David Iserson is someone you might call a person of interest in the spy game.
The screenwriter and producer from New Jersey co-wrote the 2018 action spy comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me with his creative partner Susanna Fogel.
Fogel directed the film, starring Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon as friends thrown into sudden peril and a madcap ride through Europe, courtesy of a boyfriend (Justin Theroux) who’s secretly a CIA agent.
Iserson, who hails from Freehold, made the movie with Fogel in Budapest. Last year, they returned to Hungary for another spy story about a pair of Ponies.
PONIs, that is. Persons of no interest, as opposed to POIs—persons of interest. These definitions introduce the first episode of their new series, Ponies, premiering Thursday, January 15, on Peacock.
David Iserson and Susanna Fogel on the set of Ponies in Budapest. Photo: Courtesy of David Iserson
Fogel directed the 1970s spy thriller, which stars Emilia Clarke, aka Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, and Haley Lu Richardson from The White Lotus. They play women living in Moscow with their CIA agent husbands. When they are informed of their spouses’ sudden demise in the field, they have a choice—head home to the States to grieve or stay in the Soviet Union to figure out what the hell happened.
The duo pitch themselves as unconventional yet potentially effective secret agents—unlikely to draw suspicion in 1977 Moscow.
“We’re the wives,” says Richardson’s character, the very frank Twila. “No one cares what we say.”
“I like to think of the spy genre and a lot of genres as just kind of a way to tell human stories,” Iserson, who created and wrote the show with Fogel, tells New Jersey Monthly. “You could do a spy show and it could really sort of be telling something widely about so many things depending on where your focus is. But I think for our characters, what is interesting for them is that being good at this job is so much about relationships, is about trust. It’s about people trusting you. It’s about not trusting other people, then making them trust them. It’s about kind of getting a sense of who you are as a person and who you connect to.”
From left: Susanna Fogel, Haley Lu Richardson, Emilia Clarke and David Iserson at the January 14 Ponies premiere in New York. Photo: Bryan Bedder/Peacock
Twila and Bea, played by Clarke, find themselves carrying out dangerous spy missions, tangling with both the KGB and the inner workings of the American intelligence operation. Plenty of Cold War intrigue winds its way through the one-hour, eight-episode series, but it’s Richardson and Clarke who hook viewers from the jump with their fledgling friendship. The happily brash, loudly American Twila is a good foil to the composed, Russian-speaking Bea, but it’s more than that—they’re just so fun to watch together. The charming rapport between American expats trying to navigate a web of volatile and shadowy figures may bode well for the future of the series.
“If we’re lucky enough to have a season two, I think it would be so informed by everything we’ve learned about what our actors could do and what we would be excited to challenge them to do,” Iserson says.
The Local Commercial He’ll Never Live Down
Iserson started his career as a writer on Saturday Night Live in 2003.
He went on to write episodes of shows like Mad Men, New Girl, Mr. Robot and Mozart in the Jungle. One of his first writing gigs was a commercial for his father’s business, Silvert’s Furniture in Freehold.
“I would never call it a writing credit,” he says of the TV spot, which made him something of a local celebrity when he was a middle schooler in braces.
“I’m sure all your parents know about the great selection of furniture for them here at Silvert’s in Freehold,” a young Iserson said with a breezy air in the commercial. “But they may not know about Silvert’s huge selection of teen furniture. After all, we need something that suits us, too.”
“Oh yeah,” he said with a smirk. “Silvert’s has sets for you girls, too.”
Kids at school would recite his lines from the commercial back to him in mockery and some adults would ask him to repeat some of his dialogue from the ad.
“I was so enamored with film and television at that time that I think I had this belief that a local television commercial was going to be something more adjacent to show business and I had stars in my eyes … It did not come out the way I wanted it to. But yes, that was the first time I was ever on screen. I consider the writing credit probably something that was shared between myself and the cable company,” he says with a laugh.
David Iserson on the set of Ponies. Photo: Katalin Vermes/Peacock
Back then, a young Iserson didn’t know that the very same commercial would make him the subject of an episode of This American Life hosted by Ira Glass. And when the episode aired in 2007, he had no idea that Fogel, his future creative collaborator, would end up marrying Glass.
“So the world converges,” he says.
The Reality of Feminism and Emilia Clarke’s Russian Immersion
In Ponies, Twila Hasbeck and Bea (Beatrice) Grant have their meet-cute in a Russian street market, where Bea is dealing with a difficult egg vendor.
Since Bea grew up in a Soviet immigrant family, Twila encourages her to tell off the woman in Russian. Before they get the news about their husbands’ death, they learn that their other halves share a job title: “communications envoys for the associate to the U.S. ambassador to the USSR,” which they both know is cover for CIA jobs.
Iserson, 48, met Fogel, 45, at a Christmas dinner gathering in 2015.
“Another New Jersey person had an LA sort of party,” says Iserson, who calls Los Angeles home but is in New York for the rollout of Ponies.
Fogel is the co-writer of the movie 2019 Booksmart. She directed the 2024 film Winner, which is based on the true story of Reality Winner, the Air Force veteran and National Security Agency contractor who was sentenced to prison for leaking a report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. She also helmed the 2023 movie Cat Person, co-wrote the 2021 animated film The Addams Family 2 and was nominated for an Emmy for directing an episode of HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant. In addition to his work in TV and film, Iserson wrote the 2013 YA novel Firecracker.
Fogel remembers meeting him that night at the party. The writers found common ground in their work, general frustrations and the writing process.
“We just started talking about writing,” she says. “Basically, at the time, I think we talked a lot about the hustle of keeping yourself motivated to write regularly and be self-structured and self-disciplined, and, I feel like, at that party, we ended up talking about ‘oh, well, you know, if you ever want to sit in a coffee shop and just work on our own things and whatever.’ And we ended up doing that a fair amount. We’d go to lunch and talk about our professional grievances and get advice and read each other’s stuff. And ultimately, we ended up just deciding to try to write something together, because we were having a similar moment of wanting the world to see us as big commercial screenwriters and not these sort of character-driven, small story indie people. So we wrote The Spy Who Dumped Me as an effort to just show people that we could do something really huge in a genre that we both loved.”
Ponies starts on Christmas Eve, just before Bea and Twila are plunged into an uncertain future when they learn the awful truth at a Christmas party at the American embassy. In Moscow and in public life at large, they were defined by their relationships to their husbands. Now they are forging their own path while leaning on one another—officially as secretaries, and unofficially as new players in the CIA.
Why tell a spy story set in the ’70s?
Fogel points out that it’s “nice” to not have to deal with computers and cell phones in the story, but that’s not the reason why.
“If we’re gonna do it, then it should be for more reasons than just that we like the music and the clothes and the history,” she says.
“But we do!” Iserson says.
They were also interested in how the second-wave feminism of that era really played out in women’s lives.
“Everyone talks about that time as this, like, big heyday for women’s equality, and women in power and all this, but also, at the same time, there were plenty of women in sort of traditional relationships, or who weren’t as empowered as they wanted to be, or who were told that they would have a certain amount of agency that they didn’t have,” Fogel says. “That’s the thing we’re interested in. What’s the sales pitch for what you’re supposed to feel as a woman in a given moment in history versus what you actually do feel, and how deep some of these societal issues go … What’s the reality of how confident they feel in their lives or how equal to their husbands they were in their actual marriages?”
In the show, Bea, Clarke’s character, longs to do something more than secretarial work, but she’s tied to the job in Moscow because of her husband’s work with the CIA. Before he dies, he promises her she only has to do the job a few more years.
Clarke, a four-time Emmy nominee for Game of Thrones, immersed herself in the fictional languages of High Valyrian and Dothraki to play Daenerys Targaryen. She also pulls double duty in Ponies. The English actor, an executive producer of the show alongside Fogel and Iserson, had to use an American accent and deliver lines in Russian, since Bea grew up speaking Russian with her family in Providence, Rhode Island (Fogel’s hometown) and studied Russian literature at Wellesley College.
“It’s the big difference between just writing a thing in our offices and in our living rooms and then actually having to go somewhere and ask an actor to do it,” Iserson says. “We are not Russian speakers. We wrote all of the Russian lines in English and had them translated. And we didn’t think too hard about how hard it would be for an actor to recite it. We thought a lot about classic Russian literature while we were writing it. And so everyone spoke so verbose. If you read Tolstoy, everyone just is blathering on and on. And we’re like ‘yeah, that’s how we’re gonna write this as well.’
“And so then we, of course, cast the wonderful Emilia Clarke, and then we’re like ‘and now you have to learn that.’ And she did not speak any Russian, which seems normal. She went about the very, very difficult task of memorizing a language she doesn’t speak. And she had a great dialect coach. And she just worked really, really hard. This job definitely became very much about memorizing Russian almost more than anything else. Every time she was done with the scene, she just went right back to her dialect coach and worked and worked and worked and started dreaming in Russian and having nightmares in Russian and that’s what we made her do.”
From Jersey—and Fleetwood Mac—With Love
Making a series set in the ’70s presented a prime opportunity for some mighty fine needle drops.
“We put together a playlist just when we started writing the show, so years and years ago,” Iserson says. “And it was pretty amazing that we got to have some of those songs in it. The very first song, the very first episode, “Second Hand News” by Fleetwood Mac, from the Rumors album, it’s the title of the first episode, and we had that song in mind. I think it originally was supposed to go to a different part of the episode, but it was written into the script from the very beginning, so it was really exciting to get it.”
Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson. Photo: Peacock
The song is from 1977, the year Ponies takes place, which also happens to be the same year Iserson was born.
“In episode six, we got to use a song from the long out-of-print Lindsey Buckingham-Stevie Nicks [Buckingham Nicks] album that they released recently. We’d used so many Fleetwood Mac songs up to that point that we got in their good graces and we got to be one of the first people to use that song. It’s called “Crying in the Night” (1973). And I’m really excited, and I don’t want to spoil it for anybody, but the very last song in the very last episode is something that I’m really, really happy that we got.”
Iserson might live in LA, but he does occasionally make it back to Jersey.
“The first thing we did over Thanksgiving is we go to Federici’s pizza in Freehold,” he says.
He even got to work a piece of home into the script for The Spy Who Dumped Me—the parents of Kate McKinnon’s character, played by Jane Curtin and Paul Reiser, live in Freehold. (Her character’s name: Morgan Freeman. Her parents: Carol and Arnie Freeman.) One actor in Ponies, Vic Michaelis (Upload), who plays Cheryl, another American CIA wife working as a secretary in Moscow, is also a New Jersey native, who started their life in Hackensack before moving to Illinois and Canada.
Iserson’s recent visit was the first time he brought his 2-year-old daughters to Jersey, where they quickly developed an appreciation for Wawa. But he was surprised to find they picked up an unexpected souvenir.
“My children spent their entire lives in LA and Budapest, where we made this show,” he says. “But we went to New Jersey for one week, and then they came back with New Jersey accents. It was raining the other day and one of my daughters was wanting to go outside, and she just looked at me and she went ‘outsoide?’ And then I said, ‘Oh, you were in school all day. I missed you all day.’ And she just said ‘awl day??'”
All episodes of Ponies are streaming on Peacock.
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