Stephanie Savage & Josh Schwartz On Building ‘City On Fire’ & Whether There’s More ‘O.C.’ – Crew Call Podcast

Canadian native Stephanie Savage and Rhode Island-born Josh Schwartz know something when it comes to how the young posh set ticks from Orange County, CA to the Upper East Side of New York.

And that talent doesn’t end in creating hip TV series which millennials swoon for, i.e. the 92-episode darling The O.C. (2003-2007) and the original 121-episode Gossip Girl (2007-2012), but in setting trends too, the latter being a barometer of early aughts fashion-sense, and in capturing the social media rage.

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The duo have a new limited series on Apple TV+, City on Fire, based on the 2015 novel by Garth Risk Hallberg (the manuscript was so hot, the author received a $2M advance for his debut novel from the publisher). While the novel was set in the 1970s, Savage and Schwartz transferred the TV series’ setting to post 9/11 New York City. The set-up: young clubber and good intentioned Samantha Yeung is shot in Central Park, New York City on July 4, 2003. There are no witnesses and little physical evidence. Her friends’ band is playing her favorite downtown club but she leaves to meet someone, promising to return. She doesn’t. As the crime against Samantha is investigated, she’s revealed to be the crucial connection between a series of mysterious citywide fires, the downtown music scene, and a wealthy uptown real estate family fraying under the strain of the many secrets they keep. Critics praised the Hallberg novel as a modern day Bonfire of the Vanities.

A person of interest is her dear friend Charlie (whose smitten for her). He’s struggling to cope with the death of his father on 9/11 two years earlier. After Samantha is shot, he stops at nothing to uncover the mystery of what happened.

We unpack it all with Savage and Schwartz including their early roots, creative shorthand, ability to speak YA, and whether we’ll ever see more The O.C. in this streaming era.

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