At 43, Liz Feldman is one of the youngest veterans of TV comedy writing. The creator of the hit TV show, Dead to Me, starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini started working as a writer on Nickelodeon when she was just 18. Since then, she has worked as a writer for The Ellen DeGeneres Show and also wrote both of Ellen’s Oscars speeches. She also wrote for Two Broke Girls and One Big Happy.

Despite the association with levity and humor that this work would suggest, Feldman thinks about death a lot and has been forced to by events in her life, as she told us.

“I would say I’ve probably had emotional fascination with death since I was a small child, because I lost a couple of uncles very young, one of whom I was very close to and he had three small children under the age of nine that he left behind,” she said. “I was only, about 11 at the time, and that death definitely was a seminal moment in my rearing.

I think I’ve been probably trying to make sense of that death for a very long time, and then added onto that, of course you live long enough and people are going to pass away. In my 30s I lost three friends who were also in their 30s, and one of whom had been one of my best friends in high school and he passed away five days before my wedding. And we never found out actually what happened or what the circumstances were. So I had the sort of culmination of losses basically, and I think it is our great unknown. It is the thing in life that nobody has the answer to. Nobody can really say what happens or why. It’s one of those existential questions that I think we all grapple with.

Is writing about grief cathartic for you?

The way I write is to process what I’m going through at the time. For example, Dead to Me came out of this time in my life where I had turned 40 and on the day I turned 40, my cousin passed away unexpectedly. He was 50. And already when you’re turning 40, you’re facing sort of this strange midlife, it’s half over, “who am I? What am I?” And for that death to happen on top of that, it was pretty like earth-shaking. And then there are other kinds of deaths as well, like the loss of a baby or the loss of a pregnancy and, infertility issues, and I was dealing with that too. So there can also be like the death of a relationship. There’re so many different kinds of deaths, but it’s just something I’ve always been trying to make sense of, and I think we all are.

Had Dead to Me been germinating in you for a long time?

I didn’t even mean to create Dead To Me! It really came out of a place of being in grief and trying to make sense of these losses that I had experienced and then being shoved up against a wall and forced to come out with an idea because it came out of a meeting where I thought somebody was going to pitch me something and then I sat down and they were like, “what do you have”? And I had nothing because I was a week out of my cousin’s funeral and I was struggling, frankly. And out of nowhere or I guess somewhere between the ether and my deepest part of me came this idea of a widow who goes to a grief group and meets a woman who also lost her guy, except he didn’t die. He just broke up with her. And that’s where the show comes from, and that’s a little bit about where my fascination with death comes from. It’s something that I think we all are equally fascinated, terrified, with and about. Even after Dead to Me is long and gone, I’ll still be trying to figure it out.

Has it helped you with your grief?

I wouldn’t say it has been healing, primarily because it’s sort of like exposure therapy. What I’ve been grappling with is how to sort of get past my own loss and how to deal with these moments in life that were out of my control and very sad. Boy, watching it be lived out over and over again by incredible actors is a really interesting way to process your own stuff because there have been moments where I’m sitting there watching the monitors and I’m watching either Linda or Christina do their thing, and I have to walk away from the video village and just from people because I’m having a moment where I realize, “oh, this is like expressing something from very deep inside of me, and I didn’t even realize it until I watched it be played out”. And there were definitely moments like that in both seasons where I had to separate myself and have a moment, but in having that moment, I have a catharsis, and that can be very powerful. But anyway, yes, the short answer is that it has been healing and I’m really grateful for the way in which I’ve been able to heal because to be creative and to be productive through the healing is also kind of healing.

Did you have a specific audience or demographic in mind when you wrote Dead to Me?

I come from many years in network television where we were primarily aiming for as wide an audience as possible, so given the opportunity to be a little bit more targeted in our approach, I thought, yeah, I wanted sort of middle-aged women to watch it. And in a million years didn’t think that men would sort of take to it. After that first season premiered and it seemed like lots of different people were watching it, nobody was more surprised than me. My 12-year-old niece is a big fan. I didn’t think children would watch it, but they do, which is interesting and certainly something at this point I keep in the back of my mind. But yeah, I kind of wanted to make a show that my mom would love and that I would love.

Given how much death has been among us with the pandemic, have you considered writing it in to the next season?

Right now it’s very difficult to be in production in Los Angeles, so we don’t exactly know when the show will premiere. So keeping it evergreen is important now more than ever. I talk about this with my friends and writers all the time that we don’t even really understand what we’re going through yet. We experience it on a daily basis, but I don’t fully process something until it’s over. And then I have perspective and I can look back and say, ‘Oh my God, wow. We were really traumatized by that.’ I have that feeling that we’re going to look back and go, ‘Oh, now we’re in PTSD.’ I think we’ll have a ton of PTSD for this crazy thing that we’ve experienced, but it’s collective on a scale I don’t think we’ve ever experienced before. It’s got to be somewhere akin to going through a war or something. And I wish I had some sort of crystal ball as a writer and an artist to look forward and go, ‘Oh, this is what people are going to want to see. Okay, I get it.’ I don’t have that.

You’ve been in the showbiz tranches for two and a half decades now. How do you think you have evolved?

I’m an anxious person and I’m a worrier. I don’t want to let anybody down. If I say I’m going to have a script at a certain time, I want to have that script at that time. I want to be impeccable with my word. And I want people to feel like I’m somebody they want to work with. It’s such a tenuous business. It’s so fickle. I’ve been doing this for so long. My first writing job was in 1995. So I’m 43, but I’ve been in this business for 25 years. And what I’ve learned is that you’re really only as good as your last thing that you just did. And you may have a library of things that you’ve collected behind you, but it doesn’t really matter. So I think I’m aware of that and it keeps me on my toes. I try to make it sort of a positive thing, as opposed to this thing that’s haunting me constantly. I want to fulfill my potential and I want people to feel that I’m somebody that they can trust.

Did you ever have any bad experiences with sexual harassment or not getting paid the same as your male colleagues?

I was 18 years old in a writer’s room for the first time, and I was totally targeted, sexually harassed. I was the only woman and in the writer’s room and that behavior was not only condoned, but it was probably expected. I just didn’t expect it because I was a child and I had never had a job before, and I didn’t even understand that it was wrong. And I just thought that that’s how it was. And so, to jump from there to where I am now, I mean, now I’m the person in charge, I’m the head writer. I was the only female writer multiple times. And it was because they had to hire a woman, not because they wanted to, but because it was really a mandate coming down from whatever the executive level. So, sometimes I was a writer in a room where they didn’t even really want me to be there, where they would rather me probably just honestly disappear. What started to happen was, I think, in a small way I would show up and I would do a good job. And then the next season, they hired three more women. I think, the #MeToo movement definitely woke people up and shook a bunch of people in their boots. I think, men know that they’ll be called out. I don’t know that it’ll stop them from doing it, but I think that they know that there’s more of a microscope on them. But, I think 25 years ago, I wouldn’t have this job that I have now. It would be much harder.