Into The Long Long Night at ATX TV Festival

A black-and-white comedy series about two men failing to commit suicide? The Long Long Night isn’t exactly the next How I Met Your Mother. “Where is the money truck?” laughed star and series co-creator Mark Duplass.

However, just because a show isn’t going to be a Nielsen's killer, that doesn’t mean it won’t find an audience. When Duplass and writer/director/costar Barret O'Brien rented a motel room to film the six-episode series about best buds Pete and Carroll, and the catastrophic night that accidentally saved their lives and endangers their friendship, they knew they weren’t aiming for prime time. However, the show is becoming an example of a new model of independent TV – independently produced and distributed, and highlighted at two panels at this weekend’s ATX TV Festival (May 30-June 1).

It’s a microbudget show that’s built around the decades-long real-life friendship between Duplass and O'Brien. They first crossed paths when Duplass was a teenager, living in New Orleans, when he would see O’Brien’s plays. However, the seed of this particular collaboration was planted in their early 20s, sharing an apartment in Greenpoint, New York, with O’Brien crammed into a six-by-six bedroom and aspiring filmmaker Duplass next door in the positively palatial eight-by-nine, showing each other what they were working on but never actually collaborating. Duplass said, “The idea that, twenty years after that fact when the whole world is shutting down around covid, that we could get in a motel room and do something together and see what we could come up with, it was the perfect time for this.”

Not that they had never tried to work together before. In fact, O’Brien had originally pitched this story to Duplass several years ago as a potential script for his anthology show Room 104. It was a very simple pitch (Per O’Brien, "Two guys go into a motel room, try to attempt suicide and fail”) that they discussed for season 5, but then the show got canceled after season 4.

After that, Duplass said, “It just sat around, and then the world changed with covid and we were exposed to all these new ideas, and I thought, ‘God, those two guys that he pitched me in 2017 are having a much harder time now as they think about these things.’ So I called him and went, ‘Hey, maybe we bigger this thing and make more story out of this than one episode.’”

The scale of the show – Duplass, O’Brien, one location shoot, a small crew and some additional Zoom and Facetime conversations – was so small that they weren’t risking a huge budget. However, something much more meaningful was on the line: their friendship. What if, after all these years, they finally worked together and hated the experience? “I don’t think we were risking some really deep, healthy, daily friendship that we had,” O’Brien said. “Our personal journeys had taken us geographically and friendship-wise kind of far from each other. We were friends in name and in history.”

However, the story of two middle aged cis white dudes agonizing about their role in the patriarchy, capitalism, institutional racism and ecological collapse, was undoubtedly inspired by their friendship. Like much of his best work, Duplass said, The Long Long Night is rooted in his ability to “hyperbolize by 25% to 30% what’s going on in my body, my spirit. … I have felt the pain on Barret before of, ‘How am I supposed to be a good citizen of this planet when to be here at all I am sucking up resources and holding the microphone?’”

If anything, working together not only rekindled their friendship but allowed them to be much closer. O’Brien said, “To make this piece of art that I truly love, but also to have deepened and strengthened my friendship with Mark, my brotherhood with Mark, is this amazing corollary.”

“We go out backpacking twice a year and we were not doing that before this project,” said Duplass. “It brought something new out that was really cool.”

Duplass summed up the end result as “a specific study of make bravado, mental health, and buffoonery, all in one.” It’s also a combination of their two styles of work: “Part of it is goofy and improvised, and part of has the lyricism of the theatrical world that Barrett exists in.”

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of show that network TV and the major streamers are not looking for, and Duplass is OK with that. Making The Long Long Night was undeniably “a leap into the darkness, but there was a halo of light in the corner over there, and if we aim for that there may be a landing pad.” It's not his first experience with independent television, having executive produced the 2015 animated series Animals, which was picked up by HBO on the basis of two independently-produced episodes. It was a similar experience with Room 104 (which ended up on HBO) and The Creep Tapes (now streaming on Shudder) However, The Long Long Night is different because them trying to sell a pilot: this was a completed show, looking for a home.

Moreover, it isn’t a one-off. Indeed, it was one of four projects that Duplass Brothers Productions screened as part of their indie TV showcase at South by Southwest 2024: The Long Long Night, teen wilderness drama Penelope. absurdist sketch comedy show The Broadcast, and documentary series Ryley Walker and Friends.

Out of those, they found greatest conventional success with Penelope, which they sold to Netflix. However, the TV industry isn’t really geared up to deal with indie TV in the same way that the movie business is configured to handle indie films, especially when it comes to idiosyncratic and unique shows like The Long Long Night. “They need other things to hold their subscribers, and we understand,” Duplass said. “I’m the last person in the world to say ‘I don’t know one of the major streamers didn’t buy The Long Long Night from us for $3 million an episode. I know exactly why they didn’t do that, and that’s OK. We just want to be part of a healthy ecosystem.”

That’s why they ultimately settled on Kinema, an evolution of the theatrical-on-demand model pioneered by companies like the Austin-based Tugg. For Duplass, the company is about “deputizing passionate audiences.” He explained, “The idea that your stories, your movie, your TV show, could exist on an online platform and someone could then take it and distribute it themselves and show it in their small town in a theater or a bar or the back of a van, charge people to view it, share some of the money with Kinema, share some of the money with us, the creators … that seems so smart and so cool.”

Mark Duplass at ATX TV Festival 2025

The Long Long Night screening and Q&A, Friday, May 30, 10am, State Theatre

Pain Points of the Indie TV Ecosystem (and How to Solve Them), Friday, May 30, 2:30pm, 800 Congress

ATX TV Festival 2025 runs May 29-June 1. Passes are available at atxfestival.com.

Follow all our coverage at austinchronicle.co/atx-tv-festival.

For more about booking films and series through Kinema, visit kinema.com.