The Forward Gaze of the Room

VIEWER JENNIFER SMITH writes:

What I want to know is, how the hell did they manage to get an episode about illegal kidney harvesting on the air within a week of a major international news story about illegal kidney harvesting.
Did you guys have a Ouija board in the writer's room or something?

Heh. No. But we did have a Bat.

But that's part and parcel of trying to put your best foot forward and keep yourself grounded in reality. The most important thing, when you're pitching stories for a show like The Border is to have your head in the world. All writers do this. The men and women who pitch stories based on what they saw on HOUSE last night are never going to get anywhere. You never want to be the third movie out on a subject; so by design, especially on a non-serialized show like The Border, what you want to do is take note of the little stories at the margins; not the A1 story, the story buried in the back with only two column inches, which is interesting and odd and may just turn into something.

Every Sunday (Saturday in Canada) the big weekend paper lands with a WHUMP and wannabe writers find feature stories and think, "wow that would make a good..." and don't realize that at that point there are two thousand people thinking the same thing.

It's hard to tune yourself to be open to the less obvious sometimes, or to try to imagine what will work as a story and might be topical not when you're writing it - but three or six months down the line when it hits the air.

One of the problems of Canadian TV sometimes is that the shows sit on the shelf too long -- and so they don't seem fresh when they are broadcast. It's too hard to predict where people are going to be that far out for something that's supposed to be temporally responsive, like TV.

There are other mediums that have to think even further out. That's why the big U.S. studios do all that research to try and figure out their summer tentpoles three years out.

There's a friend of mine who just got a book deal to write a big fantasy book for one of the bigger publishing houses -- because they have data suggesting what will be a big trend next year.

In the case of The Border, we're now watching episodes that were filmed about four or five months ago -- which is still longer than the lead time on U.S. series. But at least it's close.

We've all been kind of shocked by the number of echoes that have emerged in the news that reflect Border episodes that we pitched and worked out months ago. Believe me, there's more of that coming in the episodes to come.

But it IS strange that our whole "stolen kidney" story -- which has been a popular urban legend for years, finally airs a couple weeks after a real organ ring story breaks...and that story has a Canadian connection.

So I'm here to tell you:

It's because we're brilliant and we totally saw it coming.

I am available for stock tips and prognostication.

And if you want to watch Physical Assets, our take on the organ thing, the show's up at CBC. (Canadian viewers only, sorry.)