But, while she was directing an episode of Greys Anatomy Season 16, the state announced its shelter-in-place orders. Were on set in the middle of shooting a scene and the showrunner walked into the shot and said, Shut it down, Freeland told me over Zoom in January. So in the span of 15 minutes, I went from, I gotta film this scene and complete it before lunch, to Im in the car and calling my partner saying, We have to buy beans and rice and pasta right now.

This year of quarantine, however, has been oddly eventful for Freeland. She was hired to write a feature about basketball on an American Indian reservation, and she wrote a pilot script with Shaz Bennett for Ava DuVernays Sovereign, a TV drama chronicling the lives of an Indigenous family struggling to control the future of their tribe. Last year, the team pitched and sold the pilot to NBC via Zoom, making Sovereign the first Native American family drama to be developed for network television. Although the series is still in its early stages, Freeland, 40, is aware how rare the opportunity is to bring this story to prime-time television.