Going from one of several writers for a television show to a producer is a big step to take. However, Bruin alumna Caroline Williams has done just that after moving from her seat in the writers’ room of the hit comedy “The Office” to now producer of her very own show, “Miss Guided.”
“Miss Guided,” which premiered March 18, is a half-hour comedy based on a script Williams wrote after graduating from UCLA in 2004 with a master’s in screenwriting.
The show, which airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on ABC, stars Judy Greer (most recently of “27 Dresses”) as Becky Freeley who, many years after her geeky high school years are over, returns to that same school as a guidance counselor.
In the first episode, she falls for the Spanish teacher (Kristoffer Polaha) and is disappointed to find out that the popular homecoming queen during her high school years has returned as a fellow teacher.
“It’s definitely sort of a heightened reality of what working in a high school would be,” Williams said. “It’s a little bit more extreme, but there is a little bit of a love triangle and a little bit of office politics. It sort of has a little bit of everything.”
“The theme is that no matter where you are in life, it’s still similar to high school ““ the hierarchy of high school, the social cliques never really go away. You just have to change to adapt to them. The idea that high school never ends, I think people can relate to that.”
Williams’ initial script for “Miss Guided” was the writing sample that landed her a job as a writer for “The Office,” one of her favorite shows. Williams worked for three seasons with “The Office,” and wrote the script for last season’s episode “Phyllis’s Wedding,” which was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award this year.
However even as a writer herself, Williams admits that she did not know what to expect when walking into the show’s writers’ room for the first time.
“It was sort of like at UCLA where we would have workshops of 10 people, and we’d sit around and help people with ideas … so the fact that I had that experience really helped because I knew how to work in a group.”
For all those fans of “The Office” whose greatest dream would be to sit among the writers of the show, Williams dished about the atmosphere.
“Everyone’s joking all the time. Everyone is teasing each other all the time. It was definitely really funny,” she said.
Within a year of Williams’ working on “The Office,” ABC picked up her “Miss Guided” script and she left work to create her own show soon after.
Williams admits that the change from screenwriting to producing has been stressful to say the least. Her new duties include creation of new story ideas, writing and rewriting scripts, hiring writers and double-checking casting decisions, among others.
“(Producing) is like two hundred times as hard,” she said. “I didn’t realize at “˜The Office’ the role of the producer; you just have so much more responsibility.”
Even with the added control Williams now holds, the process from page to pilot still produced a number of changes to Williams’ original idea for the show.
“It turned out differently than what I initially thought,” Williams said. “It looks a little bit different than I pictured it in my head, but I think it’s turned out really cool.”
A total of seven episodes of “Miss Guided” have been shot, as Williams waits to see the success of the show and reaction of audiences.
“I’m curious because I think after the strike, shows that are not reality shows don’t do as well. … It seems like a gamble,” she said.
Williams’ former screenwriting professor, Richard Walter, is one willing to place a bet on the 2004 graduate.
“She did a fabulous job on a script that she wrote in my class,” he said. “It was a hilarious fake memoir recalling Ken of Ken and Barbie, (about) the decline of Ken ““ how Ken becomes a star and gets into drugs and booze and ends up alone in a park bench in Hollywood somewhere.”
Williams’ creativity of plot and character is just as present in the plot and characters of “Miss Guided.” The main character has what Williams refers to as “a dorky high school experience,” similar to Williams’ own, she said.
“I would definitely say the main character is kind of based on myself. I hated high school,” she said. “After I graduated I was kind of curious about what happened to people I went to school with. And the pilot sort of talks about seeing those people 10 years later in the work environment, like how things are changed.”
Although she admits her connection to her main character’s awkward years, Williams is one of UCLA’s many film school success stories, and appears to be far from misguided.
“The most important thing I learned (at UCLA) is there is no easy way into the business. You just have to write,” she said.
“People say that it’s all about who you know or having the perfect idea, but it’s really just a matter of doing the work and writing something that you enjoy and hopefully people will see it,” she said.