Westside grad makes it big in the TV industry

Each year, it seems as if there’s a new popular show for everyone to watch on Netflix; last year the show to watch was Orange Is The New Black. This summer, a new Netflix original called Ozark quickly became one of the most popular shows on TV. Along with a few seasons of Criminal Minds and Bloodline, Ozark, was produced by a 1984 Westside High-school graduate, Chris Mundy.

“At the moment I am the executive producer of a show called Ozark.” Mundy said. “What that means is that I’m basically what they call the ‘show runner’, so the show runner is always a writer. It’s kind of like being the top editor of a magazine of a paper, all the stories kind of go through you.”

Mundy describes it as having a lot of different jobs at once. He said anything that happens on set comes back to him and the cast calls him about any problems. Mundy said that his biggest success in the TV industry is Criminal Minds.

“The fact that that Criminal Minds is still on when it’s 13 years old, it’s sort of miraculous.” Mundy said.

Mundy worked with Criminal Minds for six years, the first five years he worked on the original, and the last year he said he created and worked on Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior.

“[Ozark and Criminal Minds] are very different shows obviously.” Mundy said. “In Criminal Minds, we did it all in L.A. and the writer’s offices, our sets and our stages were on the first floor and our writers offices were on the second floor. I could just go up and down the stairs and be down on set with the whole cast and our crew.”

Mundy said in Ozark, they write and edit in Los Angeles but film in Atlanta. He said it’s different not being right there and makes it harder having to go back and forth.

“The other big difference is just, Criminal Minds is a 43 minute long show, and [Ozark] is a full hour show, you’re thinking about it more filmically.” Mundy said. “You know, you’re really thinking about how it all comes together as a movie as opposed to component parts.”

Mundy said that there were certain things in Criminal Minds that were going to happen every time; in Ozark, there’s a different story line each episode. Although both shows have a dark story line, Mundy said he is not like that in his real life. A similarity between the two shows are that they both have very dark story lines but that he is not dark in his real life. He said that his mother jokingly felt as if she had somehow failed at being a mom because she would watch Criminal Minds and question how he came up with the story ideas.

“Part of [making up the story lines] is trying to think of just what would interest you as a viewer and what sort of a extreme or crazy scenario.” Mundy said. “Once you’ve done that, once you’ve thought of what a crazy thing that could happen might be, then it’s really important to know your characters well enough to know how they would react in there to make it seem real.”

Mundy said throughout the show you begin to know the characters like you know your friends. He said you tend to base characters off the people you have met, and there’s always an accidental part of yourself in them.

“You never want it to seem like a cartoon.” Mundy said. “So a big thing, what you do when you start on a show, is you sit around with the whole writing staff and you talk about every single character in detail that viewers might not ever know. Like where that character goes to school, where’d they grow up, what are their hobbies what do they do. So you feel like you know them really deeply, so this weird thing happens so you start saying okay how would the person actually react.”

Mundy was a part of the newspaper when he attended Westside High School. He said his teacher, John Hudnall, who is now a teacher at Kansas University, really helped his love for writing grow.

“He was the first teacher that ever treated me like an adult,” Mundy said. “That was huge, it was just like that kind of confidence and that respect was gigantic, it was awesome. It’s so huge for creating someone independent and someone who thinks for themselves.”

Mundy was a writer for Rolling Stones for 11 years. He said he thought being involved with TV would be fun, but never imagined that he’d be a part of it.

“To me, [writing] was a way to get to write and do awesome things,” Mundy said. “I figured that’s what I would more or less do. Magazines and books is what I figured just because I didn’t think I’d live in Los Angeles.”

Chris’s parents, Bob and Maggie Mundy said that they got out of Chris’s way when he was deciding jobs.

“Our philosophy was and is that it’s not about some sort of notoriety,” Bob  Mundy said. “It’s really about what the person wants to do with their life and trying to do whatever they can to put themselves in a position to where you can do that.”

As the first season of Ozark is finished, C. Mundy said he’s relieved at the success of the show. He said there is more stress while making a Netflix show because the whole season has to be done before people see it, where on a Network show there is feedback after each episode that airs.

“We finished Ozark and we all felt really good about it,” C. Mundy said. “[A co-worker] and I were talking a lot and be like ‘oh, I hope people like it, if they don’t, like it’s our fault because it came out exactly how we wanted it to.’ But you just don’t know.”

B and M. Mundy currently have a journalism scholarship under their name called The Mundy Family Scholarship.

“Chris had such a good experience in the journalism department and our grandson had the same experience many years later.” M. Mundy said. “[The scholarship] was just a way of us giving back to the department that made a great influence on our son and grandson.”

Mundy’s advice to students who want to go into the TV industry is broken down into three parts. He said it is very helpful to be in any kind of writing class and to talk and meet a lot of different people because you do not want to have one perspective when writing.

“People in LA tend to come out of college and then they get as like an assistant in a writers room.” C. Mundy said. “You need to have experience to go on. For me, I’d rather hire someone that was working on a fishing boat in Alaska than someone who was a writers assistant. Go do something, have something to write about.”