👋 Welcome to The Mail Cart. This is Warner, founder of AvA. Connect with me here + follow our IG page for daily resources.
🎥 AvA LIVE’s guest list today: Hollywood royalty, CatGPT, the brains behind Colin & Samir’s Press Publish & the duo that books talent on nearly every top podcast.
🎟️ ATTENTION: We saved 4 extra spots for Cara Delevingne’s pop-up show in LA tonight. Want to win? Tune-in to AvA LIVE today at 12:30pm PT as we are giving them away live on air.
🎙️ Today we sit down with Robert Carlock and Sam Means, the Co-Creators, Founders, and Executive Producers of Tina Fey’s hit sitcom on NBC ‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.’
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📹 Tune in to AvA LIVE today at 12:30 PT | 3:30 ET
⭐ Erika Alexander: HOLLYWOOD ROYALTY!!!! Actress, producer and cultural force behind credits including Living Single, The Cosby Show, Get Out and The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.
⭐ Cat Goetze (CatGPT): Founder of Physical phones and Cat Labs. One of the most influential voices at the intersection of technology, AI and digital wellbeing.
⭐ Joanna Jordan (CEO) + Antoine Jordan (EVP): of Central Talent Booking. From Letterman to Kimmel to The Diary Of A CEO to Call Her Daddy
⭐ Jenny Rothenberg: COO & Co-Founder of Smooth Media, who previously led growth at Morning Brew. She manages and represents the world's most influential knowledge creators including Cat, Matt Wolfe, and Joanna Stern & launched Publish Press with Colin & Samir
Want your question asked live on the show? Submit one HERE for our guests!
⭐Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” video episodes will move to Netflix and Spotify on July 13
The multiyear deal is worth more than $100 million. His pod has topped one billion listens, released more than 800 episodes, and ranked No. 24 on Spotify’s 2025 U.S. podcast chart.
Netflix is in search of the “always on” casual viewing YouTube its ultimate rival in time spent has..
💡 WTF is Time Spent? The total hours people spend watching a platform. More hours = more attention, ads, retention & cultural relevance.
⭐ Analog Analog Analog
Billy Joel’s 100th Madison Square Garden residency show hits Blu-ray on May 29, with a one-disc release, Hacks is rumored to be releasing a DVD? and Vinyl topped $1 billion in annual U.S. revenue. In the hyper digital era, where we have AI slop and never ending feeds we are all in search of offline, real, shared experiences.
Speaking of analog today we have CatGPT on AvA LIVE, the creator of Physical Phones, the Bluetooth landlines that literally flew off the shelves.
⭐ ‘Obsession’ has performed scarily well at the box office so far
The film was made for less than $1 million by former sketch comedian turned horror director, Curry Barker, and it has earned 100x more than it cost to make.
And if you didn’t think the story could get crazier then you would be wrong, because ‘Obsession’ has performed 39% BETTER on its second weekend of being out.
⭐ Star Wars ‘Mandalorian & Grogu’ on the other hand posted their lowest box office numbers since Disney took over in 2012
Our takeaway? Franchises are great and have their place in the world, but we need more new and unique ideas like ‘Obsession’
⭐ NEON won their 7th straight Palme d’Or (aka the top prize) at Cannes with the film ‘Fjord’
⭐ Drake dethroned Michael Jackson as the solo male artist with the most #1s on Billboard of all time with 14
⭐ ‘Dutton Ranch’ posted Paramount+’s biggest series launch to date with 12.9 million viewers in the first week doubling the previous record holder.
That $1B Taylor Sheridan deal is looking pretty pretty good.
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Today we sit down with with Robert Carlock and Sam Means (Co-Creators, Show Runners, and Executive Producers of ‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins’)
Our conversation is below..
AvA: Before we start, what does a showrunner do?
Sam: It's both a creative job and a managerial one, and the kind of impossible task is balancing both of those things. For each episode, Robert and I oversee the writing, and then pre-production, and then set, and then the edit, and finally the mix, and once we're in production we're doing all those things at the same time for multiple different episodes. We want to bring our creative vision to every stage of the process, but to do so we have to entrust hundreds of different people to execute (and elevate) that vision. Which all begins before we even start, with hiring the right cast, writers, and crew at every level, and we really lucked out with that on Reggie. I mean not luck! Genius. We're amazing, infallible geniuses.
Robert: Yeah!
AvA: How did you get your start in the industry?
Robert: When I was trying to get my material read, what is now WME was called Endeavor and their office was over a hamburger restaurant south of Wilshire Boulevard. Yeah, south. The agents there were actually looking for clients and my friend Dave Mandel ("Veep," "Seinfeld," etc) put in a good word. Today, WME owns the UFC, EuroLeague Basketball, and PBR, the world's largest bull riding league!
Sam: I got my foot in the door working on a couple failed Comedy Central pilots, which I think is how a lot of careers started back in the aughts. It's a real loss that those jobs just don't really exist anymore.
AvA: Reggie satirizes sports, media, and celebrity culture so well. Were there any real sports documentaries, athletes, or moments that helped inspire the tone of the show?
Sam: We're both big sports fans, so the tone of the documentary within the show is definitely informed by a lot of those classic 30 for 30s and stuff like that, but The Last Dance was one that really felt like a cultural touchstone. Especially within that subset of docs where it's a retired athlete looking back on their career. When we started talking to Tracy about this show, one of our starting places was the image of him in an armchair in a big empty mansion like MJ.
Robert: David Beckham, Lance Armstrong, Pete Rose, and others also participated in (or produced) documentaries in recent years, all trying in various ways to rehabilitate an image or "correct" a narrative. We liked the idea of our main character having an ulterior motive in terms of what we all see on camera.
AvA: What was it like making a television show about the making of a documentary and capturing the literal creative process on camera?
Sam: From the start we knew we wanted to do more with the mockumentary format than just using it as a stylistic choice, and we found that making Arthur Tobin and his journey part of the show itself opened up both the storytelling and the visual language that was available to us. Without getting bogged down in the meta aspects of it, we try to always be aware of the fact that someone is making a decision about what is being filmed -- and what story that person is trying to tell.
Robert: There was also some awareness on our part that bringing Arthur and the process of making the film into the larger narrative would allow us to satirize that corner of the entertainment complex as well. As Sam always says, "More like Hollyweird, am I right?!"
AvA: What’s something about being a showrunner that would surprise people?
Sam: How many horses you have to kill. People think it was only the David Milch HBO show Luck that killed a bunch of horses, but every show does it. That's just how you make TV!
Robert: If a set has a bathroom, those toilets are not connected to plumbing, but if you're the showrunner, you can still use them. It was actually Tina Fey who told me that on April 1, 2007.
AvA: There are so many amazing actors on Reggie. What is your favorite part about being on set?
Robert: A legit crew laugh during rehearsal.
Sam: I think my favorite and least favorite parts of set might actually be the same thing, which is the unpredictability. Because no matter how much you prepare, you can never prepare for everything, and that unpredictability can be incredibly stressful, but with a cast this talented and funny, it's also sometimes an opportunity to discover something that you never could have anticipated going in, and that can be really special.
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