Nichole Hill
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yesterday, I was all Quince. I was like a walking Quince billboard. We're keeping it.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I would just add like the story takes place within a context and a culture that you have to understand in order to understand any of the people that we're talking about in this whole situation. I think if you exclude race and if you exclude the role of the church in Sophie's life, you are not going to understand any of the story.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
You're not going to understand why anybody moved the way that they did, why the response was what it was. It's all important context to understand the culture in the same way that, you know, if you told a story about people who lived by the sea, you need to talk about the sea a little bit.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
So for us, we told a story in which people are deeply involved in the church and in which the people who are... The most important, the people who have the least voice and the least agency are from a place that their mother doesn't know that much about. It's very far away and that's very different and that we're assuming a lot of our listeners also don't know a lot about.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so it's part and parcel, like you have to talk about these things if you want to understand the story at all. You want to understand the urgency of the story that we're telling at all.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And it was also a lot of the people that were interviewed, I mean, it wasn't just us saying, this is weird. People who were with her, who were around her, who were embedded in her life, who were a part of her, the fabric of her life, were made uncomfortable by these behaviors and highlighted these behaviors for the team.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so part of this is just reporting out on the little flags that started going up for people about Sophie and her relationship with her daughter. Some of these flags might seem small, oftentimes they are, but they add up and add up in people's minds and start to raise real alarms for them about the safety and the well-being of the girls.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so I think we documented kind of how those small flags became like blaring alarms in the lives of the people that were around Sophie and her girls. And... I will say like one of them, the way that she cared for them when it comes to their hair, when it comes to things like that, the community that she's surrounding them with and the examples that she's being sure that they have access to.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
there's been so much data and so much research and so much study and scholarship has gone into the things that will, that help you to raise a healthy, happy, self-actualized young child and then a young child of color, of any color, in an environment in which they're not seeing people like them. And a lot of the behaviors that she demonstrated just go against kind of what has become
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
the understood best practices. And I think Chad speaks to that. I mean, I think what we were documenting is just somebody who is acting seemingly in opposition of what we all know now to be a better way to raise a child in that kind of environment.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I mean, I think that's what we kept talking about. It was the everything that's happening culturally, medically, and then not just like you're going to join a team sport. You're going to join it in the most intense way possible.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But it's like from day one. From day one. And so it's just like to imagine anybody, not even just a child, but anyone dealing with all of those factors turned up to like 10. We had to talk about it. It was just as shocking to us, I imagine, as it was to people when they first heard it. And it was really, to Aaron, to the comment Aaron read, it just is like, why?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
This doesn't make any sense to do all these things. At once, like all together, it just seems brutal and devastating and just like so taxing for an adult, let alone a child.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But I love that we work towards that. Because I do, like in our meetings, when we were talking about this, we were like, we're making this so that somebody who can intervene in the lives of these girls hears it with the hope that they hear it and that they do. And obviously that can still happen. And so that was... That's just to have that as a North Star. It keeps us honest.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It keeps us focused on what, on the story we want to tell and not on like some of the pieces of it that were just so upsetting and enraging. You just like want to rage against people and systems and all these things. But if somebody near them hears this and knows her and loves her and knows these girls and loves them, we need to be telling the story in a way that that person can hear.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
and wouldn't just immediately shut them off. And so I do think that we kept that top of mind. And watching Chalice's... I did not think that... I really did not think that Chalice was ever going to come on the show. That wasn't even really... I was just like, you wouldn't do that. So the amount of courage... that it took is just, it just blows me away.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And also how heartbreaking it has to be to get to a place where you're like, you know what? They're right. Like, I can't ignore these things anymore. To have the little flags and be like, I hope, because like you, Mariah, I was like, I really hope that this isn't abuse.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And when we were doing the earlier episodes and I would first get the scripts, I was like, yeah, this is some unsavory behavior, but maybe it's not abuse. And then you get further in the season and it's just undeniable. And I'm just a story editor coming at it not knowing these girls and not having that love for them and not knowing Sophie, not having that love for her.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so to listen and to get to the point where you have to finally acknowledge is really, really heartbreaking. And just the amount of courage it takes to admit that within yourself and then come on a show and admit that to everybody else is just extraordinary. I'm like blown away.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yes, hello. I'm Nicole Hill. I am the story editor for this season. This is my first season with the show. And I would have to say, like, the thing that really stood out to me, this is really, really a very heavy, very emotional, very, like, delicate topic. And I loved...
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I was going to say something about that, too. I was like, oh, Canada. We don't know. We don't know what's going on.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I mean, for lack of a better term, sort of our writer's room or the editor's room where we talked about how do we want to approach these? How do we infuse as much empathy and understanding into the story and into everybody who's being represented in the story as possible? And I was raised an evangelical Christian. I'm not that anymore, but I am still a person of faith.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It's a lot to be in community. It's a lot to be in community with people. But I mean, this is what's going to be needed, especially as we move forward, knowing the cuts that are being made to sort of the safeguards around vulnerable children and people.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I think it's really important, and I think it really, it's not the main story of the season, but just the ways in which people, for lack of a better term, saw something and said something around the girls. That makes all the difference. I worked in public schools for, you know, in and around public schools for nearly a decade. It's...
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
The people who are around kids at schools and then after school activities and then when you're babysitting, those are the ones who spot these issues most often and are the ones to raise the alarm. And so I think if there's any kind of, you know, this isn't again, not the A story, but the B story of this is just the work of community and protecting one another and in protecting kids.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And I hope that that comes across in Chalice's role. I hope it comes across, you know, with the neighbors and the parents at gymnastics and all over, all throughout the season, we just saw people seeing something and saying something. And that's so important when it comes to protecting kids. So my last thought is just around that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I hope everybody gets involved either in your school or wherever you can get involved in your community where you have the capacity to be consistent and engaged. I really think right now it is very important.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And I think that the way that we thought about faith and how to represent it was with so much care, with so much intentionality. And so it just made the story editing. I just feel like I upped my story editing game that much more from the conversations that we had about how do we push ourselves to be even more thoughtful and empathetic and understanding.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
This has been like it's a heavy, heavy, heavy project, but it has just been also the way that we've approached it. I think we've taken a lot of care of one another and done our best to take care of the people whose stories we got to tell. So I've loved it.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
You want to do like Mariah, like just a hard 180. Yeah, exactly. So I have a Black history comedy storytelling show. It's called Our Ancestors Were Messy. And on it, I'm telling stories that I found in historical Black newspapers and their gossip columns and society pages and looking at both
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
how our ancestors thought about beating Jim Crow while also just being so messy and just living their lives and making mistakes and figuring out, you know, what is it going to mean to be Black in America immediately after slavery and before the civil rights era. So there's lots of sound design. It's meant to feel a little bit like a movie.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It's meant to feel fun, but also, you know, to make you think a little bit, hopefully. Yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I was going to say the same thing. Those notes, when a Greta note comes in, it's not like you're not leaving a bunch of them, but when you do, it hits.