Creating a TV show. Getting to make a TV show is very much like a far fetched dream, is what it feels like, because how many people are trying to do it versus how many people get to do it. I think the last time I looked, like three percent of book authors are Latino, which is crazy, like three percent.
From Fudro Media and PRX. It's Latino Usay, I'm Maria Ino Josa. Today writer Shay Serrano and his journey from school classrooms to TV sets. Say Serrano is a Mexican American author born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He is the co writer of Miguel Wants to Fight, a movie that was released last year.
Miguel, have you ever gotten into a fight? Yes, it was me and that one dude. We're both aggressively hugging. Does that count? Oh my god.
He's also the creator of the TV series Neon streaming on Netflix.
We're Moving to Miami, I Love You, the biggest eight thumb show in the world.
And he's also the author of Primo, a semi autobiographical comedy that got a stunning one hundred percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
How many uncles are that five? It feels like fifty most of the time. Now, look still, guys, we don't have all day.
But if you think that writing a TV series was Shay's biggest dream, well you're going to be absolutely surprised. Today Shay is going to take us from his first job in construction to the unexpected encounters that, paired with his talent, allowed him to create and run his own TV shows. In his own words, here's Shay said Reno on how he carved a space for himself in an industry where Latino representation remains pretty scarce.
My name is Chay Serano, and I write about things for a living. So far, I've written four New York Times bestsellers, created a couple of TV shows, co wrote a movie, and started an independent publishing company that I now run out of San Antonio, Texas. So I worked for this construction company called Ryland Homes, and this was
in Houston, Texas in the mid two thousands. It was a first job that I got out of college because my brother in law he asked if I wanted to come work, and I thought, oh cool, Yeah, I want to learn how to build houses.
And like that seems like a fun thing to do. It was awful.
No, I did not get a ton of muscles from doing that job. I just got bored and sunburnt. I wasn't out there for twelve hours a day like those guys are put in the brick or painting the houses or land tile or whatever. I was doing like customer service calls. So if something went wrong with a house, they would send me out there.
I would go.
I would figure out what the issue was and then try to get it fixed.
Shay soon realized it wasn't the kind of job you wanted to get stuck with. So after two years.
I had intentions or dreams of being a middle school teacher with a job I had wanted to do since I was a kid, And so while I was working at Ryland, I started taking night classes and weekend classes to get an alternative certification to be a teacher, and then eventually left to do that. It seemed like an important job to have because when you're growing up you're in a teacher's classroom. That's like the ultimate level of authority.
You get to go to work every single day and you have the chance to make an impact, like a direct impact on somebody's life. I applied at all of these Title I schools, which are schools that serve the like a poorer population is how they describe it. And it was important to me to work at a school
that was predominant le people of color. Growing up in San Antonio, that was all that I saw that I got a job in South Houston as Scho was ninety seven percent of Hispanic, started teaching there, started coaching all of the sports.
It was great.
Both Shay and his wife, Laramie, were middle school teachers early in their marriage, and that's when they found out they were going to be having twins.
At four months into the pregnancy, who went into labor, like one day at work, they rush her off to the hospital, they do this emergency surgery, and then they tell her, you can't work anymore. You got to like lay down for the next four months because if you get up, the babies could just come out. We were a family of two living on two teacher salaries at that time. We were probably making like maybe around forty forty one thousand dollars a year each, so eighty two
thousand dollars total for two people were doing okay. And then we went from that to now a family of
four soon to be on one teacher salary. And it was very apparent, very quickly, that the money that I was bringing in about eleven hundred bucks every two weeks, was not enough to pay the money that needed to be going out, Like our rent was sixteen hundred dollars, and you know, you have student loans, and you have electricity bill and groceries, and then all of a sudden, two babies as well, Like I fits me, my wife lared me and the two twins, and everybody's got to
eat at least three times a day at minimum, that's twelve meals I got to provide. And so I needed another job. I started applying at Target and Poppadot and Walmart and wherever I could, trying to get just like a part time job. But nobody would hire me because I was working a full time job, so I couldn't work the hours they needed me to work. I just
started googling work from home jobs. A writer was one of them the things that you need the internet and the computer, and I said, well, I got both of those things, so I'll try and do that. But I was not trying to be like a full time writer. When you grow up where I grew up. They're not like, oh, you can go be a writer and you could like write about sports and.
Music and people will pay you money.
All I was trying to do when I first started, I need to make like four or five hundred bucks a month. And then the sucky thing that ended up happening is we make it through those months of like, all right, Laramie's ready to go back to work, and then we go to like look and see how much is daycare going to cost? Because if Laramie's going to be at work and I'm going to be at work, who's going to take care of the twins? Full time daycare for twins was like two thousand dollars a month.
That was the cheapest we could find. It was such a weird position to be in because you know, you grow up and you watch my mom worked at the corner store for thirty plus years, right and my dad drove a bus for the city for thirty plus years. You watch them get up every morning at four in the morning to be out there to drive the bus or to be at the store when it opens. Every
single day of your whole entire childhood life. You just watch them do it, watch them do it, watch them do it without even really thinking about it, And then you become an adult and you're in that position now, and then you realize, oh man, they were really busy in their butts to make sure that we had our plates of food and to make sure that we had a place to lay down and a.
Place where we felt safe and comfortable in love.
Like they were doing all of the hard parts without talking about doing the hard parts, And so you end up in that same position and you're like, all right, well, I guess it's my turn.
For about seven years, Shay would keep his full time job as a school teacher and coach while freelancing as a writer at any publication that would give him a chance.
The first real publication that I got to write for was this place called the Houston Press, which is an all weekly in Houston. That was really where I learned how to be a writer. I had an editor there named Chris Gray. The editor in chief was this woman named Margaret Downing, and they both decided they were going to sit me down and teach me how to be a writer. Here's how you report a story, Here's how you interview somebody, Here's how you request public records for information.
They're teaching me all of this stuff for whatever reason. I have no idea why they chose to do that. Then I started writing for La Weekly or The Village Voice, MTV, ESPN, Rolling Stone. You're trying to work your way up through those ranks. And then eventually what ended up happening is in two thousand and thirteen, somewhere around there, one day
I was on the computer. I went on Facebook. I had a message from this woman named Molly Lambert, who was a brilliant writer, a pop culture writer, and she was at the time working at this place called Grantland, which was the pop culture section of ESPN, created and run by Bill Simmons, and he was running this website that everybody wanted to write for. It was like writing Utopia because they didn't care about web traffic and they
didn't care about reporting something as fast as possible. All they wanted to do was make cool stuff and make good stuff. I started pitching them stuff, and I remember I wrote something for them. They published it, and then when they posted a link on Twitter, I got a hundred messages about it, more than I had evergotten about.
Anything that I'd written.
And eventually they were like, hey, we like the stuff that you're doing for us, and you should come right for us full time.
I was still teaching.
I didn't want to leave teaching, and I told them that, So now I really enjoy teaching. This is like the job I want to do for the rest of my life. Maybe there's a part time sort of situation we can work out. Then they were like, we see what you have done if you're working on this part time. Let's find out what it looks like if you're working on it full time. And I talked with Laramie about it, and I said, I think this is the thing I want to try.
What do you think?
She sort of walked me through the pros and cons of the situation, and eventually we decided on all right, we'll try it for a year. All right, I'm going to leave teaching. I'm going to go try to be a writer full time. And then, like a jackass, I signed this contract in July of twenty fifteen, and then in October of twenty fifteen, three months later, ESPN shut Grantlin down, and all of a sudden, I didn't have
a job. It took me a year to talk myself into taking his job, and then I did it, and then immediately it was taken away and welcome to journalism, baby.
But Shay had also been working on his first book, which was published that same month, October of twenty fifteen. The Rap yearbook would become a New York Times bestseller, and it was turned into a documentary series for AMC.
I was very excited about all of that, but then also I lost my full time writing job.
Then it was this weird glimbo.
It felt like, so me and my buddies started a newsletter through Mailchimp that eventually became the next book that we did together, basketball and other things. That book came out in twenty seventeen, and that's when things really changed in a way that felt almost tangible, because that book came out and it made it to number one on the best seller which is like a whole different thing, and it's sold, I don't know, thirty three thousand copies
the first week. It was like a oh man, this is a real I could just write books for the rest of my life if I want to do that. And then Bill Simmons is starting a new website. Everybody it seems like everybody's talking about the Ringer, and I was like, all right, all I got to do is hold out until they start that and then maybe they'll let me go work over there, which.
I eventually ended up doing, and that ended up being like.
Another very meaningful I worked there for six years and I was like, man, this freaking rules, and I started doing more books, creating a TV show, getting to make a TV show. It's very much like a far fetched dream, is what it feels like, because how many people are trying to do it versus how many people get to do it. The numbers are pretty abysmal. I think the last time I looked like three percent of book authors are Latino, which is crazy, like three percent, and so
that's in your head a little bit. But it's also it's not easy for anybody to try to go do so it wasn't like a thing I was fixated on. This is going to be harder for me because I'm Mexican. I didn't think about that part of it, probably just because of because I was a naive, but I just thought, I don't I want to try a thing. It probably won't work, but I'll try it. And I didn't have any experience in TV. I had never written the on a show before, or had any sort of like meaningful
experience writing the script or anything like that. But again, same as with the books, or same as with writing, I've never written before, and then I'm going to try it. I've never written a book before, and then I'm going to try it. I said, all right, I think I'll try and create a TV show that seems like a fun thing to do. And again, this all sort of ties back to the writing that I was doing before,
because I ended up taking a bunch of meetings. One of the meetings that I took was with Mike Sure, and like an idiot, I'll never forget this, I walked into Mike's office.
I didn't know who he was. I just looked and I saw him and it was it's Mo's from the office.
Oh my god, this is great. I walk in and I shake his hands. I'm like, oh, man, big fan of gear, of your work on the office. I think maybe he thought I was talking about the writing or what I didn't even know he wrote on the show. And I sat down and in his office he had a framed picture of parks and rec and a framed picture of Brooklyn ninety nine and a framed poster of
The Good Place, and like all of this stuff. And in my office I have a framed poster of the movie blood Sport and a framed poster of the movie Desperado, and a framed poster of the movie blood In, Blood Out, like my favorite sort of movies. And I thought, Oh, he's got these posters like I do. Like he's a big fan of these shows. Didn't even realize that he had created or co created them. We talked for an hour and as I was leaving, just very casually, oh,
we should you want to do that show? We should do that show. I'll help you with that. And I was like, yeah, sure, that's sure. If you want to do it, I'm down. And then when I let the agents know who had set up all the meetings, I'm like, oh, yeah, that guy Mike seemed cool and he said he wanted to work on the thing together, and they'd lost their minds.
They're like, you don't know who this guy is. He's the king of comedy showrunners.
It turned out he's the biggest guy doing it, and we went and made a TV show together, which was great.
My dad left when I was little, so all my uncles are always around and they're super protective of my mom and me. What was that for, Like, mostly it's like being inside of cart of these except that these are always cussing and punching at each other.
Primo is a coming of age comedy in the tone of Parks and rec or the Office. I worked on it with Mike.
Sure.
It's a show that you watch and hopefully when you're done, you feel a little bit better about the world and your place in it. They might be arguing or fighting amongst each other, but they're doing it in a way that lets you know they all care about each other. It's interesting because a family and the show is made up of a mother and her five brothers. They don't speak Spanish because it's loosely based on my life growing
up and in my family we don't speak Spanish. My dad is like directly from Mexico, right and when he got here back at that time, it was like a bad thing if you spoke Spanish. They put you in special classes in the school and it prevented you from having certain opportunities. So him and my mom made a decision when I was born, when my sisters were born. We're not going to teach them Spanish. They're just only
going to speak English. That way they could fit in and we don't got to worry about them being shoehorned into the ESL class because they heard them say a sentence in Spanish or whatever.
It just felt more natural.
Like if I would have gone in there and changed things around and had it to where they were speaking Spanish, to me, it would have felt been sincere. It would not have felt as real. I would have been less comfortable making the show trying to pretend that we were one thing that we weren't, and that authenticity was more important to me than trying to pretend otherwise. I've been taking Spanish classes for a while, and eventually I'll get there.
I speak a little bit.
If you're going to say some stuff in Spanish, I might be able to understand it, but I'm not going to be able to say anything back to you.
At this moment.
I don't have like aspirations of trying to direct I don't think I have. It's a little too intimidating of a process right now to be in control of all of that and have to make all those decisions I like to write a thing and then let a director direct the thing. Right, But I would like to write another movie. I want to write a teacher movie, or a heist movie, or an action movie. Or what would be really cool is a thing that I've not done
yet that I would like to do. Is same as what Mike did for me, where he was like, come on, I'll teach you how to do this, or same as what Bill did at grant Lander the Ring, come over here, I'll teach you. I'll do this, or Chris and Margaret at the Houston Press, like I would like to be in that position to do that for another like a writer who's coming up right, let me help, Let me help you make a TV show. Let me show you
some of the things that they taught to me. I think that would be a cool career accomplishment to just look and be like, oh man, that show that everybody loves that's on TV, or that movie that everybody saw, it's on in the theaters, like the person who wrote it.
I got to help a little bit.
I would say, if I had to recap my career, it's been a bunch of work and a bunch of luck and a bunch of help all roll together. When I look back, there are definite moments that I can point to and go, oh, that's when a thing changed right there. In every one of those situations, it was a reaching down to pull me up, and not because it was going to make their career any better. All
that was more work for each of those people. But they did it because they wanted to do it, and so I'm very thankful, and I just want to make sure that when it's my turn to do that, that I'm doing that any chance that I can. I gave a talk at a career day and here in San Antonio, and it was for like seventh and eighth graders, and it was so nice to just be back in a school and standing at the front of the classroom and answering questions and making jokes.
And I do that maybe like once or.
Twice a year, and it always I fill that pool. I fill it inside. All I wanted to do was be a teacher. That's the only job I wanted to have. I didn't have aspirations of being a full time writer. I wanted to teach at a school for twenty five thirty years and be part of the community. And feel
important in that way. At some point, I would like to find myself back in a classroom and teaching middle school kids and coaching a middle school football team and a basketball team, and a soccer team and a track team, just like I was doing before.
That would be awesome.
That was writer she Last month, News wrote that Primo, the show Shay created, had been canceled after what he called a short but beautiful run, but Shay continues to create. In May, he released a new book under the title A Real Human Being, dissecting nine essential Ryan Gosling movie roles. This episode was produced by Fernando Nandez and edited by Andre Lopez Crusado. It was mixed by steffrie Lebo and
Julia Caruso. The Latino USA team also includes Victoria Estrada, Renaldo Leans, Junior, Lori, mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Nur Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Benille Ramirez is our co executive producer. Our marketing manager is Louis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Zanga Roubinos. I'm your host and executive producer Mariaojsa joined us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on all of your social media and as always, I'll see you on Instagram.
Astella pro Mainoa yas Joao.
Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, and the John D.
And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Funding for Latino USA is Coverage of a culture of health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, oh