Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (22 page)

A new show requires a lot of effort because it’s new guys and new concepts, but it’s always fun with a good new show because you get to turn over cards. It takes about two years, maybe three, to turn over all your major cards in a new show — gross character revelations in a drama —
ohhh
, he’s a drunk;
ohhh
, she’s gay. After three years, the job changes, the task of maintaining a show is a different task. So at the beginning, when everything’s working right, it’s huge fun because it’s invention.

PD:
You’re developing several new shows for both basic and premium cable. Would you walk us through the process? When you decide, okay this one is interesting, what do you actually do? Pick up a phone and call somebody….

SB:
Ideas come in so many ways. When you do what we do, you become an idea machine. I have a very close friend in the music business and we were joking about how the music business is just imploding. There is no music business any more. Discs are throwaways now — they exist only to promote the concerts. We were bemoaning all of that. Even the television business, it’s all sort of upside down, trying to figure it out. So I said if you really want to make a buck, we’d start a religion. He said if you’re going to start a religion, the way to do it is Michael Jackson. We were joking, you know. And I said, obviously you can’t do Michael Jackson. But I said there’s a television series in that idea. We laughed about it. Then I called Chris Gerolmo, who is a song composer and musician as well as a screenwriter, and I said I want to talk to you about a project. So he came over and I pitched this thing to him. I said let’s spend a couple of weeks trying to figure this thing out. So he and I and another person sat here over the course of a couple of weeks and came up with a way of pitching it.

PD:
Did you come up with the characters? The world? The pilot story? What exactly did you come up with?

SB:
We came up with the single main character, our guy: who he is, what his background is. We came up with themes, basic thematics. I have to know what a series is fundamentally about. Then we wrote — not a scene-by-scene outline — but a shape. We came up with a beginning, middle, and end. And once we had that we whipped it into ten pages with a hook, I thought this was Showtime — that’s where this should go.

PD:
Did you think about casting or locations or different episodes?

SB:
We thought about episodes. But since we didn’t want to waste our time or Showtime’s time if they were not fundamentally interested, I had my agent call to just take their pulse. And they expressed an interest.

PD:
How much of that is because of your name and how much is the idea itself?

SB:
It’s the idea. If they weren’t interested I didn’t want to put them in an awkward position, or me. So we went over there. We didn’t bring anything written. We pitched it. They bought it there in the room.

PD:
When you say they bought it, what does that mean?

SB:
They committed to the pilot script. Then we went and expanded all our pages into a real outline. We sent that over there. It’s not a typical kind of show, so they wanted to get a sense of its shape. That’s legitimate. By the time we gave them pages, we were all very comfortable with it. They had a couple of notes that were smart. So we made the revisions and they said let’s go. Chris Gerolmo actually wrote it.

What’s really interesting in the world of cable is that it’s a much tougher sell. It’s not like the broadcast networks that develop thirty pilots. When a cable network develops something, they won’t push the button to begin with unless they’re genuinely enthusiastic, and so while it’s harder to get them to bite, once they bite you have a much better chance of actually getting a pilot made and possibly getting a series made.

PD:
How does that compare with your other experiences in television?

SB:
I worked on my first television series in 1969. So I have worked on shows in six decades. So when you really look at the life span of television… I started work at Universal in 1966 while I was in college. The irony of it is that the system I started in evolved and came apart at the seams and resurrected itself and today is a version of the system I started in. Television in the ‘60s was run by a bunch of studios. They were the sole suppliers for “the big three networks.” For everybody it was a license to print money.

When you worked at the studio you were essentially a hack working on assignment. We were all salaried employees under contract. And that’s the way it was until the very late 1970s when by virtue of the investor tax credit there sprang up a bunch of wonderful entertainment companies like Lorimar. That’s when we got into an extraordinary golden age of independent company television, in which writers became empowered.

And then they rescinded all the “syn-fin” rules and these five major media giants began to vertically integrate themselves. And it became a contemporary version of what it was when I started: giant five entities control every aspect of the business from top to bottom and killed the independents. They killed innovative programming because these are all bean-counters for whom the only thing that matters is the bottom line. Everything became homogenized and the most powerful people in the equation became the executives.

PD:
What do you think TV is going to look like in five years?

SB:
As a business model … Television isn’t going away. It’s still a good business. The interface between television and cell phone and computer in the next few years is going to be seamless. So the Internet, which everyone is spending a lot of time trying to evolve into an actual creative medium … I don’t think it is a creative medium, I think it’s a platform. It’s a bridge. But what’s going to happen is the Internet will become another form of television. Once all these things are interconnected this will just become a resource.

I spent about a year and a half coming up with ideas for the Web, not so much original programming as interactive websites like Metacafe. I was interested in the area because it was something different. Some smart guys from Internet companies said we’ll share revenue with you 50/50, but we’re not producers, and we’re not going to finance any production. Who wants to do that? It’s a mud pit. Whether these entities are willing to use their assets to become production companies is way in the future. Nobody knows how to monetize the Internet.

Generally speaking, the most interesting evolution in the business is the dual-stream cable model. We’re getting subscription programming and basic cable. That’s where a lot of the interesting shows are coming from.

PD:
You don’t see the Internet as altering the model?

SB:
I see the Internet as ultimately becoming a delivery system. … I tend to think it’s unlikely that we’ll ever go back to an environment in which small independents will flourish.

PD:
So why do you do television instead of movies?

SB:
Easy. Easy, easy, easy. It’s a better medium. Even with all the bullshit of television, it’s still a more provocative medium than the movie business. The movie business is basically appealing to kids and cretinous teenagers. That’s essentially what the movie business is. Very few are, in any serious way, committed to making thoughtful, provocative medium to low-budget movies that fill a real niche in the moviegoing experience. Everybody’s looking for
Spider-Man
and
Batman
and all those other men, and big high concept. Those are fun and, in the summertime, kids flock to them, but that’s not what I do.

Believe me, for any writer, you’re going to have more fun and learn more and be more productive writing in television than in the movies. You’re not going to have to share credit with 15 other idiots. You’re not going to be abused and disrespected by 15 jerks in suits who have too much time on their hands and all they want to do is eat lunch. Television is a job — you got to get it on, you got to get it out, the writers are going to write their scripts, they’re going to get on the tube. And that’s great. If you’re lucky enough to get on a successful show, you’re going to do more credited writing in two years than most movie writers do in a lifetime. So it’s a much more satisfying medium for writers.

PD:
Would you like to share a bit of advice for students in film schools who are thinking about writing for television?

SB:
Go to medical school. Not to be a doctor, go to medical school, so that when you go back into television you’ll have something to write about. Have a life. It’s my one beef with most young writers. If you want to be a director or producer, that’s one thing. Those are skills you can learn. But, to be a writer, you got to have something to write about. Not that everybody doesn’t, we’ve all lived lives, but when you’re 21, you know, you haven’t lived much of a life unless you’ve had an extraordinary experience to write about.

Unfortunately, most really young writers form their sense of life from watching television so what you end up getting is this sort of “Xerox” of life which is never the substitute for the real thing. So I always tell students, pursue your dream, but in the meantime, get a real job and have a real life.

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POTLIGHT
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CSI: M
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Ann Donahue

CSI
is “the most successful franchise in television history,” according to Les Moonves, president of CBS, the network that broadcasts the shows. With an original series flourishing season after season and three chart-topping progeny,
CSI: Miami
,
CSI: New York
,
CSI: Los Angeles
, not to mention off-network reruns, the franchise is inescapable, not that the tens of millions of viewers are trying to escape. When all the other “procedural” series are added, this genre, broadly defined, describes most of the hour drama series on broadcast networks (though not on cable).

Why?

Ann Donahue, co-creator and showrunner of
CSI: Miami
said it’s because, in a way, procedurals are simple. People want stories resolved, to see the solutions that aren’t really available in life, to be assured at the end of each episode that the bad guy gets caught.

Not that
CSI: Miami
is simple — the investigations have multiple twists, the science is intricate, and the forensic visuals are startling. But from the viewpoint of dramatic construction and the intention of the series, the format is predictable. That brings us to a general definition of “procedurals”: shows that crack their cases each episode, where the emphasis is on the puzzle more than arcs for the continuing cast. Investigation — crimesolving — is key in
CSI
and other police/detective procedurals, though
House
is an example of a medical procedural that also uses a succession of clues to reveal the culprit (in that sense, a disease), and legal procedurals (such as
The Practice
,
Boston Legal
,
The Good Wife
) use the twists of discoveries and trials to win their cases.

Procedurals have been around since the era when only three networks existed and they all required closure on every show every week. In the 1990s,
Law & Order
infused the genre with serious issues, “ripped from the headlines.” But
CSI
raised the entertainment ante when it appeared in 2000. Anthony Zuiker, a writer who had no television experience at the time, had done tremendous research, even ridden with crime scene investigators in Las Vegas, to create the pilot. The network brought in experienced producer-writer Carol Mendelsohn, who in turn brought in Ann Donahue, who had won an Emmy for
Picket Fences
and had worked at Steven J. Cannell Television at the same time as Mendelsohn.

From the beginning,
CSI
was a complicated procedural with science that none of them knew and inserts showing incised flesh pierced by bullets (later dubbed “meat shots”). They had five technical advisors and had to figure out how to write the exposition and hide it.

Mendelsohn told
Written By
magazine that their fidelity to fact continued as the series grew. The three executive producers searched newspapers for accounts of murders that inspired plots, and boned up on foren-sics. They went on to create the
CSI
style using super close-ups of microscopic evidence and unusual visual and sound techniques that dramatized changes of perspective, passage of time, or mood. Mendelsohn said, “The minutiae are the real essence of
CSI
. The interesting stuff is the real facts.”