The Bright Sessions is a wonderful podcast that bills itself as “Therapy for the strange and unusual.” The synopsis is unique and brilliant. Dr. Joan Bright (voiced by Julia Morizawa) is a therapist with a small collection of patients. They have the usual concerns, like uneasy relationships with their parents and unrequited love, and some atypical concerns, like complications with time travel and falling under mind control.
For me, what I think makes the podcast so enjoyable is the sharp writing that builds empathy while you get absorbed into the lives of the characters in a setting where they should be their least guarded. Listening to them in order makes for an enjoyable afternoon or two, and it’s easy to become absorbed in the lives of the main characters, Dr. Bright, Sam, Chloe, and Caleb.
While taking a short hiatus, new episodes will resume just this week (bi-weekly on Wednesdays), and the people behind the voices of Dr. Bright, Sam (series creator Lauren Shippen), and Caleb (Briggon Snow) are coming to Seattle this weekend to appear at Emerald City Comic Con.
Seeing the creators and stars of the Bright Sessions this weekend is one of the things at ECCC I’m most excited for, and they are making themselves available to their fans on each day throughout the convention (full schedule here) and will be the subject of a panel discussion on Saturday morning at 11am.
I was delighted that Lauren Shippen was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the show by e-mail (and quite promptly, too!).
Can you talk about how the Bright Sessions came to be? I think what I love about the podcast is that it’s such a unique idea, but also that it feels like I’m privy to someone else’s therapy sessions (and Dr. Bright expects much less of me than my own therapist).
The concept for The Bright Sessions was a culmination of months of daydreaming in my car. I’d been listening to a lot of Welcome to Night Vale and Cabin Pressure and thought it might be fun to try my hand at making a podcast – I’d had a radio show in college and had interned at WNYC, so I had a vague idea of how to export an audio file into a podcast. It was only ever supposed to be a little experiment for myself – something I would do 100% alone. I came up with the character of Sam, who went through a few iterations in my head before becoming the anxious time traveler she is today. I thought about doing a kind of audio journal as this character before realizing that I was already bored by the idea of having to listen to only my own voice. I wanted to give Sam someone to talk to and the idea of a therapist popped into my head. While it had taken 3-4 months of thinking about this character before nailing her down, the rest of the podcast more or less came together in that one car ride. Once Dr. Bright was a person in my brain, her other patients started to form and the rest is history.
Oddly enough, I had never actually done therapy before starting the podcast. It was always something I had meant to do but the problem with anxiety is that it can make things like calling for an appointment difficult. I’m in therapy now (and I think doing the podcast and having to confront Sam’s anxiety finally pushed me to deal with my own) but when I started writing, I didn’t have that reference point. But therapy is one of those things that we as a culture inherently understand – we know what it’s supposed to look and sound like. It is such an easy framing device. There’s no complicated premise to set up and there’s nothing else to worry about beyond talking. As someone who hadn’t written a lot before, this was a great way in.
How did the cast come on board?
I met the majority of the cast at the acting studio I’ve been going to for three years, BGB Studio. It is a wonderful community full of extremely talented people. I had been in class for over a year with both Julia and Briggon (Dr. Bright and Caleb respectively) and was dying to work with them. They became those characters in my brain before I had finished writing the first season so I was extremely relieved when they said yes – I’m honestly not sure that the podcast would have happened with different actors and it certainly wouldn’t be what it is today. The fourth member of our original, first season cast (the first 9 episodes) is Anna Lore (voice of Chloe), who I met in class at UCB. She is one of my dearest friends and hugely talented so I wrote the role of Chloe specifically for her. All the other actors that we’ve added along the way have either been from BGB or friends I’ve met through Anna, so it is really a family affair.
I read somewhere that episode one was the first script you had written? That’s insane and incredible! You must have been very surprised with how it had taken off.
You are correct! I’ve always loved books, so I had tried my hand at novel writing when I was a teenager but never finished anything. By the time I got to college, I was so involved with academic and pop culture writing (my hobby in high school) that fiction had fallen completely by the wayside. The pilot of The Bright Sessions was probably the first piece of fiction I had written in 6 or 7 years and my first script ever. I had no expectations for it at all – in fact, I wrote the pilot in 2014, shared it with a few people, and then sat on it for a year. I liked what I had written and had all these other ideas for characters and plot but had absolutely no confidence that I could do it myself. I talked to a few writer friends about maybe collaborating, but we never got our acts together. Eventually, I was so sick of these characters chattering endlessly in my brain that I finally sat down and wrote the first season. When I gave it to Julia, Briggon, and Anna, I assumed it would be a fun thing for the four of us to do and a way for me to test drive my writing. In my wildest dreams, I hoped we would have a few thousand listeners by the end of our first season. The way the show has taken off has been a wonderful surprise.
I want to ask you about how the show has changed from when you conceived it and started recording each episode?
There have been a lot of little character and plot things that have changed along the way, but the biggest shift was the character of Dr. Bright herself. I initially had very different plans and intentions for her – which I think you can hear in the way she is written in the first 9 episodes – but then I got Julia in. And, because she is one of the most talented and hard-working individuals I’ve ever met, she brought all this new stuff to the table. Suddenly Dr. Bright was layered and interesting in a way that I hadn’t been paying attention to. By the time we were done recording the first season, Dr. Bright’s arc was very different, which in turn affected the arc of the entire show.
You have new episodes beginning this week, if I’m not mistaken. Can you talk, in general of what we can expect from the newest season?
Yep – Episode 33 comes out on March 1st. It picks up almost exactly where we left off with Episode 32 – we are still in what I consider to be our third season and this next stretch of episodes definitely wraps up a lot of what was opened up in Episodes 25-32. There was a fairly dramatic shift of power at the end of Episode 32 and that’s indicative of things to come: power keeps changing hands in a way that the characters, and hopefully the audience, don’t see coming. Also, characters are beginning to collide in a way they haven’t before and there’s a lot of tension there. Now that Mark is out from under Damien’s influence, he has to start confronting a lot of what he’s been through and figure out who he trusts. I don’t want to give too much away, but here’s a smattering of things listeners can look forward to: learning more about Joan and Mark’s family life, a greater understanding of The AM, and someone’s ability having consequences in an unexpected way.
Are there any other projects you’re working on that you want to plug, or want to tell us how we can follow what you do online or support the show?
At the moment, my life is pretty much swallowed up by The Bright Sessions. But you can be sure that I will post any and all other projects on my own social media, laurenshippen.com, @laurenshippen on twitter/instagram, and thelaurenshippen.tumblr.com. For all the show’s social media, you can visit our website thebrightsessions.com, which has links to everything, including our merch store and bonus content. If you want to support the show, first of all: thank you! Go to patreon.com/thebrightsessions or make a one-time donation on our website! Leaving a review for us on iTunes is also a huge, and free, way to help.
What are you looking forward to at ECCC this weekend? Have you been to Seattle before?
I’ve been to Seattle exactly once, when I was about 6, so I don’t remember it much. I’m hoping to get out into the city a little bit (and please send me any and all food recommendations on twitter – eating is my favorite activity) but there’s so much amazing stuff happening at ECCC that I’ll be surprised if I leave the convention center. Other than our panel, of course, I’m especially excited for Hello from the Magic Tavern and all the other awesome stuff that’s going to be happening in the Podcast Zone. There’s some really interesting sounding panels on fandom and fangirls, subjects about which I am very passionate, so I’m going to try and catch a couple of those. I also can never say no to a Hamilton singalong so it’s very likely I will be at that as well.
