Sera Gamble Describes Bizarre First Script She Wrote About Goth Girls: ‘This Is the Story of How I Was Almost a Comedy Writer’

In Variety’s new feature, The One That Got Away, Emmy contenders reflect on one of their projects that never saw the light of day, was canceled too soon or that they’d like to revisit some day.

When you hear Sera Gamble’s name, you don’t think of comedy.

After getting her start on ABC’s short-lived procedural “Eyes” in 2005, she joined the “Supernatural” writers’ room. Later, she created, executive produced and wrote Syfy’s “The Magicians” and then, in 2018, launched “You” with Greg Berlanti, a drama based on Caroline Kepnes’ twisted novels.

The dramas are laced with a bit of darkness — and couldn’t be further from comedy. When she began though, she didn’t know what route she was headed down.

“This is the story of how I was almost a comedy writer. I would not have predicted this for my career at all,” she tells Variety. “My goal was to be a professional writer, but my first bit of traction to break into the business was with a comedy feature.”

She and her writing partner Raelle Tucker moved into a rental house in Van Nuys — “the kind of house where you’re like, some porn was definitely shot here,” she says.

Together, they wrote a comedy feature that paid homage to “Dog Day Afternoon” set in a strip club. It was a finalist in “Project Greenlight,” which landed the duo agents. So, they thought, they’d try to break into the TV side — and stuck with comedy.

“We were like, ‘We’re going to write a sample of every conceivable type, because we were not at all picky about what room we might break into.’ We just really needed a job,” she recalls. “That’s the setup for a script called ‘Misery and Anxiety,’ sort of based on us. It was about two Goth girls named Misery and Anxiety, who lived in a shitty house in Van Nuys, who wanted to break into Hollywood.”

The script opened at a plushie convention where Misery obtained giant pig suits for Anxiety in an attempt to get her laid.

“Raelle and I were really hardworking. We were very young, but it didn’t matter how hard we had partied the night before, we would always get up and work and that is boring, and it is not funny,” she says. “So instead, we imbued Misery and Anxiety with all the selfishness and laziness. It’s just more fun to watch people who want to take a shortcut and that was sort of the idea. Each week, these girls would have a terrible fucking idea for how to get rich quick or get famous.”

The pilot centered around the girls trying to get a job. Anxiety decides to monetize a livestream of their lives by putting webcams around the apartment, while Misery begs her grandmother, a former porn star, for money for a car. She sees an “American Idol” billboard and decides she could be a pop star based on looks, despite not being able to sing.

“She spends the car money on liposuction. She comes home high as balls on painkillers, unaware that she’s giving a performance to this international audience that’s watching her through webcams in every room of her house,” Gamble says through laughter. “It gets even more chaotic, and unhinged, culminating in a hallucinatory musical number starring Misery featuring Ryan Seacrest.”

To this day, the script remains the only one that Gamble’s agents said no to. Still, the hard work paid off; Tucker and Gamble were hired on procedural “Eyes” around the same time. After “Eyes” was canceled, she got a spot in the “Supernatural” room.

“I think it would be so easy for us to tell a really, elegant arc about how I ended up writing ‘You.’ Like, ‘Oh, she loves dark fairytales and she watched every horror movie ever made when she was 12,’ ” she says. “But, I honestly think like there’s a ‘Sliding Doors’ world where if we just took one more pass on ‘Misery and Anxiety,’ made it 30% less crazy and made it better, you and I would be talking about some weird, surrealist, slightly mean-spirited half- hour that I was also happily writing.”

Today, Gamble remains proud of that script — but not many have read it, and she hopes it remains that way: “I really don’t want you to misunderstand me. It wasn’t a good script. It needed a lot of work… But it did have a lot of enthusiasm and a weird awkward Goth girl beating heart that I still am endeared by.”

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