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,

eight weeks chewing my nails.

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

with other shows is

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

the other worrisome thing

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,

because these ideas are

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,

I think you're gonna be

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.

But people like Jonah Nolan

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

and starts to mandate stuff

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...

The larger question of,

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

the poo jokes every time...

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

a great sense of language.

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.

Neil Jordan writes almost all

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...

My career strategy was,

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.

I wrote three of them,

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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