My Favorite Scene: Why MTV's 'Faking It' Season 1 Finale Left Producer Carter Covington in Tears
No one loves a great scene more than the person who first
dreamed it up -- the writer. We're asking iconic shows' creators and writers to
tell ET all about the moment on their series that they most cherished getting
to see make it from script to screen.
For Carter Covington, the executive producer of
Faking It, MTV’s recently-canceled high school dramedy
about two girls who become popular while pretending to be a couple, it’s an
emotional moment at the end of season one when Amy (Rita Volk) confesses her
true feelings for Karma (Katie Ashcroft).
“I love you,” Amy tells Karma, who doesn’t feel the same
way and responds with: “I love you too, Amy, more than anyone else on Earth. Just
not like that.”
The scene -- which Covington says is not about coming out
to join the LGBT community, but rather “coming out about your feelings that you
fear will make the person you love reject you” -- was written from an extremely
personal place and served as a momentary wish fulfillment from his childhood.
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It is what I wrote Faking
It for because I've been in Amy's shoes in the past. Growing up gay in North
Carolina, I was often developing feelings for my best friends but I never told
them how I felt because it just seemed impossible to do that. I was in the
closet. I knew there was zero chance they'd feel the same way, although I still
hoped that maybe they would. When I wrote that scene, I was tapping into the
wish fulfillment of what I wish I could have gone back and said at the time. To
see that get filmed and to see Rita and Katie bring it to life with such
veracity was such a powerful moment for me. I think it's when fans too, who had
experienced similar feelings, really, really, really connected with the
show.
I always knew that Amy's feelings for Karma had to come out.
I didn't want them to be secret much longer than the first season, which was
only eight episodes, because I felt like the true meat of the series would be
how to get past that moment where you say, 'I love you,' and your friend says,
'I love you too, just not the same way.'
It's one of the few scenes I ever remember writing that I
didn't re-write obsessively. It flowed out very naturally. It was in the
earliest draft and it made it onto the screen. I didn't even edit the scene
much because it flowed really beautifully.
It was also one of the last scenes we shot of that season.
We didn't know yet if we were going to get more. It had such an emotional
punch. They were both so vulnerable and in shooting it, what I remember, is how
present they were for each other and in the moment they were. I was watching it
behind the monitors and -- I didn't even realize I was doing this -- but our
director, Jamie Travis, and also the director of the pilot and has been a real
partner of mine from the beginning, turned around about something technical and
I was just crying, streaming tears down my face. I think that scene is
beautiful because Karma rejects Amy in such a loving way. Rita was so
vulnerable that she really tapped into how I felt as a young person, struggling
with these feelings. It was a really magical day and I think we all connected
with how powerful the material we were working on is.
For me, the series is how Karma and Amy maintain their
friendship where they put each other first and how does the friendship get past
something like one friend falling in love with the other. Those are the themes
we were still dealing with in the last episode. Karma and Amy were still trying
to figure out how to get through this real difference and they had finally
negotiated to good place. I hoped to go further with that story, but this is as
much time as we got. But we got to end the series with Karma and Amy's
friendship intact.