How Hello Sunshine Hit Its Limited Series Stride

President of Film & TV Lauren Neustadter and director Nzingha Stewart tell IndieWire how the company co-founded by Reese Witherspoon became a well-oiled machine generating limited series about "interesting and compelling women."

The honest answer for why Hello Sunshine had such a prolific TV season is the pandemic.

“The timing has a lot to do with COVID because there was this moment where everything was quiet, but we were still working, so we were driving all these different things forward,” said Lauren Levy Neustadter, President of Film & TV of the media company co-founded by actress and mogul Reese Witherspoon. “When it was safe to go back and shoot, we had all of these shows that started production, and they all came together in a very similar window.”

Now the company has entered the 2023 Emmys season with not only one Television Movie contender and two Drama Series submissions but a whopping four Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series entrants — even more than some major networks. “From Scratch” (Netflix), “Daisy Jones and the Six” (Prime Video), “Tiny Beautiful Things” (Hulu), and “The Last Thing He Told Me” (Apple TV+) are all vastly different shows, but together they serve as a prime example of how, in only seven years, Hello Sunshine has already managed to make limited series adaptations of popular books its bread and butter.

In terms of how a project even gets there, Neustadter said to IndieWire over Zoom, “We always ask ourselves when we read a piece of material that we love, specifically if it happens to be a novel, ‘What is the very best way to tell the story?’ And sometimes, if that’s inside of a three-act structure, that’s a movie. If it feels more episodic, but there’s a clear point of closure, then it’s a limited series. If it’s episodic, and you could see it going on for seasons and seasons and seasons, then it feels exactly right to be ongoing.” It just so happened the four particular books of the same name as the four aforementioned series “came to an incredibly satisfying conclusion,” said the producer.

That kind of keen analysis is exactly what helped the company nab the rights to adapt the Taylor Jenkins Reid novel “Daisy Jones and the Six” before it even became a huge bestseller.

“Everyone else wanted to make it a movie. We really saw it as a series. And the conversations with Taylor were, ‘We love your book so much and [screenwriter] Scott [Neustadter] has such a vision for it. We don’t want to shrink it down into three acts, we wanna let it breathe.’” It should be noted as well that the show’s co-creator Scott Neustadter (“500 Days of Summer,” “The Disaster Artist”) just so happens to be the Hello Sunshine executive’s husband, making for a more extreme example of how the company has found much success utilizing its network.

Though Neustadter clarified that the Film and TV department is separate from Reese’s Book Club, so it is not always the case that one of the latter’s monthly picks (i.e. “The Last Thing He Told Me”) immediately becomes the next literary adaptation she and her team set out to make.

“When I, or a member of my team, reads a book and loves a book, whether it’s right for us to adapt or not, if we think that the book club community would love it, we are 100% flagging it, and Reese picks all those books herself, so she’s reading those books and if they come with our recommendations,” said the executive. “The truth is sometimes we read something and we’re like, ‘You know what? It’s not obvious to us as a show or a movie, but oh my God, I loved this book and this feels like such a clear book club pick.’ So we’re sort of sending it over there. And vice versa.”

A series like “Tiny Beautiful Things” comes from Witherspoon’s existing relationship with author Cheryl Strayed, having produced and starred in the 2014 film adaptation of her memoir “Wild.” For the Hulu series, Hello Sunshine paired veteran showrunner Liz Tigelaar, who ran its Emmy-nominated series “Little Fires Everywhere,” and wrote for its Emmy-winning series “The Morning Show.”

“Little Fires Everywhere” actually helped lead to “From Scratch,” as Neustadter was handed the 2019 Tembi Locke memoir by the author’s sister, Attica Locke, who happened to be a writer on the Hulu series, after the producer chatted with her about whether there were any good books out there about mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships.

Highlighting the organic nature of how Hello Sunshine puts creative teams together, not only did the “Little Fires Everywhere” alum then become the “From Scratch” creator and showrunner, helping guide her sister through adapting her own book, but the production company also brought on director Nzingha Stewart, who also worked on the Hulu show, to direct and produce the Netflix limited series. 

Stewart, a Shondaland alum recruited by star Kerry Washington for “Little Fires Everywhere” told IndieWire that the call for “From Scratch” was as simple as Neustadter saying “‘I have this book. I want you to read it. I only want you, I’m not talking to any other directors. We absolutely loved your block on ‘Little Fires.’ If you say yes, this is yours.’ So, I was like, ‘OK, let me read it. Let me make sure.’” On the set of that project, the pair then chatted about the director working on the back half of “Daisy Jones and the Six,” the series that submitted Stewart as a contender for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for her work on the finale, “Track 10: Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.”

“Nzingha was so perfect because she had shot so many music videos, and I knew that she wanted to return to [those] music roots and that background,” said Neustadter.

Though she was not available to work on the first block of episodes, making room for director James Ponsoldt to come in, the producer still said to Stewart, “What if we did the back half of ‘Daisy’ together and it’s all of these amazing concert sequences, and the culmination of all of this emotional stuff that we’ve been planting seeds for. And she was like, ‘I’m in.’”

It helped that Stewart had also been building up her Limited Series résumé, having directed the Morocco-set episodes of the Emmy-nominated series “Inventing Anna” and an episode of Netflix hit “Maid.” “I felt comfortable [that] I know how to do these shows about interesting and compelling women,” said Stewart. In addition to both production companies allowing her to have a real creative imprint on their limited series projects, rather than adapt to the rigidity that comes with episodic work, “Shondaland and Hello Sunshine both feel unique in that they champion women, in that they champion people of color, in that they champion queer people,” said the director. “All of our stories matter, and that is something I don’t take for granted, and that I’m so grateful for.” 

Neustadter noted that sentiment is exactly what Hello Sunshine strives to do with its productions. “Obviously we’re trying to speak to an audience of women who are hoping to see some of their stories reflected on screen. That said, my hope is also that our stories are resonating with a male audience, and with every race and gender and everyone of every sexual orientation, I hope that we’re reflecting these stories back. Diversity and inclusion is so much a part of our mission and our priority in storytelling,” said the President of Film & TV. 

She also points out the showrunners they work with as being key to that. “That is actually the benefit of having incredible writers’ rooms. Making sure that we are very intentional about being inclusive in terms of the writers and the voices and what is their point of view on the material. ‘What did you see in this book? What were you missing from this book? What did you want more of in this book?’” She added, “That is one of the gifts of adaptation, and what we’re able to do, is really love what we’ve been given and then ask questions and challenge ourselves and the amazing writers that we bring together… having those conversations come up where you say, ‘What might this have been? What was the answer to this question? And then you get to actually sort of indulge in that conversation and see what follows.”

The stars of these series are important to the process as well. “Every single story that we tell has a woman at the center of it in an unconventional way. We want to showcase her as a hero of her own story. And we want to pair wonderful material with incredible actresses and give them an opportunity to shine, and also to feel like their opinions matter deeply to us because they do, and to treat them like valued partners, which they are.”

That ultimately has become Hello Sunshine’s secret recipe for a successful Limited Series: deep consideration of its collaborators at every level, starting with the people whose work is being adapted. “I love my job for a million reasons, but one of them is that all of our showrunners are so amazing and thoughtful, and the endeavor is always to honor the book,” said Neustadter. “What we offer is we’re incredibly passionate, we care so deeply, and we’re gonna take care of your book, and we’re gonna take care of you, and we’re gonna do everything in our power to get it made. Because in truth, there’s nothing that’s more heartbreaking to me or to our team, or to Reese than to have made a promise to an author that we’re not able to keep.”