ANAHEIM, Calif. — Pop star and actor Sabrina Carpenter has had quite a year: she debuted a No. 1 album on the Billboard Top 200 (which landed her nominations in the Grammy Awards’ four big categories), completed her first arena tour (which sold out in North America), opened for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour 25 times and was granted an unprecedented unlimited budget for her Netflix special, “A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter.”

OK, that last one was a nonsensical one-liner baked into Carpenter’s special, now streaming on Netflix.

“It was definitely a joke,” said Jason Sherwood, production designer of the special, in a phone interview. “I do a lot of stuff in live entertainment, and there is always a pretty fixed and finite budget, and this was no different.”

Sherwood, a two-time Emmy Award-winning designer for television, concerts, tours, installations, plays and musicals, has worked on several stage design projects. His stage design has set the ambiance for major stars such as Camila Cabello, Elton John and Janelle Monáe, and he also designed the production for “Rent Live” on Fox, where he earned his first Emmy.

When he was approached to produce an old-school holiday variety special with a comedic undertone, it felt like a perfect fit. His background in theater, television and design informed his collaboration with the production team and the show’s star.

“Sabrina is the kind of artist who has a clear visual identity, and she’s always working inside of a certain pop culture pot of references, bringing them up and reimagining them through her lens,” Sherwood said. “It felt right up my alley, just on a personal level, because of my interests. Every year, on Christmas morning, my family and I watch ‘White Christmas,’ so there are so many little Easter egg ideas and aesthetics that I brought in from that movie to this particular project.”

In “A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter,” viewers are shown two worlds: one that allows fantasy to reign free and another that gives fans a somewhat fictional peek behind the scenes of what it looks like for one of Carpenter’s larger-than-life performances.

“We developed a creative vocabulary between the two worlds,” Sherwood said. “There’s a moment in the special where we pan over to the television and zoom in on the TV, then we go into the TV, and then we’re doing a musical number. It became sort of this device to toggle between moments that felt grander and bigger and then moments that felt more intimate or more comedic.”

During his meeting with the production team and Carpenter, they discussed the different elements they could draw from, including Christmas classics, like “The Andy Williams Christmas Show” and “The Judy Garland Christmas Show.”

The team also studied the living room sets of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “Friends” to understand what makes a set feel homey. A staple of every real-life home is a living room that looks like it has been lived in, and that’s what they went for on set. The special’s set includes a Christmas-decorated living room with a cozy fireplace, a kitchen with a retro pink fridge, a Betty Crocker cake stand and a fruitcake, a nod to the holiday dessert and Carpenter’s holiday EP.

One of the more visually striking elements of the production was its references to Golden Age Hollywood films like “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” The opening scene, set on a red-tiered cake platform stage, is a nod to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” where dancers in tuxedos surround Marilyn Monroe. The color scheme is mostly the same, but instead of being surrounded by men in suits, Carpenter’s tuxedo-clad dancers are all women. The tiered cake is also a direct reference to director and musical choreographer Busby Berkeley.

The guest performances weren’t booked before the set was complete. Still, Sherwood and his team anticipated that each special appearance would need a cultivated space that felt genuine to each individual. For Chappell Roan, a longtime friend of Carpenter, Sherwood and his team wrestled with what that scene would entail. The pop stars are both stadium and festival headlining acts, so they could have easily done a grand performance on the grand staircase behind the tiered cake, but instead, the team opted to go for a more intimate setting.

“We decided to take the house and trash it and make it look like it’s the end of the night after a great party,” Sherwood said. “We took that old-school television set and ran an 8-bit lyric video for George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’; we gave them corded microphones. It gave the set a new energy and also felt like them. It also allowed them to have a playful and authentic dynamic by singing a song together and having a good time at the end of a long night.”

Sherwood is proud of the final product, which was shot over a quick five weeks over the summer at Sunset Gower Studios in Los Angeles at a time that is the polar opposite of winter and Christmas.

“It was strange to be in a Christmas mindset that early in the year, but it was satisfying to work with an artist like Sabrina during her big moment,” he said. “Our first day on set was the day that her album went number one on its release week. It was a very special thing to get to work with an artist in the middle of a time when people are excited to hear from her.”

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