Getting Engaged to Netflix

Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.

Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke? Who?

Biagio: This episode. It’s episode 120 and we have some top guests from Down Under. We’re talking to the creators, producers and stars of Netflix’s Extreme Engagement, PJ Madam and Tim Noonan. Today, they share the inside scoop on working with Netflix. How do they sell their show to the giant streaming platform? What was the Netflix notes process like? How does it feel to put your relationship up for all to see while living in small villages with indigenous tribes? Plus, they’ll share how they broke into the industry with some advice on how you can to. And. Something leaves a unique taste in our mouths.

Unidentified Voice: Oh my, oh my God. That is. That was some strong tasting stuff.

Biagio: Music courtesy Dave Pelman. Music Dave Kelman. Hey, everybody. She’s Joke.

Joke: He’s Biagio.

Biagio: We’re married. We make unscripted film and television. I want to help you do the same.

Joke: Hopefully by teaming up with us.

Biagio: All right. Well, we are super excited today because we actually have guests. Yes, yes. Here. It’s between. Yeah, yeah. We’re not alone. Yeah. We have. And not only are they, not only are they guests not only working producers in on camera talent like us, they are a couple. So I working together, loving together. Holy cow! This is a double date, right? This is marriage. Yeah. So. Yeah. So welcome. So welcome to PJ.

PJ Madam: Thank you.

Biagio: All the way from Australia.

Joke: In case you detect that accent.

Biagio: Yes. Sorry.

PJ Madam: If no one can understand us, we’re kind of getting used to a lot of Americans saying, what? Can you just repeat yourselves? Really? Yeah. Sometimes we try to put on. And why certainly. Do I try to put on an American accent. So then I find myself doing this very lame, you know, impersonation of an American person. Just so maybe my twang can get a little bit more understood, I don’t know.

Biagio: So you just say awesome a lot. I’m, like.

PJ Madam: Trying to put on some kind.

Biagio: Of hybrid accent. 405.

PJ Madam: It’s like, way too busy. Can we just take one.

Biagio: A while? I love how, like. Being in there. I don’t know. Sorry if I ended old America.

PJ Madam: Yeah. It’s lovely to be here.

Biagio: Yeah. No. That’s great.

Joke: That’s awesome. So.

Biagio: A little.

Joke: Bit of background. Tim, you were filmmaker. You went to film school, did that for a while.

Tim Noonan: Won a bunch of awards as a student. Yeah. So I, ever since I was a kid, wanted to get into film, be a director. I did the normal route and, yeah, I went to film school, won a bunch of awards, and then I didn’t mean to get into television. It was sort of like an accidental thing. I got a call one day from a TV executive saying, hey, do you want to be on a kid show? And I had to shoot my own segments myself, and it sort of born, I think out of nowhere, I started to master the art of putting myself in front of the camera, but also being behind and shooting, editing, cutting. And then pretty quickly, I wanted to do more and more difficult stuff and push myself further. So I went and got into current affairs, where I met PJ, and I guess we worked for a show very similar to CBS 60 minutes. We were traveling the world and and making 20 minute reports, and then we wanted to make our own TV show.

Joke: So. So PJ, where did you start from?

PJ Madam: Yeah, I started as a journalist, so I kind of came from the writing background and the reporting background and we, you know, I’ve got to confess, we didn’t have many technical ambitions and certainly not wanting to be behind the camera and understand what the buttons do and the lenses. I mean, you know, when you’re a television reporter, you’re thinking, okay, do I look good in this? Do I not look good in this? What’s how’s that interview being lit? You know, the talent, obviously, that the structure of the story and the storytelling itself. But I didn’t have an appreciation for filmmaking until I met Tim. So that was an interesting combination of skills and probably, you know, different producing abilities and different skill sets that you bring. And so hence why we decided to leave our respective jobs and come together form our own production company, get together like you and work together and then create our own content. So it’s been a whirlwind ride, and.

Tim Noonan: I don’t think anything can really prepare you for the onslaught of doing your own TV show, I guess, and especially together. I mean, every single decision that we had to make was a joint decision in every sense, from running the business to being out in the field creatively.

Joke: So. So let’s fill everybody in on the show. So shows called Extreme Engagement. It’s on Netflix and it follows you guys embedding with these cultures and tribes across the world, getting rid of pretty much all of what we know in Western society as luxuries and comforts, and learning what it takes to be a couple, learning what what makes the relationship in these different. You know, going through the tribal ceremonies and stuff for coupled up. Correct.

PJ Madam: I mean, we we decided to do this because quite genuinely, we’ve been engaged for a while. And as you know, in TV, it’s sometimes you’re taken away for other projects. And Tim was actually doing his first series called Rite of Passage. It’s been rebranded here in America. It’s also called Boy Man, but he was away for two years filming that, and that was kind of a colossal undertaking in itself. But we didn’t have an engagement in the meantime. So we kind of thought, this is interesting. Here we are where filmmakers we like, you know, some fairly interesting introspection and like documenting that Tim had only just come back from the rights of passage, which explored different tribal and cultural places around the world. So we thought, well, what if we took like an engagement, like a road testing our relationship? What if we took that concept and we immersed ourselves into similar places and tested ourselves?

Tim Noonan: No one asked because a lot of.

Biagio: People listening would trip over themselves to have a show on the error that they’re starring on on Netflix, of all places. What’s it been like working with Netflix, and what’s it been like for you to sort of make that that leap?

Tim Noonan: You know, look, we I’d made a previous series for the traditional cable networks, and it was very much storytelling was, you know, coming up and like reminding the viewers the whole time about what we’ve just what you’re about to see, make sure that there’s no surprises and all the rest. With Netflix, it was very much it was it was a different way of storytelling and they were really hands off. But we had an amazing executive producer from their side who gave us big picture creative guidance, which set us on a course which was unlike anything that we’d ever done before. We were essentially selling eight feature film style shows where there was no playoffs. There was no coming up after the break, so you had to keep like people gripped throughout the whole hour without knowing what was coming. And for us, and that was a really new way of telling a story. And not only that, we had to tell the like eight episodes, one giant Uber story, like have an Uber arc over the whole series that would, you know, keep people there on watching the show. But the interesting thing was that they commissioned the show without knowing the outcome. Like legitimately, PJ and I threw ourselves into Into the Fire. Our relationship, we didn’t know would it would we survive and Netflix would ring up all the time and say, these guys are still going to get married to the end. But and it was brave on their behalf because we didn’t know we couldn’t give them an answer. Sometimes we didn’t know what we because it was it was hard.

PJ Madam: Oh, they were great in that respect. Fantastic to work with. And I think being hands off allowed us to navigate, you know, in a story sense as well. And so, you know, when, as Tim was saying, the executive producer would give these big picture notes. I mean, I know you guys have spoken about notes before, but man, they had a lot of things for us to think about. And so it was clever. There was wisdom in it. There was it was a little provocative, but it was also true. There’s a lot of truth they were retelling.

Tim Noonan: They were very much wanting to be as authentic as possible.

Joke: Can you give us an example of like one of those, like big picture to break up?

PJ Madam: We can rewind.

Tim Noonan: Yes, it can definitely do that. So like if like right from the outset we, I think we didn’t quite know we were thinking it was going to be more of an anthropological show than it ended up being. They steered us into a very internal direction about like, no, you guys make it about your relationship, because that’s what people around the world are going to relate to. Like, we want to know about how you’re faring throughout the whole thing. So we they made sure that when it was really necessary for us to sit down and just download in master interviews as diary cams, exactly what we were feeling like, if anything didn’t feel authentic to them. It was just like, cut it out. Like it needs to be as real as it possibly can be. They would, they just I think they allowed us to go on each journey. There was no I mean, if you’re making a normal television show, you normally have a shooting script. We had no shooting script. Shooting script. Like we literally got on the plane. We didn’t have time to do it, and we didn’t know a lot of the times if we’d be accepted into the village. What the whole rituals workers were operating in such remote regions, we would be dropped. We would find dropped into a place or find out, you know, in the middle of the desert where we’d end up going and find the people who were going to go live with, work out all the logistical problems, and then literally let stuff happen. I mean, it was incredible. Then you had to produce your way through out of it. Through it.

PJ Madam: Yeah. Which is very scary. I know for a lot of producers, I mean, you want to have that mud map, we’d have a rough mud map. One thing I was going to say so Netflix would do an amazing thing is they could producer would force us to look at themes and not just themes of like, what the tribes say that we were going to and what the ritual would bring, but actually how we would react and what the relationship theme would be. So you would be tying those two together and strangely, it would work. You’d be like, this is genius, actually, because we’re going to this tribe learning about, say, fertility or something. And actually we’re, we’re having these issues about around it. So it simplified the story telling process of it. So in each episode there is a theme, but there is, as Tim mentioned, this super ark. So you’re seeing the complete picture of our experience and engagement. So so they were great like that. It was different. I guess from the cable in that way.

Biagio: Yeah. No, I mean, again, you brought up earlier about the sort of like when we do a cable show, you kind of have to do these endless recaps. You’ve got your privacy, which is previously on your neck signs. You eat up a lot of your program time with really non-story stuff. Because in case someone tunes in laid, which is kind of, you know, a Netflix, you don’t have that, right. It’s, you know.

Joke: One’s going to tune in halfway through.

Biagio: Two and a half way through it. Possible. Yeah. They’re gonna watch from the beginning. So it allows you to really dedicate your entire program time to story and not have to worry about, you know, retreading.

Joke: Someone who just came in from the laundry room. Yeah.

Biagio: Which is quite scary because we had a whole.

Tim Noonan: Like, we I mean, had extraordinarily experiences. And you kind of want to show everybody right up top, hey, don’t don’t stick with us because it’s going to be really cool. And you’re going to see all of these, you know, this emotional roller coaster that we’re going to go on. And we do have like a very short super tease at the very top. But when after you get past that minute like you don’t.

PJ Madam: That’s.

Tim Noonan: The only maybe someone’s forgotten.

PJ Madam: Well, that’s the other thing I was going to mention. Like, you know, we have these themes in the episodes, but the same time we’re growing as a couple. So Tim and PJ from episode one is very different to the Tim and PJ that comes out in episode eight. So you’ve grown as like, dare I say, characters, even you’ve just grown within yourself. So people. Yeah, you know, like as as the time went on, I didn’t complain about showers. I didn’t complain about what I was putting in my mouth. Like, you can only chip a nail as a girl, even, like, really the first time because quite genuinely, you know.

Joke: You stopped caring.

PJ Madam: You do stop caring. You let yourself go, you change. Suddenly the issues become different. They move. They morph. And I think Netflix were really great at identifying that and teasing that out a bit. And just giving us the leverage to be able to.

Tim Noonan: Go is the freedom to just to to trust ourselves, I guess, and make something that we thought was going to be great, you know, but they weren’t very controlling at all and they were just really supportive.

Joke: That’s awesome. So what’s your next adventure? Oh.

PJ Madam: Well, we picked you right now.

Biagio: Out of.

Tim Noonan: This one.

Joke: Weddings are you going to have. Oh.

PJ Madam: So you’ll have to watch the show to work out how we concluded what marriage means to us. So we’re.

Tim Noonan: Legitimately we were on this journey to find out answers about whether or not we wanted to get married. And there was a point in the series where PJ’s says, told me that she didn’t want to get married, and it was all real, and it was really hard for me to come to grips with that. And so my lesson in this whole journey was that she’d been committed all along. You know, and and what more could I ever ask for? And so whereas PJ had been divorced before and so yeah.

PJ Madam: We both came in with different sorts of baggage, like we’re airing this, right. Like this is, you know, we’re basically saying, we know we have this issue like hands up. We’re we’re going to own this and muddling our way through what marriage means to us. It was beyond signing a legal certificate. So we actually realized that not even just running the company ourselves or being in production ourselves, and in fact, that we’ve been side by side for the last two and a bit years without almost spending a day apart is is testament. But we have our own spin on on marriage, and you’ll have to watch the show because we don’t want to, you know, spoiler alert. But also we’re keeping a few things like, you know, sacred to ourselves. So yeah.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah. What? You should get to have something sacred to yourself. Jesus, man. I mean, the world knows everything else. So you have one secret? Just one please. Yeah, exactly.

Tim Noonan: You guys always talk about the trailer when you’re trying to get a show up. And I really do think that that is probably the most important thing. If you’ve got an idea trying to cement that tease, that promo of, like, you’ve only got one shot. People don’t want to listen or watch anything longer than a minute now, like two minutes. It used to be 2.5 minutes and like, but really now it’s just getting shorter and shorter. Like, our Netflix trailer is only a minute. And I thought, well, God, that’s short, but it’s enough. And people’s times precious. And you really need to some something up, some it up really quickly fast. And I guess as you guys have said so many times, it needs to be a simple concept that you can that you can explain easily. Normally with a heartbeat says.

PJ Madam: Something and you get it straight away. And from there you can take people on a journey. But yeah.

Biagio: Yeah, it’s very hard to pitch really complex, twisting, strange formats. You know, in a minute that just it’s it’s it’s unfortunately it still needs to be clear enough to sell to an audience or no one’s ever going to watch it.

Joke: So yeah. Or at the very least, I mean, I’m just thinking of our unmasking a killer, which was very complicated. But you have a minute teaser, right? So you need to have that minute that people will like, wait, what? I need to know more. And once you have them with that, then, you know, we had the whole we had a 20 minute spiel that went with it because it’s such a complicated case and, and all of that stuff.

Tim Noonan: But but the concept is quite clear and simple. Really.

PJ Madam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joke: But you know, there’s lots of cases like that. So then it’s like, why is this one special? So that took a little bit. But I think, you know, the lesson we learned on that one was a lot of times you go and pitch to somebody and then they go, great, I really like it. I’ll, I’ll talk about it with my bosses. And for some reason I very much was like, no, just bring your bosses down and I will pitch it to them. And so.

PJ Madam: You didn’t want.

Joke: The I didn’t I didn’t want to send them any materials that then the boss would kind of read or not read. And so.

Biagio: Not because we didn’t think they were smart. It took us months to get our head around this case. So we worked really.

Joke: Hard on honing it down to 20 minutes that were really precise. And so thankfully at a couple of the networks, they were open to it and they were like, yeah, no, because we really do like it. So I’m going to get my boss to come and listen to it. And then at CNN, where we ended up selling the show, we did three levels of bosses. Yeah. So we were like, I will come back every time. I don’t, I don’t mind, I will come back and do the pitch. And so if if it is more complicated, if the minute teaser isn’t.

Tim Noonan: Did you do one for this show. Did you do it for.

Joke: Yeah, yeah, we did like you did a.

Biagio: Minute I did, I did a one minute, yeah. Very early on when we were still figuring out the case and we didn’t even know everything. We knew by the time we sold it. And so it was a very, like a style. It was like a style piece. You know, it’s interesting you bring that up because a lot of people will sometimes make a trailer, and the trailer is nothing but a fancy promo, and it’s still essentially just an idea at its core. So for us, our package was that trailer, that one minute trailer that sold tone and sold. You know how the show is going to feel the mystery. But the real package was the fact that, you know, our producer had 50 people on board willing to sit down and talk already. So we came with all this access to all these law enforcement agencies that was worth way more than the tape. But the tapes went through the door, you.

Tim Noonan: Know, because you need to spark the attention to the tension.

PJ Madam: Yeah. And in this medium, like, I know that you can’t suggest this to everybody sitting at home listening to this. Hey, make your own trailer because it’s sometimes an impossible task. But for us, we just felt like we we had to show some sort of concept of what we like. As you said, the look in the feel of what this was all about, the tone and exactly how we were going to create.

Biagio: It and you were going to be on camera. So you have to prove not only that you would be on camera, that you were good at being on.

Joke: If I’m going to buy into eight episodes of a couple and I need to see them, I need to see them. You need to see, you know.

Tim Noonan: You need also, I think like if you don’t have the wealth of or if you don’t have a reputation already for being for as a producer, and you’re walking in and you’re trying to get someone to commit to you, I feel like they’re only going to commit to you if you’ve already committed to yourself. If you’ve taken the time to go out there and proved yourself that you can do it and and invested that money and time into making something, you’re on your own, then I’m going to invest in you because you’re going to do it anyway.

PJ Madam: That’s difficult. Is it? Like not everyone wants to walk that path. They, you know, it’s it’s hard. It’s a hard ask, I think.

Joke: Well, it’s not a clear path either. No. So I think, you know, that’s why I hope the podcast helps with trying to guide somebody. But, you know, it is an adventure and everyone kind of has to walk their own path and figure out what they can and can’t do. But yeah, no yes to all of that. Like, I think, you know, the people we respond to the most are those who. And that’s why we actually have the portal. And it’s not we purposely make it with some hoops because.

Biagio: I realize it’s not the most streamlined. And that’s intentional. It’s it’s intentional. I mean.

Tim Noonan: So if people keep coming back.

Biagio: For.

Joke: Follow the directions and submit through it. And look, you know, we’ve had I think we’re signing a deal with an elderly lady who pitched a show and she’s fantastic talent. And she figured it out. So to me, it’s like, if she can figure it out at 80 plus years, all of y’all can figure it out, you know? But so it’s not impossible. But yeah, there are hoops there for a reason because it’s too easy for someone to sit at home, be like, oh, I have an idea. Let me just shoot an email. And it’s like, okay, you need to do a little.

Biagio: Bit more. Yeah, there’s thousands, I mean, millions of those people. But like, then you’ve got people like the two of you who, if you knew that to go pitch to Netflix, all you had to do was spend 15 minutes of your time entering some information on the web. I’m pretty sure you would have done it in a heartbeat. Oh my gosh.

PJ Madam: Yeah, yeah.

Joke: But it wouldn’t have sold it.

Biagio: Exactly.

Tim Noonan: And we needed to we I mean to get our show up. We had we worked for basically a year. We made our own tape, you know, we made our own trailer. We went and tested ourselves on camera, which was frightening because you really you’re really putting leaving yourself open to discover how, how you are going to work together. So we flew the pup in New Guinea. We made a trailer that has never seen the light of day, but it got us through the door of Netflix and sold the tone, the style, the feel of what they what they were going to invest in.

Joke: But it’s also one of those things where making that trailer give you guys the confidence then to sit across from Netflix and say, yes, we can do that, because had you not done that, you could have sat there and be like, yes, we can do this, but a part of you would have always been of, yeah.

PJ Madam: Tim had done it before, but for me, this is my first time in production. And actually while we were shooting in Papua New Guinea, I got some, some I was sick basically. So I got some rash and I was sick as a result. And it was like, this is a taste of what the journey will be like. I know this sounds a bit ridiculous, but you know, life is going to be tough and sometimes you’re not going to be physically on fire and you’re not in these beautiful luxury actuaries areas. But when we were there in front of Netflix, it was like, oh, I can do this. Like we’re actually physically putting ourselves on the line as well. We’re shooting it. We are the crew. I don’t recommend that for everyone because it just drives you crazy. And at the same time, there was a quiet confidence in going, we can pull this off. We know we, you know, whether or not. I’ve got some sort of, you know, disease. You’ve got malaria. Where and.

Joke: What’s the worst physical thing that happened to you guys?

PJ Madam: Malaria, do you think?

Tim Noonan: Yeah, I got malaria and typhoid.

Joke: Were you not did you not take medicine or vaccinated?

Tim Noonan: Sometimes you just can’t avoid it. There’s so many different strains in say, in Africa and Cameroon and ended up we both actually ended up in hospital in Cameroon. But like, thankfully we were in the place of malaria where you can get rid of it. And then typhoid is just like extreme food poisoning, but it’s just part of the course, you know, you can’t avoid that stuff.

PJ Madam: I got out, I got malaria on our way out so it wasn’t on camera. And then I think in the first week I had giardia. So that was there was a moment where I just needed to go to the toilet. And, you know, we were not in a exceptionally safe place. And so, you know, our security detail got out and Tim got out with me, and I just had to go. And I thought, well, you know, I think we’re bonded for life.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah.

PJ Madam: This whole, like, you know, being together for everything might be actually easy because, you know, barriers are broken. And unfortunately, you’re, you’re obviously for long I’ve got, I’ve got to say like our immune system to kind of, you know, bounced back quite quickly and we were eating really well, like we were eating really simply. And we were sleeping as soon as the sun would go down and we’d get up as soon as the sun would come up. So we were kind of having these clean lifestyles, like not a drop of alcohol. We were, you know.

Tim Noonan: On.

Joke: The floor.

Biagio: On the floor.

PJ Madam: We were.

Tim Noonan: All which takes its toll when you’re trying to like, film every single day and you get up and you stretch your back out to.

PJ Madam: Get used to it. This is what I’m saying. Like, for all the complaints that you may have for about a week or so, by the time you’ve done it eight times, you miss it like you leave the villages, and every single time we would be in tears, they would be into and it’d be like, oh.

Tim Noonan: Because they’ve become our film crew. So like, because we don’t have, we’re just traveling, you know, on our own that when, when we come into it and we’ve got to, we tell everybody what we’re doing and then they get so excited because ordinarily they most of them are just sort of, you know, they do their daily activities and hunting or whatever. You’re just looking after the kids and then the whole village come together with cameras. We arm them with cameras and they become this giant film crew, and we all go through that marathon together. And then by the time we’ve left, it’s this enormous sense of achievement. We’ve all accomplished something together. And it’s for people that have never been involved in film before. It’s awesome.

Biagio: It’s really cool.

PJ Madam: It’s so gorgeous. When in Papua New Guinea, we would show them back the rushes and a lot of them could speak English. Some of them had pigeon and we had a translator, obviously, and they would just laugh at everything and every scene and every bit of overlay, everything. They would just be on the ground laughing. It would be like, this is not how is this even funny? But they just got so much joy at a scene themselves. And then the next day they would be all there at our hearts going, you know, like, what are we filming today? What are we doing today? Everyone would be so excited to kind of this is what we do here. And that’s what we do here. And we were just blessed in that respect, to be able to have the time to be lirst in, in with everyone. If you put yourself and do the rituals, you find it a lot about yourselves. So it was all through our point of view. I guess we didn’t mean to, but we didn’t mind looking looking like idiots. We were kind of like, okay, when you’re pushed and you know, things get a little bit crazy and heavy, you find out who you are, you find out who you truly are. Not to mention you’re filming it as well. So all of those elements rolled into one were crazy.

Biagio: I can only imagine. I mean, first of all, obviously we’re married. We’ve been working together for years. I know how stressful it can get. I can’t imagine on top of that, if I actually had to look camera ready. I mean, I mean, it would never happen for you.

PJ Madam: To do it, like just for funny. I know that sounds crazy, but.

Biagio: I think there was one time a few.

Joke: Years ago where they were camera testing in the office, and they caught us.

Biagio: Doing our thing.

Joke: Doing our thing, and everyone was like, oh no, mom and dad are fighting. And like.

Biagio: We’re not fighting. We’re having passionate arguments.

Tim Noonan: So how do you guys find working together as a partnership? Like how do you make decisions? Do you have different roles? Are they are they divvied up or do you find sometimes if you have extreme opinions? Either way, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Biagio: Well, a lot of times it’s the extreme opinions. Either way, I think that that that happens a lot where like I’ll be like, oh my gosh, we got to do it this way. And she’ll be like, oh no, no, we really got to do it this way. And I will just say most of the time she’s right. I, I approach things from a very like visual, you know, almost, almost like, what’s the trailer for the show point of view, you know, and joke is thank God is an absolute story expert. And I mean, we both get sorry, we both know how to make trailers and stuff. But I mean, I would say that. So I’m always coming at it with this. Like can we give it a little extra sexiness? And she’s always like, okay, but can we please make sure it has the story?

Joke: Like we need to meet him? Potatoes.

Biagio: Yeah.

Joke: He’s about the gravy.

Biagio: Yeah, I am about the gravy. Both. I mean, I’m a dork. Like what I love so much about it. You know, unscripted television is there’s no money, so you can pretty much do whatever you want. I do the opening graphics myself. I, you know, sometimes I write the music. It’s just like, it’s really it really allows you to be hands on. And luckily she supports me in that, which is really helpful to you.

PJ Madam: Can I just say the reason why I caught on to the podcast is because the stuff that you guys were saying was the absolute truth. I thought if anyone who doesn’t know about unscripted listens to this, they’ve got the best training ground in understanding what they don’t know and what they’re about to know, and the whole make yourself valuable. I mean, Tim, you know, like, what other hat do you want to wear? Because no team does everything. Yeah, I’m catching up. I’ve got a little way to go to to you know, Tim’s now taught me how to shoot. But in terms of making yourself valuable, it’s the same thing as you guys. Like, you guys have had to be hands on. And I think when you’re a little engine who can, some amazing things happen. Like, we would rather like a small team of, like a graders who are like minded as opposed to a cast of thousands, because that way you can lose the beating heart or the story sometimes as well.

Tim Noonan: Yeah, I guess like what we do is very similar to you guys. I mean, we come up with concepts for, for us, it’s they’re always very personal. And I guess we’re sort of, in a sense doing extreme selfies, like we’re emotional base jumpers that love pushing ourselves, throwing ourselves into situations where we either sink or swim, filming it, seeing how we fare. And there you go. You’ve got a series. But for us, like, we have an idea and then we have to execute it. So it’s all about creating that vision, that trailer, that, and that whole process for us really cements what the show idea is. I think because you don’t really know, you have an idea about how it’s actually going to be executed. You don’t know until you start actually filming it and cutting it together. And then all the problems start to surface, right?

Biagio: And how did the who of you work through those? Because I imagine you’re having you’re having disagreements both as a producing partners and as a couple. Yes.

PJ Madam: We I’m trying to think of what some of the main arguments were. This is this is interesting. Like childbirth, if you get these things or something like what do.

Biagio: We find about goodness? For us.

Tim Noonan: We serve come, we come from the same discipline, so we come from journalism. But then I’d moved off and I’d done a series called boy, Demand for discovery and BBC. So I’d already sort of dipped my toe into the water of telling longer form stories. And so when we first came together, like working together for the first time, I think we had, I don’t know, just different ways of approaching stuff like to be seen.

PJ Madam: And I think I would want to be a lot more forensic and perhaps even literal and sometimes linear. If I got a little bit uncertain. I thought the way to fall back on this way of telling this story is like this. And that’s hard when you’re also documenting yourself. So all of those things were ripped up and thrown out, and then you realize that there is a better way. Sometimes it came after, you know, clashes.

Tim Noonan: For example, like sometimes we’ll shoot a scene and we’ll put ourselves into a, into some scenario and it just falls flat. Like for some reason it just doesn’t work. And then, you know, if if it happens that way, it usually gives you an answer. If you go down the wrong path, you know, you’ve gone down that wrong path, and the right answer appears to you about how you should be telling the story and moving on. And I think that’s where we differ. Like if I’m if I don’t get the shot straight away, PJ gets quite angry. So she wants me to get it one hit once.

PJ Madam: I think, you know, like across the board sometimes you just cannot control Mother Nature and you just cannot control, you know, some little child who’s walking around and then you’re like, no, no, no, sweetie, come to it. Come here. Can’t just walk around and meet shots or whatever. So we, you know, there it was. It was difficult as well. And also we’re in these incredible places and in these different worlds that have got, you know, not a lot of familiarity with a media crew and what we’re doing there. So it’s, you know, there was a great kind of merging of different worlds. And in the end, because it’s just him and I and assistant who goes out there in the end, the most magical thing happens. They become part of your wider crew. So the villagers, so they’ve never seen like they’ve never picked up cameras and they didn’t, you know, they’re seeing themselves back on laptops and then showing them what we filmed of a night time. We would go through the rushes and it would just create community on a different scale. It was really, really amazing, actually.

Tim Noonan: I guess to give it context, what we’re doing is we’re going out into tribal villages, the most remote places on earth, to try to learn how these people see love and how they make it last, and how their marriages work before we put ourselves through their rituals, their ceremonies, pre marriage rights, to see how we fare. And it’s not really so much about the rituals and the rights, it’s more about how we just deal with ourselves in life going through, like living out there with them and filming it ourselves, and which is harder than actually doing the rituals themselves. But we’re living in extreme circumstances. Extreme heat, -30 degrees, you know, like we’re like, oh, we set up our camp and our gear in like the middle of a desert, living with nomads and then having to charge stuff on with generators. And it never ends. You know, it’s it’s it pushes every single button, especially in our relationship and personally that you could ever imagine. And in amongst all that, we’ve somehow got to tell a story and come away with an episode.

Joke: It’s crazy to me because, I mean, we can totally relate to all the production nightmares and, you know, production is hell and war and all of those things, but to then be vulnerable on camera to show that it’s, you know, to be willing to look, you know, not just, you know, worn and tired physically, but also to show the sides of your personality that maybe are not the most attractive.

Biagio: Yeah. No.

Joke: That’s hard.

PJ Madam: That’s being vulnerable publicly. You’re going to cop criticism and you get a cop praise. You’re going to cop people who understand it and then don’t. And one of the things that I think we we did go in eyes wide open, though, we realized if we’re going to do this, it has to be to share something to the world that’s bigger than us. And we were very passionate about learning about love and marriage and what this institution of marriage is all about, because we came into our relationship with different, you know.

Tim Noonan: A fantasy. You could have a fantasy.

PJ Madam: Everything has to be rose colored glasses. And I mean, you look at different points of social media and it’s just it is kind of perpetuating a falseness of what marriage can be like. And actually, marriage is hard in marriage is a partnership. It can be a business transaction sometimes, in a way. And life isn’t easy. No no.

Biagio: No no no no no. Company.

PJ Madam: But no.

Joke: But you add your kids as employees. You’ll know exactly.

PJ Madam: But you are like me. Like sometimes in some some corners of society, we are fed a bit of a fantasy. And what we wanted to do was not be hashtag couple goals. Not at all. You know, a couple of people have been like, oh yeah, you guys like the ultimate couple with me. Like, excuse me if you watch the show. No. And the reason being is that’s life. You have good days. You have bad days. You’re constantly learning and growing and growing together as a couple. And you face.

Joke: Did you find yourself in the edited by going, oh, can we cut that part?

PJ Madam: Yeah.

Tim Noonan: But no, like Peter is saying.

Biagio: Did you.

Tim Noonan: Know I was like.

PJ Madam: Well, no.

Tim Noonan: I think the special thing about this series, I think, was that we both committed to filming whatever happened, even if it brought us to breaking point. So even if we were arguing and we were in a really bad place, we still had this Uber commitment to letting the cameras roll and just doing it on camera, which was really difficult. And then we had a whole post team back home, so we were constantly traveling and we would send our rushes back, and that gave us distance because there was just no way we could have cut it ourselves or produced it in post and the back end ourselves. We had an amazing team.

PJ Madam: They’ve all like our counselors.

Tim Noonan: Yeah.

PJ Madam: Us? Very well. By the end of it.

Tim Noonan: Yeah, of course we’d see cuts and stuff like that, but.

Joke: But you’re still the EP as well. I mean, it’s your show, it’s the Buck stops with you. So ultimately if you saw something in your like, wow, I look really bad in the scene. I did not say something nice in that that moment, either to each other or to the people in the village, you decide to keep it.

PJ Madam: In and say. And so I’ll rewind a little bit when I was saying, oh yeah, it was more hard for me because I’d been a journalist and as a reporter, I don’t know if it’s the same here in America, but in Australia you don’t have an opinion unless you’re writing an opinion piece. So I’ve been trained to sit on the fence, to be impartial, to look at both sides of the story, to not show favor either side. With this. You rip that off and you don’t go in as a journalist, and instead you are you. And so peeling off those layers was hard. But I thought, if people are going to know me and know something through my eyes, it has to be the whole hog. And not everyone like I get messages all the time saying, hi PJ, you’ve grown on me. At first I hated you. Now I think you’re okay, but you whinge and I’m like, like, damn straight I do.

Biagio: I know you’re not telling.

PJ Madam: Me that. I don’t.

Biagio: Know.

PJ Madam: You have just, you know, you need to calm down. In episode four, I felt this and we’re like, yeah, like that’s exactly correct. Like, at least we’re talking about stuff that’s otherwise, you know, you know, you like to think there’s a nice veneer and, you know, packaged up beautifully. It’s like.

Biagio: No, no. And that doesn’t really help. It doesn’t help newlyweds to think that that’s that is all so easy. I mean, listen, luckily not everybody needs to go through the most world’s most rituals to, you know, a lot along the way. Like, yes, swipe right. Swipe left is hard enough for most people. But, but but I think that it’s it’s it’s really awesome that you you let yourself be that vulnerable. I mean, I think she said it best because it’s I mean, that’s a scary thing to open yourself up like that. Well.

PJ Madam: To put it in and to allow it to, to go through all the gatekeepers and go commit. Yeah, yeah.

Joke: So when we first started dating, we’d known each other for a while, first started dating, we made a movie together that he was in. He wrote, directed, started. And it was.

PJ Madam: Your team? Yes, yes.

Joke: And I produced it, and it was in Ohio with his family. So I was definitely the outsider with all his friends, all his family. It was by far the hardest three months of my life.

Biagio: And I still apologize for that.

Joke: It was I, I mean, I did not go 30 degrees below zero, but emotionally I felt like I went through the ringer and it was one of those things where when we came back to Los Angeles three months later, I was like, okay, well, we survived that.

Biagio: We’ll do anything, anything now.

Joke: And here we are 20 plus years later.

Biagio: I mean.

Tim Noonan: So you’re saying we’ll.

Biagio: Be fine? You’ll be fine. Fine? Yeah.

Joke: Once you go through just, you know, production hell, plus all the other things, which for you were, you know, all of nature and tribes and all of that stuff. For us, it was the family friends.

Biagio: Yeah. It was. I mean, in a lot of ways, my family is more primitive than any place you guys visited. So it’s very. I doubt it. But if they are, they know. They know, they know. Yeah. Some of them have apologized, some haven’t. They just. My family is very, very.

Joke: Very protective of him.

Biagio: They’re very protective passionate bunch. You know.

Joke: Coming through something like that I mean even you see it with just regular productions, even people who are not in actual romantic relationships, like once you’ve gone through something like that, there’s a bond that you get. You know that.

Tim Noonan: It’s hard. Like, this is a hard industry. It’s hard. The storytelling is difficult, you know, and it’s it is it’s hard to make it’s TV show. Yeah. Like it really is. If it’s going to be any.

Joke: Good, there’s a lot to think about, right? It’s not just a story. You have to think about the camera. You have to think about the sound. You have to understand where the story is going. Is it still engaging? Is it interesting? Absolutely. Do they have the information? Is the on is going to be confused. Like there’s just a lot that goes into it. So for you guys.

PJ Madam: Well sometimes it takes a couple of cracks as well. Like as storytellers we just want to evolve. So everything that we’ve done, we want to keep pushing the bar. I mean we’re living in in a, in a space at a time where there’s so much content, there’s a saturation of content and it’s like, okay, well, the storytellers, how do we keep improving? How do we keep resonating, how do we keep being relevant? And I think for us, and the most exciting thing when I came across you guys was I was like, oh my gosh, there are people out there like this and you’re through the podcast, you’re actually giving. Like, I think those who may not have had an experience in this industry, the most real and, and I think authentic, you know, like it’s like you’re telling people what they need to do. It’s the advice that they need to know before jumping in.

Tim Noonan: It’s not true.

PJ Madam: It’s not. You’re not sugarcoating either in a way which is good.

Biagio: That’s great. We don’t sugarcoat.

Joke: What’s the number one piece of advice that you heard on the podcast? That you know, somebody else who doesn’t have your experience might not know, is really like the thing that resonated the most, because I feel like we talk a lot and then I don’t know what’s what resonates.

Biagio: What’s next?

PJ Madam: I think there’s a huge well, how would you put like for people who haven’t done this before but might have a great idea, say they’re sitting so they’ve come from a completely different background, is sitting on a great idea, and they’ve always thought that they could see it in a TV show. I think the concept around what is a good idea, if you’ve if you haven’t been in this industry before, is quite subjective and feelings get hurt. Sorry. And they feel like. But it was my idea and you can’t let it go. And also the idea that sometimes someone might take it who’s had a bit more knowledge of how to how to push a story together or a series together and make it better. And I think just even through your is it the submissions? What does it call.

Biagio: The. Yeah.

PJ Madam: So the way that you guys are coaching people to understand that process is it’s like you’re being very kind about like super, super kind and lovely. I mean, we’ve learned, you know, things about IP and copyright the hard way. And I think the way that you guys are coaching, everyone is lovely. And I think people need to be aware that you can have an idea, but everyone else has got this. Like the ideas.

Biagio: Ideas just aren’t enough.

PJ Madam: Yeah, ideas aren’t enough.

Tim Noonan: What do you guys think the difference is between, say, you and other producers that have ideas but just can’t get them off the ground?

Joke: A lot of luck.

Biagio: Well, yeah, but you make your own luck, right? I mean, I mean, I think I think much like the two of you, what we’ve always said is we believe in ourselves enough to cover every position on set. So if everything else goes wrong, we can make sure that we see a project through. And that goes from the earliest stages of inception of an idea. It’s like, okay, well, this idea is not enough. How do we put together a trailer? How do we put together a pitch deck? How do we who do we attach? You know, how can we make sure that it’s more than an idea and it’s different every single time? Sometimes it doesn’t get to be more than that idea.

Joke: Yeah. And look, when I say luck, it’s not like you just sit on the couch and you wait for it to knock on your door, but you have to go look for it and then be ready when the opportunity presents itself. But, you know, we met some key people along the way that, you know, believed in us just enough were they gave us a shot to prove ourselves. And had we then not stepped up, we wouldn’t be here. And had we not come through, we wouldn’t be here. But there were a few people who were like, mall, right? I’ll take a chance.

Tim Noonan: But did they take a chance because you guys were they saw how hardworking you were. How tenacious.

PJ Madam: Yeah, you you.

Biagio: Have to.

Joke: You have to find them. You know, I just remember, like, I’m thinking of of a I don’t want to say the name because I don’t want everyone to just start bugging him, and then he’ll he’ll be mad at me. But, you know, in trying to break into the business and obviously the podcast is our way of making it easier for other people because at the time there was nothing there was no way you could get into a production company. But, you know, we would go and and track people down, like, where are they speaking? Is there a guest lecture happening in town at a school or whatever? And we would go and we would show up and we listen and yeah, we hustle and you’re, you know, we’d be politely persistent and at that time still sending faxes. I know that’s how old we.

Biagio: Are, but they actually weren’t getting a lot of faxes. So ours stood out. You know, they were all email by that point. They were they.

Joke: Were calling or email and the receptionist would stop it. And it’s like we send the facts and we’re like a fax. And so it ends up on their desk and they’re like, look, I bring them in. And so then when you get them, get the meeting, you go in and we had 4 or 5 trailers to show. And at the at that point, video pitches were still very like new companies hadn’t figured out how to do them cheaply. But, you know, we had learned ourselves. So it was like, you know, yes, you show, you know, you get that opportunity, then you have to prove yourself, you have to get them. So but, you know, it still required someone to look at a fax and go, all right, column in. Let’s see what they have.

Tim Noonan: Finding funny and mentor to like. We’ve had a series of different mentors, especially yes, me, throughout my career, and they are instrumental in guiding you through mistakes that you would otherwise make and take you maybe ten years to learn. They’re like a shortcut, and I guess if people see that in you, that you’re willing to stand on their shoulders and learn and like continue on their legacy, they’re very giving. Like, I mean.

Joke: I think that’s what I miss the most. I think it used to be mentorship was a much bigger deal in this business. Even when I was an assistant, you know, it was about finding the bosses. That would be those mentors that I could learn from and that would share. And I see that less and less and to be honest. Yeah, the people that I respond to most at work on our shows are the ones that that look to me to do, to ask questions and to and, you know, and I have no problem sharing. But it’s like, okay, like you’re in it, you know, you’re not just in it for this job of the next job and the next job and the next job. And you know, you’re actually wanting to improve. So I agree I think if we could. Mentorship and apprenticeship is lost. Like everyone is just like let’s just immediately get to the job and the title and it’s like, how about you learn from someone who’s done it before.

Tim Noonan: And and pretend like you know everything?

Biagio: Well, yeah, that’s that’s hard. It’s hard when you’re starting out. Right? Because everyone tells you fake it until you make it and you hear all these things up. Project confidence. But then if you come off like, you know, a jerk or I know it all, you’re going to turn the people off. You’re meeting with. It’s such a it’s such a hard line to walk like, I don’t. I don’t envy my 20 year old self. Like it was like, no, it was difficult. Yeah. It was, it was, it was difficult, you know, and you’re broke and you’re trying to figure things out.

Joke: And I think and that’s also where I feel like I was lucky because I did have fiancée. And so we came up together. And so we had each other. Right. So if it’s like I’m feeling really insecure right now because we could be like, all right, all right, I’ll go handle this. I got this, you know, and.

Biagio: By first.

Tim Noonan: Like, be a sidekick for one another, you need that support. This is a lonely business. If you’re on your own.

PJ Madam: It is so lonely. Oh my goodness. We have a few friends who are doing it on on their own. And we’ve often said to ourselves, despite all the fighting at all, you know, like we, you know.

Tim Noonan: The production wrestlers. Yeah. Having that support.

PJ Madam: To have each.

Tim Noonan: Other is everything. So if you don’t have it in a partner, like in a romantic way as well, you want to find it in, you know, a cameraman that you’d team up with or an editor or a producer or like, you’ve got to find that right fit so you can both spur each other on to take the knocks and get the wind. I was just thinking, as you guys were chatting like the the difference, I think, between making it and not making it in, in getting your own TV show up, I feel like is just keeping on going. Yeah.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah, right. Don’t stop.

PJ Madam: In a way.

Joke: Yeah. I think that’s the line that you pretty much hear from all successful people, right? The only thing that set me apart is I never quit.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah.

Joke: Because there’s a lot of knocks, a lot of knocks.

PJ Madam: And it’s hard work. A lot of people say that they want to do it, but actually.

Tim Noonan: Backing it up.

PJ Madam: Is committed to doing it. I mean, we’ve got like plenty of stories where we’ve helped people along the way. And when they see, I guess, the sacrifice that we’ve put in, it’s a little unpalatable. Like it’s not for everyone.

Tim Noonan: All the free work that you have to do, like getting a TV show pitched together, takes months of time and research.

Joke: You don’t get paid for it.

Biagio: You get paid.

PJ Madam: For it. Yeah. So a lot of people don’t see that side and just think, oh, you have a show on Netflix. This must be, you know, so amazing. And it’s like, well, actually it takes a knock on you personally on your physicality.

Tim Noonan: Takes on most a year of pre-production where no one’s getting paid.

Biagio: Yeah.

PJ Madam: So much, so many other hits that you don’t see. Can I just ask something you mentioned Biagio? Sure. You know, you. Both of you could fulfill the roles if you needed to. Are pretty much everything in production. If anything fell over that that comes back to making yourself valuable. I know you guys talk about it a lot.

Joke: He’s being very generous with that.

Biagio: And I’m not saying I would be the greatest boom operator ever. I’m saying I’ve done it in a pinch. I’ll do it. Yeah. No, no.

Joke: No, I just mean, like, I couldn’t edit the way he ate it, you know what I mean? And it’s like, honestly, when we’re putting budgets and schedules together, it’s better if Biagio.

Biagio: Better if I.

Joke: Don’t get it. I do that, you know? So there are certain things that we both have strengths at. But I.

Biagio: Think.

Joke: Between the two of us, I think we’ve got it covered if need be. And, you know, our motto has always been, let’s hire people who are better than us. Yeah. So that our game gets upped. And, you know, obviously if someone specializes in being a DP, they’re going to be way better at it than us shooting, you know what I mean? Because that’s what they spend all their time on while we have to do all these other jobs. But what he’s saying is, God forbid the DP fall sick or their car gets in a car accident and they have to show up an hour late on set. It’s not like we’re all going to be sitting around with their thumbs twin laying until that person shows up.

Tim Noonan: It’s like it’s a lot of risk to make a show as well. Like you guys are burdening as we did, like the financial risk if something all goes wrong, you know, like, or if something happens to someone of your that shooting with you or back at home and they fall over and there’s all this other stuff when you make.

Biagio: It and you sign your life away. Right. I mean, you saying scary, scary contracts and say it’s all my fault if anything goes wrong, even though your Netflix and worth billions and I’m not, if anything goes wrong, it’s on me, right?

Tim Noonan: You want to be able to pull yourself out of a hole. So that’s like multi-tasking. Being able to at least have your hand or thumb on every roll. That’s what it makes a big difference.

PJ Madam: To make yourself valuable. Maybe in that skills. Not not talking specifically in that skill set sense, but just having a handle on exactly all the moving parts that make a production. And I think it’s an appreciation for it as well. Like, you can’t have the left hand without the right in making some of these decisions. And, you know, I think one of the biggest things that we’ve learned, and I’ll bring it back to the podcast, was it was a lovely way that you guys keep betraying it is this whole vision of what it takes to to make a TV show. You’re going to have an idea, but getting it to see it on screen, there are a lot of hurdles and a lot of hoops, and we’re not.

Tim Noonan: Trying to if it’s problem solving.

PJ Madam: Yeah, we’re not trying to say it’s all bad or it’s all challenging. Actually, it’s a lot of fun. You wouldn’t keep doing it otherwise. But to be realistic, it is a challenge. And if you’re into that, if you like seeing how you’re going to cope and if you’d like to, you know, not take things personally. And I think also be prepared to grow personally, professionally. This is the place where you want to be.

Tim Noonan: It’s kind of like having a massive puzzle, completing it and then just destroying it as soon as you’re finished to make a neat new one, you know, like.

PJ Madam: Over.

Tim Noonan: And over, over again, you get a glimpse of it at the end and then everybody sees it, and then you’ve done that one. You have to do another one.

PJ Madam: That’s right.

Joke: I think for us, you know, we both kind of started in theater. And to me it felt like you put the same kind of time and energy and work in it and then like, well, if they couldn’t make the show, that’s it. Like, that’s it.

Biagio: No one will ever see it again. It’s all over.

Joke: And so for us, at least with television, I felt like, well, there’s proof.

Tim Noonan: Yeah.

Joke: You know, like there is evidence that that work made something so. But yeah.

Tim Noonan: Because we put ourselves in front of the camera, it’s almost like we’re, there’s no turning back from whatever the good and the bad that you’ve put out there about yourself. So there’s kind of something liberating in doing that. I mean, it’s certainly not for everyone, but you can’t hide from yourself. And so when you’ve put it out to the world, you’ve got no choice but to overcome perceptions that you’ve had about your past and and move on.

PJ Madam: But unlike can I make a distinction? There are a lot of people out there who want to be reality stars or have their own show to be famous. We we never set out to do this, to be reality people. In fact, a lot of people who want that kind of image only want a happy image or a nice image. We don’t have that. If you watch the show, it’s not that. It’s a it’s more of a true take on the fights that we have, the challenges we experience, the growth spurts that we encounter. It’s not exactly, you know, not sugarcoated at all.

Tim Noonan: Some of its behind the scenes as well. So like, you know, the whole wrapping like because we’re filmmakers at heart. So like, I mean, it’s kind of like if we threw you guys into the wilds of Africa and you had to try to make a film, you know, the making of it is just pushes you to extreme limits. And I think that’s like anything it doesn’t have. You don’t have to go into crazy situations. You can just go make a film and you go, everyone gets pushed to.

PJ Madam: Yeah, but what I’m saying is that it’s it’s unlike oh, I just want everyone to to like me. No, it’s like we’ve learned something which we want to share.

Joke: It’s quite courageous to put that out in today’s world, because today’s world, which is full of trolls and people judging anonymously, you know, and saying really mean and horrible things on all the social media to to make yourself so vulnerable and just put it out there is I mean, it’s either courageous or insane. So I’m not quite a bit of both.

Biagio: Okay. I can imagine when you’re on Netflix being viewed worldwide, I imagine the chatter gets really loud. Do you just block it out? Do you avoid reading the net.

Tim Noonan: Guiding it as we go? Like we’re too busy really to concentrate on it? Like we try to answer. Everybody’s got their opinion. Opinion. And that’s fine. Like you can’t expect you know, everybody to like it’s not possible. It’s actually physically not possible. But there’ll always be 50% that won’t 50% of the will. And I guess what we want to do is take the cult like the conversations that people are having, the like if if people are stepping outside their comfort zone and being brave and doing like following their own passions, I’ll take what they’re what they say really seriously. But if they’re not prepared to do that and be a couch warrior, cable warrior, then how much validity am I really going to give to what they’re saying?

Biagio: Yeah.

PJ Madam: I think you have to know your truth. Like really, really know it and know who you are. I mean, there’s always a risk of putting yourself out there and particularly just being yourself. Like how many people actually like themselves, like genuinely. And then be prepared to share that with the world. I mean, it’s a constant work in progress, I think, even for us. And like as Tim saying, you are going to get the haters like we, you know, you see them times. I just like them all. I’m like, I from my journalism background, I’m like, I welcome all opinions, even if we disagree. And the thing that they don’t have is that they’re not informed. They’re not they weren’t on the ground. They didn’t spend a month from time to time living with people. I mean, we’ve lived with indigenous tribes now for more than a year.

Tim Noonan: And for that.

PJ Madam: Yeah.

Tim Noonan: I did like 12. And 12, one hour, 12 one hours living two years around the world in remote communities.

PJ Madam: Yeah. Okay. Can I just say add to that, I think when you read and I don’t mind reading them at all, that I surprised myself, actually, the thick skin that I do have, and maybe that’s from my newsreader days as well. People would write in and say, why doesn’t she have a piece and what’s wrong with her voice and blah blah blah. But when you do reading something and you’re kind of going, they’re missing a piece of information. I don’t begrudge people for that. It’s just an opinion. They’re just, you know, spouting off something. But if we were to meet and if I sat them down and explain to them what it was like with these people, what, how, how we would navigate something, what would happen behind the scenes that we may not have put in the show because we couldn’t for whatever reason. But this was true. They’d have a much deeper understanding that there is another side of the story that we just couldn’t simply put out there. And, you know, we know what we’re live. We know how we conduct ourselves on the road and how we’ve also run the business. And we’re pretty we’re pretty proud of getting through that. So like you’ve got you’ve got to hold true to you. You’ve got to I think just steady yourself for the stuff that comes in and yeah like I’m I kind of welcome the feedback. Yes. Yeah. It’s not it’s not something that I think we, we dwell on too much because like team said, you get really busy. Yeah. Yeah. And get overwhelmed by by.

Tim Noonan: People isn’t like when you, when you make. You guys would know this when you make a TV show, it’s so incredibly hard. And then you put it out to the world and you welcome whatever response you get. And it’s always frightening. On that day at premieres, are people going to watch? What are the ratings going to be? Is it going to lead to more opportunities? And then you sort of dust yourself off and you want to go again, I don’t know.

Joke: 100%. Yes.

Biagio: Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Jokes. Favorite line from Gray’s Anatomy is why do I keep hitting myself in the head with a hammer? Because it.

Joke: Feels so good when I stop. It’s true though.

PJ Madam: It’s true. Wrong with.

Joke: This world. There’s something.

Biagio: Wrong with that.

Joke: But, I mean, look, I think there is for all the the trenches and the hard work and the this there’s still something glamorous about telling stories. I mean, the fact that we can carve out a living telling stories is amazing. You know, I mean, we could be selling cars, you know? And not that there’s anything wrong with selling cars.

Biagio: Hey, I delivered pizzas for a very long time, right? And bagged groceries and wash dishes. Yeah. Yes.

Joke: I sold knives door to door. She did it. Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just we’re privileged that we get to do this. So we have to keep our game up so we can continue to keep doing it, you know?

Biagio: Yeah, yeah. All right. Last question. What advice would you guys have for like you guys 15 years ago who are dreaming about producing maybe being on camera. Is there is there one thing you can offer?

Tim Noonan: Story I think is everything the art of storytelling is is the only real game in town. So if you want to, it’s not. Everybody has ideas, I think. But like unless you understand the ends and flows of what makes a good story, then you, you can’t really execute anything else. And I think that whole persistence thing, like if you if you love it and you love storytelling, then you want to just get going.

PJ Madam: Oh, I was going to say something like, you know, the practical, practical things like, you know, have a tough skin, be persistent, be committed, be dedicated. But actually, when it comes down to it, I agree with Tim Story. I think the most beautiful thing is that we are in a job, we’ve created ourselves and we’re passionate storytellers. And, you know, we I think if you can build on that and keep evolving, you gotta be pretty happy.

Biagio: That’s true. You’re not just crafting the story of the show. You’re crafting the story of your life every single day. And it’s really true. Awesome. Well, I thank you guys so much for coming. This has been like the most awesome, fun, info packed thing I think we’ve done in a while. I just did so much in here. I had a great time. I hope the people listening have a good time. Thank you for coming by.

Joke: It’s not often we find couples in this business to go through what we go through. So yeah, stop sharing that.

PJ Madam: That’s what we’ve.

Tim Noonan: So as long as you be on tap for like any relationship advice you can get, we can.

Biagio: Call you. You’ve got it. All right, well everybody check it out. It’s extreme engagement on Netflix. You can watch it now. You can watch it the second you hear this. You can go binge it. I mentioned the.

Joke: Car drive.

Biagio: To two very brave people who who say they were not afraid to show their flaws, who put themselves up there to show, you know, the sort of like extremes of relationship. And you know, what it takes to know if someone’s right for you. So I commend you both for doing that, and I look forward to watching it myself. We haven’t had a chance to watch yet, but we’ve actually just met these two like four days ago. Yeah I know. Yeah. Just randomly like, oh my gosh, you have to come to the podcast. So so thanks for for getting over while you’re still here from Australia.

Joke: I know we had another meeting with an Australian visitor about two weeks ago, and they brought us Tim Tams and now obsessed with Tim Tam. No, you did.

Biagio: Not know you brought him dubs. Oh my God, this is amazing. This is incredible.

Joke: This is funny.

Biagio: Oh my God. They just we literally just as we’re telling the story. For those of you who can’t see what’s going on, they literally just lift over and produce another Tam. Not only to know about this veggie. What is it? I’ve never had, like, the staple.

Tim Noonan: Food that every single family has on their toast in the morning.

Biagio: Wow. Amazing. You have a.

Joke: Good. Yeast extract? Yeah.

Biagio: This is going to be fun. This is like.

Tim Noonan: A great taste test.

Joke: Okay, you know, I don’t do these shows that you do.

Biagio: That’s all right. So this is not a contest.

Tim Noonan: That every Australian knows that you need it actually with butter.

Biagio: So this isn’t an issue. He loves butter.

PJ Madam: This is a big.

Joke: Yeah. It’s a spread.

Biagio: All right.

Joke: Please tell me it tastes like chocolate.

PJ Madam: We should be filming this.

Biagio: Oh, my. Oh my God. That was. That is some strong tasting stuff. 000. I’m gonna make people sandwiches with that and surprise them. Yeah. For anybody out there who likes really strong tasting, meaty livery black goo, this is for you. So Vegemite people you hear first I’m producing. I’m. Bringing you the news you won’t get anywhere else. I’m literally. Oh, my God, I still can’t get it out. So did you like it?

PJ Madam: I love that.

Biagio: Let’s do some more.

Joke: It’s so salty.

Biagio: It is. And what a way. One way to wrap it up. We’re gonna wrap it up with Vegemite and tin dams. And again, as a reminder, you can see these two, you know, putting their relationship up for everyone to see an extreme engagement on Netflix. Thank you both for being here. This was really fun. Thank you.

Joke: Thank you guys so much.

Biagio: Have you seen unscripted Rick, joke and Biagio?