Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (38 page)

W
HAT
’ N
EW
?

Read
Chapters Seven
and
Eight
for ideas fresh from the trenches. The new portion of interviews with my former students (“Fourteen Years Later”) reveals how one of them made a connection through writing Webisodes for a car company. In
Chapter Eight
, Internet and international potentials are also explored.

L
IFE
A
FTER
F
ILM
S
CHOOL
: C
AUTIONARY
T
ALES
A
ND
S
UCCESS
S
TORIES

For the past fourteen years
I’ve followed one group of MFA students who happened to take my class in writing episodic TV drama. Initially, I intended only to bear witness to how careers begin. But after all this time, the reunions have led to a rare and unexpected longitudinal exploration of how the lives of seven writers evolved. First interviewed for
The Los Angeles Times
just months after they received their graduate degrees from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1997, I interviewed them again for
The Times
three years later, then four years after that for the first edition of this book published in 2005, and finally fourteen years after they graduated for this Third Edition.

In hindsight, their accomplishments and struggles now seem inevitable — which is not the same as saying that standing at the door to the classroom on their last day I knew for sure what would happen. It’s like looking at a seedling in my garden, knowing it could one day grow tomatoes, but I don’t know how many or how big, and that’s only if it survives; and that’s not a sure thing. These former students came from all parts of the country, from colleges ranging from Harvard to someplace you never heard of; not one of them had a relative in the business; not one of them was personally rich; no one just lucked into their jobs. They each worked for what they achieved, they each had some hard times, and they all survived.

Together, the four sessions form case histories that hint at what to expect as you begin writing for television. Most of all, I hope their stories give you hope: When the industry appears impenetrable, they remind you that you’re not alone. When the doors nudge open, they tell you what they did to walk through. And if they succeeded, maybe you can too.

T
HE
C
LASS
OF
’97

(The following article appeared in
The Los Angeles Times
, Feb. 8, 1998)

Reunion. Six months after graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, seven students from my advanced television writing seminar meet again in our former classroom. Reunions are bittersweet. Now we gather at night, the comforting predictability of school assignments and the company of hundreds of others taking the plunge into the industry with them, all gone. A few are thrilled to have professional assignments. Others, still mailing samples they wrote in school, trying to get agents, claim they’re not jealous. Right.

I’ve taught students like them for a decade, holding out the prospect that hour-long episodic drama in shows like
ER, NYPD Blue, Homicide, Law & Order, The X-Files
and others offer opportunities for the most incisive, challenging writing they’ll find anywhere. Now the industry is dotted with stars of previous classes — not just mine but from other USC professors. It’s a hot time for new TV writers.

The graduates gathered tonight understand the power they’d wield in television and feel responsible for what they give the public, quick to put down gender and ethnic stereotypes and relationships that don’t seem real. It’s an attitude not typical of earlier generations. Credit for it goes to the trailblazing series they’ve studied, and to living in a multi-cultural America very different from what was reflected in earlier decades of TV.

Drew Landis and Julia Rosen became writing partners at USC. Brought to the U.S. from South Korea by his minister father during the Amerasian adoptions in the 1970s, Drew worked in politics in Washington before entering the Graduate Screenwriting Program. Julia grew up in Los Angeles and made films that won festival competitions. Together, they speculated scripts for
ER, NYPD Blue, Early Edition, Party of Five, Frasier
, a drama pilot, and two features before graduating. That portfolio got them signed by The Artists Agency, a TV-movie deal, and a possible position on a new series. Credit all those sample scripts, and their certainty about television.

Drew: “An agent asked at one of our first meetings why we want to write for television. It’s because when I watch I love the connection to the continuing characters, and having experienced that, I want to translate it every week.”

Julia: “For me, it’s that feature films nowadays are comedies or spectacles. But you go anywhere in the United States and everybody is watching
ER
and they know all about those characters. The way to reach people and talk about real subjects and get to people’s hearts is television.

Wendy West wanted to write TV since she was a child. “I found an old diary, pink, with bunnies. I was excited to see what I did as a child. But when I opened it, I found pages and pages of ‘Today on
Alice
, Flo said kiss my grits’ — whatever was on TV each day.”

Her
X-Files
spec won her a staff writer position on an upcoming WB series, but it hasn’t been as she’d imagined. “I feel a little left out. My first script was not exactly what the show is. Working in the real world, you need to be a chameleon. That doesn’t mean losing your voice but you have to adapt to the style of the show you’re writing. So much of film school is spent trying to find your voice so it seems counterintuitive to think you should lose it somewhat. But only somewhat. I guess we’re waiting to see the stamp of a Wendy West script, but you can bet on someone falling in love or at least tripping over her own heart.”

Still hopeful, Wendy tells the group, “A good day is like our class for eight hours. One of the reasons I went into television is I like collaboration, knowing people are there to help you get through the outline. You’re not alone the way you are with a feature.”

That yearning for community echoes among them, all single, in their 20s. Gib Wallis wrote and performed plays off-Broadway and on London’s fringe before film school. Now he works as an actor while looking for a writing agent. He chose television because: “With features if they want somebody to rewrite you, how much of the original vision is left? With a TV show, even if you’re the youngest and you’re rewritten, they have to see you at lunch. You have writers working with writers so they understand.”

That’s his dream. But it’s a hard fit to the past months. “Right before graduation I sent out fifty query letters and to my surprise I got six meetings and I thought I’d hit the jackpot with people wanting to read my
ER
sample. They said give us several weeks. But every time I called I got this response of now is not a good time. Finally they wanted to hear back from me in July; only the TV staffing season ended in June. I told them I’d hoped they would have read it in time, and they said, oh, we’re glad we got your script but there’s no way we’re going to read it because we’re staffing right now. We’re trying to get jobs for the people we already signed. I felt there was this little window and I wasn’t able to get into it quite soon enough.”

Eric Trueheart graduated in English Literature from Harvard, but is equally frustrated since finishing his MFA. He wrote five spec scripts but “It’s extraordinarily difficult to get people to read … I’ve had a lot of time to think about what it means to be a writer.” While at USC, Eric was mentored by Glen Morgan and James Wong, then on
The X-Files
, now executive producers on
Millennium
. “They were great letting me look in on the process. But they’re so busy they haven’t read anything even though I wrote a
Millennium
.”

With television hard to crack, some graduates accepted jobs rewriting features, like Kelly Souders. Having grown up on a ranch in Missouri, she wrote fiction before entering the Graduate Screenwriting Program, where her feature thesis won highest honors. Kelly discovered “Without the episodic TV class the feature would have been a real struggle. I had to take someone else’s character in someone else’s story and put the structure together, and I learned that in episodic.”

She’s emphatic: “The quality is in television. I can’t tell you how many times I came out of a theatre and said I’m never going to a movie again. These big action things have no characters. It’s like marketing people put the film together. And then you watch
NYPD Blue
and
ER
and it’s the best writing I’ve seen.”

They long for believable characters and more of the spectrum of people in the real world. Wendy describes
Homicide
as “amazing” in its depth of internal issues among African-American characters. “The scenes between Andre Braugher and James Earl Jones were riveting — how Pembleton was conflicted over covering up to protect a black hero.”

Other students point to episodes on
ER
when Benton coped with the illness of his mother — how refreshing to see African-American women written with dignity. They’re aware the main cast includes Latinos in
Law & Order
and
Chicago Hope
, and Asian and Native Americans on
Star Trek: Voyager
.

Wendy agrees, “We have role models in TV we don’t have in features. It’s great to see women doctors sticking their hands into someone’s body to save his life. It’s not just this season. Believable women go back to Cagney and Lacey, who had real relationships — they weren’t just cops, or sex objects. Back then it was a big deal that women wrote that series. Probably they had to fight for it to be truthful.”

Not everybody is into the fight, at least, not right away. I see Brian Peterson around campus, no longer in jeans, wearing a tie. He took a job at the School until he has more scripts. “After graduating, you really have to figure out who you are again.” Heads around the table nod, understanding as Brian continues, “We were all zombies in the last month of school. We all felt so much was riding on our feature thesis, and we were supposed to start off the block with a big bang. I sent out my query letters and went home to Montana and regrouped. It turned out my feature wasn’t useful for television. A couple of agents called me back and said I loved your
ER
, it was great. And I said so? And they said so? So, where are your other TV scripts?”

It’s easier to return to the ideals of writing than cope with waiting. They retell moments from shows we studied like Dr. Greene losing a patient in childbirth on
ER
, a controversial issue in
The Practice
, gutsy innovations on
EZ Streets
, true relationships on
My So-Called Life
. Gib likes “shows to experiment with the narrative. Some of that is in
Ally McBeal
, interweaving her fantasies in a way that’s provocative.” Brian wants “a world I can see come to life like
Twin Peaks
that created its own world.”

Revisiting friends. Shared goals. Tonight it’s easier to get fired up about politicians who want to censor their art than deal with getting assignments that compromise it.

Eric argues, “In one of Bob Dole’s anti-TV campaigns, he complained about
NYPD Blue
, saying the last good cop show was
Dragnet. Dragnet
was a cartoon. If people want cartoonish versions of morality spelled out, they’re welcome to it. But the realistic dramas are supremely moral because they’re grappling with issues everyone is trying to grapple with, struggling to come up with moral answers to them.”

Kelly: “Television gives people a clear moral choice: the on and off button. I don’t watch certain shows, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be on. There are shows I could never be interested in because they don’t have enough honest reality. To me, that dishonesty is as damaging as violence.”

Left to right: Kelly Souders, Brian Peterson