Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (14 page)

At AMC,
The Walking Dead
, a dramatic series about zombies, was showcased on Halloween after a week-long festival of the best feature films in the genre. For the staff involved in making it (writer/director Frank Darabont to the crew and everyone in between) it was a full-blown Halloween party, costumes and all.

So even though the show is no longer new to the people who worked on it for months, it seems new anyway because once the show is broadcast, it becomes public property, out of the creative cocoon. “Overnights,” which are quick national ratings, are on the showrunner’s desk the next morning. He’ll tell the staff to pay no attention to the numbers, just keep writing; and, indeed, lower-level writers are shielded from marketplace pressures, temporarily. But how can you not feel buoyant if the show is liked, or disappointed if you played to an empty house? Just remember, it’s not going to do any good to blame the network (look what they put us up against — of course we have no numbers), or blame viewers (they don’t appreciate us because they’re all… insert adjective), or blame your producer (he should’ve known the title sequence/opening scene/music/ actor/whatever wouldn’t work), or blame yourself (I have no talent). Hey, probably none of those are true. It takes time for a series to catch on. Assuming you really have 13 guaranteed on the air, and a few critics recommend the show in reviews, and the marketing people do their thing, and the audience does join you in Episode Two or Three, and they become involved in the characters — then:

At Halloween — the end of October — the showrunner gets the call from the network: You’ve been picked up for the “back nine.” You’ll have an entire first season for the series to grow and stake its turf. Breathe out now.

N
OVEMBER
T
HROUGH
M
ARCH

COMPLETING THE SEASON

When I used to work as a freelancer, I often made my whole year’s salary between October and February. By then enough of the season is in place so that some of the early tension is eased. Under an agreement with the Writers Guild, shows with full-season orders must give out two freelance assignments. These not only extend opportunities to new writers and those in “protected categories” (under-represented minorities or disabled, for example), but freelance scripts can also be auditions for the staff. They bring relief and fresh perspectives and stories to an exhausted staff. Or so the theory goes.

In reality, most shows are written entirely by the staff and the few outsiders tend to be friends or writers coming off cancelled shows. Still, go ahead and pitch a freelance episode in the fall or winter. It’s a good way to meet producers, and certainly a way to break in. (More about that in
Chapter Six
.)

In the absence of a written bible, if you’re a freelancer needing the rules of a series, my advice is watch it a lot and check the websites. If the series is so new that nothing can be found, and you’ve been invited in to pitch, the producer will messenger the pilot and some scripts to you. Maybe you’ll get ten minutes on the phone about their current story needs. Yeah, it’s tough, but if they like your writing, and you bring areas the show can use, someone will guide you a little once you have an assignment.

Writing continues steadily until all 22 shows are in final drafts. Don’t make Thanksgiving plans except dinner time. As for the winter break you had in school, you’re not going anywhere this year. You’ll have a few days off at Christmas and New Year’s. Or maybe you’ll be finishing a draft at home before the wrapping paper is off the floor.

Depending on how well your series is pulled together (and that depends largely on the skill of the showrunner), you’ll be slowing down at the end of February. In fact, your own episodes have probably been written, so you’re sticking around for revisions, production, and polishes of scripts by other writers. Even if you’re mostly done, follow everything through “post.” Not only is the series very much alive with new episodes airing every week, but you want to preserve your position for the next year.

If the first season was a resounding success, the showrunner will have early notice it’s been renewed, as happened to
The Good Wife
in 2010. But plenty of first-time series are uncertain down to the wire, just like pilots. It’s awful, from a writer’s point of view. You want to create a season-ender that entices viewers to watch in the fall, and yet if you’re not being picked up for a second season, the impulse is to go out bravely and close the story arc.

Something like that happened at the end of the first season of
Mad Men
. This is how I heard the story: Now, keep in mind that this cable show is off the network grid, so they were hearing news on a different timetable or the tale might not have unfolded like this. Anyway, the showrunner (Matt Weiner) thought
Mad Men
didn’t have a chance for a second season. At the point he planned the arc, it was so far ahead of announcements that he configured the episodes leading to the end of Don Draper’s core question of whether he could be a family man, loving and loved, not unknown and alone. In the original script, Don goes home to Thanksgiving and finds his family waiting for him, and the through-line of the series is resolved. The producers wrote it, shot it, packed it up and that was that.

Except it wasn’t. On the walk to the gallows, the award nominations started flooding in. Critical acclaim. People wanted more. But what more? As the industry tale goes, one of the interns on the staff (who later became a writer/producer herself) wrote a new scene. Don goes home and there’s the family waiting, just as in the early draft. But it’s in his imagination. The house is empty. Don sits alone on the stairs of his empty house. And tune in for next season because his troubles are only just beginning.

More often, the producer bets on his show and opts for the cliffhanger, while the staff hangs on their own cliff. This happens during:

A
PRIL

HIATUS

Vacation — yay! For a network series writer, spring is like summer and winter holidays rolled into a mass getaway. The hiatus might last three months, from late March until July, or be as limited as a month and a half — April to late May. If the staff is assured they’re coming back, this is a fling of freedom. If everyone’s worried, the agents sniff around for a jump to another show. In any case, the break is total. Many shows lock their offices and leave nothing but an answering machine; even the receptionist is gone — far away, after 40 weeks non-stop.

This brings us all the way back to where we started, as the cycle spins around and around and around.

W
HAT’S
N
EW
?

That traditional network paradigm is broadly accurate for, well, traditional networks. But in the alternate universe of cable television you’ll encounter different patterns. For example,
Deadwood
on HBO did 12 episodes per year, not 22. The entire season was written in winter and spring, so all scripts were finished before any production began. They started shooting around the end of July, which is actually similar to networks, but
Deadwood
’s next season didn’t begin airing until the following March, when many network shows were winding down.

Sometimes shows have a partial season — maybe as few as 8 episodes — then take a hiatus and come back months later for the rest of the season. The final “season” of
Lost
was trickled out over two years with a very long break in the middle. Everyone knew the series would resolve years of suspense in the final segments. The challenge was how to spin that out — long enough so excitement would build; not so long that people gave up. In other cases, seasons are split so a new show can be piloted in the slot of a successful show, hoping to build on the audience used to watching that channel at that time.

New paradigms include Direct TV which paid for the first run of
Friday Night Lights
and then re-ran the episodes on NBC. No doubt, someone is out there thinking of ways to configure a Web-based season that makes financial sense to the producers. And then there’s the seasonless world populated with years of episodes from every television era, sometimes downloaded (or bought) in the never-ending afterlife of a series.

Finally, it comes down to what you choose to create. In 2000, Showtime optioned a British series with the strange title,
Queer as Folk
. Everyone assumed the American version would be so diluted it would lose the guts that made it worth buying. After all, nothing like that had ever been done here. Then, one Sunday, writers Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, who had struggled to create television movies about gay life within network standards, happened to read about this option in a newspaper. They got in touch with Showtime, and said they’d do it… if they got complete creative freedom — unimaginable at a network. Not only did Showtime give them their freedom, but also a full 22-episode order. In the Writers Guild membership magazine
Written By
, Cowen and Lipman said, “The handcuffs had been removed; we’d been released from the prison of network television. And the question posed to any newly freed man was posed to us: ‘Now that you have your freedom, what do you plan to do with it?’”

In the future, you’ll be entering an industry whose long-established systems are no longer as certain as in the traditional model. The predictable cycles are changing, and new outlets are experimenting with different ways of making and delivering stories to an expanding audience. So ask yourselves a version of Cowen and Lipman’s question: Now that you’ll have choices, what do you plan to do with them?

S
UMMARY
P
OINTS

•  Creating a new TV show follows specific steps from concept to network sale.

•  Once on the air, a show also relies on definite steps of development from a pilot through writing and producing, to being renewed.

•  In the earliest stages, a show creator might write a format or pilot script in the hope of getting a greenlight to produce the pilot, which is a prototype for the series. The pilot together with a “package” competes with other new series for a time slot, known as a “pick up.”

•  A full 22-week traditional season would occupy the writing staff through an intense 40-week schedule before hiatus. Most new series get only “short orders,” though.

•  On cable stations, the seasons and production times may differ, but the general development process has the same creative components and opportunities for writers.

G
UEST
S
PEAKER
: C
HARLIE
C
OLLIER

P
RESIDENT
, AMC C
ABLE
TV

Pamela Douglas:
Once upon a time, basic cable was something you went to for reruns, or you didn’t go. All of a sudden AMC is up there with HBO and Showtime in terms of great drama. I’d love to hear how you got from there to here. You went counter-current because at the time
Mad Men
went on, the networks were still doing car crashes and trying to grab their audience by things that were as fast as possible;
Mad Men
is as slow as possible. How did this happen?

Charlie Collier:
I was fortunate to get here in 2006 when AMC had already set out on a path of “distinction.” My bosses, Ed Carroll and Josh Sapan, along with a talented team of tastemakers in original programming and development, had just come off of
Broken Trail
, AMC’s epic Robert Duvall-led miniseries. That success gave us the confidence to set the mission of taking our film library and adding to it quality originals; originals that can stand beside the films in a way that also speaks to a passionate movie viewer. And, of course, we partnered with Matt Weiner on
Mad Men
, who put on paper, for our first series, what has turned out to be one of the true epic stories on television.

If you look at the way we launched
Mad Men
, it illustrates our strategy of originals complementing our movies, and is a great example of our mission in action.
Mad Men
’s lead-in was
GoodFellas
, one of my favorite films. Loosely speaking, it’s about a group of men who think they’re above the rules. It’s a film that has themes that crossed over beautifully into its lead-out,
Mad Men
, also a story about a group of men to whom the rules do not apply; it’s shot on film, it’s cinematic, and it’s of the highest television quality in every way.

PD:
This is not just about
Mad Men
. Then you’ve got
Breaking Bad
and other great shows. How did you go forward?

CC:
With
Mad Men
, we had success with a period piece. As they say, “imitation is the sincerest form of television.” And, as such, many a period piece hit Development’s desks soon after the series premiered — stories of flappers and Motown and the ‘70s. But we didn’t want to become the “period piece” network. We were looking for a modern-day story that had some of the qualities of the films we curate and love. Not unlike
Mad Men, Breaking Bad
is led by an “auteur,” Vince Gilligan. Vince delivered a story that was so wonderful in its description of Walt White’s transformation, nuanced in every way; and we all fell in love with the script. We built the pilot with Sony, a great partner, just as Lionsgate is with
Mad Men
.