'Greek' Creator Patrick Sean Smith Answered All of My Burning Questions
On Cyprus-Rhodes, capturing the magic of college, Evan and Cappie & more.
Earning a degree from the fictional Cyprus-Rhodes University meant something extra special. Diploma in hand, you probably swigged a lemon drop at Dobler’s, attended an unruly party at Kappa Tau, potentially lost your virginity to Lisa Lawson and, at some point or another, ran around campus in your undies.
No series quite captured the specific thrill, romance and ache of college like Greek. The show, which ran on ABC Family from 2007-2011, followed sorority sisters and brothers as they navigated love, heartbreak, friendships and plenty of drama within the complex web of the Greek system.
It’s a deeply relatable portrayal of college life mixed in with deliciously shrewd politics, highly addictive writing and a stacked ensemble that will stay with you long after the show ends. (Dale! Calvin! KATHERINE.)
I sat down with Patrick Sean Smith, the creator of Greek, and asked him some pressing questions about one of my favorite TV shows. PSA: The series is on Hulu and, my God, did I cry, squeal, and hysterically laugh during a recent rewatch. Greek is the perfect coming-of-age time capsule — with a sprinkle of hot pink ZBZ magic on top.
I watched your panel at the Austin Film Festival and you talked about getting a glimpse at the Greek system when you were giving college admissions tours. What did you take from that experience that you brought to the Greek pilot?
I went to UT Austin, which was a very large state school. I was trying to figure out who I was in college and I worked in the admissions office with all these kids who were in fraternities and sororities. It sounded interesting to me — living in a house with a bunch of guys sounded, you know, kind of hot, but also terrifying because I was in the closet. I just wanted to hang out with the girls but I couldn’t be in a sorority. I was curious about it. It seemed rarefied, it seemed aspirational from my perspective. One of my favorite movies is Almost Famous and it had a male protagonist looking at this world and wanting to be a part of it, but being an outsider. That’s some of the DNA of where Greek came from.
Do you remember the first character who came to you when you started writing the pilot?
Probably Casey. I wanted to have a female protagonist who was a little the antithesis of Rory Gilmore. Her superpowers [weren’t] her intellect, but she was savvy — kind of taking some of Buffy and putting in a little bit of Felicity. She was an amalgam of all of those different female characters I liked.
Did anyone walk into the audition room and they were exactly what you had in mind? And did anyone walk in and surprise you?
We initially had Jake McDorman in mind for Cappie because he’s charming and attractive and funny in his own way. When Scott [Michael Foster] came in, the network was just like, that's Cappie right there.
When we offered the role of Evan to Jake…Jake pushed back on not being the dick boyfriend. Had he not done that, I don't know if I would have realized the importance of being able to redeem characters.
Like, having Evan do something seemingly irredeemable in the first episode and then he aligns himself with Calvin in a way that makes you think, “Okay, this is a good guy. He just made a mistake.” I think that's what was always underneath — taking these stereotypes and these tropes but making them flesh and blood and getting into the psychology of why they are the way that they are. We wanted you to feel for Rebecca Logan. With the parents weekend episode, we got to expand Rusty and Casey's sibling relationship and see how their family interacted with them. Their parents looked down on Casey in a way because she didn't have the intellect that they thought was important. It was always trying to peel the onion and find more layers for the characters.
I love that the characters were both so flawed and so lovable — I would have never expected that by season three I’d want to hug Rebecca Logan. What’s the art behind creating those grey spaces?
That was sort of the thesis of the show for me, when Casey says, “You left black and white back in high school, it’s shades of grey.” When I wrote Greek, I gave it to my agents and said, “This is HBO, this is edgy, these people are having sex and not getting pregnant and they're drinking alcohol and they're not getting in car accidents.” It was really pushing the envelope on morality in the genre. That’s what college is — you're not an adult, you're not a kid anymore. You're stuck in the in-between learning those hard lessons away from your parents. It’s a very formative time.
…I was proud of the success of the show. I think some things burn too bright, too fast. We came out the same year as Gossip Girl. I thought I was doing really interesting tests of morality — we did the one episode where Evan pays a guy to stay away from Casey, which I was like, “Ohhhh, that's so dark.” The same week, Gossip Girl had Blake Lively overdose during a three-way or something like that. So, I [thought], I need to stop trying to be cool. I was trying to be edgy and I'm just not that person. I think Gossip Girl got to be big and huge. I feel like we got to be a little more contained. I think we kept our actors grounded in a way that they didn't blow up so quickly…it felt like we were all going to college together.
I was so struck when I was rewatching Greek just how political some of the characters are and how political of a show it was. Was that your intention early on?
I remember that first Frannie and Casey walk and talk. I wanted it to feel like The West Wing. I wanted it to feel like these are power players who are moving through their kingdom, having this conversation about ambition and how to play it. I wanted them to be smart and savvy, but still talking about a sorority.
A friend of mine, Michael Green, who I worked with on Everwood, watched my show. We have totally different tastes — he wrote Blade Runner — but when he watched Greek he said, the thing that it taught me is, if you care about the characters, you care about what the characters care about. So as long as you had a way into them, if they wanted something silly…you don't care if it's silly, you want that for them.
Right! You do end up caring deeply about who is going to become Omega Chi sweetheart and who invited who to the crush party. You get so invested in these stories. What research went into capturing the Greek system — the conventions, the songfests, all those really specific activities?
A lot of the writers on staff had been in the Greek system, so that, in and of itself, was very valuable. Our two executives at ABC Family had been in the Greek system as well. They were always looking for the details and the authenticity.
I wanted this to be the type of show that takes [the Greek system] seriously so the people who are in that world recognize we were doing the homework. When we were premiering and the network launched the key art — which was the red solo cup with all the actors in it — UCLA said we couldn't shoot on campus because their Greek system pushed back. They thought we were exploiting the experience. Once the show finally came out and they realized that we weren’t making fun of the world, we were having fun with the world, campuses started to open up again.
My first job was as a writers’ PA for [Law & Order creator] Dick Wolf and I helped with all the research. In my own sort of Dick Wolf way, I started saying [Greek] can be ripped from the headlines from college newspapers everywhere. We would look online and see what was happening — the underwear run was something they did at UCLA. We were always looking for those events and I feel like we did them all.
I’m so glad you brought up UCLA because I was so curious about the filming locations. Where was downtown Cyprus Rhodes? Where was the Greek row?
We shot at CBS Radford, I think Seinfeld shot there. There's a neighborhood street where we would just throw Greek letters up on facades. We shot at Occidental a lot, we shot at UCLA, USC. We were a low-budget show — there was one little patch of grass that was used during the assassination game with the darts, we shot a lot around there just to have outdoor stuff.
The ZBZ house was so wonderfully aspirational and felt like it bled Casey Cartwright. What was your vision for the look and feel of that sorority house?
I definitely wanted columns. It just felt [like] ancient Rome. Cory Lorenzen was our production designer, he had done Napoleon Dynamite and he could bring a little quirk to it — you can see the cats all over the house in really weird, random places. The Kappa Tau house was [also] cozy in its own disgusting, sticky floor, been there, would never want to live there…but for some reason I want to live there.
I think the houses were such big characters in it. When I knew what the series finale would be and that the Kappa Tau house would have to come down, I just remember telling my line producer, “I want to tear it down. I want to tear it all down.”
What made you decide to do that tear down? And how were you feeling on that last day?
It was so emotional. I think we shot on green screen when they're standing in the Greek ruins after it's torn down. I’m getting emotional even talking about this…I always wanted to feel like the show was going to continue to live on and you didn't need a house for it to live on, you didn't need the show for it to live on. It's really just kind of — I think Rusty says, “Living for the fun of life and not losing that.”
At the end we get a little moment between Rebecca and Evan which feels like a glimmer of hope for their relationship. Do you feel like there’s a meant-to-be quality for them?
I think so. If you took Casey out of the story and did a Cobra Kai where you just focused on Evan and Rebecca, I think they had a really interesting origin story where they hooked up at a party and she found out he had a girlfriend. I think that the attraction was always there, it wasn't transactional. Once we got to dig into that, we start to see where Evan lived in the show post-Casey…it always kind of made sense that they could find their way back to each other with their shared experiences and commonalities.
Evan had such a fascinating character arc. What did you want from that character from start to finish?
I was excited about telling stories about male relationships and male friendships. I'd worked on WB shows before that and I watched a lot of them and they never seemed to scratch the surface. Sometimes it's harder to imagine how to write men relating to one another, especially at that age. I think typically in the genre, the men are more there for the women to strive for but you don't really get a lot of layers underneath that.
I was interested in seeing the Cappie and Rusty mentor/mentee relationship. Initially I hadn't really considered the backstory with Evan and Cappie but when we got to do the flashback episode where we saw that they were friends and we saw the falling out — that just made everything feel richer in their relationship. We could put them in the secret society together so they had their own place where they could have their own relationship. They were two guys who cared a lot about each other and we got to show that in a way that was interesting and fun.
I would be remiss to not ask you about Frannie. How was that character born?
I think she was always powerful, a little cracked in her thinking but not wrong in the way that she thinks. You talked about politics and looking at American politics today it's almost as ridiculous as the Greek system. When Frannie says, “I'm the decider. I decide,” it was straight out of Bush's mouth.
I think some of the writers on the show really enjoyed being a little satirical, being timely and touching on American politics. Frannie is very much a character who is probably in Congress — despite her job at CAA. She's Marjorie Taylor Greene, all these people that it's a means to an end.
I also wanted to ask you about Katherine, who I loved so much…
Nora Kirkpatrick was a find. She actually came in the beginning of the series and we thought about her for Frannie but she played a little too big for it. When we thought of Katherine, we wanted somebody to come in with power but to be a real nut and she was so good —
Her delivery of lines. I always think of that time she offered to dance for Rusty when she was romancing him. How much of that was on the page and how much did Nora put her own twist on it?
She had such a specific voice, a specific energy and sense of comedy that felt different from our other women on the show, who we always kept a little more grounded. [Executive producer and writer] Anne Kenney was somebody who came in the beginning of the series and was kind of my seasoned guide. She’d worked in TV a lot longer than I had. The way she put it was…Greek lives six inches off the ground. It’s heightened but not so far that you lose the emotional reality to it. You have to strike the balance. When you bring in a Katherine, you have to have a Rusty energy to ground it and react to it. To be like, she's kind of crazy but that's kind of hot at the same time.
Do you hear from current college students who are watching Greek?
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I wanted that more than I wanted the show to be a huge hit out of the gate. It was definitely successful on its own terms but I look at movies like Say Anything — which is one of my favorites — and I aspire to try to do things that feel classic and withstand the test of time [rather] than just what's going to hit now. I'm just kind of like, I'm good doing my own little stories, making people feel and making people happy.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Never watched. Feel like I should add it to my queue. Thank you