Optics: Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni scandal well-timed for Jenna Owens and Vic Zerbst’s TV comedy

Next time you think about your carbon footprint, feeling guilty you didn’t offset your most recent flight, noodle on this. The term “carbon footprint” was the brainchild of an advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, who came up with it for their client, BP.

The idea was that if you persuade individuals into being concerned about the environmental impact of their own actions (do you have solar panels, are you recycling correctly, are your showers too long), that person is going to be less laser-focused on who the real big polluters are.

It’s a classic bait-and-switch from the public relations and crisis management industry, which will come under a gleeful and satirical microscope in the new comedy series Optics.

“It’s not just a matter of burying the story, it’s a matter of creating a new story for everyone to latch onto,” Optics co-creator Jenna Owens told The Nightly in mid-December.

Six days after Owens said that, The New York Times published an expose that detailed actor Blake Lively’s explosive allegations against her It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni.

Lively had accused him and his team of publicists and crisis managers of orchestrating a campaign to destroy her reputation to distract from the real story, which is that she had made complaints of Baldoni’s alleged inappropriate conduct during the production.

Lively, who has a much higher profile than Baldoni, had come under sustained attack online and in the media during It Ends With Us’s promotional campaign for a series of perceived tone-deaf blunders.

Meanwhile, Baldoni had positioned himself as a feminist ally and advocate of the film’s domestic violence themes.

Lines were drawn and the collective wisdom of the opinionated internet took sides, and they weren’t on Lively’s, who had been cast as the mean girl.

The actor alleges it wasn’t an organic movement but the manipulations of a clutch of people, among them, PR wizards Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, two names that would usually never be publicly associated with a practice that, privately, is more common than you’d think.

Particularly damning was a series of text messages. One of the missives from Nathan in trying to reassure Abel that Baldoni would be looked after read: “You know we can bury anyone”.

When the story broke, a month out from the release of Optics, Owens and her co-creator Vic Zerbst and their producers’ group chat lit up.

“Guys, are you seeing this, this is crazy, this is exactly it,” Zerbst recalled of the messages pinging back and forth between them.

Owens added, “These are people that exist in the shadows, their job is invisible, and they have become the story.”

Just like that, the show they had made, had a shorthand for anyone not familiar with crisis management.

“This is that perfect reference,” Zerbst continued.

“It’s absolutely done the homework of “Oh, this is the world we’re exploring and it’s so juicy and so crazy and so complex, and so funny and thrilling and evil.”

In Optics, which Owens and Zerbst co-created with Charles Firth, they play two young women, Greta and Nicole, who are promoted to run a crisis management firm and faced with a series of challenges drawn from familiar scenarios — the drunk footballer who disgraced himself, the telco meltdown, an airline scandal.

“The truth is always stranger than fiction,” Owens said.

“A lot of these scandals are analogues for things that really did happen and the way in which they happened. It won’t take a genius to realise what we’re referencing.

“We wanted that because we know these scandals were in the public eye, and we wanted people to question the rollout of those scandals and how they happened.”

Owens added that, of course, most of what happens behind the scenes whether in corporations, governments or around celebrities, never even make it to the public because people like their Optics characters make sure they don’t come out.

“We’ve been writing this for four years but the same scandals keep appearing again and again,” Zerbst said. “It’s terrible to see these things continuing, but it’s cool to be right.”

The Lively/Baldoni scandal, which has seen both sides filing dueling lawsuits including the most recent development of Lively’s team requesting a gag order be placed on Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, to stop him from allegedly leaking to the media, also went to the heart of the characters Owens and Zerbst had created.

Especially because Optics is a satire, it can get away with Greta and Nicole doing some awful things and making morally questionable decisions, and still keep the audience onside. Or, that’s the hope.

“We were interested in portraying this thing that we’ve seen within our generation of young women who start out idealistic and then slowly being crushed within a system as they try to succeed with it.

“What do you do? Do you hit eject? Do you say ‘I’m getting out’, or do you try and do the dreaded change from within?

“We want to have those conversations around why people do what they do, and what are the institutions that manipulate people into it as well.”

She said Optics can be a “hard watch” in a similar way to how the British The Office can be awkward and cringe, because the characters, at this point, choose to stay within the system.

“All of us do, to an extent. We have made justifications to stay, to exist within the status quo. For (the characters), they’re justifying it as ‘Well, we’re girls and it’s important we’re in this industry, we deserve to be here and we’ve been oppressed for so long’,” Owens explained.

“But the really interesting thing is, all of this fighting and hierarchy in this world is just one big distraction from the real question, which is ‘Why do have this world in the first place?’.”

The timing of the Lively/Baldoni case was exciting, even though it’s terrible it happened in the first place.

It will supercharge what Owens and Zerbst wanted to do with the series, which is to increase media literacy and have audiences question how they’re consuming a story, and be savvier about what structural powers may be at work behind the scenes.

Zerbst added, “They say advertising is the poetry of capitalism, then crisis management and public relations is the poetry of late-stage capitalism.”

Optics is on ABC and iView from January 29