Jenna McDonald wanted to shave her head. In fact, she wanted to create a lighthearted comedy—to help her get over a breakup—that would lead up to her shaving her head. While living in Los Angeles, the actor organized a string of pick-your-brain coffees with film industry professionals to help her bring the dream to fruition. The key to success? Create your own content and opportunities. “I thought, What am I doing here?’’ she says. “I have all of these resources and a foundation in St. Louis.”
So she started writing the first episode.
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The foundation McDonald mentions are her best friends, Abby Dorning and CeCe O’Neill. The original content: An It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia–meets–Bridesmaids series that the 27-year-olds have been jotting down jokes for since meeting one another, in 2011, at Webster University. Called One Brick Shy, the show is an ode to their friendships, experiences, and a “certain self-deprecating humor that’s really genuine to the Midwest,” says O’Neill. It’s best summed up, she adds, as “Charlie Day meets Jessica Day.”
The series’ first episode, which premiered on YouTube earlier this year, does include that head shave, but not before going places often considered taboo for women in comedy—including the bathroom, which is the setting for the opening scene and plot twist.
“I just thought the funniest thing in a comedy would be someone catching their significant other cheating on them while they’re on the toilet,” McDonald says of the first episode’s climax.
The characters, Drew (McDonald), Murphy (Dorning), and Gus (O’Neill), are considered heightened, “slightly dopier” extensions of themselves. The plots, like a harsh breakup, are amped-up personal experiences. “We just hang out together and when something funny is said or done, you write that in a note,” says McDonald. “It really is just us.”
The characters often find misfortune in their hijinks. As they navigate their mid-twenties in the Midwest, they do so with what O’Neill calls a “devil-kinda-cares attitude.” “It’s not so laissez-faire that nothing matters,” she says.
It’s not all just for laughs. The trio hopes the show can “break the rules about what women in film or what female comedy is like,” says Dorning. “And female friendships,” adds McDonald.
“You see female friendship in so many different forms, and it always surrounds getting drinks or gossiping or talking about your husbands or complaining about a job,” says Dorning. “That’s very valid, but I want to celebrate the type of friendship that we have that does exist elsewhere.”
Showcasing the city and its talent was also important to the collaborators, who consider themselves St. Louis transplants. (The Saint Louis Zoo’s Kali even makes an appearance.) They tapped 15 or so local connections and fellow Webster alumni to start filming in October 2018 and aimed to put as many women behind the camera as in front of it.
“We know what we were missing growing up, what we wish we could have seen women act like or be like,” says O’Neill, “to see people grow up and foster friendships that are weird as hell and kinda gross. Do normal things. Women are on the toilet half of our lives. There are tons of things that are not off-limits to real life.”
Working on the series has forced the group to grow, they say. “We’ve been able to learn about ourselves through developing these characters,” Dorning says. “Personally, I went through a huge shift in how I see my body and in comparison to other bodies. How am I going to make Murphy somebody who can be a hero for other fat people? I’ve learned so much about myself. I dress differently now, because I was building Murphy—who is also me.”
Screen Time
Meet the stars of One Brick Shy.
Jenna McDonald
An actress, writer, and filmmaker, McDonald studied film production at Webster. One Brick Shy is not the first time she’s worn multiple hats; in college, she wrote, directed, produced, and starred in many films. And that head-shave scene? “I cried before a little bit,” she admits. It was a metaphor for her hardships in L.A., she told herself: “I signed up for this. I wrote this in the scene, I wanted this to happen, but I was still shaking in my boots.” The scene was filmed in one take.
Abby Dorning
Dorning attended Webster University, where she studied costume design. Those cool graphics that appear throughout the web series? All Dorning. In addition to being one of the show’s actors and co-writers, she’s the production designer/illustrator. Experimenting, Dorning used an app called Rough Animator to draw on the video footage. The production team eventually wrote the fun doodles into the other episodes.
CeCe O’Neill
Behind the scenes, O’Neill is a director and co-writer, but come Episode 2, she debuts as the very put-together Gus, whom Dorning and McDonald’s characters consider “the ultimate adult.” Although she’s from Nebraska, she thinks of St. Louis as home. “We all knew that this was the place that this show would be made,” she says. “It wouldn’t make sense anywhere else.
Watch One Brick Shy on YouTube or facebook.com/onebrickshyseries.
