Florida Man creator Donald Todd opens up about the Netflix series…
Donald, thank you for speaking with me. As a massive Samantha Who? fan, this is an honor.
Oh wow, thank you!
Honestly, I love your work in television and think you have a lot of range. But comedy seems to be something you’re very comfortable with. What were some of the early comedy films or shows you loved that inspired you?
Wow, let’s see. I’m trying to see how to pretend or pick stuff that makes me seem younger. If I’m honest, it was the sort of stuff typical for my generation. There was Monty Python, Woody Allen, and Steve Martin. Those all came around the same time for me as a child and validated what I thought was funny. I don’t know how I found Monty Python, I was way too young, and my mother wouldn’t let me watch it. But she would go to bed early, and I’d turn it on. So as a child, we would watch that and feel really validated as to having that kind of humor.
You know, you’re figuring out as a child whether what you say is going to get you even further ghettoized into nerddom or the weird kid. And then there are these weird kids doing this stuff and having fun. And then, of course, growing up after that, Steve Martin hit us in the seventies, and then Woody Allen’s movies. I just thought, okay, I guess it’s all right to be funny and not normal.
Florida Man has a wild tone. Was the balancing act between the darkness and the humor hard? Because this show is so darkly hilarious at times.
Cracking the tone of it was and is hard. Even the people at Netflix would agree because look at how even to promote it.
When I pitched it the very first time, the first thing I said was tone is going to be our conversation continuously. Because yes, I’ve tried to do something that’s a mix of tones. It’s hard. That’s why most people don’t even try, or they don’t accomplish it. You do something that’s a drama, you know you’re gonna do The Americans, you don’t try also to be funny. Americans is a great show, but That doesn’t mean it needs to be funny. Or look at Ted Lasso, just picking an example, like they’re gonna do both. And some people don’t accept some of the other sides of Ted Lasso. It’s an extremely difficult thing to do.
But if you do Florida Man and you want to do it accurately, a mix of tones is what it is.
As a Floridian myself, you captured the very complicated state very well. What inspired you even to capture the Florida Man, which I love the title. It’s great. But what inspired this whole idea?
Well, it just being a child in Florida is what inspired it. I’ve had this thought of a show like this in me since I was younger than you should have that thought. I can remember being 8, 9, and 10 years old, not thinking about even wanting TV. I didn’t think that was a thing, but like somebody should be telling the real story here. And that story is not what anybody thinks it is if they don’t live in it.
They tried. People come from the outside, and they’ll tell a silly story. They’ll tell a story about Miami and how crazy Miami is, and they’ll tell Scarface or whatever. But the real story growing up in central Florida, especially being a Southerner who isn’t considered a Southerner. As a person whose family just kind of drifted down through sharecropping in South Carolina and Georgia down to this very, very Southern place. But it’s isolated within a beach. It’s a beach community that’s also a Southern community.
I started to become aware early that it was defined by an amorality that is not acknowledged. I grew up Baptist, and we were convinced, of course, that we were moral people. Florida immorality is the real religion. However you feel about our previous president and administration, but it says something that they end up in Florida. Everybody who wants to get away with anything ends up in Florida. That’s, that’s just where they are. That struck me early on; this is the state’s legacy, well before I was born.
As someone who grew up in the Latino-filled area of Tampa and moved to more Southern parts of the state, that duality is very real.
Of course, you see Mike (Edgar Ramirez) jettison himself out of there as soon as he could at the age of 18 because being culturally Latino and Southern, but also in central Florida. He always felt like; I don’t know what; I don’t know how this happened. I just somehow touched down in a strange land and can just touch back out of it.
Now, moving more to the show, Florida Man has one of my favorite premiere episodes; it perfectly sets up your universe well. What do you want to get across when crafting a pilot or series premiere?
To me, it’s about the characters. Uh, it’s about, it’s about their theme. What is this character’s story, and how do I make sure they [the audience] understand the journey they’re going to have to go on?
And for Mike [in Florida Man], it was about a guy who believes that he is a hero who just got off the heroic path, and he’s delusional because the fact is that his hero’s journey never started. He convinced himself that he was a hero. He joined the Marines at 18, and then he became a cop and a detective. He was a hero but a gambler, so it threw him off that path.
So, he thinks that he is simply finding his way back onto the highway after taking the wrong road. When I do a pilot, I say, okay, where are they now? Where do they think they should be? So Mike is in the worst place you could possibly be except Orlando, which is stuck in the middle morally.
I don’t want to get into spoilers for the series, but you have some pretty fun twists and surprises throughout. Is that something you go to saying, I want these twists, or do they kind of come naturally in your story? How does it work crafting those in??
Well, you have to do both. You have to want twists, but they have to come naturally. So, fortunately, if you have a story with this many elements built in, the twists are going to present themselves.
When you go down to find somebody in Florida, you find is that there is no straight road in the entire state. Just metaphorically, but the whole show is supposed to be at a simple errand. You go down; you get something; you come. And because it’s Florida, because of whatever gravitational forces and moral forces are at work, you get thrown off course and thrown off course and thrown off course. So, that becomes a natural storytelling motif.
We even have an episode called ‘One More Day’. It represents saying I just need one more day, and I’m outta here. And that’s how you feel, and that’s how you feel life in Florida is like when you’re there.
Many thanks to Donald Todd for taking the time for this interview.
Florida Man is out now on Netflix and stars Edgar Ramirez, Abbey Lee, Anthony LaPaglia, Otmara Marrero, Lex Scott Davis, Emory Cohen, Clark Gregg, Isaiah Johnson, Paul Schneider, and Lauren Buglioli.
EJ Moreno
