Christa Miller is well known for her roles on television from The Drew Carey Show to Cougar Town and, most recently, Apple’s hit series Shrinking. But she’s landed her first Emmy nomination for her work behind the camera, as the music supervisor on Ted Lasso.

Miller doesn’t play a role on Ted Lasso, but she’s more accustomed to doing double duty, as she did for Scrubs, Cougar Town, and now Shrinking. “When I’m in a show and I’m doing the music, the timing works out perfectly,” she says. “I have time before to prep. I can listen to music in my car and figure it out with all the characters and scenes. And then afterwards, we are usually wrapped for the season when they start really editing.”

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But Ted Lasso was not a show she was ever going to appear in. When the show’s cocreator—and Miller’s husband, with whom she shares three children—Bill Lawrence asked her to take on the role of music supervisor, she discovered she’d be working closely not only with co-music supervisor Tony Von Pervieux, but with cocreator and star Jason Sudeikis too. “He has great music taste, and he was very specific about a lot of the music choices,” Miller says.

Miller, who fell in love with music at a young age (“I was always the dorky person, but I had the best mixtape that everyone wanted,” she says), had originally thought that the UK-set Ted Lasso would lean heavily on the music of British bands. But Sudeikis brought in his own taste to create a blend that perfectly parallels the show’s story of an American coach traveling across the pond to coach a British football team. “It’s cool to work with someone that has a different music sensibility than you do,” she says. “I know his music, but it’s not music that I normally work with.”

As the series grew in success and popularity, they were able to get bigger names and songs onto the show. Nominated for Ted Lasso’s series finale, “So Long, Farewell,” Miller and Von Pervieux are especially proud of the original songs they landed for the third and final season, including Ed Sheeran’s “A Beautiful Game,” which is produced by Max Martin. “They were both fans of the show,” Miller says of the pair, who are also nominated for an Emmy for original song. The song is played as the team watches an inspiration video during halftime that then leaves them crying on the field—and lets the audience laugh. “It was such a perfect placement for a song because that’s what you want: If you can make someone cry, then it’s really funny.”

Miller prefers to feature songs in their entirety instead of snippets—“I only really want to use songs that I love and that I think are great”—and says the real magic happens when you pair a great song with a great scene. “The goosebumps are when you’ve matched a special song with the scene properly that’s not too on the nose and that’s different than you thought it would be,” she says.

With Ted Lasso now wrapped up, Miller has been planning what the music for the second season of Shrinking may sound like, once it can get going after the strikes. Miller, who also stars on the show that was created by Lawrence, already feels like she’s got one hit song ready for it, a song called “Not Strong Enough” by Boygenius. “We’ve been just listening to it on repeat and it’s great,” she says. “I know it’s perfect for Shrinking. I just don’t know where.”

Shrinking also gives her that balance she craves of acting and doing music supervision at the same time. On the show, she plays the neighbor of Jason Segel’s character, who has a tendency to insert herself into her neighbor’s life. “It’s more fun for me to do a show that I’m in because I use music in my acting,” she says. She’s proud that the first season of Shrinking, which features songs by Arcade Fire and Phoebe Bridgers among others, was able to nail “all the feels” but that it never “felt too sad.”

Working on hit shows gives her the ability to recruit the most massive songs and musical talent, but it’s the discoveries she treasures. Back on Scrubs, for example, she helped get the first song Joshua Radin ever wrote, “Winter,” onto the series. And she put an early Sheeran song on Cougar Town. With Shrinking, she placed a song by Rosa Linn on the show just before the singer gained momentum and went on tour with Sheeran. “I know if I love a song and think it’s a magical song,” Miller says, “and then it’s put to a great team, I just know people will start buying it.”