A MILLION LITTLE THINGS Post-Mortem: DJ Nash on Eddie’s Fate and the Season 3 Timeline

[Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for the season 3 premiere of A MILLION LITTLE THINGS.]

Despite a rough go of it, A MILLION LITTLE THINGS’ Eddie (David Giuntoli) survived his hit and run accident. But getting hit by a car didn’t come without its consequences: Eddie is now paralyzed, with only a small chance he’ll actually regain movement back in his legs.

In the aftermath, the show jumped forward a month later, as a hospital television showed Dr. Fauci sharing warnings about COVID.

But there was some good news: When Eddie got home, his loved ones surprised him with the vow renewal ceremony that he and Katherine (Grace Park) had been planning when he was hurt.

So, what comes next? AMLT boss DJ Nash shares how Eddie will cope with his new reality, how COVID will play into the show, and more…

What led to the decision to have Eddie be paralyzed by his accident? How will this be changing him, fundamentally, as a character going forward?
When we knew we were building towards this accident, there sort of were four choices [as outcomes]: There was he died; there was he was survived with no long-term effect; there was there was, for a brief soap opera minute, the idea that he might not have this memory; and then there was where we landed.

[Executive producer] David Marshall Grant, who has been with the show since the beginning, and I share many things in common. One of the things is we were both raised by parents who were both physically challenged, and us seeing the true grit in our parents. My dad was blind; he went blind when he was 11. I only knew him as being blind. But he went to college, went to law school, he put five kids through college. He did not teach me how to throw a spiral. He did teach me how to catch a spiral. But I really couldn’t throw to him; he could only throw to me. And so there are different ways in which he parented.

What Eddie’s going to discover this year is that he’s not going to be the father he thought he was going to be. He’s not going to be the husband or friend he thought he was going to be. It’s going to be different. And he has to either accept that, or it’s going to tear him apart. And what we’re going to watch is his journey, hopefully, towards acceptance.

There was a moment when Eddie expressed concern about pain meds he might need during this recovery. Is that a storyline you’re planning on following or was that to just to acknowledge his sobriety?
What has been kind of cool about our characters is when something happens, story-wise, it kind of leads to other things that we’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s relevant.” Like if you remember from our premiere last season, it really was a story about Delilah having guilt about the baby that was keeping her from breastfeeding and then we found this beautiful way in which Maggie stood up to her to the lactation specialist saying, “Just because I’m not going to be able to breastfeed my kid one day doesn’t mean I’m not going be a great mom.”

I think, in a similar way here, is as we’re telling a story about Eddie overcoming paralysis or dealing with paralysis, there was this element of, “Wait, oh, pain meds. That’s not going to be available to him the way it would be to others. Let’s include that as an element of what we’re tracking.” So, yeah, I think that that we wanted to certainly do a nod to people who are in recovery who don’t have that same access. Some people deal with it different ways—we did a bunch of research. Some people go, nope, can’t have it. Some people do it where it’s very, very supervised, because there’s a pain in the system. Hopefully, this storyline will feel authentic as the other stories we’ve done.

The show does jump forward a month, so the series has caught up to COVID impacting the country. What can you say about weaving COVID into the world and how much our characters will be actively dealing with that this season?
You know, the compliment our show gets that means the most to me is it’s authentic. We’ve dealt with things like depression, suicide, breast cancer, domestic violence, chemical dependency, 9/11…hopefully, I always approach it like if someone who a loved the person who is dealing with what we’re talking about is sitting next to me in the editing bay, they would feel like we got it right. Wouldn’t necessarily love the story, because sometimes we take turns that are hard to deal with, but we told them right.

As we were looking at this season, for like a second, maybe two seconds, we thought about not including it as part of our storyline. But because our show is so authentic, because to some people there’s this blurred line where it feels like they’re hanging out with their friends, it seems fake to not have this friend group dealing with what we’re all dealing with now. It also felt like a really hindering thing for our story. So many of the stories from the show comes from our incredible writers’ room, where people are sharing real things that happened to them, the pain, and the true grit they’ve shown in enduring it. So why wouldn’t we do that with COVID as well? And so we talked about it.

We don’t want it to be a weight and a drag; that’s not what we want and hopefully not what we’re doing. It is an acknowledgment of what we’re all going through. And, you know, some of it is comedic. Like, I will tell you this, last night, I was up way later than I should have been working on a jigsaw puzzle. I’ve done more jigsaw puzzles in the last four months than I have in the 48, 49 years, up to that point.

So, I think there’s just elements of how we are with just a protocol [with new things in our lives]. When we do take out in our house, you don’t have to discuss it anymore: I know I come in, “contaminated,” she lays down a garbage bag, we unpack it—there’s just a way in which we’re doing that. And I think by including that setlist to our characters lives will hopefully make our audiences feel seen.

This is a show that has obviously played with time. Since you have that device of slowing down the season to tell the story of a short window of time or jumping ahead like the premiere does, is COVID something the show will be dealing with all season? Or is there the plan to jump ahead this year to a post-COVID world?
It’s very hard to jump ahead to the point where you go, “Oh, I’m having Thanksgiving with my family again.” And so our plan for this season is to jump ahead a little bit, because we’re still behind in time. That’s kind of one of the advantages of our show…for whatever reason, it seems to always take place over a day. The next episode, more often than not, has to be a direct pickup so in three seasons, I think we’ve covered maybe exactly three and a half weeks [in what has been shown]. Maybe not as small as that, but it feels like that sometimes. So we had the advantage here of coming in where we left our show at that accident, calendar-wise, was pre-COVID. We have the advantage of jumping ahead as far as we would want within what we’re dealing with to get to, hopefully, be present time by the end of the season.

Our hope is that COVID is not affecting our lives the way it is now by the time season 4 premieres. And that our characters return to not normal, but probably new normal. I will say this: In depicting that zone between when COVID started, and when we became more aware, one of the things we’re very conscious of is not depicting mistakes. So, for instance, early COVID had people saying don’t wear masks. That’s one element of the story that we’re not telling, because we don’t want anyone to think that that’s the present day approach.

Maggie is now a month into her time overseas. How she is handling being away?
One of the cool things about having a third season show is you can get the actor you want for and we have with our series regulars and we’ve been very fortunate over the last three seasons, but we wrote, Jamie with Chris Geere in mind. So the fact that we got him and he’s there, it’s just like a dream come true stuff. He’s been incredible work with, so funny, and really able to play the drama, as well. So that’s been incredible.

We knew that Maggie was going to go on this journey to find herself. And we knew that Gary loved her enough to go to the airport and encourage her to do that. Now she’s going to have a journey that seems like it’s going to include Jamie in some way. And what we’ll see is whether or not Gary is as receptive to hearing all about it as we think he might be. There’s a storyline that writers came up with it’s brilliant, that immediately puts Gary and Maggie directly into each other’s lives, in a very necessary way, while he’s still seeing Darcy. And we’ll see that challenge of Gary and Maggie.

The people who are Team Maggie, I think will be very pleased this season, because all the reasons we fell in love with the couple and all the things that make us root for them to be together are certainly present. And the people who are Team Darcy, I think will find the Gary, in this chapter of his life, has almost got an instant family with her kid and her being a single mom. I’ve heard some people on Twitter wanting Team Maggie/Darcy. It won’t be the way they wanted, but what they do get is an interesting relationship that develops from being the ex-girlfriend and girlfriend of someone who is so important in many people’s lives.

The premiere did seem to confirm who actually hit Eddie with the car. How much is that playing into the season and the show’s overall mystery?
My answer would be, “Did we confirm who hit him?” That’s my answer. Because this is A MILLION LITTLE THINGS. And just when you think Rome is going to take his life, it’s Jon. And just when you think Constance Zimmer is in the church because she’s Barbara Morgan, she’s not.

So that is our season 3 mystery?
We’re following not only who hit Eddie, but why. There’s certainly some options in front of us: It could be the drunk guy at the bar from the finale. It could be Alex’s dad, who I will tell you is a Reverend, and has a Bible next to him on that seat, and might need to confess, ironically; he might need to go to confession.

To go deeper into Rome and Regina for a second, they had a couple of really pointed looks at each other at the vow renewal ceremony. How are they holding up a month removed from losing what they thought was their child?
I really appreciate you catching those looks, because we spent so much time trying to get them and create them. I think the loss of a child—I’m 21 years married. I think we’re going to make it; I really do. I think the only thing that would challenge that is if we lost a child.

I think for Regina and Rome, while this child is still alive, in some ways that makes it even more difficult, because they can’t mourn this child as if this child had died at birth. The child is with the birth mother. So there’s a part of them that feels like they can’t even have the feelings they’re having, much less be able to process. Rome and Regina are in exactly the same place—they both lost this child—but they’re dealing with it in such completely different ways.

We’re going to watch and see if this couple becomes the best version of themselves through this or whether it’s irreparable. Rome’s depression, Regina as a survivor of child sexual assault, with those issues, they were able to turn to each other for. In some ways, between Rome making Regina want a child that she didn’t want previously and Regina saying no to the [second] baby, I think they both have a certain amount of anger and hurt. How are they going to process that?

Is there anything else you can tease about season 3?
There’s one [storyline] we haven’t touched on, that maybe I’m most excited for this season. It’s maybe the one I’m most proud of in three seasons of writing this show. And will make certain people who didn’t previously didn’t feel seen, feel seen. And I’m excited for us to watch that story.

I want to be as vague as that, because I don’t want to tip where any story goes. But there is something that is building that you may or may not catch as it’s building. But it’s going to be such a moving story when it finally surfaces.

And I hope that our fans are safe. I hope they’re healthy. I hope that while they’re isolated, because of COVID, once a week, they’re able to hang out with a group of friends who they feel are their group of friends. And I hope through all of this, and the stories we’re telling this year, including the one I alluded to, and the others that we talked about, that our fans continue to feel seen. Because we do see them.

A MILLION LITTLE THINGS, Thursdays, 10/9c, ABC

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