Production designer Joshua Petersen takes on his first major TV gig with the Amy Schumer-starring dramedy Life & Beth.
After a sudden incident, Beth (Schumer), reexamines her past and who she wants to become. The series cleverly blends past and present allowing Petersen to dabble in ’90s nostalgia and decade-specific details—while also using carefully chosen elements of his production design to help tell a season-long narrative arc.
Here, in the latest installment of our “Five Questions” series, Peterson details his close collaboration with Schumer and a few of his favorite sets from the series, now on Hulu.
Awards Daily: Joshua, I would love to know a little bit about your background and how you became involved with Life & Beth.
Joshua Petersen: This is my first year in television, major television, as a production designer. This project just came about through my agent; I was kind of waiting for a big project to come along that really spoke to me. I was turning down a lot of stuff, and this like came to me and I read it and just fell in love with the script right away. I mean, it’s really emotionally charged and different than what I was expecting.
I’ve always loved Amy. We talked about an hour on the phone and really hit it off. And I flew to New York and started working two days later. There was a fast and very strenuous prep period to get the show off the ground and start shooting.
We shot for 65 days straight and I had a blast. It was very hard and very fun. Everyone was really driven I think the deeper aspects of the material fueled everybody emotionally.
AD: What was it about this story that allowed you to stretch your muscles and express yourself as a production designer?
JP: Working with period pieces is always something that you want to have the opportunity to do. It’s really fun to do something that you have vivid memories of, depicting the ’90s and a childhood that was very similar to my own and in the same time period as my own. And using that to highlight elements like trauma and healing that can come out of like revisiting your past, I think that’s something that we all did during the pandemic. The timeliness of this show was something that was clear to everybody. It was fresh on everybody’s minds. That was pretty healing for me in particular and something that really struck me.
I loved that Life & Beth also had contemporary elements to explore. There’s a lot of sets in the script. The most fun aspect was the building, I love building and this script had a lot of that. Building the MRI set, for example, was not something that I’ve been asked to do yet. I really loved that set in particular. And then also some of the collaborations that I had with the cinematographer [Jonathan Furmanski] and getting an opportunity to design shots and execute some more complex maneuvers is always a great challenge.
AD: Do you have a scene in particular that you’d like to highlight?
JP:There were a couple. In episode four [featuring Jonathan Groff], the hoarder’s apartment—with that set ‘How do you design a hoarder set that a camera can still move through?’ So, we built everything true to scale. It really was difficult to move around in. We had the ability to pull away walls, so whole areas of the clutter could move at once. And the camera could move in on a techno crane with a remote head—almost like a steady cam working through the columns of stuff.
In episode 106, we have a shot that pulls out of the window of Michael Cera’s cabin then pushes through a window in Brooklyn and in Beth’s sister’s apartment and pushes through the window and cranes up to show Ann (Susannah Flood) in the bathtub with her new pet fish. And it’s a really like beautiful scene. I mean, I watched it like 40 times in the final cut. It’s just such a fun shot. I mean, you’re sucked into it in that moment, but building a set with like the, you know, these like removable walls that can roll out of the way as the camera goes through the window. That’s what we live for!
AD: As you mentioned Life & Beth plays with memory quite a bit. How did you design the sets to change and morph based on Beth’s experiences?
JP: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the, the house itself is littered with details from my own childhood home. We built everything from memory. The carpet on the floor is the same carpet from my childhood home, the doors, the hardware on the cupboards and the closet doors and stuff actually comes from a factory in Oregon by where I grew up. There’s a ton of stuff in there.
Amy was really open with her childhood photos. Her journals were props in the film—her real journals that she read. She is just very generous with her time. And we shared a lot of memories, little details that we could pepper in constantly. There were many times where it was two in the morning and one of us would text the other with some last-minute addition thing and we’d just like laugh and then try to get it in the show, you know?
AD: What can you tell me about the color palette and tones you worked with for Life & Beth?
JP: You know, when I design a palette for a show, it’s really important to pair everything with a narrative arc. And in television, sometimes you don’t get to explore that as a through-line. That’s more of a film thing; I have a strong background in indie film where we get to do that. But the runtime of our show is three times the runtime of a film.
And to be able to explore a narrative arc through production design over 10 episodes is always something I wanted to explore on television, with the possibilities that lie in that you can be a little more subtle with it, which is how I like to work. Having the cluttered aesthetic of the ’90s is the color theory of the show.
We see versions of the same palette from the beginning. And through Beth’s memories, we kind of discover where she gets onto that track in terms of the color story. When we finally arrive at the ending of the show, we also see those elements in play, but in earthy and vibrant and very much in the present moment in nature.
We did not do anything in a linear fashion, so it was a bit of a challenge, but I think that it really paid off. I really worked with my team a lot to ensure that there was a through-line all along.
In production design, you have the opportunity to telegraph information in subtle ways in which we are hearing the story visually. And a lot of times, those elements came through in, and I’m very proud of what we created.
Life & Beth is streaming now on Hulu.