At four months into the pregnancy, who went into labor,
Speaker 1: like one day at work, they rush her off to
Speaker 1: the hospital, they do this emergency surgery, and then they
Speaker 1: tell her, you can't work anymore. You got to like
Speaker 1: lay down for the next four months because if you
Speaker 1: get up, the babies could just come out. We were
Speaker 1: a family of two living on two teacher salaries at
Speaker 1: that time. We were probably making like maybe around forty
Speaker 1: forty one thousand dollars a year each, so eighty two
Speaker 1: thousand dollars total for two people were doing okay. And
Speaker 1: then we went from that to now a family of
Speaker 1: four soon to be on one teacher salary. And it
Speaker 1: was very apparent, very quickly, that the money that I
Speaker 1: was bringing in about eleven hundred bucks every two weeks,
Speaker 1: was not enough to pay the money that needed to
Speaker 1: be going out, Like our rent was sixteen hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: and you know, you have student loans, and you have
Speaker 1: electricity bill and groceries, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: two babies as well, Like I fits me, my wife
Speaker 1: lared me and the two twins, and everybody's got to
Speaker 1: eat at least three times a day at minimum, that's
Speaker 1: twelve meals I got to provide. And so I needed
Speaker 1: another job. I started applying at Target and Poppadot and
Speaker 1: Walmart and wherever I could, trying to get just like
Speaker 1: a part time job. But nobody would hire me because
Speaker 1: I was working a full time job, so I couldn't
Speaker 1: work the hours they needed me to work. I just
Speaker 1: started googling work from home jobs. A writer was one
Speaker 1: of them the things that you need the internet and
Speaker 1: the computer, and I said, well, I got both of
Speaker 1: those things, so I'll try and do that. But I
Speaker 1: was not trying to be like a full time writer.
Speaker 1: When you grow up where I grew up. They're not like, oh,
Speaker 1: you can go be a writer and you could like
Speaker 1: write about sports and.
Speaker 3: Music and people will pay you money.
Speaker 1: All I was trying to do when I first started,
Speaker 1: I need to make like four or five hundred bucks
Speaker 1: a month. And then the sucky thing that ended up
Speaker 1: happening is we make it through those months of like,
Speaker 1: all right, Laramie's ready to go back to work, and
Speaker 1: then we go to like look and see how much
Speaker 1: is daycare going to cost? Because if Laramie's going to
Speaker 1: be at work and I'm going to be at work,
Speaker 1: who's going to take care of the twins? Full time
Speaker 1: daycare for twins was like two thousand dollars a month.
Speaker 1: That was the cheapest we could find. It was such
Speaker 1: a weird position to be in because you know, you
Speaker 1: grow up and you watch my mom worked at the
Speaker 1: corner store for thirty plus years, right and my dad
Speaker 1: drove a bus for the city for thirty plus years.
Speaker 1: You watch them get up every morning at four in
Speaker 1: the morning to be out there to drive the bus
Speaker 1: or to be at the store when it opens. Every
Speaker 1: single day of your whole entire childhood life. You just
Speaker 1: watch them do it, watch them do it, watch them
Speaker 1: do it without even really thinking about it, And then
Speaker 1: you become an adult and you're in that position now,
Speaker 1: and then you realize, oh man, they were really busy
Speaker 1: in their butts to make sure that we had our
Speaker 1: plates of food and to make sure that we had
Speaker 1: a place to lay down and a.
Speaker 3: Place where we felt safe and comfortable in love.
Speaker 1: Like they were doing all of the hard parts without
Speaker 1: talking about doing the hard parts, And so you end
Speaker 1: up in that same position and you're like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: I guess it's my turn.
Speaker 2: For about seven years, Shay would keep his full time
Speaker 2: job as a school teacher and coach while freelancing as
Speaker 2: a writer at any publication that would give him a chance.
Speaker 1: The first real publication that I got to write for
Speaker 1: was this place called the Houston Press, which is an
Speaker 1: all weekly in Houston. That was really where I learned
Speaker 1: how to be a writer. I had an editor there
Speaker 1: named Chris Gray. The editor in chief was this woman
Speaker 1: named Margaret Downing, and they both decided they were going
Speaker 1: to sit me down and teach me how to be
Speaker 1: a writer. Here's how you report a story, Here's how
Speaker 1: you interview somebody, Here's how you request public records for information.
Speaker 1: They're teaching me all of this stuff for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: I have no idea why they chose to do that.
Speaker 1: Then I started writing for La Weekly or The Village Voice, MTV, ESPN,
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone. You're trying to work your way up through
Speaker 1: those ranks. And then eventually what ended up happening is
Speaker 1: in two thousand and thirteen, somewhere around there, one day
Speaker 1: I was on the computer. I went on Facebook. I
Speaker 1: had a message from this woman named Molly Lambert, who
Speaker 1: was a brilliant writer, a pop culture writer, and she
Speaker 1: was at the time working at this place called Grantland,
Speaker 1: which was the pop culture section of ESPN, created and
Speaker 1: run by Bill Simmons, and he was running this website
Speaker 1: that everybody wanted to write for. It was like writing
Speaker 1: Utopia because they didn't care about web traffic and they
Speaker 1: didn't care about reporting something as fast as possible. All
Speaker 1: they wanted to do was make cool stuff and make
Speaker 1: good stuff. I started pitching them stuff, and I remember
Speaker 1: I wrote something for them. They published it, and then
Speaker 1: when they posted a link on Twitter, I got a
Speaker 1: hundred messages about it, more than I had evergotten about.
Speaker 3: Anything that I'd written.
Speaker 1: And eventually they were like, hey, we like the stuff
Speaker 1: that you're doing for us, and you should come right
Speaker 1: for us full time.
Speaker 3: I was still teaching.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to leave teaching, and I told them that,
Speaker 1: So now I really enjoy teaching. This is like the
Speaker 1: job I want to do for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's a part time sort of situation we can
Speaker 1: work out. Then they were like, we see what you
Speaker 1: have done if you're working on this part time. Let's
Speaker 1: find out what it looks like if you're working on
Speaker 1: it full time. And I talked with Laramie about it,
Speaker 1: and I said, I think this is the thing I
Speaker 1: want to try.
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 1: She sort of walked me through the pros and cons
Speaker 1: of the situation, and eventually we decided on all right,
Speaker 1: we'll try it for a year. All right, I'm going
Speaker 1: to leave teaching. I'm going to go try to be
Speaker 1: a writer full time. And then, like a jackass, I
Speaker 1: signed this contract in July of twenty fifteen, and then
Speaker 1: in October of twenty fifteen, three months later, ESPN shut
Speaker 1: Grantlin down, and all of a sudden, I didn't have
Speaker 1: a job. It took me a year to talk myself
Speaker 1: into taking his job, and then I did it, and
Speaker 1: then immediately it was taken away and welcome to journalism, baby.
Speaker 2: But Shay had also been working on his first book,
Speaker 2: which was published that same month, October of twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2: The Rap yearbook would become a New York Times bestseller,
Speaker 2: and it was turned into a documentary series for AMC.
Speaker 1: I was very excited about all of that, but then
Speaker 1: also I lost my full time writing job.
Speaker 3: Then it was this weird glimbo.
Speaker 1: It felt like, so me and my buddies started a
Speaker 1: newsletter through Mailchimp that eventually became the next book that
Speaker 1: we did together, basketball and other things. That book came
Speaker 1: out in twenty seventeen, and that's when things really changed
Speaker 1: in a way that felt almost tangible, because that book
Speaker 1: came out and it made it to number one on
Speaker 1: the best seller which is like a whole different thing,
Speaker 1: and it's sold, I don't know, thirty three thousand copies
Speaker 1: the first week. It was like a oh man, this
Speaker 1: is a real I could just write books for the
Speaker 1: rest of my life if I want to do that.
Speaker 1: And then Bill Simmons is starting a new website. Everybody
Speaker 1: it seems like everybody's talking about the Ringer, and I
Speaker 1: was like, all right, all I got to do is
Speaker 1: hold out until they start that and then maybe they'll
Speaker 1: let me go work over there, which.
Speaker 3: I eventually ended up doing, and that ended up being like.
Speaker 1: Another very meaningful I worked there for six years and
Speaker 1: I was like, man, this freaking rules, and I started
Speaker 1: doing more books, creating a TV show, getting to make
Speaker 1: a TV show. It's very much like a far fetched dream,
Speaker 1: is what it feels like, because how many people are
Speaker 1: trying to do it versus how many people get to
Speaker 1: do it. The numbers are pretty abysmal. I think the
Speaker 1: last time I looked like three percent of book authors
Speaker 1: are Latino, which is crazy, like three percent, and so
Speaker 1: that's in your head a little bit. But it's also
Speaker 1: it's not easy for anybody to try to go do
Speaker 1: so it wasn't like a thing I was fixated on.
Speaker 1: This is going to be harder for me because I'm Mexican.
Speaker 1: I didn't think about that part of it, probably just
Speaker 1: because of because I was a naive, but I just thought,
Speaker 1: I don't I want to try a thing. It probably
Speaker 1: won't work, but I'll try it. And I didn't have
Speaker 1: any experience in TV. I had never written the on
Speaker 1: a show before, or had any sort of like meaningful
Speaker 1: experience writing the script or anything like that. But again,
Speaker 1: same as with the books, or same as with writing,
Speaker 1: I've never written before, and then I'm going to try it.
Speaker 1: I've never written a book before, and then I'm going
Speaker 1: to try it. I said, all right, I think I'll
Speaker 1: try and create a TV show that seems like a
Speaker 1: fun thing to do. And again, this all sort of
Speaker 1: ties back to the writing that I was doing before,
Speaker 1: because I ended up taking a bunch of meetings. One
Speaker 1: of the meetings that I took was with Mike Sure,
Speaker 1: and like an idiot, I'll never forget this, I walked
Speaker 1: into Mike's office.
Speaker 3: I didn't know who he was. I just looked and
Speaker 3: I saw him and it was it's Mo's from the office.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this is great. I walk in and
Speaker 1: I shake his hands. I'm like, oh, man, big fan
Speaker 1: of gear, of your work on the office. I think
Speaker 1: maybe he thought I was talking about the writing or
Speaker 1: what I didn't even know he wrote on the show.
Speaker 1: And I sat down and in his office he had
Speaker 1: a framed picture of parks and rec and a framed
Speaker 1: picture of Brooklyn ninety nine and a framed poster of
Speaker 1: The Good Place, and like all of this stuff. And
Speaker 1: in my office I have a framed poster of the
Speaker 1: movie blood Sport and a framed poster of the movie Desperado,
Speaker 1: and a framed poster of the movie blood In, Blood Out,
Speaker 1: like my favorite sort of movies. And I thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: he's got these posters like I do. Like he's a
Speaker 1: big fan of these shows. Didn't even realize that he
Speaker 1: had created or co created them. We talked for an
Speaker 1: hour and as I was leaving, just very casually, oh,
Speaker 1: we should you want to do that show? We should
Speaker 1: do that show. I'll help you with that. And I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, sure, that's sure. If you want to
Speaker 1: do it, I'm down. And then when I let the
Speaker 1: agents know who had set up all the meetings, I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy Mike seemed cool and he said he wanted
Speaker 1: to work on the thing together, and they'd lost their minds.
Speaker 3: They're like, you don't know who this guy is. He's
Speaker 3: the king of comedy showrunners.
Speaker 1: It turned out he's the biggest guy doing it, and
Speaker 1: we went and made a TV show together, which was great.
Speaker 4: My dad left when I was little, so all my
Speaker 4: uncles are always around and they're super protective of my
Speaker 4: mom and me. What was that for, Like, mostly it's
Speaker 4: like being inside of cart of these except that these
Speaker 4: are always cussing and punching at each other.
Speaker 1: Primo is a coming of age comedy in the tone
Speaker 1: of Parks and rec or the Office. I worked on
Speaker 1: it with Mike.
Speaker 4: Sure.
Speaker 1: It's a show that you watch and hopefully when you're done,
Speaker 1: you feel a little bit better about the world and
Speaker 1: your place in it. They might be arguing or fighting
Speaker 1: amongst each other, but they're doing it in a way
Speaker 1: that lets you know they all care about each other.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because a family and the show is made
Speaker 1: up of a mother and her five brothers. They don't
Speaker 1: speak Spanish because it's loosely based on my life growing
Speaker 1: up and in my family we don't speak Spanish. My
Speaker 1: dad is like directly from Mexico, right and when he
Speaker 1: got here back at that time, it was like a
Speaker 1: bad thing if you spoke Spanish. They put you in
Speaker 1: special classes in the school and it prevented you from
Speaker 1: having certain opportunities. So him and my mom made a
Speaker 1: decision when I was born, when my sisters were born.
Speaker 1: We're not going to teach them Spanish. They're just only
Speaker 1: going to speak English. That way they could fit in
Speaker 1: and we don't got to worry about them being shoehorned
Speaker 1: into the ESL class because they heard them say a
Speaker 1: sentence in Spanish or whatever.
Speaker 3: It just felt more natural.
Speaker 1: Like if I would have gone in there and changed
Speaker 1: things around and had it to where they were speaking Spanish,
Speaker 1: to me, it would have felt been sincere. It would
Speaker 1: not have felt as real. I would have been less
Speaker 1: comfortable making the show trying to pretend that we were
Speaker 1: one thing that we weren't, and that authenticity was more
Speaker 1: important to me than trying to pretend otherwise. I've been
Speaker 1: taking Spanish classes for a while, and eventually I'll get there.
Speaker 3: I speak a little bit.
Speaker 1: If you're going to say some stuff in Spanish, I
Speaker 1: might be able to understand it, but I'm not going
Speaker 1: to be able to say anything back to you.
Speaker 3: At this moment.
Speaker 1: I don't have like aspirations of trying to direct I
Speaker 1: don't think I have. It's a little too intimidating of
Speaker 1: a process right now to be in control of all
Speaker 1: of that and have to make all those decisions I
Speaker 1: like to write a thing and then let a director
Speaker 1: direct the thing. Right, But I would like to write
Speaker 1: another movie. I want to write a teacher movie, or
Speaker 1: a heist movie, or an action movie. Or what would
Speaker 1: be really cool is a thing that I've not done
Speaker 1: yet that I would like to do. Is same as
Speaker 1: what Mike did for me, where he was like, come on,
Speaker 1: I'll teach you how to do this, or same as
Speaker 1: what Bill did at grant Lander the Ring, come over here,
Speaker 1: I'll teach you. I'll do this, or Chris and Margaret
Speaker 1: at the Houston Press, like I would like to be
Speaker 1: in that position to do that for another like a
Speaker 1: writer who's coming up right, let me help, Let me
Speaker 1: help you make a TV show. Let me show you
Speaker 1: some of the things that they taught to me. I
Speaker 1: think that would be a cool career accomplishment to just
Speaker 1: look and be like, oh man, that show that everybody
Speaker 1: loves that's on TV, or that movie that everybody saw,
Speaker 1: it's on in the theaters, like the person who wrote it.
Speaker 3: I got to help a little bit.
Speaker 1: I would say, if I had to recap my career,
Speaker 1: it's been a bunch of work and a bunch of
Speaker 1: luck and a bunch of help all roll together. When
Speaker 1: I look back, there are definite moments that I can
Speaker 1: point to and go, oh, that's when a thing changed
Speaker 1: right there. In every one of those situations, it was
Speaker 1: a reaching down to pull me up, and not because
Speaker 1: it was going to make their career any better. All
Speaker 1: that was more work for each of those people. But
Speaker 1: they did it because they wanted to do it, and
Speaker 1: so I'm very thankful, and I just want to make
Speaker 1: sure that when it's my turn to do that, that
Speaker 1: I'm doing that any chance that I can. I gave
Speaker 1: a talk at a career day and here in San Antonio,
Speaker 1: and it was for like seventh and eighth graders, and
Speaker 1: it was so nice to just be back in a
Speaker 1: school and standing at the front of the classroom and
Speaker 1: answering questions and making jokes.
Speaker 3: And I do that maybe like once or.
Speaker 1: Twice a year, and it always I fill that pool.
Speaker 1: I fill it inside. All I wanted to do was
Speaker 1: be a teacher. That's the only job I wanted to have.
Speaker 1: I didn't have aspirations of being a full time writer.
Speaker 1: I wanted to teach at a school for twenty five
Speaker 1: thirty years and be part of the community. And feel
Speaker 1: important in that way. At some point, I would like
Speaker 1: to find myself back in a classroom and teaching middle
Speaker 1: school kids and coaching a middle school football team and
Speaker 1: a basketball team, and a soccer team and a track team,
Speaker 1: just like I was doing before.
Speaker 3: That would be awesome.
Speaker 2: That was writer she Last month, News wrote that Primo,
Speaker 2: the show Shay created, had been canceled after what he
Speaker 2: called a short but beautiful run, but Shay continues to create.
Speaker 2: In May, he released a new book under the title
Speaker 2: A Real Human Being, dissecting nine essential Ryan Gosling movie roles.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced by Fernando Nandez and edited by
Speaker 2: Andre Lopez Crusado. It was mixed by steffrie Lebo and
Speaker 2: Julia Caruso. The Latino USA team also includes Victoria Estrada,
Speaker 2: Renaldo Leans, Junior, Lori, mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent,
Speaker 2: Nur Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Benille Ramirez is our co
Speaker 2: executive producer. Our marketing manager is Louis Luna. Our theme
Speaker 2: music was composed by Zanga Roubinos. I'm your host and
Speaker 2: executive producer Mariaojsa joined us again on our next episode.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, look for us on all of your
Speaker 2: social media and as always, I'll see you on Instagram.
Speaker 2: Astella pro Mainoa yas Joao.
Speaker 1: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation,
Speaker 1: working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide,
Speaker 1: and the John D.
Speaker 3: And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Funding for Latino USA is
Speaker 3: Coverage of a culture of health is made possible in
Speaker 3: part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
Speaker 3: oh