How Sabrina Carpenter's A Nonsense Christmas Nailed Its Tone

For Sabrina Carpenter, all year has been the most wonderful time of the year. Her Grammy-nominated breakthrough album, Short N’ Sweet, featured three top-10 singles: “Espresso,” “Please Please Please” (which reached No. 1), and “Taste.” The Short N’ Sweet Tour was a kitschy delight, and she even had her own pop-up cafe. To cap off her 2024, Carpenter made a throwback holiday special for Netflix, A Nonsense Christmas With Sabrina Carpenter.

A Nonsense Christmas With Sabrina Carpenter’s production designer, Jason Sherwood, immediately understood the assignment. “Sabrina is very funny. She’s tongue in cheek,” the two-time Emmy nominee told me during a recent conversation over the phone. “There’s always a wink and there needed to be this sense of taking people behind the curtain and showing them how the sausage gets made, mixed with this distinct old Hollywood aesthetic.”

Below, you can read the rest of my interview (which has been edited for length and clarity) with Sherwood, including the old Hollywood inspiration for A Nonsense Christmas With Sabrina Carpenter, how the duet between Carpenter and Chappell Roan came together, and his favorite holiday specials.

How did you get involved with the special?

I was recommended by a colleague to Simone Spira at OBB Media. Simone is the executive producer for this project. She sort of put it together. OBB put it together, I should say, and a colleague recommended me because they were looking for someone who had music experience, but also a theatrical background based on the overall concept for the show. I’ve done a lot of work with pop singers and music artists, but also in the theatrical space. So she and I had a quick meeting in late July, which was nutty, because this project shot at the end of August. We had a quick meeting and just completely hit it off. I totally understood their reference points. We hit the ground running.

What were the initial discussions about the tone of the special like?

The overall idea was to create a premium variety holiday special, but that it would live in a throwback old Hollywood aesthetic. And they sort of kept referencing Marilyn Monroe and Gentlemen Prefer Blonde and some of the iconic Cher variety specials. And when I came on, I quickly put together a board to land us on a variety of reference points, and I looked at everything from Madonna’s Celebration Tour to Busby Berkeley to Michelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2 wearing that Christmas tree dress. I looked at White Christmas. There are a lot of really iconic holiday and variety specials to reference and pull from, and then bring them through the filter of Sabrina as a contemporary person, as a contemporary artist. We wanted to nail that balance perfectly.

An idea that we cracked early on and got excited about was the difference between fantasy and performance and “real life.” A lot of these old holiday specials they have, if you look at the old Andy Williams Christmas special, or even the old Judy Garland special, you have these great living room interiors. And Sabrina was excited about making a sitcom version of her house. Like, “Oh, welcome to my home, who’s at the door,” and a guest comes in and there’s a TV in the space. Maybe we go into the TV and we’re in an old Hollywood sound stage. But then we can also go into the living room, and there’s Sabrina making cookies or shaking an espresso martini. This kind of concept came into focus for us early on about her house as the main space, and this fantasy Hollywood stage as the other space.

Beyond the old holiday specials you mentioned, the concept also reminds me of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse when you never know who’s going to show up at the door.

Exactly like that. And that’s really a big part of how the show is structured. As the guests came into focus and as the songs that they wanted to sing came into focus, we would create a storytelling beat around that. Like, for example, when we found out that Chappell Roan was going to come do the show, it was, like, “All right, well, what’s the song, what’s the moment?”

The two of them, I think, were excited about doing something that felt more informal in a way. And there was this discussion of them doing what would feel like a karaoke number to a classic song. And so then we book it’s going to be “Last Christmas,” right? And then we had this idea that they would do it like karaoke. There’s an old TV in Sabrina’s house set. And we were like, “Oh, we should run an 8-bit karaoke lyric screen on that TV.” And the two of them should come down the stairs in party dresses, like it’s the last song of the party. We took the house set, which, throughout the show, is shown really beautifully. It’s a well appointed room, and it’s bright and fun. And we trashed it and made it look like the end of this kind of Euphoria-meets-Christmas party rager-meets 1980s prom. There’s a decrepit Merry Christmas banner hanging off the mantle, and popcorn all over the floor, and beer bottles and champagne bottles, and the two of them are standing there barefoot in the living room with these corded microphones singing “Last Christmas,” karaoke style. It’s about the two of them playing and having fun. That was one of the moments that felt for us, as a team, that we were nailing the concept of what this could be.

How familiar were you with Sabrina before getting hired for the special?

I was super familiar with her. When I joined, it was late July, practically August, so by then she was having, you know, she’s been having a really big moment for a while, but it was definitely a big summer for her. And the promo for the album release was in full swing. So, I knew “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” She has a holiday EP, Fruitcake, which I hadn’t listened to until I joined the project.

I was familiar with her reference points. The references are very much in my wheelhouse as a 35-year-old gay man and also as a theater person, right? I mean, Sabrina has been on Broadway. Sabrina has a theatrical sensibility. In one of her music videos, I can’t remember which, she holds up a big newspaper headline, and it’s basically a direct lift from Chicago. It was easy to join this project. And the idea I pitched that got me this job was, there was a very famous image of a whole bunch of synchronized swimmers on this kind of tiered fountain. It’s an old Busby Berkeley image, and they’re all in swim caps. This sort of tower is shot from above. It’s shot all around, and there’s like 60 women on it. And I was like, “We should do that. But with a big red tiered cake or a big green tiered cake, like it’s a big Christmas tree and Sabrina’s at the top of it and she’s wearing a big star on her head.” Those kinds of ideas were the things that got our wheels into motion, visually.

So much of Sabrina’s vibe is wink-wink double entendres. How were you able to translate her humor into the special?

I’ve worked on a lot of theater stuff, and I think a big thing about comedy is understanding which element needs to be funny. In a certain moment to land a joke, what’s the funny bit? Is it the actor delivering the line? Is it the costume? Is it the prop? Is it the environment? Tone? I think the thing that really soars about Sabrina is that she, including her styling, often feels elevated. And we wanted to hold on to that. It’s the moment that gets to have the wink. So there’s a moment in the special, in the opening, where Sabrina does a song, and then she takes us on a tour backstage while singing to introduce the special. And she makes a joke about how Netflix basically gave her an unlimited budget as long as she’d go viral, and she takes this huge candy cane and throws it through a window. That was a moment where, in production design and art department land, we got to support the bit. It was the kind of show where we wanted to create an environment that would have a lot of phases or malleability, but not necessarily an environment that felt cheeky unto itself.

Do you have a preference between working on a live performance, like the Oscars, or a taped special?

What was cool about this one is, I’ve worked on award shows, stuff that is live to tape, or rather, aired live and it’s happening in the theater. It’s happening in space. What I like about that is the interplay between performance and audience. And even on Sabrina, we had a live studio audience for a lot of this. Sabrina’s fans, a couple hundred people, waited outside for hours, who would come in for us and shoot for 15 minutes. The energy that they bring versus when we shoot things without them is completely undeniable. I like to do stuff that is in front of an audience, even if it is something that we are taping and then editing later; it’s that very specific alchemy between a person telling a story or singing a song in front of a live audience. It’s an energy that you can’t replicate in any other form.

When I saw her on the Short N’ Sweet Tour, I kept thinking, “She’s very good at being famous.” There are just some people who have it, and so much of Having It vs. Not Having It is the interaction with the audience and everything you’re talking about.

Oh yeah, she has charisma in spades. It can’t be taught. She has stage presence, and she can perform. She’s really the total package.

Is there a dream artist you would like to work with?

Personally, as a designer, I really like when I get to have a direct line of communication with whoever the person is. I’ve done tours for Sam Smith and Sara Bareilles and the Spice Girls, and I got to talk to those artists directly about what they were dreaming about, or what the music wanted to feel. That’s a really great scenario for me, and it was very similar on this with Sabrina and her sister, Sarah, and Sabrina’s management team, who are really communicative people. It’s a small operation for someone who’s having such a huge moment. It was great because you were having a real conversation with the folks who are building the vision of her project.

Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying, I like working with artists who don’t necessarily have a whole enterprise around them. And there are lots of artists who have, you know, like 10 people you have to get through to get to them. So in thinking that way, as much as it would be cool to do something at the scale of like Beyoncé or Lady Gaga, I think the actual person for me is Bonnie Raitt. I have seen her in concert so many times. There’s never a lot of set design, per se, but she’s an artist who I would love to make a stage for. And actually, I’m designing the stage for the Kennedy Center Honors, and she is one of the honorees. She won’t perform on the stage, but we’re getting to make something for her music to honor her, which is a very special thing.