"It's a Good Way To Care For Your Audience."

IT MAY SEEM like embarrassing fanboy stuff, namechecking Shawn Ryan two days running, but for this one, I have the reflexive link-love loop of Jaime Weinman to thank. There is no earthly reason not to love and read The A.V. Club religiously, but Noel Murray's interview with Shawn Ryan is front-and-centre the best nuts and bolts interview I've read about the biz in awhile.

In fact, to Playback or the Banff TV Festival or anybody else organizing a "master class" or "interview" for an industry crowd (Ie: not the public) THIS is the type of drill down questioning your audience wants; not softballs they could read in a USA Today profile.

Ryan thinks very, very similar things about the process of running a show that I do -- which, of course, is why I think he's so brilliant. (Hey at least I cop to it.)

But it's more than that. I've been lucky enough to see Ryan's way of working up close, and I've seen the disaster that results from trying to work in, shall we say delicately, a less magnanimous way.

There has been a whole bunch of chatter to and fro about the summer of discontent on Canadian TV shows. (None of it in the press, because nothing that doesn't make it into a press release gets covered in entertainment reportage in this country.) There were a whole lot of bumpy rides out there. Rides that could have been a damn sight less bumpy with a little more of the method Shawn Ryan discusses below. It's a method that requires two things that aren't always present here: confident and articulate managing showrunners, and writers who have, and bring, A-level game.

First show I get up on my own, I shall read from the Book of Ryan. The whole interview's a great thing: but here, to me, are the most relevant bits: (Photo credit: Mark Mainz/Getty Images)

AVC: Have you had the ending of The Shield in mind from the start, or did that develop as you went along?

SR: Over the years, yeah. It wasn't until I started getting into seasons three and four that I thought about how I wanted it all to end. I had a couple of big notions, but the show has always been a collaborative effort, so I took my ideas to the writers, with all of us sitting in a group. We had like three months' time before we began filming season seven, so we all sat down and worked it out. By the time we started filming the first episode of the final season, we had a pretty good idea where we were gonna go. Then we figured some other things out along the way, as we were filming. So it was a process. It evolved. But I always think it's better to take your time and go through a lot of ideas—and dismiss a lot of ideas—before figuring out where to land. It's a good way to care for your audience, too. If you spend hours and hours and days and weeks coming up with the ending, then there's a chance the fans won't figure it out on their own.

AVC: When you're dealing with a tightly serialized drama like The Shield, is it appropriate to think of it as being like a long feature film, or a novel? Or is it still ultimately TV?

SR: There are story-room sessions where you think about the big picture, like a novel, but once you have certain things in place, you have to treat each episode like an hour of TV, and think that maybe this will be the only episode that anyone will ever watch. You want to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end to the episode, even if you have storylines that are carrying over. You still want it to feel like a cohesive hour of entertainment. And you can't think about both at the same time. We'd have story meetings where we'd sit around and talk about the big picture, and a lot of meetings where we'd sit around and think about what we were going to do for one particular episode: "What's the arc for this character in this episode?" And so on. That's how we dealt with it.

AVC: Yet when the last episode airs, fans will have seen one of the rare TV series that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

SR: Yeah, and that wasn't always intentional, because when you start a TV show, you're not necessarily thinking, "Are we setting up what we need for season seven?" You're just trying to stay on the air, and you try to learn your job as you go, and do what you can. But we've been able to plan for a couple years toward an ending, and that has helped us make things come back around. So I do think that people who watched the series from the very beginning, or watched the episodes in a short time frame—on DVD or online, for instance—will think The Shield feels novelistic, in the sense that it's cohesive. We tried really hard to be consistent and have things make sense from one season to another.

AVC: If you had to boil down what The Shield is ultimately about, what would you say?

SR: The original central question still holds true, I guess: "What are you willing to accept, in terms of behavior, from the people who protect you?" That was a very resonant question in 2002, when we were still in the shadow of 9/11. But I think as the series has gone on, the question has turned more inward, relating more to Vic and the other guys on the Strike Team in terms of, "What price do people pay for having bent the rules?"

What I've always liked about The Shield is that the show asked a lot of big questions early on, and a lot of the episodes were very broad, and the show was kind of shocking in many ways, especially compared to the other things on TV. But TV has really evolved since 2002, both on network TV and on cable, and I think The Shield isn't as unique as it used to be, even though we were the first to do a lot of stuff. But what we did—which is why I think the show has had some legs—was make the questions smaller and more personal. We went more inside Vic's head and heart, and did less ass-kicking. I think if we'd tried to up the ante on the ass-kicking, we would've lost our way, and the show would have become less relevant. The fact that we were able to spend two to three years asking those big questions, but then turn toward, "Okay, what happens to the man Vic Mackey, who has put himself above the law, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons?" Now it's become very much a character piece about what happens to Vic, what happens to Shane, what happens to Corrine, what happens to Dutch and Claudette. Which I really like.

But you know, I always like to leave it for other people to talk about what the show means. Nothing makes me happier than to have a really smart person tell me why the show is smart, especially if I didn't intend that. [Laughs.] I tend to be a very instinctual writer, and I don't plot shows out like, "This is my thesis and this is how I'm going to subtly sneak my thesis into this episode." I really just approach it from, "We know these characters well, here are the situations that they're in, now how would they behave? What would the consequences be?" And it's always fun to see how people interpret that and dissect it afterward, and make me and the other writers seem probably smarter than we really are.

Amen to that. There's also another wonderful piece of insight for getting started writers about the value of working on a show that you may not think is "the best show." One of the lamest things that the dyspeptic snipers do when they want to somehow score points off you is to cherry pick previous credits. It shows no understanding of the business whatsoever, but hey, it's the internet - ignorance is bliss. But the point Jaime Weinman picked up on is true: a show like Nash Bridges, believe it or not, can lead to The Shield and LOST. It's all part of the unpredictability of the game -- where you learn the process, and how is more important than the content when you're building your career and learning your craft.

Now if you'll excuse me, I see my Itunes download of The Shield finale is finished. My phone is off the hook for the next forty-four minutes!