Spec Addendum

BELOW, WHERE I link to a post outlining what the current "good" Drama & Comedy specs are, I also made a comment that personally I feel The Good Wife & Modern Family are solid spec choices.  That prompted this comment from reader Dan:

Always thought the rule was not to spec a show unless it's got 2 seasons in the can. Is that no longer the case?

As in everything else when it comes to writing or creative arts, it's more important to know what the "rule" is and why people refer to it as such, than to follow it slavishly.  A certain amount of subjectivity is always part of the writing process.   (I used to sum this up by saying ee cummings knew what the rules of punctuation & capitalization were; he didn't break them lightly...then stopped when fewer & fewer people seemed to know who ee cummings was.)

Corollary to this rule, too, is one about notes: it's not always that you should take the solution the note taker is giving -- in fact, that's rarely what you should do. But you need to respect the bump. Figure out why they've got a problem there, and come up with your own solution.

So, then, what is this idea about not speccing a new show, or a show that has less than 2 seasons in?  What's that about?

 1) The Show May Not Yet Be The Show

Shows often take awhile to find themselves.  Look at Flash Forward or V.  Both of those shows have gone through creative direction changes, and their fates are therefore uncertain. If they right themselves & become hits, then you'll have a better idea what the spec should look like.

Characters & actors, pacing, shooting style, emphasis, tone -- all of these things can radically change in the first season of a show -- especially if it's a splashy pilot. It's one thing to make a big splashy pilot, it's another to figure out how to do a satisfying show week in and week out, 22 weeks a year.

Parks & Recreation is a fine example of a show that started out a bit sketchy but has now settled nicely into what it wants to be.  The characters are better defined, they're about to make a character change that will pretty much solidify the core of what's working.  If you'd watched and deconstructed the first few episodes, you'd have no clue how to write the show -- because the show was not yet the show.

A couple of years ago when they did the Bionic Woman reboot, they ran like 7 shows there in 7 weeks.  There was no pattern.  Imagine if you'd tried to spec that.  Besides being cancel bait, you would have torn your hair out trying to figure out the story engine.  They didn't figure it out. Why should you be expected to?

I also recently got a box set of a nifty USA show called In Plain Sight.  Witness protection show. In the first season, they try to do a "light" episode about a wedding. It's painful.  Really stands out.  Sometimes you stretch to see how far you can go in your first season, and you might have some weird, off kinds of episodes.  It's all part of the process.

On the other hand, and here's where the 'rule' as guideline thing comes in -- some shows never go through those growing pains. Or at least they don't leak onto the screen. Frasier was Frasier from Day One.  Funny Pilot, Great first season. 

I think Modern Family & The Good Wife are like that too. Both shows roared right out of the gate. Their early episodes are structurally, emotionally, tonally very consistent with what's come after. They know what they're doing.  I don't think you'll learn much by waiting another year to do a Modern Family.  And if you do a good one, you might be among the first to get out there with one, which would be a plus. Better that than the spec everyone's sick of reading already.

2) The Wunderkind Doesn't Always Work Out

Heroes, first season. Who knew?  A few years ago, I knew somebody who wrote a really great Joan of Arcadia spec at the start of her second season.  Then the show fell off a cliff.  When she started writing it, it was a buzz show getting good ratings.  She got about 2 months out of the spec and then it was dead, dead, dead.

3) You Wrote a What?

People making TV are busy.  And a lot of the time they don't have time to watch as much TV as you do.  Also, the more "cable" you get the more you run into the chance that some show's idiosyncratic tone might not appeal to the reader.  Before they decide if they like you, they really have to like the show.

Shows with a couple of seasons under their belt, you're betting that more people will have seen them.  In this fragmented TV world, that's not a guarantee by any means, but it's just a little bit more pad to let you come up with something that can circulate widely.

By 2nd season too, you get a sense of what the polarizing shows are.  You don't want to do one of those because what if you get someone who hates it?  True Blood is a polarizing show.  Sons of Anarchy, polarizing. Weirdly, Community -- bit polarizing.


There's always going to be a balancing act between how early can you spec a show so that it's still fresh, and not everyone's doing it, and has it really established itself in both the zeitgeist of your readers, and as a replicatable  template. 

In the end, you have to arm yourself with as much knowledge as possible by reading the trades, keeping your ear to the ground, and being realistic.

And I'm also a firm believer in: never spec your favorite show.  You have to like the show (there is no smell more stinky than someone trying to do a show they think is beneath them) but -- especially if you're new -- you need to be dispassionate about the show's weaknesses and strengths.  You want a calling card showing how well you can replicate a voice -- not a piece of fanfic.

Specca Decca Doo.

I KNOW OTHERS have posted this, but it's very useful if you're looking to write a new spec, and if you're new (ie: not produced yet, or one sale) you should ALWAYS be looking to get crafty and write a new spec. 

And I also post it because it comes to me courtesy of Karen Hill, who has a big brain & is a total babe besides.  Bow down before her, earthlings.

For my 2 cents -- there's no way I'd write a 30 Rock right now...  The Good Wife is solid & a great choice, and if you're a comedy writer, cranking out a Modern Family is a must.

Tv-calling.com's Spec Guide.

Digging Deeper's Always Justified

FROM TIME TO TIME, I get goaded into fights with my Canadian friends about the American sensibility.  It's a time honored sport -- Canadians watching Americans. They get pretty good at it, with the complete domination of the airwaves & multiplexes and all. 

But as we all know in our non-lizard brains, the media rarely gives you the full story.  It doesn't even necessarily serve you up the right pieces.

A statistic that has not changed since I was fifteen:  about 90% of Canadians I know who I would describe as somewhat to very Anti-American who for reasons of career, education, love, or money -- find themselves living in the USA, become much, much less anti-American. This holds true for bros, classmates, college friends, ex-girlfriends -- everybody.  What that has always said to me is the terrible limitation of observing from afar, & how you can never really see the full truth underneath.  Not unless you're willing to dig, listen, and set aside your assumptions.

That's a great lesson for everybody, of course.  And it's also, coincidentally, one of the biggest problems in crafting Canadian English programs that ring true.  People have that American signal clattering around their fillings all the time.  Under those circumstances, what does an honest appraisal even look like?

Being in the USA at this juncture, during the last gasps of the healthcare debate, has been eyeopening for me too.  It shows me how deep and true the philosophical & political divide is in this country, and also how much the stagecraft only serves to make it all worse.  Seeing what plays out on the TV night after night makes it hard for me to reconcile that some of the nicest people I've ever met are Texans, and how many times I've met people who I fundamentally agree with on just about every issue, yet despise personally.

Americans live big lives. There is no doubt about that.  And there's a tremendous fissure running through this nation between forces of progressvism, forward looking thought, and conservative, fear-based isolationism.   The sense of American exceptionalism magnifies both of these strains, to the point where it makes it very, very difficult for an outsider looking in to come to a true, honest bit of insight.

This isn't universal, of course. I mean, it does happen.  I remember reading de Tocqueville as a teenager and being fascinated by how much one 19th century Frenchman got right in describing Americans I knew & recognized.

Now look at this article and grok on the Anti- de Tocqueville -- British officers during the Revolutionary war who reveal through their letters the huge, gaping gulf of understanding that made compromise impossible. They literally did not understand what the Americans' problem was.

“Killing seems to me a very unnatural trade, but these people are beyond nature as well as reason,” Strachey wrote to his wife after the British won the Battle of Long Island in August 1776. “They might at this moment have peace and happiness, but they insist upon having their brains knocked out first.”

Eric Foner, the Columbia University historian, said the Strachey letters “offer a vivid firsthand account of on-the-ground British sentiment as the War of Independence progressed.” He added: “The British seem unable to understand the principles or ideals that motivated the Americans. They see the demand for independence as lunacy and cannot imagine that the colonists have legitimate grievances. Over all the letters offer a good indication of why a peaceful settlement wasn’t possible.”

Does that sound at all familiar to you?  Like anything you might have seen recently?

When I watch British dramas like Spooks/MI-5 (love it)  and Jekyll (love it til the end)  I'm more than amused by the degrees to which British dramatists default to easy, lazy characterizations of Americans, which drag down the otherwise excellent drama by robbing the story of a better character.  (Americans, of course, more than return the favor -- see any British stereotype in Yankee TV as well as any Arab character you've seen in the last fifteen years.)

Chuck Klosterman did a piece on This American Life not so long ago called "Stereotypes Uber Alles"  that traced, hilariously, the distortions that come with Germans' fascination with viewing Americans through the "cowboy" mirror.  That link above is well worth listening to -- actually, the whole show, "Got You Pegged," is particularly juicy for a writer trying to create characters who transcend national or even personality types.

And to circle back to the Canadian angle, you can see John Doyle today give full flower to one type of easy American characterization in his review of the new Jamie Oliver show on ABC.  He admits that, yup, it's reality and so heightened -- but seems to be doing everything he can to link health care to American attitudes to say that "Americans are really like this."

Sidebar:   We all know that Americans love the classic hero narrative, ie: the person who has an inner and outer goal and who triumphs against adversity both external and internal to arrive in victory at a better place.  That's a powerful myth that's drilled into Americans' psyche.  A few years ago, Doyle posited in an article for an American publication that the Canadian narrative was more about forebearance:  the little person might be steamrolled in the end, and Canadians like stories about how well someone suffers the indignities with the deck stacked against them.  Interesting theory. (And it also could be interesting theory badly paraphrased, so account for that.)  End Sidebar.

All of these things: Canadians myopic view of Americans, Germans' weird fetish for cowboyization of the American experience, and the British view with its own inherent distortions that come from differences of class, perspective and attitude smack up against an America that has always been more heterogeneous in its intellectual and emotional makeup.

What's different, and new, is that we now have passed fully out of the window in history where Americans were more or less of the same mind.  Yes, with Howard Zinn & all I'm not saying that Americans were ever united.  What I am saying is that as content creators,  it's our bad fortune  that the medium of TV, TV storytelling and much of what we think of as American mass market entertainment came out of what now looks like an anomalous time -- the post WWII era of middle class conformity.  Even the "counterculture" of the 1960's were still rebellions predicated on familiarity with that way of thinking.

Glenn Beck is definitely an idiot, but it's really interesting watching him try to wage this war on "progressivism" in the American soul; just as it's more than a little interesting to see that Texan schoolboards want to demote Thomas Jefferson because he coined "separation of church and state."

There have always been these duelling Americas, marching beside each other, fighting and swatting and roiling for dominance.  But as media becomes ever more targeted and we find less and less to say to each other, it begs the question, "how the hell do you tell if anything is authentic anymore?"

Which brings me to FX's latest show, JUSTIFIED.  This program, which has aired two episodes in the USA. (It won't show up in Canada til later this year.  I think on Super Channel.  You've never heard of Super Channel?  I'm not surprised, but that's another column.)

Based on an Elmore Leonard story called "Fire in the Hole," it is about as close as you can get to a 21st century interpretation of a western.  Timothy Olyphant is as great as he was in Deadwood as Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshall who, thanks to his trigger-happy ways, finds himself exiled back to Kentucky, where he grew up.

One of the things American TV often gets wrong is the South. Not surprising, since the industry's in Los Angeles, and all those East Coast Harvard writers like to go out and hang their shingles. There's a lot of talk about the midwest and what the flyover viewer thinks, but not a lot about the South.  What makes Justified so utterly compelling to me is the way in which it explores things that we've seen rendered as cliche a hundred times before -- coal miners, white supremacists, minutemen types, and America's fascination with the gun. Somehow Justified manages to upend all that stuff, tell great stories, and at the same time give you a glimpse into a life, an attitude, and an America you've never seen.  Two episodes in, I am so addicted to this show, I can hardly believe it.   And I'm not the only one.

Justified is what you come up with when you dig a little past the easy view and drill down a little deeper -- upending your assumptions, your expectations, and your own well held myths. 

There's a sneaking part of me that thinks that when this show finally does come to Canada, it will play really well in the West, and maybe nowhere else. It will be interesting to see if that plays out -- and then decide what that means for those of us trying to connect with the audience above the 49th parallel.

Oh, yeah. One more thing... Justified comes from Writer/Producer Graham Yost.  Son of Elwy.  Canadian.

Hahahhahaha. Oh, so typical.

The Pacific: Terrific, Horrific

A COUPLE OF weekends ago, feeling a bit under the weather and worked-out, I did a very stupid thing.  I watched all ten hours of the new Tom Hanks/Spielberg miniseries THE PACIFIC in one sitting.

Now there's a whole bunch of reasons why this is a bad idea, but one of them certainly isn't quality.  In short, The Pacific  (HBO & HBO Canada, April 14/9pm)  is very, very, very good.

The follow up to the enormously successful Band of Brothers, The Pacific may ultimately lack the cohesiveness of that series' tracking of Easy Company, but that's merely because of it staying true to the template established by Brothers...don't embellish & keep it close.

Like the earlier series, The Pacific accomplishes its depiction of the bloody, four-year long hop from island to island by focusing in on some real life material.  In this case, the real-life figures are Sgt. John Basilone, Pvt. Eugene Sledge, and Pvt. Robert Leckie. All were with the 1st Marine Division, but each was not present at every battle.  Basilone was celebrated in accounts at the time, and Sledge & Leckie, the material comes from their published memoirs.

At the end of the series, which tracks the men returning home, one of them is dropped off by taxi. The driver, a former army man, who, in a nod to Brothers, served in the European theatre, refuses to take money. "I got to see London & Paris at least. You guys in the Pacific..."

And that's probably the best way to describe the show. It's great, it's compelling, and as it goes along it's very, very, very difficult to watch.

My knowledge of the Pacific war was limited going in... I knew placenames, some of the battles, and the idea that it was tough.  It's a tribute to the guys making this series (in Australia) that they managed to make all the islands look different.

They also don't skimp on either side of the story.  They show the heroism, but also the madness.  The U.S. marines are not always portrayed in the best light.  You see people do terrible, terrible dehumanizing things. The Okinawa episode, which comes 2nd last, is almost unbearable.

But the psychological map painted, almost essential so that it's not the fog and noise of dirty, bloody battle in every episode -- shows the cost paid in full by the "Greatest Generation."  People of my vintage grew up thinking that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something that came out of Vietnam.  The Pacific sets that record straight, once and for all.

It's hard to watch as these fine young men are slowly ground down by the horrors they witnessed, but it does make you realize that the rose-colored way we view WWII as maybe the last "good war," is about as meaningless a distinction as can be made.

A few years ago CBC tried to do a doc called "The Valour and the Horror" which suggested and postulated a version of bombing in WWII that was not entirely heroic.  Veterans groups got so up in arms that the documentary was shelved and not reshown, and the CBC apologized.

Now most of the veterans with the first hand accounts of The Pacific are gone.  To view a series like this, and to see that experience, what they went through, warts and all -- doesn't make it seem less heroic to me.  At all.  It makes it seem more human. And tragic, and awful.

It sounds like I'm warning you away from this show.  I'm not.  It's important. It's well made. It's very compelling and enjoyable. There are wonderful love stories in there, and performances that are revelations, particularly James Badge Dale as Leckie and Joe Mazello as Sledge.  But there's also a very strong guest performance by an Australian actress, Claire van der Boom (the name fits) in Ep 3.

Hats off to Hanks and Spielberg on this one.  It's great to see someone using power to make something that's important.  As a document of sacrifice & horror, The Pacific is simply required viewing. Any politician that rattles sabres should be strapped in a chair and forced to watch it exactly as I did.

But without the breaks. And rewinding certain parts.

There are plenty of historical backgrounders on the HBO site too. They're well worth watching.

The Snooki Principle

EVERY ONCE IN a while, something occurs to me to write about and I think I've just thought it up and then just before I write the entry I realize, "oh waitaminit...I think I actually read that somewhere."  It happens.

But sometimes you wrack your brain and you can't come up with whether you've come up with this, or someone else has.  And this is such a case. I think this is my own idea, I'm about 90% sure it is -- but there's a nagging part of me that wonders if I read it on a blog somewhere, or in an article or something.

I'm aware that this is the start of the long slow slide that ends with me not being able to remember the word for can opener. I'm thrilled by that, yes, thanks for asking.

Okay. Here's the theory.  I started thinking this in earnest when I was humbled completely late last year, or early this one by Jersey Shore, and how absolutely I enjoyed it.  It was a hard and shaky lesson after years of turning up my nose at The Hills and other shows of that MTV ilk.  But besides stupidity & violence, what the Shore had going for it was a clear, taut, easy-to-understand concept.

I'm doing a lot of development right now, and it is incredibly hard work.  Creating a world that provides possible springboards for lots of stories, and offers good characters, an interesting franchise, natural story possibilities and relatibility is tough.  So how do you know if you're there?

This isn't perfect; it's shorthand, but here goes. I call this The Snooki Principle.

Could it be a reality show? How would THAT show be constructed?

That's it.

Often when you try to explain your pitch you get led down weird blind alleys. But when you think of the shows that are really strong in their franchises, the truth is, you can translate them to the world of unscripted with very little alteration.

To wit:

Desperate Housewives  spawned the Real Housewives of...
The O.C.  gave us The Hills...

Right now they're casting about for a real life Will & Grace.

Modern Family could be a doc series tomorrow.  So could The Office.  (Those are easier, of course, because of the form.)

But look at the number of shows that have done the unscripted version of CSI.

Sons of Anarchy would be a great reality show -- and was, when Hunter Thompson did the book 3 decades ago and nearly got himself killed.

In terms of British shows, they have the comedy/caper show Hustle, and The Real Hustle.

Skins could be ported to reality easy-peasy.

And in our own backyard, I'm sure you could find a real life Trailer Park Boys if you went looking.  Flashpoint, you might be able to do that too, though you'd probably have to shoot for a long time to get that many juicy stories.  Slings & Arrows would work easily.

This obviously works less well for anything genre based.  It's not that Being Erica isn't a decent show, it just would be...uh...hard to find its real-world analogue.

On the other hand, look at The Wire, and then find the Sundance Channel's Brick City, about Newark. Voila. There you go.

This is primarily a visualization exercise. One of the gifts reality has given us is that they tend to have sharp characters, clearly defined conflicts, and -- wonder of wonders -- they are very, very, very story driven.

If your original series is feeling a little loogey to you, take a moment and visualize it as the spectacular success it is meant to be, and then imagine how they'd translate it to the reality realm.

If you get hung up, or can't figure out how it would play, chances are there's something at the heart of it that just isn't quite there yet.

And if you don't solve that thing, you'll wind up in Celebrity Rehab with Tom Sizemore, or people will be doing an Intervention with you. Right before they throw you to the Ice Road Truckers.

Okay. Stopping now.

Keep a Light, Hopeful Heart. But Expect The Worst.

ONE OF THE THINGS I worry about (among soooo many) is what the proliferation of blogs & books & software & contests have done to the modern wannabe screenwriter.

Forgive me for a "back in the day" thing -- especially since my BITD isn't that far in the past. But I was fortunate enough to start writing longhand and in the age of the typewriter (which did shape your attitude toward words differently; they felt more permanent when erasing them was so...difficult) and certainly in the age before the rise of the Screenwriting blog. I daresay that my friend Alex's was the first writing blog I ever read, a month or two before I found John August.

I looked for a bit of validation on the contest front at the beginning of my career; we all do. But most of them are scams or wastes of time -- at best, diversions, at worst, closed harbors designed to trap you into venerating your own self-regard & masturbatory tendencies.

And with very, very few exceptions, I think screenwriting books suffer the same problems.

What feeds good writing is reading. And finishing bad scripts, and maybe exposing your slightly less-bad scripts. I did this in theatre before I started making money writing for TV. I still believe, honestly, that one of the main reasons why I stopped writing plays was that I had too much respect for the people who were really good at that form.  I remain an avid reader of plays, always.

In any case, it always comes back to the same three things:  1) writers finish stuff, 2) they know that it's okay to fail and 3) they do not motivate themselves exclusively through dollar signs.

All of that tenacity was kind of hinted at in the before-time, when it was harder to find info or interviews with screenwriters; where to most people writing a screenwriter & getting a response would be roughly akin to getting a personal response from Rocky the Squirrel or Elmer Fudd.

There's a certain cohort today -- and this always shocks me -- who want to be spoonfed to the extent that they think a writer should answer any question they email them in a timely fashion -- even if, you know, that question is answered in lots of places on the blog that supposedly sparked the person to write to that writer in the first place.

I mean, if you can't read, how can one expect you to have the stamina to live through 1) and 2)?

So it's with a bit of mixed emotion that I recommend a fascinating collection of advice on writing I've pored through in five mintue increments over the last couple of days.

It started from a few Twitter links, which led me to a Salon article by Lauren Miller. Miller was riffing off a special at Guardian Unlimited, celebrating Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writing fiction. (And is there any more hilarious evocation of the perils of the modern proctrastophere than that last sentence?)

Anyway, the Guardian approached a bunch of Fiction writers, including Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Neil Gaiman & others for their own lists. And though they're mostly talking about writing novels, I actually think the once-removed status of the advice makes it just as trenchant for screenwriters.

Here are a few random pieces from some of the different lists:

6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

8 Don't wish ill on your colleagues.

6 Don't drink and write at the same time.

5 Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.

6 Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.

5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.

4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn't matter that much.

5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.

7 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.

Of course, the craft wonk in me marvels and wonders at the possible significance at the fact that most of the advice I find most compelling, each writer has chosen to place in the middle of their lists. (Second act problems, maybe?)

But I also encourage readers to take a long look for some unexpected insight at Laura Miller's list at Salon.com. There's one entry that particularly caught my eye:

3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting. Of course all these elements are interlinked, and in the best fiction they all contribute to and enhance each other. But if you were to eliminate these elements, starting at the end of the list and moving toward the beginning, you could still end up with a novel that lots of people wanted to read; the average mass-market thriller is nothing but story. If you sacrifice these elements starting from the beginning of the list, you will instead wind up with a sliver of arty experimentation that, if you're very, very good, a handful of other people might someday read and admire. There's honor in that, but it's daft to write something with the deliberate intention of denying readers what they love and want and then to be heartbroken when they aren't interested. If you want to engage with more than a tiny coterie, take storytelling seriously; if you think that's incompatible with art, you are in the wrong line of work.

I think this is one of those elemental truths of writing. But what struck me most about this -- and longtime readers of the blog, you can probably see this coming -- is how often in a development meeting at Canadian networks or production companies, you have to deal with notes that work the back end of the list.  You get a lot of talk from Telefilm or this Exec or that about Character, an awful lot about theme, and what you're "saying," and very, very, very little about story. And so often, we get highly celebrated Canadian films or TV shows where the story comes last.  Coincidentally, story is the hardest thing for non-writers to talk intelligently about -- because it relies heaviest on the boring part of writing: the craft.

The funny thing about good writing about writing? Every once in a while, there's a break in the clouds of solipsism and you get to see the plain laid out starkly before you.

Ah well. Back to Webisodes & Project#2.

You Can Make It If You Try

THE HBO SERIES "How To Make it In America" which I wrote about here, now has its first episode up for preview on the HBO Canada website.  (The Link in the Blog goes to the Canadian site; I presume if you're in the USA you can go to the main HBO site and see the preview there.)

Enjoy.

And Jesus Was a Crossmaker

GOOD OLD ALEX EPSTEIN up there in Montreal there is giving it the good fight, trying to figure out new ways to have difficult conversations.  In this case, how to communicate the old, "Uh, no, I can't polish your niece's script because it's not really a script, y'see" problem.

This is the real groanworthy stuff, and there's not a pro writer out there that doesn't have a miserable time when they find themselves taking one of those jobs because you need the money.

But why, specifically, is it such a pain in the ass?  Well, Alex takes a stab at explaining it with a nifty carpentry metaphor:

A dialog polish is like slapping paint on a cabinet or dresser. It makes it look better. But it doesn't make it work better if it's not working right. If it's not working right, you have to take the thing apart, usually all the way, and recut or replace some or all of the pieces, and then put the whole thing back together again before you paint.

Likewise, if an aspiring writer asks if I'll write with them, then the answer is almost always "no." I'll consult, or I'll do the writing myself, but I can't co-write with someone who's not a pro writer.

I find that once you start using carpentry metaphors talking to producers, they start to understand better why you can't "polish" an amateurish script, or "co-write" with an amateur. Try using this metaphor yourself, let me know how it works out.

Whole piece is worth reading; and it has a nice takeaway that may or may not work the next time you have to have an awkward conversation about doing a "polish" on something.

2040Haha

GREAT ARTICLE in Huffington Post (by Omri Marcus) about what's going to be funny in 30 years...(further to the below, I guess.)  I'm not going to excerpt because you really should go read the whole thing.  (H/T to Jill Golick via Twitter)

On the other hand, here's an article that really isn't very funny at all.  What, now, 52% of the population, and 58% of the TV audience or something?

Oh, and the delightful Jude Klassen passes along this link that goes very spicily with the article above.

Spartacus: Blood & Sand & Tushie

IT'S A LITTLE bit difficult for me to figure out what to say about SPARTACUS: BLOOD & SAND. (TMN, 9pm) the first two episodes of which I caught via screener.


I have to say off the bat that my love for the sandals & swordplay genre has been pretty well sated now. After Gladiator & Rome, & the passing-interesting 300 & my long-ago memories of I Claudius, I'm not sure what there is to say.  


And that's where bias gives way to the headshake of pragmatism.  Of course, there's nothing really to say -- it's all about show now, now that those nifty slo-mo ramp shots and lovingly gross splattery blood effects can be made on a TV budget. And that's when I start to drift off and put on a different hat.


But first, the basics. This is indeed the retelling of Spartacus -- a warrior consigned to slavery after betrayal by a weaselly but ambitious Roman commander,  and ripped from the bosom (oh yes, literally) of his extremely hot wife, only to be reborn as the greatest of gladiators. 


The script is a bit stiff, written in that "heroic adventure" patois that makes this very 2010 series feel almost old-fashioned. After the wit and realism of Rome, it's a bit disappointing. (Although there is gusto in coming up with scatalogical curses involving not very-flattering terms for parts of the human anatomy.)


There's life every time John Hannah and Lucy Lawless are on screen, but in between that it's a whole lot of blood spatter in slo-mo and -- did I mention -- a whole wack of nudity, of both the male and female stripe.


Spartacus: Blood & Sand is an original series from the Starz! cable network in the USA,  produced in New Zealand by Rob Tapert -- who's partnered with Sam Raimi, who of course is no stranger to either blood & guts or shooting in New Zealand. It's deliberately shot entirely against greenscreen -- so there are no sets, which makes for a heavily CGI look.


The look, again, is one of those things you're either going to go with or not.  At least until the crazy technology of Cameron's Avatar filters down to the TV level, heavy CGI shows are forced to make a choice -- deploy the tools to try and get as close to real-looking as possible, knowing that the matching might occasionally -- on a TV timeline -- not quite work when lined up against the real elements, or just embrace the artificiality.


Spartacus opts for the latter route. The whole thing is lit and shot in a way that's meant to evoke the graphic novel experience.  So the transitions are flashy, and the frame is always full, and instead of realism everything looks stylized and painterly.  You're either going to go with that or you won't.


Did I mention there's nudity?


Anyway, as I was sitting there trying to figure out what I thought of the show, I found myself thinking about it as example, as product -- as example for what's getting made out there, and for what it might teach us about where the market goes next.


And from there it's a lot easier to see the show's appeal.  Attractive cast...lots of violence, story always moving forward, good visuals, bunch o'sex and fight scenes. It's diverting, for sure, and it's pretty well paced.  But the true test of the show was when I put it on again while I was playing cards yesterday, so people could see what it looked like.


The show very clearly reverses the TV usual of being dialogue-driven, or at least demanding that it be listened to. This is a show that's probably destined to do very well internationally because you can watch it, hear nothing, and figure out most of the story. It's that visually driven.  I suppose that's smart when it comes to export.  It's an interesting exercise watching how they choose to tell the story visually rather than through dialogue at almost every step.


So in the end, personally, there's more to admire in Spartacus than necessarily enjoy.  It looks gorgeous, it's competent popcorn entertainment -- and if you're working in TV you should probably watch it, because shows like it may just be your bread & butter over the next several years.  

It's Not TV...

OOOH. SHINY.

Scott Thompson on "Death Comes To Town"

KIDS IN THE HALL's Scott Thompson had a pretty wonderful, candid conversation about Death Comes To Town with the blog Torontoist.  John Semley's interview is well worth reading:

Was there any hesitance doing something long-form like a mini-series after the experience of working on Brain Candy? Why not a sketch special of new material or something like that?

We knew we couldn’t do a sketch series. We could never improve on what we did before. There would be no point. For years we were burdened by our reputation, and this was a perfect way to do something new where even if we blew it we’d still have our sketch show. It’d be like a failed experiment. In our own careers, we’ve all gotten much better chops as writers and actors. Sure, many of the projects we worked on may not have been great. Many have never been seen. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t learn from them. We knew that we could do this. The idea was great. It was a large canvas we could work with. Large themes and multiple characters.Brain Candy came during a period in our lives when we were all messed up, by many things, one of them being fame. But by this time in our lives we had dealt with all those things...Making this mini-series was a joy. For me, personally, it was an absolute joy. I’ve had some personal problems, as I’m sure you probably know.

Of course. I wasn’t going to bring it up.

I don’t mind at all. Honestly I’m so thrilled now to be where I’m at. You can ask me. I don’t mind at all

Read what Thompson has to say about the "male energy" of comedy & how that challenge inspired him, and how he managed to fight cancer while shooting the show, here.

Up in the Chair

WILL DIXON does Clooney, Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner here. And it's priceless.

The Male Gaze And Great Big Bangs

ARE YOU AWARE of this phrase, "the male gaze?"  Do you have a thorough understanding of what it is and what it means? It's one of those phrases that you hear bandied about, but a lot of people aren't sure exactly what it really means.  Unless maybe you're female writer.  Or a feminist film studies major.  If you're a guy maybe you're a women's studies major.  Or you're just a bit more advanced than me.

I mean, that's not entirely true.  I am aware -- I try to be consistently aware -- of the fact that the audience for TV is more female than male. If you're writing in this medium, you're writing for women.  So at some point you run across the idea of "the male gaze" and how it does or doesn't affect your show.

But it's a dicey thing trying to discuss, or make understood, the effect of "the male gaze" on TV and film -- especially to a younger male writer.  I've been in rooms where "the woman" (sad, I know) elicits groans time and time again when she tries to fight for one little antidote to the pervasiveness of that male gaze in the show.  Just something for the script. And I've been in other rooms where years and years of chafing under male-led writing rooms and programs leads to the classic overreaction:  the bullshit flip where every situation is a reversal ... where the woman always has to come out on top.  [Cue every current TV commercial, where the sensible wife is married to the fucking retarded manchild douchebag.]

Before we get further, lets get that 101 Feminism definition of the male gaze and what it means for film & tv.

Bringing up "the male gaze" will often get you in a lot of fights.  I've been on both sides of those fights at different times. But today I want to point you to a ... just extraordinary little article that every screenwriter should read.

It examines The Big Bang Theory, and how it freed itself from the tyranny of the male gaze; and how that made the show better.  If, like me, you're somebody who got caught off guard by how bad BBT was when it started and then saw it later and went, "uh, when did this show get so funny?" (To me it happened on an airplane watching a rerun in the seat back)  This article walks you through, start to finish, how rethinking your character and making somebody more than a prop can lead you to a stronger, fresher, BIG FUCKING HIT SHOW.

This article is incredibly well presented, and concise, so there's no point me even excerpting it.  Just go read the whole thing here.

I have no idea who Linda Holmes is. But she wrote the best article on TV writing I've read in months.

Check it out.

Great Moments in Bad Science

YOU KNOW, sometimes Academics really stretch.  But I've avoided writing about this article on a study done somewhere for two days just because I couldn't get past how stupid it was.

Through a set of ingeniously concocted experiments, reported Friday in the journal Science, researchers show that white characters in television series display far more negative body language toward their black peers than to members of their own race.

The bias conveyed by these body clues is not only recognized subconsciously by people who watch the shows, but significantly influences their feelings about the black characters.

I'm too weary to go into it further. But let's start from the top:

TV storytelling is about characters in conflict.  Therefore, any study of "tv body language" is going to be skewed because on TV, unlike in life, people are ALWAYS IN CONFLICT.

Comparing relations and body language of say, "House  and Foreman" vs. "House and Wilson" that doesn't take into account not just the race of the character, but their social relationship to the other character, the genre of the show, the way they tell stories...all of it...is BULLSHIT.

Phrenology & "subliminal" science -- that's about the weight of this.

I would love to see this study, I really would. I bet any TV writer, no matter how addled, could demolish it simply by comparing how they've cherrypicked character relationships, in about twelve seconds.

Completely fucking stupid.

The Little Things

MANAGED TO SCORE some episodes of the eighth season of SPOOKS, the Brit show that's one of the inspirations for The Border.

One of the things you sometimes see on Brit dramas are dodgy American accents.  Spooks/MI-5 has had its good and its bad over the years.  In the current series (the show's eighth) Irish Actress Genevieve O'Reilly takes on the role of the new CIA Liasion to MI-5.

But it's not the accent that jars.

Nope, in the second episode, she takes on a false identity, that of "Victoria Franklin," who she id's as named after "her favorite U.S. President."

Ouch.

I suppose you could say she was taking the name from Franklin Roosevelt, or hell, even Franklin Pierce.  But most Americans in the know, seeing as it's the last name, would probably associate it with Ben Franklin.

Who of course...was never President.

Ouch.

It's the little things that will kill ya.  I remember in my 1st ep of The Border, we scripted chatter between scrambled F-16's and the ground.  And there was a hole in the cut where the stock would go. And when the stock got put in, of course, the plane was an F-15.  D'oh!

People notice.

Nitpickers.

Like me.

Curse you, Internets!

DMc: Bold Cultural Commentator, Massive Douche? Or Both?

WELL COLOUR ME SURPRISED.


The podcast is now up for my appearance on CBC Radio Q yesterday.


The discussion starts around 21:30 with an interview with the (surprisingly reasonable) Communications Director from the Parents Television Council, and continues with me and Timothy Jay, the author of Cursing in America: A Psycholinguistic Study of Dirty Language in the Courts, in the Movies, in the Schoolyards and on the Streets

Wow that title alone makes me want to drop an F-bomb or two.

Interestingly enough, although I immediately heard from the usual passel of friends and well-wishers saying, "heard you! sounds good" -- the fact that I also got more than one email from people who remain "highly offended" by the use of the word "douche" on TV (and by Michael Buble's use of the word to describe himself on Q, which sparked the segment yesterday in the first place.)


Now my impulse is to say, "wow, with everything people have to worry about, we make a stand on language on TV? Really?" That certainly seems to be one of the prevailing sentiments on the Q blog about the subject.

And yet...and yet... the response I got makes this easily the most controversial appearance I've had on the show. Even though I would argue that I've said way more provocative things on the radio in the past. Goes to show that whatever the conventional wisdom says, people will care about what they care about, not what you think they should care about. It's a good lesson for writers to always keep in mind.

So yeah, maybe it might be great to kill your hero or get that cat...

...but then again. Maybe not. Not if it makes the audience hate you.

One of the negative emails I got to the appearance raised the point that as a man, I really had no right to pass judgement one way or another on the use of the word 'douche.' I'd like to excerpt a little of what I wrote back. I started by pointing out that I think Jay made the point of the segment when he said that society cannot function where we go by what riles the most-easily offended. Then I wrote:

I also really think we hit a slippery slope if the only metric of whether something is offensive or not comes with the proper sex organs or racial orientation attached. What is the difference between that and the argument that only black people can write books featuring black characters, or only deaf people can play deaf people in the movies?  A non-disabled actor has no ability to play someone in a wheelchair?  I don't want to create art in that world.  It's a trap.

South Park did a pretty interesting episode a couple of weeks ago where a similar issue was explored around the use of the word "faggot."   The boys used the word to describe Motorcycle riding guys who were obnoxious, and were taken to task for being homophobic, though it was clear from their stunned reactions that the boys didn't associate that word with "gay" at all.  During the episode they managed to sneak in some of the etymology of "faggot" in there -- and uncovered that long before its association with gay people, it had other meanings -- women, heretics, soldiers drafted into armies and on and on.  Meanings change.

Similarly, where do we go with "bitch?" There's a word that was rehabilitated, robbed of its power largely by -- not women -- but gay men using it with each other, reframing it to something harmless.  That was a pretty serious word to throw around when I was a child.  Now it's mild enough that a singer could have a hit song saying "I'm a bitch, I'm a lover...etc etc." Damn catchy song.  All for the better.

I recognize that there are people out there who do find the word offensive. But the problem here is that you find it offensive because of a usage and a connotation completely divorced from the context of its current use.  By that logic, we should all not be able to use "damn" because to highly religious people, "damning" someone is serious business. 

In high school, I learned the danger of living in a context where what was offensive hewed to the most conservative definition.  I was banned from doing school announcements because I said, "What the hell?" in relation to something -- and that offended one of the highly Christian teachers.

I think in Canada, part of the reason why our art is so mild much of the time is that we use that same metric.  And I don't think it's good for either pushing the envelope of art, discourse and society.  

The other point I never got to make on the radio was that, of course, I do consider that portion of the audience (which includes my Sainted Catholic Papa, by the way) when I'm writing dialogue and cursing into dramatic scripts. One of the differences of opinions I employed on a recent show was where I'd try to shy away, whenever possible, from using "Goddamn!" or characters saying, "Jesus Christ!" because I know that there is still a very large segment of the population that might otherwise have no problem with what I was writing that would view the use of those words as a dealbreaker. Seeing as I was writing for a public broadcaster, and you could easily get at the intent and the cadence and truth of the scene by employing other salty language instead, I generally try to avoid using those epithets. Not because I'm censoring myself, but because the need to use those specific terms is low. And sometimes I think there are writers who'd use them MORE because they disagreed with religion so much that they were delighted to "stick it" to the faithful.


Now, does that make me inconsistent with the use of the word "douche?" I don't think so, cause I don't think that the opinion on that word is anywhere near as settled and universal as the number of people who'd be offended by dropping "Goddamnit!" into a script.


Does that make me a hypocrite? Or merely a big douche?


Couldn't resist. Sorry. Have at it in the comments below.

We'll Always Have Chicken

DRIVING AROUND CENTRAL Florida last week was a bit of an unsettling experience.  A few of years ago, everywhere you looked there were blue tarps, and smashed trees, and the occasional FEMA trailer -- legacy of a recent hurricane. 


This time, the signs pointed to the financial tsunami that hit Florida harder than a lot of other places in the U.S.  Foreclosure sales, unemployment stories, storefronts left fallow and vacant, and even boarded up walkaways -- where people flew their underwater mortgages, seemed to be everywhere. 


Nothing caught my eye more, however, than the liberal sprinkling of men standing on Street Corners, waving signs for a retail chain. "This location: 70% off! Closing Sale! Everything including the fixtures!"   I counted four or five of them, advertising different locations where Everything Must Go, during my week away.  It was a sobering antidote to the Black Friday hype.


I'm the first to admit that my mind for business has never been a steel trap.  I think back to high school and my Intro to Business class. I don't remember a thing about it -- except for the teacher holding up a computer punch card, and soberly intoning, "no matter what happens, you're always going to need to know how to use these."


Seven days in the sun and the American mediascape, looking back on things here, following the testimony of this group or that group at the CRTC just made me realize with full force how much the supposed Captains of the Industry here are a bunch of old white guys waving punch cards.


First, let's talk about Hulu.


Like a lot of Canadians, I've experienced Hulu only sporadically. (The site is geo-blocked from Canada.) Now, even most of the proxy server workarounds you once could use to see content don't work.  They never worked that well anyway -- as the processing power the proxy sucked up made the video you'd watch stutter if you were on anything other than a screaming fast computer on a wicked fast broadband connection.


But last week, I got the full Hulu.  Late night, catching up on Modern Family, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Family Guy -- and a score of other shows.  A couple of streamed ads. Perfect playback, even on the "light" connection where I was staying.  It worked great. Give me a Boxee or Apple TV interface to my TV -- or hell, WiFi enabled TV, and I am over the moon and don't need another thing to get all the tv I want.   And the only reason I want to make that jump to the TeeVee is demographic -- teens and twentysomethings are just fine leaving it on the computer. 


A massive library of current content. Ready right now.  Whenever I want. New eps posted the day after they first air.  Without fail. Robust interface and playback.  Wicked.


Meanwhile, back in Canada, representatives of the broadcast networks, in pushing their "value for signal" -- made the following suggestions:  they want to extend the Simultaneous Substitution policy so that they can now "delete" programs that they buy the rights to, if they play on a U.S. channel at a different time.  So if you're a cable subscriber, you should get used to seeing a lot more blue screens and "this program not available" warnings.  Hmm. There's value for you.


Well, no matter. Maybe you could watch online too. Rogers just announced a Canadian Hulu, right?  Oh.  Uh. Except it only works if you're a Rogers subscriber. And there's not a lot of content. And like the clunky on Demand channels where programs disappear without rhyme or reason, the interface is kind of lame.  So, uh, it's not like Hulu at all, really.


So it's like the comparison of broadcast websites all over again?  With the Canadian offerings shoddy, scattershot, hard to navigate poor shadows of the American versions? 


Yup.


Hmm.  Let's explain that "value for signal" again?


But let's not be churlish here.  it's not just the broadcasters who've been running annoying ads for months. Let's look at the Cable side.


Bright House Networks is the cable provider in Central Florida.  The picture is sharper and clearer.  There are no artifacts. The HD channels "pop." TCM is a revelation -- I never realized how compressed and shoddy the quality of the signal I was getting from Rogers was.   Plus, when you call Bright House, they're efficient and friendly.  You book an appointment, you get a two hour window and they're always there.  They're pleasant to deal with, and customer focused. 


I don't know a single person in Canada who would use that phrase to describe their cable or satellite provider. 


What else?  Ah yes. There's the matter of the digital transition.  The U.S. has more or less completed the transfer of signals to the digital spectrum. Those analogue frequencies are being auctioned off. Everything's proceeding apace.


In Canada? One by one the broadcasters revealed that they don't really have much of a plan to make the transition, and that there's no way they're going to make the 2011 deadline the CRTC set. The deadline they've known about for years.


So there's going to be a delay in auctioning that spectrum here. So innovations in telephony, more communications choices for Canadians... none of that is going to happen here yet. Hurry up and wait. 


So the Canadian picture seems to be: poor BDU service & innovation, substandard on demand delivery, bad pictures, bad customer service, bungled "Hulu-like" service launches -- everything, in fact, relying on the protections afforded by the fencing of the CRTC, while not living up to any promises or responsibilities under the Broadcast Act. 


Broadcasters solutions to the new reality that people want to be able to watch programs when they want, how they want? Lock down and restrict them more. 


Who are these guys?


I don't mean to be impertinent, but it strikes me that there might be somebody you guys could talk to to get over this hump you all seem to be having with thinking outside the box a little bit, as the world you've known comes down around you.


Maybe you could talk to us.  


Creatives.  


Crazy idea, I know. But think about it.  A few years ago the knock on Canadian shows was that they looked cheap. And they were cheesy. And slow.


So we had crews that busted their ass and upgraded their skills. D.O.P.'s raised their lighting game.  Now, you rarely see the kind of flat, Shoppers Drug Mart lighting you used to see on Canadian TV.  Instead, there's the brilliant and vibrant frames you see on Flashpoint, or The Border, or Being Erica. 


Writers heard the knock of the slow moving story -- and many of us committed to our craft, studied, and worked to try and figure out a way to come up with excitingly paced stories that can still deliver at a lower budget.  Do we always get there? No. But we get there a lot more often than we did. We saw the need, and we changed. We also looked at the structure of how things worked and said, "well, if you want something that has pacing and where the creative fires on all levels, you have to empower us a bit."  So we slowly began the process of educating a reluctant industry here about what a Showrunner is, how it works in the U.S. system, and why it has a better chance of delivering your audience a vibrant product than the bad old way of doing things. 


There's been lots of pushback on that, of course...but there are also lots of veterans who've stuck around here who are more than capable of taking on that role.  We just need to get to the point where they hire them off the top -- not once the show is already in chaos in production.


There were other changes too.  A recognition of the importance of source music, of faster editing and more dynamic shooting.  Producers and writers on the other side of the aisle studied the lessons of Reality TV, and changed the kinds of shows they pitched.   Quietly, around the margins, Canada became a place that does great lifestyle and reality shows.  


I also watched HGTV when I was in Florida.  And I saw, literally, that half the shows on the air there are made here.  That doesn't get written about a lot. But it's true.  There's also an explosion in animation, in tween shows, in children's. Quietly, around the margins, creatives who live the most precarious of existences here have looked at the challenges of the market over the last decade -- the collapse of first-run syndication, squeezed license fees, the rise of internet-ancillaries -- and tried to adjust our way of doing things.


It's not perfect. We're not there yet.  There's deadwood and nepotism and people who shouldn't be doing what they're doing, sure. But at the same time, there is Battle of the Blades, Flashpoint, Corner Gas, Dragon's Den... I could go on... while broadcasters get up there in Gatineau and proffer no new ideas and refuse to even acknowledge the new world they're already living in -- the post Hulu, TV Everywhere world that there's no going back from -- Canadians are watching homegrown programs in numbers not seen in years.


And events like a FIVE MILLION audience for the Grey Cup game show that -- whatever the broadcasters want to claim -- that there is a hunger out there for something to watch that isn't just a rebroadcast of a U.S. show.  Canadians will watch them if they're good.


The problem is, of course, that our partners up to now have had a vested interest in, well, making sure they're not too good. And even when they are, claiming that they don't make money.  


It's pretty ironic, in fact, that just about the only part of their business these guys have mastered as well as their American counterparts seems to be the "Hollywood Accounting" part.


The comparisons and contrasts from my week in Florida were eye opening in the extreme.  But it wasn't until my last night that it all came together -- when the power went out.


Day after Thanksgiving, seven p.m.  Whoosh.  Total darkness.  Too early to go to bed. What to do?  


Rummage through the hurricane kit. Find the batteries for the radio.  Put 'em in, and tune the dial...


...And there, in the dark, for forty minutes or so, we listened to the clear, bemused voice of Ira Glass and This American Life.  


A couple of great stories -- about Poultry and the Supernatural.  A hiliarious anecdote about an Orthodox Jew who goes to heaven only to find out that God is, in fact, a huge chicken.  And the archangel Michael's job is to feed him and keep his cage clean.  "All that praying, all that suffering, and for what? God is a chicken!"


"Not A Chicken.  Just... chicken."


See, I'm really not doing it justice. And that's the point. Reaching back to an earlier form, the rules are different, the delivery different, but what was there, gloriously alive and vibrant and entertaining -- was the story.  The story will survive, no matter what form or challenge we throw at it.  For those of us whose business is story, that's got to come as a comfort, no matter how backward and antiquated and maddeningly out of touch the captains of the industry seem, it's we, who have rolled with the punches and changed what we do already over the last few years...it's we who will survive.


So maybe the business mind isn't the be all and end all. Because a business mind that can't see the change coming and get on board isn't going to be around much longer.


Don't believe me? 


Man I wish you could have seen those guys on the corner.  70% off. Everything Must Go! Fixtures Too! This location only.


This location on Hiawassee, or International Drive, or South Conroy, or Colonial...


This location only. 


Everything must go.


Blockbuster Video.

Kinda Exciting

IF YOU'RE A TeeVee Geek... from the NYTimes:

After devoting most of his energy in recent years to feature films and cable, the writer, director and producer Larry Charles is returning to network television. Mr. Charles, left, who wrote many episodes for the NBC hit series “Seinfeld” and “Mad About You” in the 1990s, is to write and direct the pilot of an as-yet-unnamed series for NBC. In this decade Mr. Charles has directed Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” and “Brüno” films, and also directed, produced or written episodes for the HBO hit series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Entourage.” The new NBC show is to have an ensemble cast and be set in a small town. Mr. Charles told The Hollywood Reporter that the show would try to depict “contemporary American life through the prism of a do-it-yourself homemade aesthetic that will mix mediums.”

Running With The Sons

I'M NOT THE first to notice this, but in case you haven't seen it elsewhere, Kurt Sutter from Sons of Anarchy has one of the best descriptions of the job of Showrunning in toto, that I've ever read.

As you read, please note the places where there's room for variation.  Every writing room is run differently.  You can have a staff where the showrunner rewrites all, or one where the communication is good enough that writers can do meaningful second drafts. There are shows where the senior writers aren't rewritten as much because their scripts are closer; I've found shows where the Writer follows their ep through production and becomes sort of the showrunner proxy is a good way to delegate.  But it's not the only way to do it.

If you're partnered with a Director (like Tommy Schlamme on West Wing or Pamela Fryman on How I Met Your Mother) maybe you don't spend as much time in editing.  Or maybe you don't care as much about wardrobe. You can split up duties anyway you want.

Sometimes you have a second that runs the writing room for you.  Sometimes you come in with the whole season figured out in your head and you pitch it to the staff; sometimes it's vague and you let the staff pitch to you.

Sometimes (and I think, ideally) it's your show. Sometimes it's somebody else's and you're there to execute it.  There are lots and lots of variations. But there are two things that I think are common to all the iterations, when a show works:

Communication.  The showrunner sets the tone, and others succeed or fail as well, by how well they can communicate with each other.  Being able to articulate concerns and questions; being able to visualize problems eight weeks out instead of day after tomorrow and come up with workable solutions is key. So is being able to listen when your Producer speaks budget to you, and to come up with ingenious creative fixes without compromising content...Being able to inspire confidence and also to trust that there aren't factions or Producers squabbling behind your back, that in fact, everybody is pulling in the same direction -- the direction that you are setting...all that is what we mean when we talk about the second essential component:

Having a Vision.  It's easy to come up with an idea for a show. Ideas are cheap like borscht.  The tough thing is being able to see that idea through to a finished episode, season, or series. Having the experience to know what is important and what's not, where you can compromise and where you can't, what's essential and what's not.  Remember, you've got forty people running around. Actors think their role is the most important.  Production Designers think their needs are greatest. To propmasters it's about stuff. Wardrobe, Hair, Makeup -- all view the show through their prism.  It's your job to conceive and communicate how they fit into the orchestra that is your show.   That is what vision means. Or should anyway.

Anyhow. Go read Sutter.