Lunch Off the Lot: Michelle Ashford

“I cried every day,” Michelle Ashford says. “It was excruciating. When I finally got to the end, I wrote, ‘This f—ker’s over!’”

Nestled at a table in Akasha, a lively farm-to-table restaurant in Culver City, the Masters of Sex showrunner can’t help but laugh as she recalls her first painful attempt to pen a TV script. Then in her mid-20s, Ashford had recently quit her job as a writer’s assistant and was, she reports, both unsure of her talent and on a tight budget that left her “eating beans out of a can for six months.”

How times have changed.

On a Wednesday afternoon in early July, the Emmy-nominated writer-producer was just back from a vacation in the Galapagos Islands. “I was completely unplugged,” she says dreamily, over a beet salad and iced tea. “It was amazing.”

With the third-season premiere of her show less than two weeks away, the creator–executive producer was bracing herself for the reaction to the drama’s creative reboot, which includes an increased focus on the kids of famed real-life sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, as well as a four-year time jump in storytelling.

“It’s a lot for people to take in,” she allowed. “But if we end up telling the whole story [of Masters and Johnson], it’s, like, 30 years, so we have to move!” Especially since — if Ashford gets her wish — the period drama will conclude in a few short years: “If you ask anybody that does this, they’ll say, ‘My show has a natural life.’ I think the most we’ll get out of this is six seasons.”

Growing up in Claremont, California, Ashford was significantly less concerned with plotting out the future. “I was just kind of shapeless,” she says. “It was all about being social and having fun. I had a blast in high school. But I was such a shit student.”

She half-heartedly chose economics as a major in college and entertained the notion of becoming a lawyer. “I had a vision of myself in a suit, which is hilarious because I don’t own a suit now!” she says.

An elective course in TV ultimately inspired Ashford to change career paths. Her first writing-staff gig was on Fox’s 21 Jump Street, which paved the way for a number of other network jobs, from NBC’s Boomtown to CBS’s short-lived L.A. Doctors, where she met fellow writer-producer Greg Walker, her husband of nearly 17 years. (Together, they have two sons.)

But while her personal life was falling into place, her professional one was no longer fulfilling. “It’s very easy,” she explains, “to find yourself doing work that you don’t necessarily love in network television.”

What Ashford found herself increasingly drawn to was the rich dramatic material coming out of HBO at the time, including The Sopranos and Band of Brothers. “I remember watching both of those and going, ‘Oh my God, there’s another way,’” she says, before adding with a laugh, “I said to my agent, ‘I don’t care if I have to hook on Sunset Boulevard, I’m going to write the next HBO miniseries!’”

Her subsequent work on two of the cable giant’s fact-based minis — John Adams and The Pacific –- earned critical kudos and, in the case of the latter, an Emmy nomination. With Showtime’s Masters of Sex, she’s further burnished her reputation as one of TV’s premier adaptors of nonfiction material.

“I haven’t had to come up with a fictitious world in forever, and I love it,” says Ashford, who’s also cowriting HBO’s forthcoming Lewis and Clark miniseries (she’s also on the producing team, along with Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt). “There’s something so profoundly moving in writing about people who actually did real, huge things.”

With lunch finished, Ashford has a big challenge of her own to tackle back on the nearby Sony lot: breaking story for one of the season’s final episodes. Not that it’ll be all work and no play in the Masters of Sex writers’ room.

“Some people knit to relax. We’ve started coloring,” she confides. “If you go into the room, you’ll think it’s either the coolest or craziest thing you’ve ever seen because it’s covered with all these beautiful designs we’ve colored. They look like little pieces of art — or some weird psychedelic experiment!”