The
Memo
A Note From our Writer
There’s nothing like a good female comeback story: Tina Turner, Martha Stewart, Cleopatra.
But for every kickass Egyptian pharaoh in a gold-embroidered midriff, I know countless women who will never recover from 15 years of bad decisions. Their picker was broken – they chose partners who were time holes. They spent all of their financial and spiritual currency on lame endeavors. They gravitated toward the horrible familiar of a busted childhood. Theirs is the opposite of a comeback. These decisions sealed their fate for the rest of their lives. The consequences had a long tail.
And that’s where the concept of the delightful sci-fi, feminist novel “The Memo” spoke to me. What if young women could make the best decisions throughout their early adulthood? These were moments that mattered, but they didn’t know it in real time – because how could they?
And, then, I had a more philosophical quandary: without the struggle and the drama of a comeback, would these women have acquired the grit and character the world requires of them?
And if every decision is the right decision, when do women discover who their real allies are? Because, in my experience, lifelong friendships are FORGED on bathroom floors.
And that’s my hourlong carbonated adaptation, THE MEMO. It’s about ambition, yearning, regret, and friendships.
Dana Calvo
TONE
This is a droll feminist comedy with sci-fi elements. Meaning, it’s weird and wacky and we’re going to own that. “Killing Eve” meets “Fleabag” meets “Broad City” meets “Mrs. Davis.”
Structure
Each season of THE MEMO focuses on a new “client” who is about to turn 36. (That’s the age where things get solidified, in a kind of biographical amber.) These women span the globe, the spectrum, sexual identities and socio-economic classes. (They are always women, because men and nepo babies don’t need The Memo.).
SIMCOTT Characters
Desiree
is one of the highest-ranking executives at the Simcott Institute where The Memo app was created. She’s been at Simcott for 35 years, but if she doesn’t get her subscription numbers up, Desiree will be fired (ex-communicated from a hidden-in-plain sight cult). But like thug life, cult life chooses you, and Desiree is financially and emotionally enmeshed with all things Simcott. It was the founder, after all, who saved Desiree from a life on the street, after she had been kicked out of a health food supplement MLM (okay, also a cult). Desiree is our series axis who becomes deeper embroiled in the corruption and danger of The Memo.
Gilbert Simcott
is the founder of the institute that created The Memo. He’s a bear-like intuit with a Ketamine addiction and a mercurial temper. He’s retirement age, but he has no plans on leaving gracefully. In fact, he will do anything to make sure the institute continues to excel. Even if that means covering up deadly consequences of his app and firing loyal employees.
Season One Characters
Soft-in-the-middle, underdog heroine JENNY is heading to her college reunion on the eve of her 36th birthday. She has a passion (and talent) for baking, but she is currently a diner hostess. A daytime diner hostess. As she compares herself with her former roommates, Jenny harbors the same suspicion that so many of us do – that she never “got the memo.” That she’s operating with only some of the information needed to live her life to the fullest. Hers is a small existence that lacks momentum, and she senses the institute may hold some answers for her.
Jenny
Jenny’s former college roommate and supposed best friend, is a venture capitalist with an enviable life. Geeta is married to an attorney, and they have two delightful young children. Geeta, first-gen Indian American, has hit all the ambitious milestones that her family demanded and then exceeded them. But Geeta didn’t do this alone. She subscribed to The Memo in her senior year of college, just as the institute encouraged. And she’s been lying to and withholding this crucial bit of information from Jenny ever since.
Geeta
Jenny’s other former college roommate, hasn’t been as close with Jenny over the years, but Leigh has always been more candid with her. Leigh is a worldclass amateur surfer who lives in Hawaii with her musician wife and their deliciously fat infant. Leigh knows that The Memo saved her from years of a closeted life, so she is not only grateful for the institute, she is something of an undercover Memo evangelist for women yearning to be their true selves.
Leigh
is Jenny’s best guy friend. Before Jenny began traveling back in the time, which screwed with the timeline, Gabe was a devoted and divorced 37-year-old Dad who secretly loves Jenny. Gabe also has an incredible and feisty daughter, RAMONA. But Ramona’s existence becomes Jenny’s drive throughout Season 1.
Gabe
Disturbed by what she suspects is a cover-up of the death of a former “client” of hers, Desiree goes undercover within the institute for the FBI. She communicates with her handler on a burner phone and sometimes wears a wire during her meetings with Gilbert. Desiree does not share with the Bureau that The Memo 2.0 is causing idiosyncratic aging of some of Jenny’s body parts. She tells no one, in fact, and reassures Jenny that these flashes of accelerated aging are normal.
As for Jenny, her ascension to becoming a cause célèbre in the baking and bread world is overshadowed by the devastating acceptance that her ambition disappeared little Ramona. It’s the darkest trad wife parable you could think of. At first, Jenny appeals to Desiree. Then to Gilbert. Her burning desire is to stage a one-night stand between Ramona’s parents (who in The Memo timeline never married), create Ramona, have Ramona put up for adoption and then ADOPT her. It’s preposterous, sort of. And if that doesn’t work, Jenny has a Plan B.
By following The Memo to the fucking LETTER, Jenny’s dominance and success is assured. And the more powerful and wealthy she becomes, she aims to PURCHASE the Simcott Center and force them to re-animate Ramona’s existence.
But Jenny better act fast, because toward the end of this first season, Gilbert tells Desiree that The Memo 2.0 rollout cannot save her job. In fact, he’s closing the institute and moving to the Ozarks to live with one of his four siblings who also has premonition powers that were harnessed in The Memo. Desiree checkmates Gilbert, confronting him about at least three fatalities that seem suspiciously linked to The Memo. Gilbert says their only hope is for The Memo 2.0 to serve as a timeline patch – that Desiree’s new, older clients will have to help them dip back into the timeline to prevent these deaths.
Season One
United with Gilbert in a covert operation to cleanse the timeline of deaths that could be linked to them, Desiree takes on her second client in this sophomore season of the show. As Simcott troubleshoots some glitches in the Beta rollout, Desiree also has to answer to her actions from last season.
She’s got to shake the FBI. She’s got to manage the increasingly volatile Gilbert who is now deep in a biblical-caliber feud with his quintuplet siblings. (Yes, there are five Simcotts, all of whom have special gifts with intuition.) And she has to navigate an altered marriage, now that her husband is losing his hearing. (He’s a trombone player and aspiring musical director who urges Desiree not to believe the urban myth that Beethoven was deaf when he wrote some of his most famous symphonies. “Being a hard of hearing musical director is like being a blind sharpshooter. It’s a very very hard sell, Desiree.”)
Where Jenny in Season 1 had a small circle around her – her two best friends, Gabe and (sort of) Ramona, Season Two’s client, BETTINA, requires a different strategy from Desiree.
You see, Bettina subscribed to The Memo for two months, but the advice she followed led to such a falling out for her family that she deleted the app and never looked back. Mirroring Gilbert’s sprawling family conflict, Bettina’s story exposes the impact on a larger family when The Memo upends generational dysfunction.
As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Bettina will be motivated by a 15-year regret. She understands that the gulf between her Memo-guided potential (the wealthiest landowner in the Southwest) and her actual achievement (owner of her father’s sandwich shop in Albuquerque) is massive. She knows it now – she is a majestic failure. It’s a perspective that Jenny was never afforded in Season 1, because she had never used The Memo as a senior in college
Season Two
Season Three
Desiree’s client in Season 3, LUISA, is a genius who cannot resist the compulsion to try and alter The Memo’s suggestions. In doing so, or trying to do so, she creates a chaos in the timeline that will test Desiree and endanger the institute and Gilbert.
Desiree’s series arc began with her defending her work at the institute and fighting to keep the life she had built. But Desiree eventually comes to understand that she’s been feeding women a winner-takes-all perfectionism that isolates them. It makes them feel like frauds for not being happy, even though they’ve achieved everything they have ever dreamed of.
Desiree will grow and learn from the very clients who once rejected her proposal. Just as Desiree is helping women access their best lives thanks to The Memo, she is starting to see that the institute is a janky Ponzi scheme.
By the series finale, Desiree realizes the institute is just another cult, run by another dude, who’s using women to enrich himself.