‘Black-ish’ Boss on What Kept Him Productive at Home Amid the Pandemic

“Black-ish” showunner Courtney Lilly looks back on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic of being stuck inside as being like “Groundhog Day.” Having just moved into a new house in February 2020, he set up an office in the guest house, which is a converted garage, so he and his partner, who is a professor, could have their own designated space. “Being Gen X, the idea of two separate spaces, where I live is separate from where I work, it’s part of my operating system,” he says. The space is “like a studio apartment,” which means that along with a desk there is a bed and kitchen appliances — and random gifts stored there. But he did what he could to make it a “no-frills” environment because “work is supposed to be hard, so the more comfort I put into a space, the more it makes me feel like I’m not working,” he says.

Keep Cool to Carry On
Writers’ rooms for network television shows typically start in the summer, so although Lilly has lived in the Los Angeles area for two decades, he wasn’t really paying attention to how hot it got in the middle of the year, because he “wasn’t participating in daytime summer activities” and offices on studio lots are climate-controlled. But tucked into a guest house in Los Feliz during multiple 100-plus degree days in 2020 had him “sweating through Zooms.” Despite not wanting many comforts around when working, a cooling system turned into a must-have. “That air conditioner saved my life!” he says.

When Lilly first started running “Blackish” in 2019, he thought about the aptly titled episode of “Newsradio,” “The Cane,” in which Phil Hartman’s character Bill suddenly begins to use the titular item, to the annoyance of at least one colleague. Lilly made a joke about suddenly starting to carry around a big green Pellegrino bottle. His assistant at the time began putting those bottles around him and he started consuming them, and eventually the bit became reality. “It felt like a good prop,” he says. But now, it feels “like a good connection to the writers’ room,” especially with the team spread out around Los Angeles as they work remotely. “One of the hard things about this year was it was difficult to connect with the people who are the lifeblood of the show,” he says. “So, little things like that that were visual, for me, were big.”

Lilly doesn’t consider himself someone who loves screen technology, but he found himself surrounded by it out of necessity, especially during the days he was running both “Blackish” and its prequel spin-off “Mixed-ish” simultaneously. “I probably had four to five screens going at the same time,” he says, noting his iPad was where he kept his scripts ready to read, while his desktop computer and one laptop would each have Zoom open. Another laptop was “to be used as needed,” he adds. “I, by no means, was ever in control of any of it. It was always, ‘Hey catch me up.’ This was not ‘Minority Report,’ but it was useful to be able to check in and do what was necessary to make sure everyone stayed on task.”

Similar to the books, Lilly’s yoga mat, which sits on the floor in his home office but has not actually gotten used, is “aspirational.” As he puts it, “So many things are these idealized things that we imagine ourselves one day doing. ‘Let me take 20 minutes … ’ or ‘I’m going to meditate during lunch.’ I never did any of that.” The pandemic, he reflects, was a time for people to cling to the people, beliefs, ideas and areas of hope they needed to get through the stress and fear of the time. For him, “that yoga mat was a tease that at some point I would use this opportunity to grow and get more flexible.

Retirement Plans
Lilly has a stack of books nearby that taunt him a little bit because they are ones that he feels like he should be reading — and really wants to be reading — but for which he has not yet actually had time. Among them are Rachel Cusk and Bryan Washington’s novels “Second Place” and “Memorial,” respectively, and “Real Estate,” the third in Deborah Levy’s autobiographical trilogy. “I felt like I was missing out on things because of being so busy,” he says. “It just piled up. I think I liked getting packages, I liked feeling optimistic about having time to read these books.” Since Lilly is now able to go back to work in his office on the lot, he only half-jokes he’s “very excited to read these books when I retire.