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Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show Page #3
as a English as a second
language teacher
at a Japanese school in Van Nuys.
But I thought, you know,
six months to a year.
Six and a half years later,
I could not get arrested.
Um, everything I tried,
uh, nothing happened.
We'll get, uh, the full outline
by the 22nd out to everybody.
Um, notes or no notes,
I wanna send you out
the script on the 23rd.
And then we are in the end
game of the final episode.
I'm sure everything will be great.
They'll love it.
I was 33 before I had my first
professional writing job.
After four seasons
on this teen sex comedy,
I was desperate to get into,
like, mainstream network.
I took my favorite
show on TV at the time,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and I wrote a spec.
That got into Joss Whedon's
people's hands,
and I spent the next, I think,
And then I finally got a call
that Joss Whedon wants to see you.
That was when I felt like my
career has really started.
During the dark days,
the thought would pass my mind
about giving up, but honestly,
it was the only thing I felt
really passionate about.
It was the only thing that I
thought I could do really well.
Part of the main job description
in the writer's room is,
you're the guy that has to come
in and sh*t on everybody,
which I actually hate doing...
But are very good at.
Uh, well, you know, I try,
I try to do it
with a wink and a smile.
One of the things that
I've seen go horribly awry
to not make a decision.
Um, you need to make a decision.
Whether it's good,
whether it's bad,
whether everybody agrees with it.
You gotta make a decision.
There are two approaches
I think you have to be careful
about when you do TV.
One is, to not know it all
where your show is gonna go.
And then, I would say
is to really think you do know
where your show is gonna go.
What I mean by that is,
there are some shows where they go,
"We have a five-year plan.
We know exactly what's gonna happen."
Well, I'm always suspicious of that,
really hard to come up with,
and if you come up with
five seasons' worth of ideas
in the last two months,
then my guess is,
they aren't the greatest
ideas in the world,
because, I know the shows
I've worked on,
it's taken us a lot longer
to work it out.
At the same time,
if you don't have any plan at all,
and you've got a pilot
that makes an entertaining
hour of television
but you don't really know
where it leads
and where it goes to,
in big trouble.
My job, when I'm producing
a show that I haven't created,
is to help the creator
and the showrunners do their job.
who created Person of Interest,
someone who had done
such incredible work in film
and was just dying to tell the story
as a TV series,
and along with Greg Plageman,
do an extraordinary job
running that series.
My job is to really kind of
support them in what they need.
So, rather than being
someone who sort of calls them
out of the blue, you know,
I would much rather
be someone who is there
when they need me to be there,
but not someone who is
trying to impose ideas on them,
because really, it's their show.
A showrunner friend of mine
who asked me
when I was pitching the show
in the first place,
he's like,
"Yeah, what's episode six?"
That was the big question:
like, do you have a franchise?
Is there an idea that's
durable with the show?
And I think you and I
had to generate...
We were in New York...
and the pilot was a f***ing disaster.
I mean, front to back,
across the board,
it was just, you know,
anything that could go wrong
went wrong.
What did you guys come up with?
What are you, what are you...
are you gonna be able
to tell a story of the week
and a bigger story.
For me, it was answered in
episode seven.
I think that was the defining
moment for us in the season.
We're coming to it saying,
we're gonna get f***ing bored
if it's just gonna be this every week.
That's not what we signed on for,
that's not what we wanted.
And the only way for people
to really feel like the show
has any stakes
is for our guys to lose,
for our guys to f*** it up.
... between a stand-alone...
There was some resistance to it,
but there was no win
at the end of the show,
which is the network's big thing.
It's like, well...
our guy lost.
- It's a known goal.
Yeah.
But the twist was so great,
and that threw down the gauntlet
and said that's the kind
of show we're gonna be.
And that was the closest we had
to sort of a creative argument
with the network...
not to talk out of school.
I think we
were successful in the pilot
in making exactly what we wanted.
You know, we made a thing
that's really funny,
really wicked, really filthy,
and managed to take a good swing
at the financial services
business while we did it,
which was really fun.
If I could keep that kind of balance
going within the show
and not just go for
although, love a good poo joke...
then we'll have won.
We haven't brought any scripts in yet.
We're just bringing...
We brought our first outline in yesterday,
which was Karen's, which was amazing.
We're working on episode seven
so you wanna just keep, uh...
One has high hopes.
I wanna make a great piece of work.
Um, whether I can accomplish
that, I have no idea.
Matt Carnahan has
I like the combination of
profane and soulfulness.
It had elements of satire
about American business
that sort of felt like
unique territory for comedy.
All of our shows
run slightly differently.
the scripts of The Borgias.
Tom Kapinos writes
all the scripts of Californication.
I think, in truth,
House of Lies is still defining itself.
It's run more traditionally
with a showrunner and a writing staff.
Yeah, job security is a punch line
in our profession.
Our entire well-being is in jeopardy.
We don't own the white boards.
You know,
they can cart 'em off tomorrow.
I had no real career path
planned out, I was just...
if you offered me a job,
I would take it.
So you look at my rsum,
and it's just all over the place.
I don't think you could figure
out what I was doing.
That was a really tough show for me.
That is not my world, not my milieu.
and I think, consistently,
they are like the lowest rated
fan favorites in the series,
and I totally... you know,
I cop to that freely. I just...
Yeah, I should not have been
writing that show.
The main thing that David tried
to impress upon us as writers
was to always be entertaining.
I actually have a sign
in my own writer's room
that just says, "be entertaining."
So, if you think about The Sopranos,
it was funny, it was violent,
there was great music,
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"Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 Aug. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/showrunners:_the_art_of_running_a_tv_show_18064>.
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