Kate Melville

ENDGAME was a short-lived, beloved-by-geeks tv drama about an agoraphobic Russian chessmaster who lived in a hotel and solved crimes. I wrote for this show through the rainy winter of 2010 in Vancouver, in a writers’ room so tiny we all had to stand up if anyone needed to leave the room. It was here I first met a cool cat named Graeme Manson, who was in the midst of pitching a seemingly-impossible clone show called ORPHAN BLACK.

ENDGAME’s crime stories all had a slightly screwball edge, so there was a lot of laughter in the writers’ room – the showrunner Avrum Jacobson introduced us to Old Jews Telling Jokes, and co-writer Jeremy Boxen (another OB alum) introduced me to webseries The Maria Bamford Show. (Writers find the best stuff online because of a very important creative process called procrastination.)

Most Proud Of: My Dr. Who chatroom joke.

Insider Secret: I still don’t know how to play chess.