This Team is On Fire

Although they couldn’t spend the five months of the 2023 WGA strike breaking story, writing team Sara Casey and Manuel Herrera found plenty of ways to spend time together. The writers and co-producers on CBS’s Fire Country served as strike captains and routinely carpooled to Paramount along with Casey’s dog, Fox.

At the conclusion of the strike, Herrera and Casey were gratified when the new MBA included a provision that writing teams in screen and television would receive pension and health contributions as if they were separately employed.

Writing team Manuel Herrera and Sara Casey on the set of Fire Country.

“It’s something we’re looking forward to. It gives us a sense of security going forward in our careers,” said Herrera. “We were talking to one of our co-workers who is friends with a team who are a little older, and they had not felt like they would be able to retire because they had to split a pension contribution. Now, going forward being treated as individuals, this gives us a functional reality. So that’s been great.”

“We have lots of friends who are still out of work and who want the opportunities and the protections that the new MBA provides,” added Casey. “We’re hoping that we can see the industry kind of right itself again and have people back to work and careers thriving again.”

But for their mutual passion for film and TV, the pair might never have met. The Orange County-raised Herrera is the son of a Guatemalan immigrant father and a white American mother, both of whom were teachers. He studied at Chapman College, considering a career as a playwright or screenwriter before pivoting to TV. 

Casey hails from a small town in northern California outside Sacramento. The daughter of journalists, Casey went in a different storytelling direction, watching a lot of TV and developing a flair for telling stories in less conventional ways.

“I was on the school papers and going down the same path as my parents,” Casey said. “I would embellish some stories and my mom would get really pissed. She was like, ‘You cannot be doing that,’ and I would say, ‘Why? It makes the story better.’”
 
Herrera and Casey met at a screening of the Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. A year later, Casey was hired at Showtime, where Herrera was already employed. He ended up training her in her assistant duties.

As desk mates, the two learned that they shared an interest in writing. Casey would frequently ask Herrera his opinion on elements of a workplace comedy she was developing. Ultimately, she asked him flat out if he would co-write the project with her.

“I was like, ‘Nah, I’m good,’” Herrera recalled.

“But I did annoy the shit out of him until he finally caved,” Casey added. 

The pair ended up as a team. Both feel they have similar sensibilities, as well as aesthetic strengths that balance each other out; Casey tends to go a bit dramatic and dark while Herrera writes lighter and more comedic.

Sara Casey and Manuel Herrera picketing at Paramount Studios.

“When we push those together, it’s like a genre mash-up,” said Casey. “So we’re very genre-bendy. I think also because we’re different we can challenge each other in different ways. I personally don’t love set, but Manuel’s great on set, and since we do it together, it makes it a lot more fun.”

“There are a lot of complementary things, too,” agreed Herrera. “She’s way more organized than I am, both on the page structurally or breaking a story, but also just in our day-to-day life. I’m a little bit more loose. But it all balances out, which is really good because it took a while to figure out what we were both uniquely good at and have that be simpatico.”

In 2020, they were accepted into the Viacom CBS Writers Mentoring Program. After graduating, they were hired for their first staffing job on the mid-season show Good Sam, which was canceled after 13 episodes.

“Fortunately, some of the writers we knew from Good Sam knew the showrunner on Fire Country and put in a good word for us,” Casey said. “We got really lucky. We were able to go from one staffing season to another, all within the CBS family.”

“A huge shout-out to the Paramount Writers program,” added Herrera. “It was so hugely beneficial to us and to so many people we know. It taught us so much about how to be TV writers. It was a crash course that is really valuable.”

Both acknowledge that the other great resource in advancing their careers has been each other.
“Being a TV writer can be pretty lonely,” Casey said. “I feel very grateful that we have each other. When it gets really lonely and things get hard or dark, you have somebody else in the trenches with you.”

“Inherently, this is a collaborative medium,” added Herrera, “and we do that every day.”