My Husband Writes for TV!
Tune into The Librarians: The Next Chapter May 25th on TNT!
Reader, the time is finally here. The Librarians: The Next Chapter - a reboot of TNT’s popular series The Librarians - premieres in less than a week on TNT! And you’ll see two familiar names in the credits: Sean Persaud & Sinéad Persaud.
Sean Persaud is, of course, my husband. Sinéad Persaud, is of course, my sister-in-law. We three make up Shipwrecked Comedy, which has made a few projects over the years that you might have enjoyed: Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, The Case of the Gilded Lily, or Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story, to name a few.
The goal with making things through Shipwrecked Comedy has always been to help catapult us as writers/actors/producers into making things for a bigger stage. And when Sean and Sinéad started this endeavor back in 2013 (before I even met them), I don’t know if they had any idea where it would lead, or just how long it would take for it to lead somewhere other than YouTube.
Breaking through as a writer in the industry is just as difficult as breaking through as an actor, and Sinéad & Sean have had many very close calls over the years - times we thought they had a job for sure, only to wait and wait and wait and…nothing. They’ve been through different literary managers who proved to not do much more for them than they were doing for themselves. As with anything else in Hollywood, it became all too easy to get discouraged. But a couple years ago, a writer friend who I’d worked with on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries reached out saying she might have an opportunity that Sean and Sinéad would be right for, if they could send along their samples. They did, and before they knew it, they were staff writers on The Librarians: The Next Chapter for The CW.
They went in to one day of work, their first real day of work as television writers, and then the WGA went on strike.
The rest is a long and convoluted story - the strike lasted for six months, and once it was over, they were set to be back in the room. First it was going to be on CW premiering in October of 2024, now it’s going to be on TNT, premiering in May of 2025. Next week. It’s finally here!
It’s been a two-year long process of them being in their first ever writer’s room, writing for a show that feels so smack-dab in their wheelhouse that it almost seems ordained, if the road to get there hadn’t been so rocky. And as I write, they’ve written three episodes of television between the two seasons that have been made (yes, two! The first is only just now coming out, so there is a lot more Librarians to come); they’ve been to Serbia to be on set to film some of those episodes, and perhaps most exciting to me, we’ve enjoyed that coveted WGA health insurance for the past year.
There is so much more that could be said about their process and what they’ve learned - how different writing in a professional writers’ room is vs writing on their own for Shipwrecked - but Sean is not the one writing this Substack and I’ve probably co-opted their experiences for my own stories enough. Suffice it to say, I am so unbelievably proud of them. I am so proud of how hard we all worked for them to get to this point, and I am so excited to see where they go from here. I think you have to have been living under a rock to not have some awareness of just how difficult making a living in Hollywood has become in these past few years, and for them to have just written two seasons of a highly anticipated tv show has me jumping out of my skin with happiness. They worked so hard to be this lucky.
So please, tune in to The Librarians: The Next Chapter’s two-night premiere starting on May 25th, and tune in every following Monday night after that to see what Vikram and the gang are up to. And get excited for Sean and Sinead’s first ever episode of television, “The Librarians and the House of Cards,” coming in June. Yes, I am planning a themed party, thank you for asking.
Yay amazing. So well deserved. Fingers crossed I can watch this in the UK.