Made Through the Shutdown

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.