When The A.V. Club sat down with Josh Thomas this past December, we were eager to hear about the path that took him from his critically acclaimed, semi-autobiographical breakthrough, Please Like Me, to his new Freeform series about a blended family coming together in the wake of tragedy, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay. But faced with the question of why he wanted to tell the story of an Australian entomologist who suddenly finds himself the legal guardian of his two American half-sisters, he was charmingly self-effacing. “I just make it the way I think it would be good,” he says at the top of the video above. “And then you get to the end, and you do the press tour, and they’re like, ‘So why did you do it?’ I don’t know why I did it!” Thomas might not have that answer, but he had plenty to say about finding specificity in representation, how to make viewers miss a character they’ve only just met, and why you should never cover your face in dung beetles for the sake of art.
Photo credit: Pamela Littky/Freeform