Carrie Brownstein

"[Costar] Fred Armisen and I are obsessed with the minutiae of a situation. What is fomenting the most discomfort in a relationship? It's usually where someone's belief system kind of goes off the rails. That's where we want to start exploring, because that moment is where you feel almost your worst. You become aware of all the inherent contradictions, all the ways that you're in conflict with your environment. That's where we start.

Fred and I spent our formative years in indie rock. An in-group/out-group dynamic was pervasive in those communities. A set of esoteric rules that seemed impossible to follow permeated the entire subculture, so that something that should have seemed very inclusive ended up feeling highly exclusive. Most of the characters that Fred and I play are the ones who are coming up with those constantly changing rules--like the feminist bookstore owners. Or we're the people trying to make sense of the rules, who are so cut off by the rules that we kill ourselves to follow them. Or we end up being contrarians, and the thing we thought we were going to embrace we end up rejecting.

I understand the impulse that there are just so many things to figure out--with recycling, say, and in a moment of pique you're just like, ‘I'm done. I'm done. Here, I littered.' That's when you see somebody's true colors, the part of them that is struggling to make sense of things, that is vulnerable, still childlike, and where the anger isn't as in-check as they thought."