What A Revoltin' Development!

I'M COMING A bit late to the party on this one, but the article is so good and puts a funhouse mirror up to so many of the problems of development in the Canadian TV industry that I think it's worth calling extra attention to Peter Jukes' frustrated lament in The Prospect, about "Why Britain Can't Do The Wire."

The gist is too much power in the hands of too few executives. If you read Kay Reindl at Seriocity (and really, why wouldn't you? She's awesome) you might question some of the Jukes' conclusions about American Development as relics from a slightly-earlier time. (Because he's talking largely about BBC development too, he easily conflates HBO and Cable and American Broadcast Networks. Really, the problems and priorities of those two groups are actually pretty far apart.)

In certain quarters in this country, when the subject of TeeVee comes up, you'll have those who point to the UK as the antidote to all the excesses of trying to ape the U.S. system -- as a better vision for Canada's industry to try and emulate. But read these paragraphs (which start with the story of a British writer pitching in the USA, and tell me if this doesn't sound a bit, well, familiar:

I went to studios and spoke about my project for 20 minutes. I didn’t need a track record—the presence of a producer, writer and a good idea was enough to have a pilot commissioned.

In Britain, however, the quality of an idea will have little to do with getting a green light. Internal politics and “who’s up and who’s down” will decide. The fate of independent producers is just as bad, turning domestic drama production into a court, with its favourites, intrigues, and sudden disgraces.

One reflex reaction to the decline of British television is to blame it on “chasing the ratings.” But US drama proves that the descent to the lowest common denominator isn’t the only way to get audiences. Nielsen ratings are still king on the major networks, but HBO nurtured The Wire through years of obscurity until it became a hit. With the rise of DVDs and the importance of foreign sales, channels are earning a large proportion of their income from the “long tail.”

Well gosh. That doesn't sound like much of a solution now, does it?

And for our own industry, which so far seems to have cottoned onto the need for the word "showrunner" if not the actual job description. (You can tell it's penetrating that far when Non-Writing Producers want to be referred to as "Non-writing Showrunners." Oh, it's happening.) Here's a description that points out why that job is needed, and why it more or less has to go to a writer:

Apart from a radical restructuring of our own broadcasting industry, what lessons can we take away? The most important, as David Simon points out in the interview (below), is that in US television drama “the writer is God.” This is not because of literary cachet—it’s arisen out of aesthetic, technical and commercial need. Drama is incredibly expensive to make and economies of scale kick in when stories are told over 13 or 24 episodes. They cannot be written by one person alone, nor can they be effectively controlled by studio executives, actors or directors, whose talents by definition lie elsewhere. It requires a team of writers willing to develop character and narrative over a long haul, keeping it focused and fresh. It’s not the writer, singular, who is God in US television drama, but the role of the writer, generic, in the process.

This doesn’t lead to “writing by committee.” My experience is that four minds are four times more inventive in a team than if each works alone. But this requires a conductor to keep the voices to tempo and tune, and the key to this is the showrunner—the head producer who has creative control of the series. Showrunners like David Chase (Sopranos), Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) or John Wells (ER) helped carve out a space for collaboration. Time and money is also invested. In the US, beyond your individual scripts, you are paid a salary to come into a “writer’s room” and help the work of others. The Wire is a good example of the result. Conceived by David Simon, a former journalist, and homicide detective Ed Burns, the collaborative ethic allowed them to bring in voices from film writing and crime fiction —such as Richard Price and George Pelecanos—without losing coherence.

It's kind of an amazing common sense thing. I mean, why in heaven's name would you put a writer in charge of the creative? Why would you put them in a management position, especially in Hollywood, a place where film writers couldn't be afforded less respect?

Doesn't it kind of logically follow that maybe it's because, well, nothing else really worked in TV? That, in fact, the Showrunner system developed because teaching writers to manage was easier than teaching Producers with no writing background how to think with the all-encompassing creative vision of a writer? And understand how to translate and communicate notes for other writers?

Or as Macleans' Jaime Weinman put it, when he wrote about this last Thursday:

Canada is infamous for having a TV drama culture that (not always, of course, but often enough for it to be a pattern) combines the weaknesses of both systems: a domination by non-writing producers, with the head writer supervising a writing staff but not a whole lot else.

But the U.S. system, making a writer into an executive, is kind of a strange one, and one that goes against normal instincts. The writer’s temperament is not necessarily that of an executive. On the great DVD features for It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, creator Alan Zweibel talks about how difficult it was to adjust from thinking like a writer — protecting his material and his scripts — to being responsible for all aspects of the production, and caring as much about episodes written by other people. The U.S. system essentially asks people like Larry David to do management jobs when they’re totally unsuited to being managers in any traditional sense. And yet it works, because somebody has to be in charge of any production. And while the director is the one most likely to be in charge of a movie, a writer is the only person who can come close to handling all aspects of a 13 or 22-episode TV season.

There are a few cases where we do a show in this country and the writer is in charge and it still goes south. (You will always have those failures,) and I think it's testimony to just how difficult a job it is, and how much management it does entail. If you're not temperamentally suited to leading or communicating with others, it can be a rough ride.

I guess the lesson here is that it's not easy anywhere, and no system is perfect. The U.S. system tends to work better than anybody else's, that's true -- but it also comes with a high attrition and waste rate. And the attempts to rationalize that has led, variously, to doing things more like Canada (greenlighting series from scripts without a pilot -- while we do pilots. Crazy.) and putting Leno on 5 nights a week.

Same Challenge. Different Solutions. None of them perfect.

Anybody got an Advil?