Toronto's Andrea Scott on loving theatre, leaving it for TV and then moving to L.A.

Over the past decade or so, I've had several wonderful, long conversations with writer, producer and all-round creative force of nature Andrea Scott.

One was for a NOW cover story I did back in 2016 tied to her SummerWorks show Don't Talk to Me Like I'm Your Wife. I caught up with her less than five years later after she had successfully, and out of practical necessity, made the transition from playwright to TV writer (she was then a story editor on the long-running hit series Murdoch Mysteries).

In between those pieces, often at the theatre, we'd quickly chat about what we were doing, what we were seeing. I recall one bus ride from Toronto to Stratford when, over the phone, she was briefly hashing out details with playwright Nick Green about an upcoming collaboration that turned out to be their remarkable play Every Day She Rose, one of her only scripts to get a Toronto staging outside of a festival context.

In my recent story last weekend in The Toronto Star, I touched on Scott's feelings of being mistreated/underappreciated by Toronto theatres, and also about her big move to L.A. to work on the upcoming ABC Signature (owned by Disney) series High Potential, created by Veronica Mars' Rob Thomas.

But because of space limitations, I had to cut a lot of fascinating stuff from our 90-minute chat, which took place over cocktails a couple of weeks before Christmas.

So here, for paid subscribers, are some quotes from that lively conversation.

Among the topics we touch on are: the sample script that got her more than a dozen meetings; how her acting training helped her pitches; writing for theatre vs. working in a TV writer's room; being mocked by a Toronto dramaturg and an artistic director; how working in an office helped her as a producer – and more.