By Robin Whittaker
If you haven’t yet watched “Reasonable Doubt,” now’s the time to catch up.
The Hulu legal drama stars Emayatzy Corinealdi as Jax Stewart, a whip-smart Los Angeles defense attorney who challenges the justice system as fiercely as she navigates the turbulence of work, family, and her own complicated personal life. It’s a series driven by bold choices, both on screen and behind the scenes.
With Season 3 having premiered in September, I spoke with members of the show’s post-production sound team to find out what it’s like crafting the audio world of a series that’s unapologetically female-forward, from its storylines to its creators — to your author, one of the music editors.
The show was created by Raamla Mohamed, a powerhouse writer and showrunner, and her influence resonates across the production pipeline, especially in post. At the helm of the sound team is Danika Wikke, whom members may remember from the CineMontage Q2 2024 cover story on “Only Murders in the Building.” At press time, Wikke had the rare distinction of being sound supervisor for all three of Hulu’s top streaming shows.
Once Danika locks the edit, her mixes head to the dub stage. There, dialogue and music mixer Colette Dahanne takes over, alongside sound effects/Foley/background mixer Jason Dotts. It’s a true team effort, one with a notable number of women in key roles.
Music editing is led by me and Maximilian Rubell, with music supervision from Jen Malone and Whitney Pilzer, and Sarah Chapeck coordinating. Overseeing it all is co-producer Aida Kattan, backed by her all-women post team: associate producer Karyna Bhinvatdhana, post coordinator Bri Worthy, and post PA Chay Crumble.
Recently, I spoke with Danika, Colette, and Aida about the layered audio landscape of “Reasonable Doubt” and what it takes to bring justice to the mix.
Robin Whittaker: Danika, tell us a little about your process. You do a lot of different shows.
Danika Wikke: Getting all the elements to the mix stage involves the same steps, but obviously the content is different. Raamla really knows what she wants to hear, and music plays a noticeably big part in this show. We do a spotting session before we really get started on anything. That’s the process in which we watch the episode together and discuss what Raamla wants. We talk about all the different elements involved; what we want to hear or not hear in a specific scene, etc. We talk about the dialogue and whether it’s clean enough or needs ADR. Sometimes there is a need for discussion if, say, a scene was cut down or removed, and we now need to record an ADR line to make sense of the storyline. For example, when we are in the therapist’s office, it is a room high up in a building. It should sound different from when we are down on street level, but we still need some sounds to poke through here and there to keep us in that space. It’s a balancing act.
Then there is the music. The show’s composers are the famed artists Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad [newly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest].
Robin Whittaker: Aida, your job involves keeping a lot of balls in the air. We only deal with the sound and music side of things, but you are also dealing with visual effects, color, and I don’t even know what else. How do you do it?
Aida Kattan: Post actually starts in prep, before the show even goes into production. We have to set up all the vendors. We also plan out the dailies workflow with production so we’re ready for the footage to come in. We join the production prep meetings and break down the script with all the department heads to know what will be needed from post and budget, accordingly.
Once production begins and the crew starts shooting, the editors get going. We try to anticipate their needs by searching for stock [pre-recorded music licensed for media use] based on the script, but we’re on standby to find other options or provide them with anything else they might need. Jen and Whitney are fantastic; they always sent the scripted needle drops to the editors early, so that was one less element to chase down.
Then there’s everything else in terms of picture and sound finishing: online, color, visual effects, ADR, mix, etc.
There are always multiple things happening simultaneously between prep, production, and post. The calendar becomes my best friend; it’s all about the deadlines and knowing exactly where you are in the process on each episode. To keep track of it, you really depend on your team; everybody has their own list of duties and helps keep the machine running.
Robin Whittaker: Colette, I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but we both lived and worked in the UK at the same time. What are some of the workflow differences between the two countries?
Colette Dahanne: When I was in London some 20 years ago, liquid lunches were popular.
Joking aside, mixers in England back then seemed to be full-time employees of post-production houses. It was a bit of an adjustment to be freelance when I moved to the States.
Also, here in the United States, the union really protects you, whereas in the U.K., it was pretty much nonexistent.
Robin Whittaker: Go union! And Colette, how did you get into the business?
Dahanne: Growing up, I always appreciated music and film. I studied film and TV in France, then I did a university exchange in London. My mom is English, so it was going back to my roots, too, in a way. Then, when I finished university, I felt like they didn’t really focus on sound in a practical way. It was all theoretical. So I did an audio engineering course in England. But it’s funny: the course was all music, music mixing, music recording, and nothing to do with film.
After that, I must have sent my resume to a hundred different places that had anything to do with sound. My first interview was at De Lane Lea Studios, a major film post-production house in Soho London. At the interview, I was given a tour of the studio, which was so amazing, as this was my first glimpse into this world. I was shown their Foley stage. They had so many props! And they lifted rugs, and there were different surfaces for recording footsteps. They also showed me Studio One, which was this big movie theatre with a console big enough to accommodate three mixers. My jaw dropped. I got the gig there as a runner.
One of my duties as a runner was making tea and coffee for clients, which, after five years of study, made me think “hmm…”. But what it actually taught me, which is really important, is that, in the end, what we do is service the industry.
Wikke: Your goal is to please your client, and everyone has a different aesthetic.
Dahanne: After a few months as a runner, I began learning the ropes of mixing at De Lane Lea, assisting other mixers and eventually becoming a mixer myself. After I moved to the United States in 2006, I began doing much more sound effects editing and sound design, and I learned to mix in the box [mixing completely digitally, in a digital workstation with software plug-ins], where the lines between editing and mixing are blurred.
So I not only do mixing: I cut sound effects, I do dialogue editing. For me, it’s all sound. I’m fortunate to wear different hats, and I love being versatile and adaptable. So I can do a lot of work remotely from where I live in Mammoth Lakes.
There are challenges, of course, with living in a resort mountain town. For example, when visitors come for weekends and holidays, as a local, you need to get all your groceries ahead of time. And there is snow removal in the winter. But I live relatively close to LA, a 4-to-5-hour drive, so I can easily come back to mix on a show.
Robin Whittaker: Aida, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into post?
Kattan: I was interested in working in film and TV but didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do within the industry, so I tried a few things before I landed in post. I moved to LA midway through college and graduated from USC as an English major, so it felt natural to pursue a job in development.
I worked at a couple of smaller production companies for about eight years but eventually decided that the pace was too slow for me. I wanted to see the fruits of our labor rather than spend years on a project that might never see the light of day. So I left development to work in production, mostly on indie films and shorts, as a script supervisor and doing other miscellaneous jobs.
While I loved my time on set, it still wasn’t quite right for me. I got my next opportunity when one of my old bosses got hired to run a new network and offered me a job in promo. I enjoyed it and had a great five-year run in that department until, sadly, the network shut down.
I decided to make an effort to get into scripted television, a longtime passion that was always out of reach and seemed impossible to break into. I emailed a friend who was an assistant editor on a show to get some advice and insight into her world. She reached out within a month to say that a post coordinator position had opened up on that show, so I applied and got it. I’ve been in post ever since and haven’t looked back.
Robin Whittaker: How did you get into the union?
Wikke: At the beginning of everyone’s career, getting into the union is such an enormous thing. And then you’re in and working, and you forget how hard it was. I don’t remember the number of days you needed in a certain amount of time, but whatever it was, I had the hours. I had a steady editing gig at a non-union reality house. But they were being less than helpful in helping me achieve my goal of getting on the roster. In a very last-minute turn of events, I was able to get my payroll company to verify my hours and that got me on the roster with Contract Services. I joined the union shortly after that.
Robin Whittaker: Besides being so woman-centric, what makes this show different?
Danika: The show has some spunk to it. The overall vibe is chill. And also because Raamla welcomed jokes.
Colette and Jason would put jokes into the mix, and we would play them during our playback. Some jokes would be bold and others more subtle, but always perfectly timed. Some showrunners are not as playful when it comes to their mixes, but Raamla is.
Dahanne: By Season 2, she expected a couple of Easter eggs for every episode. And for the last episode, Raamla requested that two of our jokes stay in the mix; they went on air!
Whittaker: This is the most women on a stage that I’ve worked with. Most of the time, there are one or two ladies, but the balance is always less than 50%. This show was 75%, if not more. Have you seen a change in the last few years?
Dahanne: Well, when I first studied audio engineering, I was the only woman out of seventy students taking the final exam. When I first started, I could count female mixers on one hand. But I feel there has been a lot of progress since then, and in the last five years, I have seen so many more women mixers in the field.
