Marti Noxon Still Wants to Tell the Stories Television Is Afraid Of

It was oppressively hot in Riccione when I sat down with Marti Noxon at the Italian Global Series Festival, where she served as president of the Drama Series Jury.

Fortunately, someone nearby had a handheld fan.

Once we were marginally less likely to melt into the furniture, we turned to television, a medium Noxon has helped shape through series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, UnREAL, Sharp Objects, Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, and Dietland.

At the festival, however, she was examining other creators’ work rather than presenting her own.

The drama jury watched two hours from each of seven international submissions, representing countries including the United States, Britain, Italy, Sweden, and South Korea. Noxon said one of the clearest signs that a series has accomplished something special is when another creator feels a flash of professional envy.

“Anytime you feel jealous, when you think, ‘I wish I thought of that,’ then you know they’ve accomplished something really special,” she said.

Judging such a broad selection also required her to recognize her own preferences and then attempt to look beyond them.

“You look at what you’re gravitating toward, and then you have to step back and be more impartial,” she explained.

One entry particularly impressed her with its direction, although she could not identify the series during the competition. Watching it also reminded Noxon how much she wants to return to directing.

“I’m a director and a frustrated director because I haven’t had the chance to do it,” she said. “It’s been so hard to get anything off the ground. When you watch someone’s work and think, ‘That’s top-notch,’ it makes me wish I could get out of the gate again.”

That difficulty is not due to a lack of ideas.

Noxon is developing projects across several genres, including a supernatural series with A24 UK based on Susan Barker’s novel Old Soul. Jessica Rhoades, who also produced Sharp Objects, introduced her to the book.

“I was saying, ‘I don’t want to do anything super dark,’” Noxon recalled. “And Jessica said, ‘I want you to read this book.’ I read it and thought, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.’”

The project is spooky enough to overcome her temporary resistance to darker material, although working internationally has required some cultural translation.

“In America, we tend to be very direct,” Noxon said. “In Britain, you’ll notice a kind of politeness that might be masking what they’re really trying to say.”

Fortunately, Rhoades is now based in London and, as Noxon put it, serves as something of a “whisperer” between the two working styles.

Noxon has also been developing an international espionage project inspired by source material that drew her into a genre she would not ordinarily have pursued.

Then there is Kill Show, a project she described as “the darker version of UnREAL” set within the true-crime world.

“It’s so cool,” she said. “If I were a programmer, I’d put it on the air tomorrow.”

After decades in television, Noxon trusts the instinct that tells her when an idea is ready to meet its moment.

“I know,” she said simply. “I felt that way about Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce.”

That particular comment delighted me because I covered all five seasons of Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce and still consider it one of my favorite shows. The series began its life at Showtime before landing at Bravo, which was making a brief venture into scripted programming.

Noxon believed in the project strongly enough to tell her representatives, “I think this is the one,” although some people feared that putting the word “divorce” in the title would repel viewers.

Instead, the series offered an unusually honest depiction of what divorce looks like after years of marriage, shared history, children, and entangled lives. A former spouse does not simply vanish once the paperwork is signed.

“Whenever I see those stories where people say, ‘We were married for 20 years, and now we never talk,’ I’m thinking, ‘Really?’” Noxon said. “I don’t think that’s how life works.”

Her own experiences helped inspire the series.

“I was surrounded by other women going through the same thing, and most of us were the breadwinners,” she explained.

“I didn’t see that story being told the way we were experiencing it. We still had these dynamics with our exes, and we had the financial power. It felt like sexual politics were going through a big shift, and I wanted to write about that.”

The show explored all of that while still looking glamorous enough to be mistaken for lighter fare.

“I always said that’s what the show was about, but it was dressed up in heels with a martini in its hand,” Noxon said.

The cast, including Lisa Edelstein, Paul Adelstein, Beau Garrett, Necar Zadegan, and Retta, helped make the series irresistible.

Noxon credits her daughter, Lane, with planting the idea that Retta could join the show after Parks and Recreation ended.

“We loved Parks and Rec,” she said. “Lane said, ‘Maybe she’d go on your show.’ And I thought, ‘She wouldn’t want to do that. Why would she want to do that?’”

Thankfully, she did.

Noxon remains interested in stories built around groups of women, particularly women whose lives are rarely treated as television’s center of gravity.

She has written a project about an ensemble of women in their fifties, something that sounds a little like a spiritual successor to Girlfriends’ Guide a decade later.

“I would love to make that show,” she said.

The women’s relationships include the sharp, affectionate exchanges that often exist between longtime friends.

That humor has not always been understood by executives, who questioned why the characters were so snarky with one another and asked what viewers were supposed to find aspirational about them.

“They love each other,” Noxon said. “We are snarky with each other, but in a loving way. We’re very direct. They’re joking. Eighty percent of the time, they all know they’re joking, and the rest of the time, that’s what creates conflict.”

She also pointed to a persistent double standard in how that behavior is interpreted.

“If men were doing it, people would think it was funny and enjoy it,” she said. “I cannot tell you how many times I get the ‘unlikable’ note with women, and I honestly cannot recall one time that I’ve gotten that note on a male character.”

Anyone familiar with Noxon’s work knows she has never been especially interested in sanding women down until they become agreeable.

She created Camille Preaker, Amy Adams’ wounded and frequently self-destructive journalist in Sharp Objects, and helped bring Rachel Goldberg and Quinn King to life on UnREAL. These women could be cruel, damaged, manipulative, brilliant, and painfully human, sometimes within the same scene.

Noxon does not expect the industry’s discomfort with complicated women to disappear on its own.

“We have to make it that way as women,” she said. “You have to keep pushing that envelope. And then we have to get everybody to watch it.”

UnREAL was one of the rare occasions when an executive actively encouraged Noxon to push further into the darkness rather than retreat from it.

An early pilot had not worked, and a Lifetime executive asked Noxon directly what had gone wrong. Noxon gave her an equally direct answer.

“She said, ‘I want you to go back to the original script. You can make it even darker,’” Noxon recalled. “And I thought, ‘You are speaking my language.’”

Noxon and the creative team then mapped out the first season, including one of its most devastating turns. When she finished pitching the story, the room briefly went silent.

“You could tell all the executives were sitting there thinking,” she said. “Then she said, ‘I love it,’ and everybody else said, ‘We love it.’ That was the only time I had an executive not say, ‘These characters are unlikable.’”

Before our time expired, I had to ask about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the recently abandoned attempt to continue the series with a new generation.

Noxon, who joined Buffy during its third season and later served as showrunner, approached the proposed continuation cautiously from the beginning.

“I always have the same feeling, which is, ‘Good luck to you,’” she said. “People are still watching the original series and are obsessed with it.”

She was never eager to be the person responsible for revisiting something so beloved and potentially getting it wrong.

“I think my stance has been very clear,” she said. “I don’t want to be the person who does it wrong.”

Noxon said she was surprised when the new project initially moved forward, although she emphasized that she meant no offense to the creators for making the attempt. From what she understood, however, too many competing creative visions may have complicated the process.

“With a show, you always have to make sure you’re rowing in the same direction,” she said. “It seemed like people were rowing in all kinds of directions. You have one story, and if everybody is going in a different direction, you end up splintering everything.”

It was a fitting observation from someone whose best work has always possessed a fiercely recognizable point of view.

Noxon knows what she wants to say, what kinds of women she wants to write, and when a story has found the right moment.

The frustrating part is that the television business does not always know how to recognize that certainty, even when it comes from someone with an extraordinary record of being right.

For now, she is still writing, still developing, and still eager to direct again.

The rest of us are waiting for someone to get out of her way.