Charlotte Dobre on Textuationships: how bad dates became a pilot

Charlotte Dobre tells me her new pilot, Textuationships, grew out of two frustrations: a string of horrible dating app experiences, and a career stretch where she wasn't getting auditions for roles she related to.

She describes the series as a comment on modern dating and social media, written over seven years, financed by her, and finished as a single 27-minute episode. She also cast her ideal man in it and ended up marrying him.

Charlotte Dobre wrote Textuationships after a breakup and a dry spell in auditions

Dobre says anyone in the film industry, especially actors, can relate to how tough it is. There was a time, she recalls, when she wasn't getting auditions for anything decent. She saw a big gap in the marketplace for roles for someone like her. The auditions she did get were for really young women or for young moms, not parts that spoke to her. "At least I wasn't getting them. Maybe I needed a new agent," she says.

I know that feeling. I've gone in for many young mom roles, only to get in the room and hear that I'm too young to be a mom. Dobre says she couldn't relate to the characters she was reading for. She wanted to play funny women dealing with dating problems and show her range, from being funny to being able to cry on command. She wasn't getting auditions that showed that side of her, so she set out to make a project that did.

The idea came when she had been broken up with again. The dating scene felt terrible, and while her friends met husbands and boyfriends on dating apps, she had horrible experiences. She floated the idea to her mother almost as a joke, and her mother took it seriously: "Actually, like I think that's a great idea. I think you should write down all of these horrible dates, and you should write a scene." So she wrote a scene.

A TIFF party introduction led to a director mentoring her script

Dobre says she snuck into a TIFF party and ended up meeting a director. She calls what followed schmoozing, the kind of thing you do in the industry, mentioning that she had worked on something too while playing it down. He offered to read it and give her feedback. When she sent it, his response was that she had something. She remembers being stunned.

Because she had done plenty of acting but little scriptwriting, he became a mentor. He recommended books, and they held writing sessions on WriterDuet, a platform where both people can edit. He looked at all her drafts through a shared account.

From there, she says, it snowballed. Everyone who read it got excited, because everybody has had a horrible experience on a dating app, and people found it funny. She ended up producing it herself, because she didn't see the point of finding someone else to fund it when she could fund it.

Charlotte Dobre calls the pilot "a comment on the modern dating scene"

For anyone who doesn't know the series, Dobre sums it up this way: "It is a comment on the modern dating scene. It is a comment on social media, on how unrecognizable dating has become." She adds that it might also be a little nudge to get people back to basics.

What I liked is that it feels unapologetically her, and relatable. The feeling of navigating a dating app, with friends pushing you to do it while you don't want to do it that way, struck me as real. Near the top of the pilot, her character says she doesn't want to be alone, and a male character gets mocked in a taxi for not having a girlfriend. My reaction was that there's nothing wrong with being single, so I asked her about that pressure.

Dobre thinks people choose relationships that are bad for them over being alone, staying uncomfortable rather than being single. She says she can't speak for men, but she feels much of women's worth is tied to whether they're in a relationship. When she posted the announcement for the pilot, she says, everyone thought she was announcing a pregnancy. She admits she clickbaited a little, knowing people were waiting for that kind of news, but finds it telling how women's worth gets tied to who they date, marry and when they have babies. She believes there's pressure on both men and women to be in the right relationships.

Seven years, a pandemic, and one 27-minute episode

Dobre started writing the script seven years ago. It was a long process with roadblocks. She was about to pitch it once when COVID hit and nothing was being filmed. That was when she started posting on YouTube, and she eventually built the platform to back the project financially herself. There were many rewrites and much back and forth with other creatives, and both preproduction and postproduction took a long time.

She now has the utmost respect for producers, directors and anyone behind the scenes. Even for one 27-minute episode, she says, "the amount of hoops you have to jump through and problems you have to solve" was a lot of work.

Asked whether the theme still holds up, she says she feels it's more relevant now than ever. Part of her wondered whether it would still be relevant in three years, given how fast technology is changing and how people already confide in AI. "Maybe they'll start dating and marrying AI," she says. She still has single friends meeting men on apps and having better luck than she did.

She met her husband through a friend instead. She had set her app height filter to 6'2" and up, and he's her height, so they never saw each other on an app. She thinks she could have met him much sooner, and sees it as a sign of how shallow dating has become, with people always chasing something better and missing great people over superficial things like height. I added that we build filters around who we picture, and even when you get exactly what you want on paper, it may not be a match. She agreed, saying being a good person is probably more important to her than height, and that someone she can see herself growing old with is, she thinks, a little more important than height.

Charlotte Dobre took full creative control as producer and post supervisor

Wearing several hats was a lot, Dobre says, and she does enjoy simply being the talent. When you're the boss, people don't know how to talk around you. She recalls rooms going quiet when she walked in while the crew was horsing around. That was fine with her, she stresses, but people never know how a producer or financier will feel about slacking.

Her reason for taking it all on was timelines. Everyone she worked with was incredibly talented, but they had other commitments, and her project wasn't a priority. She says she isn't claiming she did everything herself, but she was the post supervisor. She was in the editing room, she handled the coloring, and she sat in on sound design. Doing it herself meant no juggling schedules and no pushback over a line, a scene or a color. It felt good to have full creative control. When I pointed out that her face and name will be attached to it forever, she said: "It was too important."

It shows. I saw it with a Los Angeles production mindset and was impressed. Dobre credits an amazing cinematographer, and says she loved the lighting in Euphoria. Having worked as a photographer for a long time, her favorite look is low light with purples and bokeh. When she described her vision, the cinematographer told her he had never made anything like that. "I picked the right people," she says.

Balancing YouTube with bigger creative projects

Dobre says her workload comes in waves. Her day job is long-form YouTube content, and she films three or four days a week. She usually has one big creative project going at a time; before this, it was a launch project in which she played a bunch of characters. She doesn't know what's next, though it seems people want a second episode.

She used to post every day, then every other day, and now once every four days. She scaled back on purpose to make room for auditions, panels, writing and sketches. Money is great, she says, but feeling creatively fulfilled is important too. I noted that this can help avoid burnout, which so many content creators face when everything can become content.

Textuationships' message is that "we all just want to be loved"

Dobre says she made the show to bridge the gap between what women and men experience in dating, and to show that we're not that different. "I think at the end of the day, I think we all just want to be loved," she says. It was important to her to include a strong male voice, a good guy.

A small part of her felt there wasn't one out there for her, so she created a character who was her ideal man with good morals. Then she found one. The actor who became her husband was that man. She cast him as her ideal man and ended up marrying him.

She says the reception has been really good, and she's been blown away. She has a second episode written, but the first took a year, and it was just her; maybe with a team it would be different. She expected far more criticism, but notes it isn't officially out and the general public hasn't seen it. "It's rare that someone would pay to troll," she says, so she'll see what the reception is once it's free. For now, she says, so far, so good, and she's really happy with it.