Melissa Carter is the showrunner of The Cleaning Lady, which recently concluded its first season on Fox. In her career, she has worked on products such as Stargirl, Famous in Love, and Queen Sugar. In 2015, she won a WGA Award for her work on Deliverance Creek.
The Cleaning Lady centers on a Cambodian doctor who comes to the US for a medical treatment to save her son, but when the system fails her, she uses her intelligence to fight back, breaking the law for all the right reasons. The Cleaning Lady stars Elodie Yung, Adan Canto, Oliver Hudson, and Navid Negahban.
In the series, it is revealed that the main criminal at the center of the story, Hayak Barsamian, played by Navid Negahban, is supplying weapons to the Armenian military in their fight against Azerbaijan. Armenian Film Society spoke with Melissa Carter on the Armenian connection in the series.
Armenian Film Society: The Cleaning Lady is based on the 2017 Argentinian television series La Chica Que Limpia. How did your project initially come about?
Melissa Carter: Shay Mitchell, an actress with an overall deal at Warner Brothers, has a production company who found the format and optioned it. Warner Brothers liked the project and it went out as an "open writing assignment" to writers. Miranda Kwok who was a writer on one of Warner Brothers shows The Hundred came in with a take they liked, and they hired her to develop it. Before Warner Brothers took it out to pitch to various networks, they asked if I would be the showrunner and supervise Miranda through the pilot writing process. I loved the project and Miranda, so I came on board.
AFS: Armenians are often depicted as gangsters in film and television, but in The Cleaning Lady, we discover that the main criminal, who happens to be an Armenian character, is supplying weapons to the Armenian military in their fight against Azerbaijan. Can you talk about the inception of this storyline?
MC: We knew our "big bad" of season one was going to be Hayak Barsamian from the pitch stage. However, we wanted to dimensionalize him so that he wasn't a stereotype or a stock bad guy character. One of my friends, Taline Yerelekian, sent me her son Christian Yerelekian's podcast You'll See Why where he interviewed Aram Hamparian about the Armenian resistance to Azerbaijan. I found it fascinating, and at the same time I was also listening to the coverage of the war on NPR. There was an interview with an Armenian soldier where he said that if they were going to stop this invasion it was up to the Armenian people, no one in the world, none of their neighbors, would come to their aid. I found this really moving. We already had in our storyline that Hayak was an illegal arms dealer or gun runner, but it occurred to me that Hayak doesn't just sell guns for his own wealth, but the genesis of this came about in order to do everything he could to support and protect Armenian. As Hayak says in his speech in episode three, “Our Father Who Art in Vegas:” “Our homeland has been torn apart over and over again by war, but no matter where Armenians go in the world, Armenia will always be our home."
We also wanted to show different types of Armenians in our program. Dr. Saroyan is Hayak's personal doctor, but he goes out of his way to treat Thony's son Luca and helps save his life. Hayak's daughter Isabel Barsamian received her MBA at Stanford and has no idea what her father does for a living. She and her husband Ben Tashjian are well-educated professionals who want nothing to do with crime and it is a big plot point when Isabel finds out. In episode three, when Hayak realizes his son Tarik is spoiled and headed in the wrong direction in life, he sends him to Armenia to join the resistance against Azerbaijan.
AFS: In episode three, we see a traditional Armenian wedding. The production team had reached out to Armenian Film Society to help make this as accurate as possible, as well as provide support with resources in the casting of the musicians, but there are certain inaccuracies related to the Armenian culture throughout the series. Can you talk about this a bit?
MC: As television writers and producers, we always endeavor to make everything as accurate as we can. The Cleaning Lady is particularly challenging in that we have so many ethnicities and groups to represent: Filipinos, Cambodians, Latinx, Armenians, immunocompromised, undocumented workers— more so than any show I've ever produced. In the wedding episode, we did internet research, personal research, and took a few liberties to tell the most engaging story we could tell. What was exciting to me is after we shot the scene of Isabel Barsamian coming down the stairs in the pre-wedding celebration, Taline sent me a video from her wedding ceremony, and it was identical frame by frame. So you have those “victories” but then later someone points out what you got wrong. As a producer, I never get offended, I just promise to do better.
AFS: Is there word on a second season? Do you imagine the Armenian storyline will carry over into the second season?
MC: We have not gotten a second season yet. I urge your readers to please catch up and watch us on Hulu as they are still counting those numbers. I feel very positive about a pickup, and on Monday, March 28, Miranda and I pitched Season 2 to Fox. We hope they love it, and we hope to get a pickup soon. We will continue to have an Armenian presence in the show, but as we delve deeper into Thony De La Rosa's own criminal enterprise, she will face her own moral dilemmas.
AFS: Is there anything you'd like to add?
MC: I really want to thank you for your support and your honesty. We endeavor to make interesting, complex characters who audiences can root for and empathize with. We set out to create a diaspora of people who either had to leave their home countries, or chose to leave to make a better life for their children. As Arman Morales said to Thony about immigrants charting a path in American in the pilot: "It's not about doing things the right way or the wrong way, but any way you can." We value our viewership in the Armenian community and hope we are entertaining our audiences in a new and exciting way.
