Brickman '05 writes speed-dating series for the Web

Mattie Brickman ’05 and producer Jon Avnet on the set of RO, a new web series that aired in December. (Photo: P. Martin)

In a new drama series on the Web, an attractive, smart young woman named Ro meets a series of men at a speed-dating event in a restaurant. She spends five minutes bantering with each one, before a bell rings to indicate time’s up. The first date compares her to a mutt. She hits it off with the second date, telling him that she spent the last few years in Italy. Before long, it’s evident that Ro is not her real name and that she seems to be hiding something and trying to reinvent herself.

Mattie Brickman ’05 is the creator of RO, which aired on WIGS, a new online channel, in late December. Brickman wrote six episodes – each about five to seven minutes long.

A playwright who is trying to break into TV writing, Brickman had been working mainly in theater in New York. But when producers of a new channel on YouTube began creating shows featuring leading female roles, they asked Brickman to write one of the series for their channel.

“I wanted to explore someone who had an amazing memory – a memory that had gotten her into trouble in the past, had led her to absorb too much about people and use that information unwisely,” says Brickman. “And then enter her life just as she is trying to get herself together. She still has this mind where she has these insights and perceptions into people but she doesn’t want to go back down the wrong path again, although that temptation is there.”

Brickman moved to Los Angeles last spring so she could be involved in the production of RO and explore opportunities in California. She’s not sure if the WIGS channel will be renewed – and therefore if she will write more episodes for RO.

Having written for the computer screen, now Brickman is working on a pilot for TV about three estranged friends “who band together in New York City to makes ends meet in a very unusual, scrappy, musical sort of way.”

Although she’s living in LA, she doesn’t want to say goodbye to New York. The pilot, she says, “is a timely ode to a lot of my friends and peers who are trying to do their passion projects and pay the rent.”

Watch RO below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr-91MrOVg8&w=560&h=315]