Showrunner Kahane Cooperman Discusses The Filmmaking Care Behind ‘The New Yorker Presents’

One of the most interesting shows currently streaming is one that you probably haven’t heard much about. This show innovatively plays with the bingeable and user-controlled nature of streaming itself while smartly tackling difficult subjects and interesting stories. I’m talking about Amazon’s snippet series, The New Yorker Presents.

The New Yorker Presents brings to life a curated selection of stories and articles from the magazine. The show spans time periods and genres, jumping from high brow humorous stories that The New Yorker is known for to insightful 12-minute documentaries to those iconic cartoons. The series watches as a genuinely pleasant and compelling look into the lives of several interesting people without the intimidating tone people associate with the magazine. All of this can be accredited to the creative force behind the series.

The series is helmed by showrunner Kahane Cooperman, formerly a longtime producer for The Daily Show with John Stewart, and acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney, who directed the who directed the HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Disbelief, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Netflix‘s Cooked. I had the opportunity to speak to Cooperman about how the creative team decided which pieces to adapt, where they see the future of the show going, and what it was like working with Amazon.

DECIDER: There’s a lot of New Yorker content you could choose from. How did you choose which New Yorker pieces to adapt?

KAHANE COOPERMAN: You know, built into our production schedule was that curation period where we literally had to delve into these magazines. It was very overwhelming because we actually have access to the magazine’s archives, which go all the way back to 1925. It seems daunting, but we had a lot of people reading a ton of stuff. But also David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, recommended a bunch of pieces that we would then look at. Prior to my coming onto the project, Jigsaw Production �� Alex Gibney’s company — produced the pilot, and in researching for the pilot, they also were also able to come up with a lot of story possibilities that, while didn’t make it into the pilot, were still there. So we were able to take all this work plus everything we were reading. It also helped a lot that one of our supervising producers, Jack Leschner, has a very encyclopedic knowledge of The New Yorker. That was incredibly helpful. He just remembers every article, everything he’s ever read, and he’s been reading it his whole life, so it was great to have him for that part of the process.

We would put together all of these stories, and we had to evaluate them for a lot of things. First we look at — you know, it just needed to be a good story. Whether it was fiction or not, it needs to be a compelling, good story. And then not every story is conducive to visualization, you know? We wanted to make sure that we could make a good film out of these stories. We also wanted to make sure we had a variety of perspectives and voices and subject matter so that the series didn’t feel that it was all one tone. The idea was to ultimately create a menu of story possibilities that we could present to our filmmakers. It was very cool to be able to say, like, ‘Here’s your menu. What story do you want to choose to make a film about?’ … For the most part, they (the filmmakers) found something that they loved in what we gave them, and that’s who you want making the film. You want someone who’s really responding to and reading the material, and it resonates with them because you’re going to feel that passion in the filmmaking.

D: The New Yorker can be a very time sensitive publication. Have there been any plans to create more time-relevant stories for The New Yorker Presents?

KC: We definitely would like to. Right now, we’re waiting to find out if we get a second season, so this is all hypothetical, but it was very much, if we were able to continue with the show, we’d want to find a way to have more urgent and topical pieces that are part of it. It’s hard because it’s not turned around like a news show. It’s turned around like short films are, and they take a longer time to craft and get going. We already had all of these interesting conversations about how we can address more urgent topics and still contend with the lead time that we need to produce the films at the high quality that we’re going for. And also, Amazon has some technical … there are certain technical things with Amazon, and that’s just part of what it is. When we deliver a piece, they have a lot of checkpoints and all kind of things they have to do to turn it over so that it can becomes streamable. It’s not that they’re not working on technology to make that go faster, but it still takes a while.

But we have thought about possibilities. Like is there any way to make it kind of modular where, at the top of the show, there’s a slot open we can place something that was quickly turned around into it? And just drop it in? We have all kinds of ideas, and it’s something we would like to do.

I will say that there’s one piece in the current series that was not originally created for the series. It was completely done — all of our production — based on the shooting in San Bernardino. We just all looked at each other and felt really strongly, and to Amazon, like ‘We really need to do a piece about gun control.’ We actually kind of went back into production to create this one piece that is currently in one of our episodes. It’s based on two Adam Gopnik essays and produced by one of our filmmakers, Jed Rothstein. It’s a really strong, powerful piece, and we turned it around really quickly, but it’s a little more of a generalist approach to the subject as opposed to the ability to overnight turn something around to cover something that just happened. But it is a way to address something that’s in the national conversation and has urgency. It was important for us to make sure our first season included something about guns and gun control, given the state of things in this country.

D: How quick was the turnaround time for the gun violence piece?

KC: It was just a couple weeks, from start to finish, which is much less time than we’d normally have. We had the idea, we had to get all the various sign offs and various stages. We focused on the essays that we wanted to. We made sure Adam Gopnik (the articles’ writer) was open to it. This was all a reflection of The New Yorker and the people of Amazon and Jigsaw and Conde Nast Entertainment. They needed to combine the two essays, so we worked with the filmmaker to do that and to make sure that his voice and that his point of view was still fully represented and that it was in his words and his voice, which it was and is. Meanwhile, we had Kay Rothman, who was one of the story producers on the series, we made her the producer of this particular piece, which is almost all archival footage. She immediately went into gear, winding up all the archival footage that we thought we would need to be seeing while we were hearing Adam Gopnik’s words. The whole machine just went right into action.

D: It’s certainly a powerful piece. What was it like working creatively with Amazon?

KC: It was excellent. One of the greatest things about working with Amazon was that out of the gate, Joe Lewis and Ryan Angelini, who were the key executives that I worked closely with, were asking us and telling us and advising us to take risks. That phrase — ‘Take risks’ — that was Amazon’s mantra to us in terms of this show. I think they really were looking to make something that was provocative that that got people talking, one way or another, about the individual pieces and the series as a whole. So they were really open to getting in touch with the stories, different approaches to them, and when we got into those stories — and Amazon weighs in on everything, like any network would, as did The New Yorker and Jigsaw and Conde Nast Entertainment and myself and some of my colleagues …

Amazon, I will say, they gave more notes on every single piece, on every story, than anybody else did. But the good news is, they were very good notes, very smart notes, very thoughtful notes. Obviously, I don’t always agree with every note or I was in the middle between looking out for the filmmakers’ initial intentions, and we wanted to really honor that. So there were certain notes where I felt like we would consider them, but we maybe weren’t going to address them. I would let Amazon know, and we would have a very civil discussion about it. In the end, they trusted my instincts on these pieces and saw their notes as suggestions. I don’t think you can ask for better than that in terms of a creative partner on such a big and mysterious endeavor as this, since none of us knew how it was going to turn out, you know?

[Where to stream The New Yorker Presents]

[Stream The New Yorker Presents Season 1, Episode 4’s short film on gun violence]