In 2014, Berninger and Besser moved to Los Angeles with their four-year-old daughter, Isla, and purchased a bungalow in Venice, not removed from the ocean. Tom got here alongside, too, and began understanding of a guesthouse within the again yard. The three of them have been creating a tv collection primarily based loosely on Tom’s movie concerning the National, however fictionalized. “The pitch was a show not unlike ‘The Monkees’, but more modern,” Berninger mentioned. “A real, honest look at the music industry.” Berninger put collectively a band and known as it Das Apes. He wrote new songs, a few of which ended up on his first solo document, “Serpentine Prison” (2020). They filmed a pilot, scouted areas, took conferences with HBO. In the tip, they spent almost a decade engaged on the present. “It was this endless circle of excitement and failure, excitement and failure,” Tom informed me. Berninger mentioned, “We were sober about the chances of actually getting a TV show. But it felt like we got pretty close.”
Finally, within the spring of 2021, they gave up. “There was real, genuine heartbreak,” Berninger mentioned. “A lot of it was connected to my brother. I felt responsible for pulling him along on a long climb toward something that wasn’t going to work out.”
