Newsroom

On making good television a long way from the studio lot.

There’s a stretch of I-94 between Chicago and the Calumet Region where the skyline trades glass for smokestack in about twenty minutes. Mills, rail yards, the orange flare off a blast furnace if you catch it after dark. I drive it most weeks. It isn’t pretty in the postcard sense, but it’s where things got made — and you can still feel that. A place built by people who worked with their hands and didn’t say much about it after.

I came up from the shops. Before I wrote a word of television, I built sets, drove the truck, ran a camera, fabricated props on a midnight shift. The craft came first, and it came from places like this — Pittsburgh, where I’m from, and the Region, where I landed. Two steel towns, give or take. Both taught the same lesson: make the thing, make it right, let the work speak.

Make it right. Let the work speak.

The business still assumes that work happens in Los Angeles. That you develop there, staff there, and live and die inside a thirty-mile radius of the studios. For a long time that was mostly true.

It’s less true now.

The tools moved. A room can run across three time zones at once. A streamer doesn’t care about your area code, only whether the pages land. Cloud-based, bicoastal, remote — whatever you call it, making television stopped requiring a particular zip code somewhere around the time the rest of our lives did too.

But logistics were never the real argument. The real argument is about where stories come from.

Los Angeles is a company town. It’s very good at making things about itself and increasingly unsure about making things about anywhere else. The catch is that the specific, lived-in material good television runs on doesn’t grow on a lot. You can’t manufacture the Region. You can’t fake the particular way a man who gave thirty years to a mill talks about it — or doesn’t. You have to have stood next to him. You have to be from somewhere.

That’s the case for working outside L.A. Not that it’s cheaper or easier; it’s neither. It’s that distance keeps your eye honest and roots give you something true to point the camera at. The best material I’ve got didn’t come out of a pitch meeting. It came off a job site, a loading dock, a two-lane road in western Pennsylvania.

So we built Twointhebush to travel. Boutique by design, cloud-based by necessity, rooted on purpose. We break stories where we are and keep breaking them when nobody’s buying — a living repository, the practice kept warm whether or not there’s a deal on the table. The shops taught that too: you don’t stop sharpening tools because there’s no job that week.

None of this is a complaint about Hollywood. It’s a field note. The center held a long time, and now it doesn’t have to. Good television can come out of a steel town as easily as a studio lot — easier, maybe, because the steel town isn’t trying to be anything but itself.

Simple to say. Harder in practice.

But that’s the work.

Good TV. ‘Nuff ced.

An original essay from Twointhebush Television Co.

On the Bears, ‘The Bear,’ and Northwest Indiana’s sudden turn in the spotlight.

Two things happened this spring, and together they say something.

First, the Chicago Bears’ board voted to advance a new stadium in Hammond — a site near Wolf Lake, thirty miles from the Loop and squarely in Northwest Indiana. After more than a century in Illinois, the franchise is talking openly about crossing the state line, and the people who run the Region are already moving dirt in their heads. Whatever it finally becomes, it’s the biggest spotlight the Calumet area has had in a generation.

Second, and quieter: The Bear — the most Chicago show on television — dropped a surprise one-off episode called “Gary.” It’s a prequel, a road trip. Richie and Mikey take a job for Uncle Jimmy and drive out of the city, and where the show points the camera is Gary, Indiana. Our Gary. Eagle-eyed folks around here will also catch Lisa Beasley in the cast — yes, the same Lisa Beasley from Zen Room. The Region is a small world.

We’ve been saying this for a while: there are stories out here. A blast furnace, a two-lane road, a town that built half the country and then got quiet about it. For a long time the coasts drove past. Now the most prestigious kitchen drama on TV is filming in Gary, and an NFL franchise wants to plant its flag in Hammond.

There are stories out here.

I’ll admit my own stake in this. I’m a lifelong Region rat, and I hope the Bears land here — not for the tailgates, though I won’t say no, but for what a project that size drags in behind it. A stadium means live broadcasts, control rooms, camera crews, a technical director calling the show on a Sunday. That’s a trade, and it’s one I teach. My broadcasting students at Purdue University Northwest train in exactly that work — live production, technical direction — and right now most of them have to leave the Region to practice it. Anchor infrastructure like that in Hammond and you hand a generation of them a reason to stay.

And the work doesn’t show up alone. When crews come to build and run a project this size, the union grows with it — IATSE recruiting local members, putting Region hands on Region productions. That’s how a one-time spotlight becomes a standing trade: cards in pockets, skills that stay, a crew base that doesn’t have to be imported every time someone calls action.

It reaches across the state line, too. A franchise this size planting in Indiana doesn’t just borrow Chicago’s crews — it grows new ones here: a generation of Calumet Region media professionals, trained on home ground, who carry the Region’s story with them. The established Chicago locals would make room, welcoming Indiana members onto the call sheet. That isn’t a loss for anybody — it’s how a craft economy widens, and how the Calumet Region starts amplifying its own narrative instead of renting someone else’s.

And it’s bigger than the jobs. The Region is, by most honest measures, a news desert — under-covered, and when it is covered, usually framed from a metro newsroom across the state line, in a way that tends to serve the people already holding the power. That’s how a place slowly loses the right to narrate itself. A spotlight this size won’t fix that alone, but it gives local storytellers something they’ve been short on: confidence. Permission to write the place down, to chase the muse where they actually live, to trust that the story under their feet is worth telling.

None of it surprises us. The Region has always had soul, heart, and stories of the folk — the kind you can’t fake from a writers’ room three time zones away. So we’re building the room here, and keeping it warm, so we’re ready when the rest of the world finally pulls off the highway to look.

Good TV. ‘Nuff ced.

An original essay from Twointhebush Television Co.

How Zen Room got made when the industry had stopped — and why that still means something to us.

When we started Zen Room, the world had just gone quiet. Theatres were dark, sets sat empty, shoot dates were evaporating by the week. Making anything at all felt like swimming upstream.

We made it anyway — a small, largely female crew, Chicago talent from the writing through the edit, a set run with care in the middle of a pandemic. Back in 2021, our friends at Shirley Hamilton Inc. — Ashley Joyce’s longtime talent agency — put the production up as Exhibit A in a piece about Chicago’s refusal to quit, holding it up as proof that writers’ rooms can live anywhere and that the work doesn’t have to wait for Los Angeles to say go.

That meant a lot then. It means more now. Pushing a comedy across the finish line under those conditions was the most redemptive thing this team has done together — the kind of hard that bonds a crew for good. I’m delighted with how it turned out, proud of everyone who refused to let it die on the vine, and — I’ll admit — eager to hear what you think once you’ve seen it.

That meant a lot then. It means more now.

→ Read Shirley Hamilton’s “Chicago, COVID, & Commitment”

Good TV. ‘Nuff ced.

Variety has the exclusive: our single-cam mockumentary — co-written by and starring SNL’s Cheri Oteri — screens June 20 at the TCL Chinese Theatre.

It’s official — Zen Room, the Two in the Bush mockumentary that pokes fun at small-town wellness culture while quietly falling in love with it, has been selected to screen at Dances with Films 2026.

Pokes fun at small-town wellness culture — while quietly falling in love with it.

Variety broke the news in an exclusive. SNL alum Cheri Oteri co-wrote the pilot and stars as a business-savvy partner running the studio from house arrest, opposite Ashley Joyce — who co-wrote the show and plays Lauren, the true believer determined to bring yoga to a town that isn’t so sure about all the stretching. Lisa Beasley and Aaron Latterell round out the ensemble, with Layne Marie Williams directing.

The pilot screens June 20 at 1:45 p.m. at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

→ Read the full exclusive at Variety

Reel Chicago on the origin story: SNL’s Cheri Oteri joins Ashley Joyce’s homegrown mockumentary as it starts shooting a 10-episode first season in Chicago.

Before the festival lights — the build. Reel Chicago covered the start of production on Zen Room, the Two in the Bush single-cam mockumentary set inside a small-town yoga studio.

SNL alum Cheri Oteri signed on as lead, executive producer, and writer alongside creator Ashley Joyce, who wrote the series and stars as idealist studio owner Lauren. Layne Marie Williams directed, leading a largely female crew on a deliberate Chicago homecoming — proof, as Joyce framed it, that a writers’ room can live anywhere. The ensemble pulled from Chicago’s deep bench, including Lisa Beasley and Aaron Latterell.

A writers’ room can live anywhere.

The plan: ten short-form episodes, shot start-to-finish with Chicago talent, in partnership with Chicago Media Angels and Cinespace’s Alex Pissios.

→ Read the original at Reel Chicago