Welcome to Hartley
Six young people from the small town of Hartley, California begin their post-high school lives, navigating the complexities of isolation, virtual relationships, and sexual expression in the first show from Sideway.
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Episodes
01. As school starts, Natalie suffers a move-in day setback, Noah and Amy share a bad omen, Mia writes a song, Travis pursues material gratification, and Joey discovers something painful.
03. Natalie and Amy discuss Noah, among other things. Joey and Travis discuss Mia, among other things. Mia admits some truths to herself.
02. Amy starts a new relationship. Joey gains a foothold in his quest for emotional manipulation. Natalie is bombarded with unwelcome male attention, and hatches an idea. Everybody learns about nudes.
04. Natalie does something she’s never done before: misbehave. Amy’s new relationship comes at the expense of her old one with Noah. Noah and Natalie share some fraught sibling time.
05. Noah makes a new friend who might be a little unstable. Amy falls head over heels. Travis furthers an unlikely alliance. Mia confides in a stranger. Joey basks in a tenuous victory.
Six young people from the small town of Hartley, California begin their post-high school lives mid-quarantine. Most of them are heading to college, some of them are still trapped at home, and all of them are living and breathing through their phone screens. Over five days we watch as they make new connections, reopen old wounds, discover buried secrets, and navigate the gaps between their public and private selves in the digital space of Sideway’s simulated social network.
Amy
Celina Atangana
Amy is that rare breed of person and even rarer breed of teenager who’s secure in herself and who she is, though it wasn’t always that way. The only sister in a family of brothers, she struggled with gender dysphoria as a child and was scarred by the death of her mother. But while flying under-the-radar at Hartley High, she came into herself, became open about her sexuality, cultivated her love for film and her talent as a cinematographer, and refused to get caught up in the race for attention and identity that possessed her peers. But her secret senior year hook-up with Natalie, twin sister of her best friend Noah, leaves Noah still in the dark. How long can she manage to suppress this fundamental piece of her coming-of-age?
Cast
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Celina Atangana she/her
Amy
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Lillian Johnson she/her
Mia
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Ethan Olson he/him
Joey
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Saga Snow they/them
Travis
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Brandon Wiman he/him
Chase
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Vincent Doud he/him
Martin
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Blake Jennings he/him
Kyle
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Gabriel Matthews he/him
Noah
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Tara Rose Schreiber she/her
Natalie
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Kaelyn Wilkins she/her
Ada
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Jared Anthony he/him
Adam
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Jasmina Tang she/her
Pearl
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ERAN HAMMER
Director, CEO
Eran Hammer has been passionate about the intersection of technology and storytelling from his first venture in 1995-- an online publishing house for short fiction. Eran has been building products and leading teams for over 3 decades as a tech executive previously at Walmart, Yahoo, and Citi, a prolific open-source developer (creator of the hapi and joi frameworks), and co-author of the OAuth protocol (the web login standard). When away from his keyboard, Eran likes to pretend he is a construction worker, food critic, photographer, and farmer (having once raised three emus all named Kevin).
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BRIAN MAGID
Writer, Head of Content Development
Brian Magid is a screenwriter and occasional film essayist rotting away in New York. He earned his BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch in 2018, and after two years of being very very busy, he joined the Sideway team in 2020, where he penned the Hartley pilot script. He now acts as Sideway’s Director of Content Development, and lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Nymeria.
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MICHAEL HAMMER
Producer, CFO
Michael heads Sideway’s production operations. He oversaw the production of Sideway’s inaugural show Hartley, which included working with hundreds of actors, a dozen locations, and the logistics behind remote filming. Michael is currently developing a new Sideway show (codename “Happy Hour”), which has recently recorded a table read. When he is not producing content, Michael focuses his time and energy on his family, including his 17 year old twins. He is a trained chef and avid cookbook collector.
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