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Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show Page #8
I was, you know,
first in and last out.
And if you're doing that,
I think people
are a little more forgiving.
The first year of Buffy
was like, uh, was like
everybody was on ecstasy,
everybody hated everybody,
everybody loved everybody,
That was how I described it.
And my wife just quietly said,
"I think the crew wanted to go home."
There's a part of me
that has a very, very fond
sense of nostalgia for the show.
But, the weight of...
for those six years,
it never left me.
It was all that I thought about.
When I woke up in the morning,
I realized that I had been
thinking about it through the night.
was picked up, thinking that the show
would probably be canceled
after a few episodes.
And then I got married
three days after the season one finale.
And then I had my son
right around the time
that Locke and Jack were
going into the hatch.
So, those are...
The fact that I...
The benchmarks of my life
are measured by the show.
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
I did Lost for six years
and that was all I did.
My friend, Heather,
was an executive at ABC.
And she called me on a Friday night,
and she said,
"Do you wanna meet with J.J. on Monday?"
And I said, "yes,"
and in saying yes to that question,
I basically
completely changed my destiny.
And... And if I had said yes,
and then Heather had said to me
"Listen, this is gonna be
the next six years of your life.
"The word next to your name
when you die
"is going to be Lost.
No matter what you do,
"it's going to say Lost writer,
you know?
Um, how do you feel about that?"
I would have said,
"Forget it, I'm not taking the meeting."
The burnout rate
for showrunners is 100%.
100% of the people who do this
stop by their mid to late 50s,
whether in success or failure.
So that's the problem:
it's too good to quit,
and it's too hard to do.
If you said to them, the only way
that I'm gonna be able
to produce the next episode
is on a hospital gurney
with an IV running into my line,
they would say,
"Great. What kind of gurney
"do you like,
'cause here are three choices.
And what would you like in the IV?"
There's so much
literally to do every step of the way.
If we didn't have each other to do it,
I think we'd go crazy.
And there are showrunners...
single showrunners...
that run multiple shows, and I...
I literally
have no idea how that...
I actually think that you can't.
I mean, you have to
hand it off to someone...
We're having
a little conversation about this,
if you guys wanna leave for a minute.
they can run more than one show.
I actually don't think you can,
without giving up on one of them.
I mean, I'd love to
know how they did it.
The year I had three shows, um,
I had a lot of focus.
56 episodes, did them all.
I don't want to do that again.
But, there was a grandeur to it,
because it was the last year of Buffy,
so I couldn't drop the ball there.
It was the first year of Firefly,
so I couldn't drop the ball there.
And it was the fourth year of Angel
where I thought
everybody knows I'm gonna
drop the ball here,
so I can't drop the ball here
because that's where
they'll be looking for it.
And the emotion
that we were going through on Firefly,
which was terrible, but so bonding.
There is an element of,
once you get them all spinning
they kind of balance a little bit.
You can go from here
to here to here a little bit.
But, only for a certain amount of time,
and then you die of extreme old age.
Please tell me you got a warning.
What is this?
A documentary film?
If a show is in its third year,
it's a hit.
You can replace "behind the camera",
you cannot replace
"in front of the camera."
So, if there's a huge fight,
if you're not getting along
and it comes to who's gonna stay,
"The first year,
"they work for you,
second year, you're partners,
and the third year,
you work for them."
This is dressed up.
Monitored.
This is such a good idea.
Yeah, new shoe...
Are those new shoes?
Are those your...
Look how new they are!
They're triple-tied!
You're trying to look decent.
Triple-tied, those are triple-tied.
Uh-huh, you don't even know
Oh, okay, okay.
When I'm dealing with my cast,
the occasional hot tempers
is impossible to avoid.
If you're lucky,
the arguments that you have,
it's all based in character and story
and trying to do the best
show that you possibly can.
I try to focus on what's constructive,
'cause generally,
there's a note to be had
inside... inside a vicious
throwdown argument.
I really, you know,
try to not bring poison onto my set.
And if an actor has a reputation
of being poison
I don't bring 'em on.
I don't care
how f***ing good his work is.
I don't want somebody
undermining the energy
that we have on the set
that ultimately feeds
the work and,
and what the show is
and how... and how people
perceive the show.
Action!
He threatened her in front of you?
We were casting the Shield pilot.
I was very proud of that script.
And then actors started to come
in and read for Vic Mackey.
And all of a sudden,
it didn't sound so good,
and I started to get really
depressed about it.
And I remember one day,
our director, and I said,
"Maybe the script
isn't as good as I think it is."
And I remember the next day,
Michael Chiklis came in,
and he sat down,
and he had about a six
that just from beginning to end,
he was Vic Mackey.
And he got up and he left the room,
and I turned to Clark and I said
"No, I'm a great writer."
And it's a... It's
a good example of, you know,
when you feel so great
when you find that actor
that just embodies a role.
Cut!
Don't have to be so mean, Booth!
It's their job to do
what's written for them.
And of course,
they're invested in their characters
in a way that we're just not
because they spend
all their time with it,
whereas we're spending time
with seven characters
at a minimum.
On big things,
like whether or not the character
should be in a relationship,
well, we know where we're going.
Mm-hmm.
And they don't.
They trust us.
When they get a script,
usually we'll get a phone call
of them saying, "Wow, this is wild.
I mean, how am I supposed to do this?"
You know, and you're like,
"Well, what do you think?"
And then that's when
the conversation begins.
Our lead actress, for example,
she's hit these challenges
that even ourselves, we're like,
"Well, this is gonna take
a long conversation."
But, I mean, like nothing:
"Okay, guys, that sounds great,"
you know,
"Let me take a crack at it."
And you know, we're just
sitting here flabbergasted
because... I would have
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"Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 31 Aug. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/showrunners:_the_art_of_running_a_tv_show_18064>.
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