Mm-hmm.

And, um, and so, uh, any praise that, uh, comes my way, uh, three quarters goes back to Liz.

So, uh, to answer the question, you know, I, I, I, I did come in with some working knowledge of, of Michelle.

So when I got Jesse Barron's article, which is what kicked this entire thing off- Uh, I had landed very solidly on the idea that Michelle was just a bro- a deeply broken bordering on psychotic individual.

Uh, a- and so I came in with a judgment, um, which is never a really good place to start as a writer and espe- especially a writer of true crime.

Um, I will say that I quickly tried to push that away, like, once I had, had the, the opportunity to begin to delve into the research.

And the thing that, that I will say that I learned in 2019, which is sort of when I first started circling the project, w- was that this show ultimately was a show that was...

Mm-hmm.

So why was Robert the right way into the story?

Well, I think that part of it had to do with the fact that I had told the studio and the network that I wasn't going to show a single murderer.

And so if that becomes sort of your thesis statement of what you're going, how you're going to approach the work, then you, it almost assuredly, and by the way, and then by extension, you're not making it about John Wayne Gacy, then almost by extension, the logical next move is is for you to pick up with him being caught and then try to...

And then you're building a story about not who did it, but why did it and who did they do it to.

And by extension to that, then that became...

I didn't really...

To go back for a second on this whole idea of focusing on the victim's I didn't really know what that meant.

But was there anything about the physical scale of the crime scene that was particularly difficult to recreate? Yeah.

So why was Robert the right way into the story?

Well, I think that part of it had to do with the fact that I had told the studio network that I wasn't going to show a single murder.

And so if that becomes sort of your thesis statement of how you're going to approach the work, then it almost assuredly, and by the way, and then by extension, you're not making it about John Wayne Gacy, then almost by extension, the logical next move is for you to pick up with him being caught.

And then try to, and then you're building a story about not who did it, but why did it and who did they do it to.

And by extension to that, then that became, you know, I didn't really, you know, to go back for a second on this whole idea of focusing on the victims.

I didn't really know what that meant.

I just said it, and then I didn't know really how to achieve it.

But was there anything about the physical scale of the crime scene that was particularly difficult to recreate?