Liz Meriwether may very well be good at everything. In her medium of choice, she’s gone from a famously quirky sitcom (New Girl) to an award-winning send-up of Silicon Valley hoaxer Elizabeth Holmes (The Dropout) to celebrated comedy about terminal cancer (Dying for Sex) to the current Furious, a thriller that’s about as dark as anything you’re likely to find on TV this summer. Oh, and she’s also writing the Britney Spears movie.

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One thing Meriwether has no immediate plans for, no matter what her former cast members might be saying on talk shows, however, is a New Girl reunion. Despite Max Greenfield‘s Today show announcement about “amazing” scripts and her own riffing on Instagram, it’s as much a running joke as True American and the douchebag jar. “Because we did the show when we were so young, there’s a camaraderie and a familiarity there,” says Meriwether. “There was a lot of making fun of each other, and I think that has continued. They are some of the funniest people I’ll ever work with. Everything they say makes me laugh so hard. So I’ve been really enjoying this. But it’s very weird.”

Weird as it may be, Meriwether does have thoughts on what a New Girl reunion might look like — should they ever make one. During a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter podcast, I’m Having an Episode (Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple), she talked about it at length, along with sharing the time she almost got fired from the show, details on her serial killer research for the Emmy Rossum collab Furious and how she’s been listening to Dying for Sex star Michelle Williams‘ audiobook recitation of Spears’ The Woman in Me as she works on the coming biopic.

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Since moving on from network sitcoms, you’ve made The Dropout, Dying For Sex and now the very dark thriller Furious. From the outside, it does appear that you’re trying to cross things off of some sort TV genre bingo card. Is that the plan?

What’s next, right? I don’t know what bingo card it is or what I’m gonna win at the end of it. I’m hoping it’s a lot of stuffed animals. Each new thing has given me a confidence to keep going further. The Dropout was my gateway drug. That feeling of being comfortable with discomfort and not knowing if something was possible and finding my way through it, I do think some of it comes from working on New Girl for seven years. I was 29 when it started. For some of it, I felt trapped. Obviously, I was incredibly grateful and loved doing it. But sometimes, I couldn’t believe that I didn’t have time to do anything else. I could only do that.

You did famously sleep in your office in the early seasons of New Girl.

I slept in my office! I had a relationship with the security guards. They would surprise me. I would scream and they would scream. I’d never be wearing a bra, so there was a kind of intimacy there that prepared me for marriage. Trapped feels like too harsh of a word, but I did feel stuck in that genre after doing that for seven years. I needed to experience other kinds of storytelling. 

We we need to discuss this ongoing New Girl reunion bit. Is this just coordinated trolling? What’s going on?

I don’t know how this happened or how it got so out of control. I love it, though. I think that this is the reunion. I don’t wanna put myself in it. I absolutely should not be acting. But if we ever did a reunion, it should just be this…  Blair-Witch-Project-style, shot on iPhones, everybody kind of talking about wanting to have a reunion. When I found out that Max had said on the Today show that I had written amazing scripts for the reunion, I thought, “Maybe it’ll blow over. I don’t know if anyone cares about this.” Immediately, there was an article. I don’t want to name names, but people pretty high up in the organization were calling other people and asking if there were scripts.

It’s pretty remarkable to see Max Greenfield, America’s sweetheart, go on Today and just lie to Jenna and Sheinelle.

I did Jake Johnson’s podcast the other day and we were talking about it. With Jake and Lamorne [Morris], you always know that they’re kidding. But with Max, he’s such a good actor that you believe him. I was just, like, “What are you doing?”

You say you wouldn’t want to be on camera, but it seems like the Larry David route is the only way to go if you ever did this… Like season seven of Curb your Enthusiasm and the Seinfeld pseudo-reunion.

I think that’s what America wants. Doing some kind of meta thing, like what has been happening, is so funny. I don’t know what form that would take, but I can’t get my head around going back onto that set. It feels like we’ve all changed and moved on. I don’t fully understand reboots, I guess. But that group of actors are just really funny together. Maybe that’s on my bingo card. Maybe I need to be a TV star. Maybe I should get my boobs lifted and just because a full-on star.

The reboot thing is interesting, because we’re living in a time where nothing really goes away. It’s on Netflix, it’s being remade, it’s being rebooted, there’s a reunion… 

Things don’t go away. That’s part of what’s going on here. When I finished New Girl, I had such profound sadness that it was, in my mind, over completely — that it was going disappear, because that’s what it felt like a lot of shows did. That’s not been the case at all. When people tell me that they still watch it, I almost get emotional. Because so much of my experience making that show was people telling me that not enough people were watching it. There was a period where Fox was stressed out that not enough men over the age of, like, 25 were watching. I kept thinking, “How do I get men in their 40s to watch this show?” It felt like a failure to me at the time, that not enough people were watching it.

How much did they hammer you about that stuff? Because the thing with New Girl was that it premiered at a level that was totally unsustainable. The pilot was huge.

Unsustainable. Then it became clear how weird and niche it was. People were like, “I don’t wanna watch this.” (Laughs.) There was a moment when Kevin Reilly … sending no shade his way, but he was the head of Fox [at the time.] We had a big meeting — before season three, I think — where he showed me the graphs of viewership. In my mind, there was fold out. It started high and then he folded the paper out and it just kept going lower and lower. So this was at the start of the season. He put that in front of me and was like, “This is what the viewership is. What are we gonna do about it?” I’m probably 31 years old, and I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know how to get people to watch the show.” So, yes, it was a huge part of the conversation, the notes we were getting, the pressure we were under.

Let’s go back to you sleeping on the Fox lot. You started New Girl when Hollywood, as an industry, was still celebrating the intersection of work ethic and self harm. When did you realize that was not a healthy path for you? 

That was how TV was made. My co-showrunners, Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, had worked in television for a really long time. Their stories about the writers room on Joey were that nobody went home. Nobody saw their kids. Nobody had families. That was part of why there were almost no women. It was the culture of writing TV, a badge of honor … how hard you could work and how late you could stay.

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Making network television is almost impossible to do and it does require an enormous amount of time. I honestly didn’t get it. I started to get it at the end of season three, when I almost got fired, because everybody was just so burnt out. I think the actors started saying “This is untenable.” It was Dana Walden who was like, “You have to figure out how to be a leader here.” I went around and I spoke to almost everybody, somebody from all different areas of the crew, just to figure out how to make it better.

One of the big ways was just shorter scripts, have fewer alts. The extra jokes and trying to make things funnier constantly, sometimes we had 16 hour days. That’s begun to change, although it still needs to change more. I think that it finally settled in for me when New Girl was over. I was at some event and I spoke to Quinta Brunson and she was like, “Yeah our writers go home at like 4 p.m.” I did it all wrong. It’s possible to do an incredible show like Abbott Elementary and treat everybody well. I just didn’t have a model for it, and it never occurred to me that it should be the way things go.

How close did you get to being fired?

I think really close. I was with my family in New York and and my agent called me because Dana wanted to talk to me. It felt pretty serious. Honestly, I was not delegating at all. I had never been in a writer’s room before. The first season was a massive hit. So, everybody was like, “Don’t change anything about what you’re doing!” What I was doing was sleeping in the office and not delegating or using my writers room very well. But then I was learning more about showrunning from being on panels, listening to showrunners answer questions. Because it’s such a weird job. No one tells you how to do it. I’m still so thankful that Dana didn’t fire me and gave me a chance to prove myself. 

So how did you get from there to Furious? Have you always had a dark procedural in you?

It’s very loosely based on the 1987 movie Black Widow. Emmy had wanted to make that into a show, and I was excited about doing something completely different and exploring a female serial killer. I love serial killer shows, but I’d never seen one with a female serial killer other than Killing Eve. I wanted to dive into that character and this seemed like a good framework. This sounds insane, but the more I learned about female serial killers, the more I was drawn in  — especially learning that most female serial killers have been victims of violence. That idea began forming in my head, just the cycle of violence and how misunderstood it is when it comes to women.

Do you have a lot of female serial killer trivia that you now deploy?

The one that’s really haunted me is that most of them are caretakers of some kind. I’ll let that one sink in. It’s not a fun cocktail party factoid. It’s always about a form of intimacy. It’s a form of connection. They often really know their victims. My Google history is terrifying because I was going down so many rabbit holes. “How to kill someone without people finding out? How do I get arsenic?” It was a lot of trying to figure out how to kill people. If I were my husband, I think I’d be a little scared. 

Considering this is such a departure from your previous work, was there a moment where you thought, “What am I doing?”

Almost every moment up to the point that the show came out. The worst for me was writing the finale. As a comedy writer, I’m not somebody who plans ahead 10 steps. A lot of my story breaking was trial and error. A lot of it was getting where I wanted with one episode, moving on and realizing that I had to go back and rewrite the one before to make sense of the next one. When the show was picked up, I had written two episodes and had no idea where it was going. If you’re doing a dramatic thriller, I don’t recommend that. Not having a plan was always a good writing comedy. So when I got to the finale, it was — spoiler! — “interior house – night.”

I realize you’re not going to talk about the Britney Spears movie, but I would like to talk around the Britney Spears movie. You have not written a feature in 15 years. Having spent all of that time since with so much creative control, how are you feeling about letting go of that?

It’s different and, in some ways, liberating. We’re so early in the process that I haven’t really experienced it yet. But I’ve spoken to Jon Chu and Mark Platt so much. They’re collaborative and it’s been great. I’m so used to being the final word on everything, but it feels really relaxing at the moment because I’m writing something and I don’t have to be the one to figure this out. “Exterior parade!” (Laughs.) I get to just be a writer and that’s fun.

In your prep for this project, did you read the book The Woman in Me, or did you listen to the audiobook performed by your former collaborator, Michelle Williams?

I’ve done both multiple times. That audiobook, if people haven’t listened to it, is one of the best audiobooks that’s ever been made. Michelle is unbelievable. It’s like a monologue. I told her that her performance of the audiobook broke my heart in so many ways. She’s being true to Britney and also telling a story in the way she’s reading it. Another spoiler: Michelle’s a really good actor. Maybe I’ll turn a script in to Mark and Jon that’s just Michelle on a stage, reading. I wonder what will happen.

What is your approach to writing, in terms of outside stimuli? Do you need quiet or are you listening to a lot of Britney?

I’ve been listening to her music a lot. I’ve been listening to a lot of music that was happening around the time that she was making music. That’s out of necessity. I want to just get the feeling that moment in time or just remind myself. I’m exactly Britney’s age, so a lot of that music just takes me like immediately back. My kids are reading Harry Potter, so this feels like a portkey. 

OK, final question of this Britney Spears interrogation: do you have a favorite Britney song?

I have been going back into her whole catalog, and I’ve been making a playlist for myself of my favorites. So I don’t have one. But I really love “Perfume” and “If I’m Dancing.” She’s made a lot of albums. Her hits have been such big hits that I think there are a lot of songs that people don’t think of.

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