“It’s the first comedic thriller I’ve ever done. A lot of the projects that I’ve done in the past have been very black and white; they’re heroic, they’re drama, they’re rom-com, and you always know who the antagonist is and you know who you’re supposed to be rooting for,” declares “Based on a True Story” composer Sherri Chung. For our recent webchat she adds, “This was a story where we don’t know if should we be rooting for this guy, is this guy as bad as he said, as bad as we think he is, is he as good as we think he is? The challenge musically was that you don’t want to give it away. You don’t want to telegraph what the audience doesn’t know yet. You don’t want to ruin the fun of them trying to figure out for themselves who they want to root for and what they want to believe in.” We talked with Chung as part of Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&A event with 2024 awards contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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“Based on a True Story” was created by Emmy nominee Craig Rosenberg (“The Boys”) and stars Emmy nominee Kaley Cuoco (“The Flight Attendant”) as realtor Ava and Chris Messina former tennis star Nathan, a married couple who seize upon an opportunity to capitalize on America’s obsession with true crime amidst the threat of a serial killer terrorizing their neighborhood. The Peacock comedy thriller series co-stars Tom Bateman as a plumber who befriends Nathan, Priscilla Quintana as Ava’s affluent friend Ruby, Liana Liberato as Ava’s younger sister Tory and Natalia Dyer as Chloe, a bartender who catches the eye of Matt and Nathan at a bar one night.
“I think the success is that it lies within the nuance, in the spaces between the horror and between the comedy, between the funny and the really dark brooding nature of it. This is almost like a nervous laugh, where you’re not quite committing to the horror of it,” Chung explains about what she set out to achieve with the tonal shifts that feature throughout her score. “There’s obviously times where it’s very polarizing, it’s like, no, this is dark. There is some stabbing. There’s a murder going on, and that’s just a matter of scoring what’s on screen and elevating that horror. My goal was to try and always make it as though there was like a very tight string that could snap at any moment. And it could snap in a good way, like comic relief, or it could snap in a really bad way, like our killer could snap it, always leaving the audience with this uneasy feeling, both with instrumentation and with pacing and drive and other spotting choices.”
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