I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

OH CANADIAN SCRIBE, I see you out there, reading this bathed in the cathode ray glow. You've kept silent, so silent, saying nothing as the sands shift around the sinkhole of our little industry. "Better to stay under the radar," you think. "Besides, I'm probably just going to go to the States anyway."

Really?

Well, read a couple of recent articles from Variety first:

Recession shrinks writers' room. An excerpt:

One unfortunate casualty of the recession that may not receive as much attention as the slow sales of homes is the shrinkage of the writers' room.

Those containers of creativity haven't physically gotten smaller across the television production landscape, but they're slightly emptier these days. Rough financial seas have produced tighter ships.

"I definitely feel as if there are (fewer) jobs out there," says Damon Lindelof, exec producer of ABC's "Lost."

"Whereas new shows from pilots that got picked up used to have 10 to 12 writers -- that was the size of our staff in 2004 -- we're just eight now. In late winter and early spring of this year, when the recession was rearing its ugly head, everybody was hearing rumors about the ramifications, that nobody was immune and that we had to make compromises."

"For a show like ours," says Lindelof, "or 'Dexter,' that only does 15-17 episodes but is very serialized and complex and hard to do, it's almost impossible to generate those shows with writing staffs of less than six to eight."

For the immediate future at least, some shows might have to find out the hard way if that's true.

"I don't think anybody really knows, because we're only now finding out what the new shape of the room can do," Rotko says. "We'll have to see if the story is working, if the procedurals are working. This may be the framework: a smaller, slightly condensed room.

And:

TV credits constrict with job market

Experienced showrunners and senior writer-producers who would have easily landed full-time staff slots just a few seasons ago are now taking on consulting producer gigs, thanks to the much-diminished number of scripted series ordered by the major nets for the 2009-10 season.

The rise of consulting producers is definitely a function of market conditions, but that doesn't mean that it's automatically a horrible situation for writers. Seasoned scribes who have reached the exec producer or co-exec producer level say they'd much rather work as consulting producers than take another title that would indicate they've taken a step backward -- and make it harder for them to command exec producer stripes in the future.

"It is a manageable, win-win situation for everyone involved if (a consulting gig) is properly put into place and constructed," says Thania St. John, a drama vet who is a consulting producer on Lifetime's "Drop Dead Diva."

"Nowadays you have a large group of very talented (writers) who have reached a certain level in their career. At some point there's just not going to be that (top) job available, but you still want to work. It makes sense to be a consulting producer."

The consulting producer role has become commonplace on comedy and drama series during the past decade. It typically involves an experienced hyphenate working one to three days a week on a series -- helping to break stories and outline arcs, offering rewrite and punch-up services and general troubleshooting advice.

(Posted using ShareThis)

You've got no Green Card. Things are tough all over. And the Promised Land has lots of experienced scribes with a 323 or 213 area code who've got nothing going on.

So, uh ... maybe, oh, I don't know -- maybe now's the time to actually get off your ass and try to make things better for you and your fellow creatives here, hmm?

I mean, it's better than just stressing out, right? That stuff's good for nobody!

Respect the audience, and the process -- and be prepared. There's a lot of tearing down coming. You want to pick up a hammer and maybe plant a flower or two? Or are you gonna keep being the passive character in your own life story?

Point of No Return

NICE ARTICLE in The Walrus this month that sets the table on the current problems in Canadian drama. Anderson does a good job giving the history of the medium in this country, and how it comes to find itself in its current parlous state.

With Quotes from Janet MacLean (co-creator/Executive Producer, The Border,) Chris Haddock, (Creator/Exec Producer DaVinci's Inquest, Intelligence) Bob Martin (co-creator, Slings & Arrows) and Mark Ellis & Stephanie Morgenstern (creators of Flashpoint.)

I'm working up a series of State of the Nation posts for a couple of weeks from now. Let's see if Haddock is right, and it's my turn to get pushed off the cliff. For now, read what Anderson has to say:

Walrus Magazine » Point of No Return » By Jason Anderson

(Posted using ShareThis)

Reprint: Thanks, Mr. K.

CAUSE IT'S MY BLOGAVERSARY, I'm posting a couple of pieces from the first month. This is where I finally revealed what the title of the Blog was about.

originally published 9/12/2005

Okay: so here it is. A thousand years ago, when I was still a journalist, I was interviewing an author. Doesn't matter who, but this was a writer I admired greatly. While the tape was changing, I peppered him with questions for my own interests' sake: "how did you make the leap to professional writer?" and things like that.

He smiled for a bit and nailed me with a glance. He saw what I was asking without me even asking it. He laughed and said,

"getting sick of the treadmill?"

And I smiled, too. He caught me out. This was certainly the first time any of my interview subjects had showed the slightest interest in the guy asking the questions. He paused for a second, like he was weighing saying something, and then he said,

"You'll get there. If you really, really want to write, you'll find a way to do it, and you'll find a way to make money doing it."

"Okay, I've got speed."

That's the cameraman telling me that he's ready to keep going; to resume the interview. So the last part of what the author said was the first thing I saw when I screened the tape back to cut my story together.

His face changed for a second there. Just a wisp of darkness crossed, and then was gone, as he settled back into interview mode. And before I got off my next question, he said,

"Just don't expect it to solve all your problems. At a certain point, you're still in the corner at the party, staring out at people; bewildered, munching dead things on sticks."

So. Now you know.

Reprint: His Master's Voice

IT'S MY FOUR YEAR BLOGAVERSARY, so I'm reposting a few nice pieces from that first month of blogging.

Originally published 8/20/2005

A few years ago, in a previous life, I was a television producer at a hip TeeVee station. I would do the kinds of stories where you talked to authors, people plugging their new book, videogame, pyramid scheme -- things like that. I didn't do many musicians - there were other people for that. I did lots of people who were big in advertising and marketing. Though I was tangentally related to that field, mostly the act of interviewing those people made it utterly clear to me that, boy, was I ever glad that I had not sought out a career in advertising and marketing.

Being an interviewer and producer was a strange gig, especially at this place where there was such high turnover; that kind of low level info tv is a factory -- you churn out one story after another, each one as disposable as the last. I was always an "off-camera interviewer." It meant that you tried to keep your questions short, and leading. You were constantly trying to get people to expound - not to have a conversation with you, but to talk for posterity, like they were communicating directly with that audience of one, watching at home. If you do it long enough, you start to feel like a ghost. You become about process, ever aware of the camera and the clip. It got so I could hear when we were coming near the end of the tape, because of the change in the whirring of the camera motor. I would always get my camerapeople to turn out the red light, and tell them to start rolling early, and just ease into the conversation. People got less nervous when you did that. While they were talking, you became the master of not interrupting, of feeding back signals of response that weren't verbal. A whole lot of smiles, and nods, and hand motions - everything short of speaking so that your voice wouldn't be heard on the tape. You learn to listen in clip. As you followed the conversation, there would be a dispassionate part of you that said, "bing. there's my opener. bing. that's a closing clip. bing. there's the clip I need to bridge the piece." You were simultaneously of the moment, deep in the conversation, and utterly apart from it.

Rarely in this life do people get to talk, really talk, as long as they want to. Conversation demands that you follow along, that you engage the other person; that you cede ground and give and take. An interview isn't like that at all. You could always tell the media-trained people, who spoke in soundbites and never veered off the mark. But with other people, civilians, the same pattern would always emerge. People can talk on one subject for about twenty seconds. Sometimes as much as thirty, but usually not much more. After that amount of time, they either go off on a tangent, run out of steam, or start repeating what they've already said. Try it sometime. It's uncanny.

Over the course of a few years, I probably interviewed close to five hundred people. Just the ghost in the chair listening to clip as the camera motor whirred. A couple of times in my social life, people would grow cross with me as they caught me "interviewing" them. They would call me on it, and ask me to stop. One woman put it best, when she said to me, "I'm not sure I like you when you do that. You go so far away."

Looking back on it, I realize that job for was perfect preparation for what I do now, though my life couldn't be more different. Then, I'd meet fourteen new people each week. Now, I spend most of my time alone, and the people I try to make speak, are entirely fictional constructs. Though some of those advertising types would give them a run for their money on that score.

What's remained is that separateness, that apartness. Part of actually being a writer, a working writer, is having an ability to disengage from the world, and from the people around you. To take that step back; to listen for the clip, the line, and notice the inflection and the rolling cadence of how people talk. Sure, it's artificial. But when you saw my interviews on the TeeVee, they were naturalistic, and you believed them. And that's just what I'm striving for when I write a script. It takes an awful lot of craft, and stepping back, to make things seem natural. To create a believeable world, one must sometimes take yourself out of this one.

For a long time I thought those years spent talking to people as an off-camera interviewer were wasted years; an unfortunate eddy that I'd followed for a while. For a long time, I saw that time of my life as a man who knew what he wanted to do, but lacked the courage to do it.

Now I'm not so sure. Though those interviews became tedious near the end -- I knew I had to get out when I found myself with a pasted-on smile listening to some guy talk about his new Molson ad thinking, "I could reach across right now and poke out your eyes, and you'd probably keep on talking about the breakthrough creative of your cheesy beer ad," -- I gravitated toward that job for the same reason as I settled into this one: because it suited something in my personality. I never wanted to be the centre of attention: not at work, anyway. But I did want to pull the strings.

I can hear the camera motor. I'm almost out of tape. And to think, I started out this entry wanting to explain what "Dead Things On Sticks" meant. Ah well. I'll get to that.

Driving Casting Mad

HIDDEN AMONG Bruce Handy's enjoyable Vanity Fair feature on Mad Men's new season is a little tidbit that actually serves as great crafty advice:

Another role came up, a twentysomething adman described as “blond, doughy, British.” Carrie Audino, one of the show’s two casting directors, raised an objection: “That really limits us. We can do 20s and British or doughy and blond, but all four is tough.” Weiner thought for a moment, then offered a poetically succinct summation of the character: “I want him to be one of those guys whose only attraction is his accent.” Now they had something they could work with. (The original character description had been “too limiting,” Audino told me later. “A doughy British guy who’s blond, in his 20s? There are two of them—maybe—in L.A.”)

The thing to remember when you're writing a TV script is that -- as I talked about in the series last week -- everything's happening fast. Including casting. You never know who's available at any time. You may think that you have the perfect picture in your head of what someone should look like, or be like. But how many stories have you heard of an actor who came in, and ultimately was iconic in a role, but who wasn't at all who the writer pictured going in?

All writers write specific types in sometimes, and you never know what the casting director is going to come back and say is difficult or limiting. On The Border, we would often get into trouble when we tried to find actors within specific ethnic groups that maybe for cultural reasons don't have a deep pool of actors. (First generation immigrants, for instance, tend not to have too many sons and daughters saying, "Mom, Dad, I want to be an ACTOR!" and finding unqualified support.)

It's also that combo of traits -- accent, look, etc, that dices and slices your choices. Casting Directors will try to go off the beam a little, to show you contrasts. They may ask if a part can be cast color blind, for instance. (I don't mean the actor is color blind, I mean that any ethnicity will do.) But they generally do try to hew to what you've written.

But Weiner's solution in the excerpt above is quite elegant, because rather than frame the part in terms of externals and their own mind's eye (physicality, appearance, cadence of voice, accent) it frames the part in terms of what the impression the audience should be left with.

It's a little mind shift, but when you're squeezing in those two description lines to bring a character to life, it's worth considering what the effect of the character is meant to be -- and rather than describing externals, conjure a feeling. Write what the first impression should be for the viewer.

Because if you do that, the casting director can come back to you and say, "Yeah, but what do you see in terms of height, weight, accent, hair color or age?"

Sigh.

It's a funny business.

Mad at 40 000 Feet

I KNOW THAT one of the things that makes humans prickly and maddening is the tendency to elevate anecdotal experiences to the level of something greater, more sweeping, and more important than the cold hard evidence might suggest.

So, uh...I hope you'll forgive me now for doing that very thing.

Last night I flew back from Calgary, where I spent the weekend visiting friends. These friends, very sweetly, had inquired on my behalf to see about getting AMC so I could watch Mad Men. No dice, of course. It's not offered on Bell Expressvu.

AMC in fact, is not available in a whole lot of the country. And no Canadian network saw fit to purchase the rights to Season 3 of Mad Men. CTV ran the first two seasons in a rather desultory fashion, but since the numbers weren't boffo out of the gate, passed on the 3rd season.

We've talked about some of the weird realities of TV in the midst of the great implosion before. But Mad Men is a particularly maddening fulcrum. It's an old-fashioned kind of show, paced and even shot in a style that's out of step with today's world. It's a show that bucks the prevailing trends in so many ways -- even down to the makeup of its writing staff.

It's a show that has a massive, much bigger impact on the culture than its numbers would normally suggest. It managed to establish -- instantly -- a strong brand identity for AMC that brought that channel firmly into the 21st century as a quality series destination. To watch the show on AMC is to understand, finally, the endgame of demographic targeting. The ads are all high end -- Lexuses, big brands -- Tiffany kind of stuff. Once upon a time these brands would spend freely and had enough clout to either advertise very selectively, or to scattershot everywhere. Nobody can afford that anymore. But advertising on a low-rated show is still cost effective if that small audience makes over 100K a year -- and that, my friends, is the Mad Men audience on AMC.

And just as the 3rd season starts, there are signs that the perennial low-rated tag -- the last slam against the show -- might be fading, too. Ratings for the premiere were up -- dramatically up. Close to 3 million may not seem like a lot, but there are shows that the American Networks are putting on now that are pulling close to that. For a cable channel to get that is ... well, still pretty astounding.

Here in Canada, of course, there is none of that, since nobody picked up the show. So what happens when unavailabilty meets a highly desirable audience?

Well, in a word -- weirdness. ITunes Canada announced earlier this week that it would be selling Mad Men immediately after its AMC broadcast. I checked at about 2AM ET Monday morning, and it wasn't yet up. But when I got up -- there it was. I dutifully slapped down my $2.49 (on my credit card,) downloaded it, and transferred it to my Ipod Touch.

American readers might be scratching their heads right now -- because none of this seems very unusual. Mad Men has always been available the next day on Itunes.

The point is that in Canada, it's a break in the dam of an artificially skewed and restricted market. Until recently, it wasn't uncommon for one of our broadcasters to buy a series just to keep on the shelf so that another broadcaster couldn't get it. Protected by regulation that allows them to selectively block U.S. signals when they're running the same show, Canadian channels have evolved to a place where they cherry pick the best of American network creati

vity, and slap it up on the air. It was literally a license to print money.

But now here comes Mad Men. A show that's of the moment, and might be catching fire. It's a brand establisher and a brand enhancer. Could this be the show that paves the way for paid downloading? That makes it palatable for the higher end of the audience segment? Because the people who buy Lexuses aren't, I believe, the people who'll spend a lot of time futzing with torrents and conversion programs, and what have you. Oh, and they're also the ones who'll probably be buying all those web-enabled TV's first -- so the whole "watching it on your computer" stigma's going to disappear, too.

You might laugh, but one of the odd things about the implosion of the music industry was the increase in the amount of quality music for the thirty to fortysomething market. It makes sense, when you think about it. We're the only ones still buying CD's.

Anyway, it's certainly too soon to tell. But there may just come a time where CTV or Global wishes they'd ponied up for that 3rd season, to delay the opening of Pandora's box.

Anyway, flash back to last night. I'm on Westjet Flight 158 to Toronto. I forego the seatback TV, take out my Ipod Touch, plug in the headphones, and settle in to watch the Mad Men season 3 premiere. I was glad to have spent the money, to have it to watch. I thoroughly enjoyed it -- propping up the 3 inch screen on top of the seat in front of me. After it ended, put the Ipod touch away, took out a book -- and switched the headphones to my other Ipod. (I know, I know -- shutup.)

A couple minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder. A guy one row back had seen what I was watching. And he saw that I wasn't using the Ipod anymore.

"Uh," he said, feeling a little awkward, I guess, "Listen, is there anyway I could borrow it? I really, really want to see that premiere."

I smiled, said sure, and passed it over. The guy was so excited, he bought me a drink when the cart came around. Factor in the course of that inflight drink, and I have now, essentially, made a profit on my Itunes purchase of Mad Men.

I can safely say I've been flying with that Ipod for about two years now -- and nothing like that has ever even vaguely happened before. It made me feel like there is definitely something going on.

Flash to today, and the implications of this story (found via Jaime Weinman.)

Oscar winner Holly Hunter ("The Piano") has earned an Emmy nod for each of the first two seasons of "Saving Grace." But today, TNT announced that the crime drama will solve its last case next summer. The cable network will push back the previously announced winter run of the remaining six shows in Season 3 of "Saving Grace" and Fox will film just three more episodes to tie up loose ends. While TNT wanted to continue with "Saving Grace," Fox decided to end production on the show after disappointing overseas and DVD sales

The tail has begun to wag the dog.

All those American nets have their production companies, and the calculus of what makes a show a hit is completely off now. Friday Night Lights? Family Guy? What makes you continue a show? What makes you stop it?

It's fluid, and it's fast moving, and the Canadian networks are in no way prepared for any of it. Of course, neither are the producers, or anybody else.

DVD sets with features of Canadian shows are often poorly distributed afterthoughts. (Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys are probably the best exceptions.) Most of the time, distribution -- both in DVD and film -- is a joke in this country. Itunes and VOD offer a possible way out of a historically Mickey Mouse approach. Does anyone have the guts to take the chance and step up?

It's generally acknowledged that the reason that 24 became a hit for FOX was because they brought out the first season in the summer before Season 2 started. People rented or bought, caught up, and by the time Season 2 premiered, the show came back a hit.

Contrast that with a worthy Canadian show like Intelligence. There's a show that could have really benefited by having a DVD in the pipeline before the second season. But it was not to be. They blew the release window, for whatever reason. Well, actually, wait a minute. Chris Haddock actually spelled out the reason in an interview with me:

We’ve been trying to get theAmerican distributor – we ‘ve got an American company that’s been putting the DaVinci show out on DVD and they look at Canada as a small market but we’ve been trying and just pushing, pushing to try and get them to make the investment in the first season. We won’t have it out when we hoped we’d have it out – this summer, because in their mind Canada’s just too small a market to put a rush on it. It’s a struggle. If we had the ability as CTV did to put a lot of coin behind it like Corner Gas, boom there they were with the set…it really does help. It’s a good support system. Unfortunately we don’t have the resources at the CBC to do that.

Haddock's as savvy a writer/producer as this country has. And the guy knows how to push. He knew the importance of timing the DVD set, but still couldn't get it done.

Now it's a couple years later -- the evidence is clear that you have got to have this stuff thought about upfront, and it's still not part of the calculus -- not really. The Canadian way of just doing everything to get the show made, and making the DVD an afterthought -- has to end. As the Saving Grace example proves -- it's not ancillary anymore. Everything's up for grabs.

Sure, there's still the catch 22 of you can't get anyone to buy something they haven't heard of, and they won't hear of it 'til it gets written about.

But it's not too much of a stretch to see a time when some enterprising American studio looks at a prestige product and does math and figures out that they can ride the hype and promo in the U.S.A. -- and maybe selling it to a foreign broadcaster isn't the most profitable route.

And then the networks here are screwed, because they have no Plan B.

Well, I suppose they could get serious about trying to make their own stuff -- and have their own quality shows to market. But that requires a culture where talent matters, and where you can recognize and develop quality material because you recognize what goes into it.

And we're pretty thin on the ground on that.

Anyway, again, I have no idea where any of this ends. And in the Canadian tradition, I'm sure there are a hundred people out there who could tell you how that would never work in Canada, and why they can't do it, and why nobody should ever even try. That is, after all, the Canadian way.

But the guy or girl who figures out a way to make it happen? The person who decides for one final moment, to be leading and not trailing edge -- who puts together a plan that combines all the things that are going on in the various rumbling, crumbling corners of the TV business -- That's the person who gets rich. Maybe a new media risk taker might save some old media dinosaur. Maybe not.

All I know is, looking down from 40 000 feet, and with all the bullshit that creatives have to face in this country, I have to say that I was so very relieved on one front: I'm glad I'm on my side of the line, and not theirs.

Cause there's turbulence ahead. Don't say nobody saw it coming.

Indians and Hispanics Don't Live in Scranton

WOW. I mean, just... Wow.

H/T @kazza323

Tv Series Scripting: Part Five: Production White & Beyond

Earlier posts in this series: Part One. Two. Three. Four.

RIGHT AROUND the time when the notes from the network come back on the 2nd draft, the writer/story department & showrunner have a “Come to Jesus” discussion with Producers, the AD department, and others about how this sucker is going to be prepped and shot.

The Director has also weighed in at this point – emphasizing the parts of the 2nd draft they really liked, and those that left them a little colder. They may pitch for scenes to be done a little differently, for the emphasis to be switched up, or any one of a hundred other things that they think will make the show sexier or cooler. In many cases, they’re right, and the writer dies a little inside. In a lot of cases, they’d get you a lot further down the road of “we can’t do this in eight days,” in which case the Producer puts on their best stern, “no no no” look.

Ideally, if you board the 2nd writers draft of a script, it should not….quite…fit. A board will show you a few days that are just ungettable. There are locations that just can’t really be accommodated. Maybe there are three stunts and they say, “choose two.” Maybe there’s a night lighting job that just is too extensive.

In any case, now the script process becomes about horsetrading, and the writer tends (with the showrunner’s blessing) to start making the changes that may not be ideal, but need to be made to make the show, and the board, work. In some cases this results in happy accidents that require a bit more work, but end up making the show way better. It’s a collaborative process, after all. In any case, from the 2nd draft, you hopefully find yourself, with the work and toil of the showrunner, the draft writer, the director and the AD, putting out the LOCKED PRODUCTION WHITE a day or two or three before the start of official prep. Generally, this represents the showrunner/head creative’s last pass on the script – it’s the practical blueprint for how you will work over the next eight days. The network continues to give notes, but they’re mostly line notes, and brief.

From here on in, changes to that locked WHITE script that generate coloured pages are driven almost entirely by production.

The main exception to this is dialogue changes that come from the read-through, which is the first chance for the story department to hear the story on its feet. Actors can sometimes drive a full pink simply by their read.

It’s possible that between WHITE and PINK and BLUE, props might disappear. You might lose a character or two. Maybe ACTOR lines will disappear. ACTION beats might be scrubbed. Bigger changes are usually as a result of a production problem: A location falls through, and needs to be re-imagined. A story beat has to be moved from a location day to a studio day. Actor availability problems force a rejuggling of lines or scenes, or a last minute re-configuration of a character for a different actor.

For most of this, the writer is now a surgeon who’s taking orders from the Director and the Producer and the AD's, (and in later years, the actors... yup, there's an old saying in TV -- first year the actors work for you, 2nd year you're working together, 3rd year you work for them, god love'em.)

It’s a general truism of production that the script on a TV series that gets shot is usually one draft past where it was best. I don’t know how true that is. I’m guessing if you’ve gone to DBL GREEN or TRIPLE BLUE, that’s probably true. In any case, the sides get made, the scenes get shot, a couple may get dropped and picked up later, or not – and the show passes from writing to shooting to editing, where it’s – in effect – written for the third and final time.

So that’s it. That’s the process. If you take anything away from this, let it be this: the idea that all first drafts and early drafts are trying to fix the creative, and are, yes, by their very nature, probably not shootable. It’s a process you have to go through to get you where you want to be.

Also, remember in film that these processes occur over years of development. Part of the juice that writers get from TV is that all this needs to happen quickly. Instinct drives so much of it, that flexibility and the ability to talk your way through change quickly become great advantages. It’s not about writing the absolute best script – it’s about writing the best script that can be shot. It’s not obsessing over commas.

It’s a high wire act. It might seem like the writer doesn’t take production concerns into account. (Every series I've been on, production and the story department start out a little wary of each other.) Believe me, we do take things into account. We just can’t really process and implement them, until such time as the story works.

And more or less, that's it -- from the writer's perspective, of how you get from start to finish. Thanks for reading.

Tv Series Scripting: Part Four: The Second Draft

Earlier in this series: Part One, Two, and Three.

THE AXIOM IS simple: writing is rewriting. It is in the 2nd draft that we see (hopefully) the creative direction of the script solidify. The second draft also represents the symbolic handover point of draft from a purely creative document to a practical production document.

The first draft is submitted to the network, and they come back with their notes.

Their notes rarely, if ever, take production considerations into account.

This is a bit of a flaw in the process of making TV in Canada – in the USA you’d get notes from both the studio and the network.

The network notes view everything through the prism of what they think their audience wants, and what will get them excited, and what will get them to NOT change the channel. That means they’ll talk demos and about their brand, and wonder if things are clear enough. Networks sometimes vacillate between giving the audience too much credit and not enough credit. My impression is that the audience is WAY smarter than the network gives them credit for most of the time, but that’s an argument that’s very difficult to win. Because if you’re right, you get a cooler show, but if they’re right, they lose a viewer and money. And they’d rather err on their side than on yours. Of course, you can make the case that being too obvious will lose them viewers too. Good luck with that argument.

But I digress.

What the studio (who in the U.S. system, is deficit financing the show) would generally come back with, besides creative notes, (everybody gives creative notes, because though few people can write, everybody feels they know why something is written badly,) is notes on shootability. This is where you would get the red flags of nervousness about those numbers of locations and extras, and the VFX you’re asking for, and the problem location that you’ve just written yourself into a corner and really, really need.

Here, we have to make do with the network notes, and trust the producers will catch the really problematic budgetary pitfalls that lurk on the way to the 2nd draft.

The network notes may be extensive. Usually they’re a mix of “make this clearer” or they may react viscerally to a character beat they don’t like or something they think will make the viewer change the channel. Sometimes the writer’s task is to figure out what the note is really saying. As I said above, everybody thinks they know why something is bad – but in actuality, most of the time they don’t. When networks offer solutions in their notes, it’s very rarely the best solution.

Sometimes you have to figure out what the real bump was for them.

Like radiated pain, or a medical condition that presents as a set of symptoms that may have little relation to the organ causing the problem, diagnosing what’s really wrong and what might fix it is a bit of a devilish, voodoo process. But seeing the networks’ reaction to the notes also serves the happy purpose of clarifying your reaction to the material, too.

By now, you’ve sat with that first draft for a week. You’ve thought about everybody’s notes in the story department a bit, and maybe you’ve even had a “are you fucking crazy?” discussion with the nervous producer.

You might have had time to count the day/night splits and realize that they’re unworkable. Maybe the AD is truly perverse, and boarded the 1st draft just for shits and giggles.

With the notes back from the network, generally the writer meets with, or hears the story department’s reaction to those notes, and comes up with a plan of action.

In any case, you go into writing the second draft with the determination to make the creative work. The object is to come out the other side with a script that, in a perfect world, you could shoot and have it be a well told, structured, and paced story.

It's a big amateur mistake to judge a script based on the first draft. (And I'm not talking about reading a first draft, restructuring or throwing out so much of it that it's barely recognizable and coming back with another draft. That's not really a second draft, so much as a second first draft.)

Experienced series writers and showrunners will judge a first draft by a different yardstick than many. What it comes down to, basically, is this: if I had to rewrite this sucker, could I do it fast? Would it mean just changing dialogue or shaping scenes, or is there major, major structural work to be done?

That's something that you only really learn as you go along.

But if you talk to a lot of experienced writers and directors, they will generally tell you that when the writer's on the ball, it's shocking how much the quality of a 2nd draft can come up from the first.

I first learned this lesson before I even really got into the business. I was teaching, and a student of mine had written a West Wing spec script. I'd written one myself the year before, and it was smoothing my transition into the business, so that combined with my love of American politics meant I gave this student a bit more time than I usually would.

Her first draft was not good. It was a very student-y script -- long dialogue without shape, but also a certain fuzziness on the workings of American government. The character voices were off, and it lacked the crisp details, the "aha" fun moments of wonkery and, of course, the flourishes of poetry and oratory that Aaron Sorkin brought to his best scripts for the show. (This was in the show's 2nd season, when it was arguably at its creative height.)

The student listened, and took copious notes, and went off. And I expected I'd get a script back that was slightly improved.

I was wrong. What I got back was frankly, a bit humbling. She'd listened and internalized all the notes. She'd researched, and fixed all her story problems. She'd filled in the political and personal motivations, sharpened the fuzziness, aligned the voices, and come up with ingenious and creative solutions that in many cases were far, far superior to the suggestions I'd proffered.

I was caught by surprise by the dramatic increase in quality from first to second draft.

I haven't been, since. It happens all the time.

So, on a series, besides swinging for the creative fences, and showing all the confidence the first draft lacked, tackling the 2nd draft also includes you seriously considering the impact of the script on production. As you worry less about whether people will get the story and be able to understand and enjoy it, that space is filled by anxiety that comes from worrying about how this sucker will be shot. The writer may find himself unable to meet the AD’s eyes. Maybe there’s been a preliminary scout and the writer knows that there’s simply no way that they’re going to get that abandoned amusement park or casino. Maybe a swingset in a playground or a VLT section at a bar might suffice?

The writer in the 2nd draft does their best to try to get close to shootable. Where they can eliminate a scene, they do. Where they can combine a scene, they do. Where they can eliminate or combine characters, ditto. Maybe the four beats in the action sequence only needs to be two. Yes, maybe most of Act 2 doesn’t need to be at night. Maybe Act 3 can be a new day. For the responsible TV writer, this is where you sharpen the creative as best you can, and you do your best to take every single Production suggestion you can comfortably accommodate and have the story still work.

In the WGC contract, a script payment covers two drafts and a “polish.” A dialogue polish is supposed to just be line changes, and not substantive changes in structure, and should comprise no more than 10% of the script. Because this is not generally the most useful thing to do at this stage, most productions tend to just eat the polish, pay out the writer on that, and keep moving. If the writer is on staff, that “polish” might wind up being yet another big rewrite to get you to the Production White draft.

When you submit the 2nd draft to the network, generally it’s assumed that the basic structure is sound and won’t change too much. The act outs are in the right places. The scenes are in the order, and in the ballpark, of how you’d like to shoot them. The showrunner might have taken a pass to better “voice” the show.

The notes from the network on the 2nd draft are generally -- but not always -- lighter. You might find out one or two things they’re being sticky about. But generally, it’s seen as the end of the road of putting the story needs first.

Next Time: Going White