Using Your Creativity To Make A Difference

During my recent trip to Los Angeles for the Disney*PIXAR Coco event, I had the honor of sitting down with Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters, showrunners and producers of Kevin Probably Saves The World for a fun and empowering Q&A session.

This powerful duo met while working as assistants on The X Files. Most recently, Fazekas and Butters served as executive producers/showrunners on both “Marvel’s Agent Carter” and “Resurrection” on ABC. Prior to that, they created The CW cult hit “Reaper” and served as writers/producers on “Law & Order: SVU” for five seasons, during which time they received two Writers Guild nominations.

Fazekas and Butters recently signed a new three-year overall deal with ABC Studios, under which their F&B banner, a writer-friendly pod, has been based for the past four years. They have also developed pilots for the CW, CBS and Fox, in addition to having served as writers on series such as “Terra Nova” and Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse.”

But Kevin (Probably) Saves The World is very different (and lighter) from what they’ve been doing, which they describe as “blending comedy, drama, and action.” They decided to write something they would enjoy watching with their families, and didn’t even think that ABC would air it!

Tara Butters is mom to a 12 and a 10 year old kids and Michele Fazekas’ kiddos are eight and six.

“I can watch with my kids and that we could both sit down and enjoy it. And, you know, typically what happens is tomorrow morning my girls get up at six o’clock in the morning. We come downstairs and we watch it before school. Because they see rough cuts, because they love to — my oldest reads the scripts, but we’ll watch it on Wednesday morning, because we have to time shift, ’cause they don’t stay up till ten. It was important to us to have stuff that we could watch with our kids.” Tara Butters

I wasn’t too familiar with Kevin (Probably) Saves The World, but after watching a few episodes, it became an instant favorite. I was excited to know that we would be live tweeting from the ABC building during the 11/7 episode, because I don’t really get to do that a lot. Some of the simple pleasures of life – especially now that we get 280 characters!

Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas are so talented and inspiring and true Hollywood powerhouses, blazing the trail for other women in the industry:

“We hire all the directors. We hire all the writers.” Michele Fazekas
“In the first 13 episodes, we have three or four women [directing]. And we were able to get Rob Hardy, a director of color. And that was of the first 13. It’s really hard on a first-year show, because I think it’s below 30 percent  diversity. So when you’re trying to even get 50 and 50 of your directors, it’s incredibly difficult just based on those numbers if it’s around 70 percent white male and 30 percent everything else!” Tara Butters

I am excited to see people that are passionate about creating quality entertainment, and even more when they promote diversity and inclusion, empowering others to learn, and being awesome moms, too!

“I like to go home. I like my family. I don’t need to work all the time. And I’ve worked with guys who don’t like their families, and so they stay so that means you have to stay. I’m like, I’m not gonna do that. We have this philosophy of, we will train you how to be a producer. We will train you how to be a showrunner.” Michele Fazekas

I love the concept of  Kevin (Probably) Saves the World. Basically, Kevin Finn (Jason Ritter) is not a good person. He’s not terrible, but he’s selfish, and clueless, and values material wealth and status over all else. And he’s beginning to realize that those things aren’t making him happy—in fact, he’s fairly miserable. Just when things seem to be at their worst, he finds himself tasked with an unbelievable mission… saving the world.

Yvette (Kimberly Hébert Gregory HBO’s Vice Principals) is Kevin’s celestial guide, protector and teacher, drill sergeant with divine authority. She’s not an angel (which is a human construct, according to her), but a Warrior for God.

Yvette delivers incredible news to Kevin: in every generation, there are 36 righteous souls on Earth whose mere existence protects the word. Kevin, she tells him, is the last of the 36 righteous. Humanity has been thrown into crisis. Without the 36, the world will begin to lose the one thing that allows us to persevere through the ups and downs of life: HOPE! 

Kevin (Probably) Saves the World is filled with hope as Kevin embarks on a mission to “power up” his soul through acts of kindness and selflessness, so that he can eventually find and anoint a new generation of righteous people. 

Michele Fazekas told us the show came as an idea to write a spec (a speculative script) because of the dark place many people were after all the campaigning:

“…Whether you’re on the right or the left politically… there are just a lot of people who are unhappy and don’t feel good about where they are in their life, and that they don’t feel heard. And I think we kinda took that as something as inspiration – it felt like people needed something that just came from a good place and reminded you that little acts actually do add up and that you can do one thing and that might inspire somebody else to do a good thing.” Tara Butters

Michele Fazekas agreed and nodded, pointing out that “it’s really easy to find ugliness in the world.”

Founder of the Positive MOM® and creator of the S.T.O.R.Y. System: a blueprint to craft and share powerful stories that will transform your results and help others do the same. Dr. Elayna Fernández is a single mom of 4, an award-winning Storyteller, Story Strategist, and Student of Pain. She’s a bestselling author, internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, and 5x TEDx speaker. She has spoken at the United Nations, received the President’s Volunteer Lifetime Achievement Award, and was selected as one of the Top Impactful Leaders and a Woman of Influence by SUCCESS Magazine. Connect with Elayna at thepositivemom.com/ef and follow @thepositivemom. To receive a gift from Elayna, click HERE.

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Photo credits: ABC/Guy D’Alema and Bob D’Amico