You’ve graduated college. Your future seems boundless. Then, you’ve moved to a new city…but the unfamiliarity of that city already makes you homesick. You’ve found a new apartment…except it’s not as luxurious as you believed it would be. You’ve got a new job…but it’s not the dream career that you imagined as you received your diploma on graduation day.
If you’ve ever experienced any (or all) of those emotional plateaus, then actor/filmmaker Cassidy Davis’ funny yet relatable comedy series ADULTING can help you take a humorous look at the challenges of post-college life. Created and written by Davis, ADULTING’s first season streams on its web site (additional links below) and Apple TV – the latter through the new JiveWired TV app. The app will soon appear online and through Roku, as well.
ADULTING co-stars Davis and Mallory Fuccella as Katie and Charlie, a pair of best friends who bravely venture into the most intimidating territory they’ve ever entered: Los Angeles. During their first days in La La Land, Katie (Davis) and Charlie (Fuccella) get ensnared in a veritable cornucopia of comedic complications. With their friendship being tested throughout every awkward situation that arises in their lives, Katie and Charlie get a hilarious front row seat to the unpredictability of millennial adulthood.
Davis is no stranger to that unpredictability, nor is she unfamiliar with the difficulties of getting used to a place where almost everyone dreams of seeing their names in lights. While ADULTING humorously reflects the complexities of both experiences, Davis’ personal backstory has a few things in common with the comedy found in her first web series project.
L-R: ADULTING co-stars Cassidy Davis (who also created the show) and Mallory Fuccella.
“It’s loosely based off of my first year moving to Los Angeles. I moved around a lot as a kid, so I thought that upon graduating college and moving to L.A. it wouldn’t be too hard of a switch for me because I had learned to adapt to a lot of different environments,” Davis remembers.
Adapting to Los Angeles, though, was an experience that challenged everything Davis believed about her own self-reliance.
“I felt like I was a pretty self-sufficient, smart adult living in the world, but it was definitely a huge wake-up call moving to L.A. and realizing there were so many things that I had no idea how to do and so many things I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I hit all these speed bumps along the way of my first year.”
In her down time, Davis started to talk about the pitfalls and growing pains she’d been enduring in Los Angeles, “I would call home and tell my parents these stories or talk about it with my friends. Everyone was laughing and saying how relatable these stories were. People my parents’ age were like, ‘oh, I remember being there. It gets better. Don’t worry.”
Not only did life in L.A. get better for Davis, but it also led to a creative breakthrough for the actor and filmmaker: the creation of ADULTING. “I took a step back and looked at what my life had been for the past year, and found a lot of humor and relatability in it all. I just started writing it all down into episodes, and that’s what inspired the show to come alive.”
Before Davis cast the role of Charlie, her original inspiration for that character had a true teasing streak. “I wrote Charlie off of one of my college roommates, who was always poking fun at me. She was a lot more Charlie-esque, and that’s how I started writing Charlie. When Mallory (Fuccella, co-star) and i went to college together, and when we re-connected out here in L.A., Mallory stepping into the role brought a whole new life to it.”
Once Fuccella joined Davis as her co-star in ADULTING, Davis changed how she saw her character (Charlie). “After knowing she was on board, the writing started being more tailored to her and to her version of Charlie rather than my college roommate’s version of Charlie. It’s loosely based on my previous college roommate.”
L-R: ADULTING co-stars Fuccella and Davis.
As actors, Davis and Fuccella have some interesting commonalities with the characters they play in ADULTING.
“I would say that my character, Katie, is definitely a version of who I am. I try to be really optimistic, so I take that aspect of my personality and gave it to her and infused that a little bit. As for my co-star (Mallory Fuccella), I would say Charlie is a version of her, as well. She’s a little bit more grounded than I am in real life, and a little bit more realistic about things.”
Like Davis and Fuccella, their characters in ADULTING also possess differing outlooks on life. “We (myself and Mallory) definitely see the world in two very different ways, (but) in a good way,” replies Davis. “Katie is a little bit more innocent and naive than I am, so I think she’s a version of myself in that way. I would say Charlie is a little bit more pessimistic than Mallory is in real life. I think they’re versions of ourselves, but (they’re) obviously not our true selves.”
Though Katie and Charlie’s misadventures in maturation are inspired by similar incidents in Davis’ own coming-of-age journey, Davis reimagines them in an unforgettably comic way during ADULTING’s debut story arc. “In the first episode, when we (Davis and Fuccella) are apartment hunting, my current roommate and I really did go through that. The apartment was pretty much as bad as depicted in the first episode. There was poop in the elevator. The apartment manager was unresponsive. We did punch up the quirkiness of the characters a little bit.”
Unlike the atmosphere of Davis’ actual apartment building, ADULTING’s residence was populated by some obvious oddballs. “The man holding the flower didn’t happen (in real life), but we put that in there because we thought it built out the world of how weird this apartment building was a little bit,” says Davis of the first episode’s additions. “Similarly, the apartment manager who we ended up touring the apartment with wasn’t quite so curt, but again, we punched that character up for comedic effect, as well.”
Episode 2 of ADULTING was inspired by Davis’ actual brush with an unusually flirty mattress salesman. “The day I got my first mattress in real life, I thought the humor of it was that I didn’t know what I was doing, first of all. Second of all, the guy was hitting on me. I thought it was so interesting because it was such a weirdly intimate thing to buy a mattress, and then to have the employee flirt with you is even weirder. I was basing that character off of that interaction.”
Conor McGrath plays a flirty mattress salesman-turned love interest for Katie (Cassidy Davis) in ADULTING.
For ADULTING, Davis created the character of Greg (Conor McGrath), an offbeat yet charming version of the salesman who tried to win both her heart and her business.
“…I did bump him (the salesman from Davis’ real life) up to be a lot more quirky, nerdy and lovable to bring the comedic effect to life, to bring about this sweet relationship between the two of them, and to build the romantic connection in the hopes that he would win over everyone’s hearts.”
Cooking is an activity where delicious success is frequently preceded by disastrous failures, and one specific kitchen calamity from Davis’ past ties in to one of ADULTING’s tremendously relatable plotlines. “I figured out what a clove of garlic is after making a heavy garlic pasta – not realizing that I was using heads of garlic and not cloves of garlic,” she remembers. “That happened in real life. I made dinner for my roommate and used a bunch of heads of garlic instead of cloves. She ate it, and it didn’t go well.”
Davis took her memories of that garlic gaffe and elevated them to hysterical heights for ADULTING’s third episode. “The comedic effect that I punched up for the series was adding in a time crunch (in the episode’s story) to make it all matter a little bit more,” Davis says. “The stakes are a little bit higher, and now (in the episode) I had to face my date after smelling like garlic, as opposed to in my real life where we laughed about it and went to bed. Adding that time crunch pumped up that comedy a little bit.”
While ADULTING’s memorable cold opens distinguish the series from other webisodes in a structural sense, they humorously show that every young adult has experienced the uncomfortable challenges of beginning a new life in a new place.
“A lot of those cold opens were based on real life,“ says Davis. “The rest of them are more written off of some common struggles that we thought people would relate to, and (they’re) not necessarily completely real – although (for) the cold open for the last episode where she climbs in through the apartment – I actually have done that, as well. I locked myself out, and I had to climb through in my dress and heels. I wasn’t on a date, and again that was added for comedic effect, but I did do that in real life. I’d say probably all of it is based on my life, the more I think about it.”
ADULTING’s pre-episode cold opens also represent how Davis and Fuccella’s characters aren’t the only people who grapple with becoming responsible adults. “I wrote those opening teasers because I wanted to establish that it’s not just these two girls who are bad at adulting,” Davis adds.
“They’re not just 2 dumb girls who are just trying to get through life. The world is struggling with adulting. Adulting is hard for everyone. One way of growing out that world was starting with these cold opens of someone, completely unrelated to the story, who’s also struggling. (I wanted) to bring together the idea that we’re all in this together, (and) we’re all figuring this out to the best of our abilities.”
Safely parking a car without unintentionally hitting another vehicle is like trying to fit inside a cramped elevator without bumping into whichever bodies are inside of it. Davis, whose tricky tries at parallel parking introduced her to Los Angeles’ infamously packed curbsides, recreated those uncomfortable attempts in the first cold open prior to ADULTING’s opening story.
“I struggled with parallel parking every day, and that’s the cold open for the first episode,” she explains. “No matter who you are in L.A., you’re probably parallel parking at one point or another. There might have been a time where you struggled with it, and we’re going to tap into that moment with you.”
A young L.A. millennial, Lexi (played by Jetta Juriansz) makes a messy and embarrassing return from a grocery in the prelude to episode 3 of ADULTING.
Walking to and from a grocery store in Los Angeles is even trickier when you’re carrying a bundle of perishable goods across a long distance. Like her misadventures with parallel parking, Davis introduced episode 3 of ADULTING by comedically reframing her embarrassing attempts to carry groceries in fragilely-built bags.
“The cold open for the third episode, where she’s dropping groceries, truly happened to me. I just remember feeling so helpless because I was too far away from the grocery store to go back and get more bags, and I was too far away from home to do it in shifts,” says Davis. “I just remember collapsing one day on the sidewalk, not sure what to do with all my groceries sprawled around me. That one was definitely written off of real life.”
If you spend a day or a lifetime in Los Angeles, you’re almost assured of running into one of the city’s most plentiful species: the actor. While the amount of wannabe thespians is immeasurable in L.A., its pool of proven and promising talent was a rich resource for Davis and Fuccella when they cast ADULTING. “The guy who plays Greg is a friend of ours. Most of the cast is friends, or friends of friends. I would say 90 percent of the people (in the cast) were our friends, and if they weren’t, they were referred to us by people.”
As a regular performer at the Los Angeles studio of improv comedy group Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), Davis counted on many of her on-stage collaborators to transfer their skills to ADULTING’s uproarious pre-episode teasers. “I knew that I could give them the scenario, i.e. give her the grocery bags and say, ‘this is what we’re going for. Can you just improv it out for the next 2 minutes?’ and know that it would be a success.”
Produced for $5,300, the first season of ADULTING was made at a pace that moved almost as fast as life in Los Angeles itself. “It was my first time producing something, so it was a lot of learning on the fly. It was definitely a whirlwind. I was producing the next episode while we were shooting the former episode, and while we were editing the episode before that,” Davis says.
Luckily, Davis’ supportive collaborators and friends had her back during every shoot. “The production process was definitely a whirlwind of fun, though. A lot of people helped me out in finding crew and finding people who would work well together on the set.”
Once the preparation for ADULTING’s second season begins, Davis believes that a stronger level of efficiency and manpower will make filming the series a little easier. “Moving forward, I definitely want to have some more team members and more organization with it,” she comments, while forecasting growth for a crucial part of the show’s pre-production. “Moving into season 2, we’re definitely going to hold more auditions and expand (the casting process) a little bit more.”
On set: Sound recordist Ajala Bandele, director Lizzie Lockard, director of photography Jordan Michaud-Scorza and ADULTING co-star/creator Cassidy Davis.
Though a good part of ADULTING’s viewers are millennials who face the same ups and downs of growing older as the series’ characters do, older viewers are also drawn to it for its identifiable spotlight on post-adolescent life.
“Surprisingly, a lot of people in their ’50s have told us that they really enjoy the show because they remember when (they were young adults). I think it’s a show for everyone, but primarily (for viewers) in their early ’20s,” Davis adds.
Davis sees the thematic parallels between ADULTING and primetime sitcoms like GIRLS. NEW GIRL and 2 BROKE GIRLS. Though her series tackles many of the same stumbling blocks that young millennial women experience after they hang up their diplomas, ADULTING is dramatically boosted by its look at the ties between its two central characters.
“I think that what sets us apart a little bit is that it’s not just about adulthood. It’s about the friendship between these two girls, and the resilience that women and people have – especially young adults. It’s really highlighting that. It’s highlighting the bond of two female friends, and what that can be. I also think it’s a little bit younger than some other shows.”
In real life, it takes time for people to cope with change. Reflecting that in its storylines, ADULTING features its post-grad protagonists cautiously treading the waters of adulthood. “They’re fresh out of college, and they’re going step-by-step through adulting rather than going right into things that are usually shown on TV, I would say,” says Davis of the roles that she and Fuccella play on ADULTING.
People who watch ADULTING may think that it’s comedically constructed like every average sitcom. From the first frame of a typical ADULTING episode, though, that expectation gets shattered. “I also think the structure of the show sets us apart, with the cold opens setting the tone and establishing the world of the show. Those will continue to be a part of season 2. That structure sets us apart, as well as the idea that every episode ends at the highest peak of failure.”
Paired with its memorable cold open sequences, ADULTING also redefines what a situation comedy should feel like for viewers. “Once the girls have gotten to the highest peak of failing at whatever they are trying to accomplish in that episode, that’s when the crash-in of ADULTING happens and the episode ends – as opposed to a traditional sitcom structured (to) end with a resolution feeling,” Davis notes. “This is trying to end when it’s at the highest peak, instead.”
L-R: Davis and Fuccella, co-stars of ADULTING.
As ADULTING’s young audience gets older – and hopefully, wiser – Davis already imagines how the show and its characters will grow with its viewers.
“The struggle of adulthood doesn’t end at any age,” she explains. “My mom talks about adulthood, and she’s a few generations ahead of me. Right now, she’s struggling with what to do about the neighbors’ tree in her yard, so I don’t think the struggle of adulting ever ends at any age. I could see the show going for many, many seasons, with it going through what it’s like to become parents, what it’s like to become retired, etc. I think these two girls could face every stage of life together.”
While Davis has planned at least a five season arc for ADULTING, the series shows how perseverance, friendship and laughter can guide everyone through all the tough parts of being an adult. “I hope people watching the show take away that they’re not alone in the day-to-day struggles they might face,” Davis says. “We’re all going through it together, and we’re all supporting each other through it. Take a step back. Instead of looking at it all as a struggle, maybe start to see the humor in it all.”
(NOTE: Davis is looking into adding closed-captioning to ADULTING.)
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