Legends of Tomorrow: Marc Guggenheim Reveals What Show-Within-A-Show Was Hardest to Direct

Tonight’s episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, titled “The One Where We’re Stuck on TV,” centers on the team being “hidden away” by Charlie inside of television shows. The idea, apparently, is to protect them from the other Fates, now that they have captured her and, based on some script pages the episode’s director shared online today, reality has been radically rewritten. That director? Longtime Arrowverse producer Marc Guggenheim, who has been writing and producing for 20 years but begins his directorial career with tonight’s episode. While the cast — most of whom Guggenheim has known for years — no doubt made it easier, the writers did not give him a simple epiode.

In the episode, the Legends have to skip between Arrowverse parallels to Friends, Star Trek, Downton Abbey, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the way to a resolution. Along the way, they’re joined by a couple of characters we haven’t seen in a while. Guggenheim said that, in spite of all the big action needed for the Star Trek scenes and the extensive hair and makeup for Downton, it was the Friends riff that really challenged him.

“I would say that the stuff that made me the most anxious was all the stuff on the Friends set for two reasons,” Guggenheim told ComicBook.com. “Number one, I wanted to shoot it like a multi-cam. That immediately placed certain limitations on me. Also, it’s a lot of the episode. It’s a huge number of pages and we shot all of that in one day. I was just, quite frankly, I was intimidated by the sheer amount of material we needed to get in a single day. On the one hand you could say, ‘well, I’ve never directed anything before, so why is that much harder than directing a multi-cam for the first time?’ The answer is, I’ve at least worked in television — I’ve at least worked in one hour drama for 20 years. I have a much greater sense of how footage gets edited together when you’re filming with one or two cameras. When you start to add three cameras to the mix, and you’re trying to emulate the shooting style of four cameras, it becomes a lot harder and a lot more challenging. That was the day I was definitely the most anxious about.”

Ironically, just hours after Guggenheim’s directorial debut airs on the West Coast, HBO Max will be released at 3 a.m. tomorrow ET/midnight PT. With it? Every season of Friends, available to stream free for the first time since it left Netflix in January.

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, airs on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, following episodes of Stargirl.