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Let's play the Holy Blood Holy Grail game and pretend that the above is all true and confirmed.
Darabont, ultimate television historian that he is not, wants to model The Walking Dead on how the BBC makes TeeVee -- with a showrunner, no staff, and freelancers coming in to write episodes. First of all, I think the BBC model works because production over there is an entirely different animal than it is here. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there story editors on BBC shows? Isn't there some experienced framework in place to make the shows run smoothly? And haven't the majority of the showrunners come up through the very stringent system so that they know how it all works? Don't they have -- dare I say it -- experience? And don't the freelance writers also know precisely how the system works, and how to pitch and write scripts for these shows?
Since that's not how we do it here, I can't imagine that this sort of thing would run smoothly. Actually, hang on a minute... I actually have experience with this sort of thing! I was on a show where it was decided that the majority of the episodes would be freelanced. This led to hearing A LOT of pitches and not surprisingly, an enormous number of those pitches missed the mark. Because see, that's how our system is designed. It's almost impossible for freelancers to pitch an acceptable story to a US TeeVee show, which is why the WGA required freelance episodes are usually given to friends or assistants. Freelancing, for the most part, is so that people who want to break in are given the chance to. I'm a huge proponent of handing freelances to assistants. If I had a show, that's what I would do, too.
Darabont, unfortunately, is speaking from ignorance. I don't know what his thought process is for this decision (if indeed he made it). But I can imagine a few possible reasons: One, he figures that he is doing all of the work anyway, and can continue to do all of the work AND keep up with production. And two, that because of his feature director mentality, he truly has no idea what the fuck a writing staff is FOR. But this isn't all on Darabont. The comments on sites reporting this potential news have been staggeringly ignorant. Nobody understands what a writing staff does. Many of the comments say shit about staff writers just lazing around collecting paychecks they aren't actually earning. Other comments say that the writing sucked so hard that firing the writers is the right thing to do. Others say that hey, Darabont wrote most of the episodes and how long does it take to write a script anyway? Just don't fire the make-up guy. A goodly number of comments mention David Kelley, Aaron Sorkin and David Milch, three showrunners who write the majority of the episodes of their shows. So certainly Darabont, great genius that he is (he's from FEATURES!) can handle 13 zombie episodes. Still others -- and these are the most dangerous -- are from people who heard somewhere that TeeVee used to be mainly freelance, so obviously it works. And then the BBC example.
Over on Blastr (they spell it that way), Marc Bernardin -- one bloody smart cookie -- had these comments:
Is there a virtue in having a writers' room, in fostering the free-flowing exchange of ideas, inspiration and experience? Absolutely. But that's not the only way of making television; there are others, and they are perfectly capable of turning out excellence. Babylon 5 was written nigh-exclusively by J. Michael Straczynski, and didn't have a writing staff. Every line of dialogue during the first three seasons of the Emmy-winning West Wing came from Aaron Sorkin's keyboard; the writing staff there served more as a platoon of researchers.
Actually, word is that Sorkin's room broke the stories and then Sorkin wrote the scripts. So I suppose if you think that dialogue is 99% of writing, then this theory makes sense. However, that's not what I think.
Turning to freelancers might allow for a shorter production schedule, with a dozen writers all working at the same time, turning in an avalanche of material simultaneously to then be honed and polished by executive producers like Darabont and Robert Kirkman.
That's certainly the shiny fantasy of how this could work. But I have to ask... exactly WHEN is the heavy lifting -- the actual breaking of stories -- supposed to occur? If you haven't worked on a production schedule, then you really don't know what happens when the train leaves the station. If the writers are involved from the ground up, then they are more adept at getting the voice, pacing and characterizations. If you keep them out of the process and just hand them an outline, you are fucking yourself. Like, seriously.
And freelancers will get you new voices, fresh legs to help carry the drama over the long haul. They can also come from anywhere: Wouldn't it be sweet to see Stephen King bounce in for an episode, or David Chase, or Neil Gaiman, or Steven Moffat?
Because Stephen King bouncing into X-Files was such a success. This is backwards. The showrunner IS THE VOICE OF THE SHOW. The last Goddam thing you want is for a TeeVee show to have a thousand different voices. If it's an anthology, maybe. But this format doesn't work for anthologies, either. I have first-hand experience with that. But that's not even the biggest outrage with this statement. Now what you're talking about is famous writers, who don't need the work and don't need the money, taking work away from actual TeeVee writers. Well, how fucking OFFENSIVE. Is television REALLY going to turn celebrity? It's bad enough that networks want names for everything but REALLY? You're going to turn TeeVee back into a freelance medium and rather than that being a GOOD thing for writers, you are now just handing scripts off to Stephen fucking KING? Go tell your great idea to working TeeVee writers and see what they say about it.
Okay. People. Please. Don't be fucking stupid. You have no idea how it works. You don't know what writing is. You don't know what a writing staff does. You don't understand how the BBC model is different, or that because TeeVee used to be freelance-heavy, that was before even your parents were born. And ultimately, you have NO FUCKING IDEA how the credit process works. There are certain showrunners who have a tendency to put their names on scripts with other writers. They all have different reasons for doing so. They could just adore the shit out of residuals, and want as much as possible, even at the expense of a staff writer making a tenth of what the showrunner makes. They could be of the philosophy that since they are running the show, they have every right to put their names on scripts. They could want to cover their asses just in case a script gets nominated for an award. Or, they could think that actually sitting down and writing dialogue is REAL writing, and the work the writing staff does is not.
My favorite comments blame the staff for horrible shows. But see, a writing staff on its own has NO power. The power in TeeVee is ceded to the showrunner. So if you're watching a show you hate, blame the executive producer. Don't blame the writing staff.
It still astonishes me that people do not understand that the writing of the script comes at the END of the writing process. Just because you are not typing "Fade In," that doesn't mean you are not writing. Writing is preparation. Writing is construction. Destruction. Composition. It's editing. Storytelling visually, emotionally, humorously, logically. Critical thinking. Letting go of great ideas in service of the story. Character arcs, planned over an episode and a season and the life of the show. It's inspiration, the testing of that inspiration, the honing and fine-tuning of that inspiration. It's collaboration, for the love of God. It's a group of experienced brains tackling a blank white board and breaking a fucking story in two days.
Nowhere in the comments of one of these sites do you see someone say, "But who is going to break the stories?" Because that's not why people go into writing. They have "ideas." They think sitting in front of a computer or a typewriter or putting pen to paper is romantic. Writing is never shown as it really is, from the bottom up. Nobody gives a shit about how the chassis of a car is built. They only care about the trim. It's really easy for someone to read a script and give notes, just thoughts off the top of their head, and think that those notes will be a cinch for the writer to incorporate. Because after all, you just need to put in the leather seats or tint the windows, right? With a story, though, if the person giving the notes doesn't understand how that story was built and created, then the notes could be difficult to implement. And sometimes, they will be impossible. The writer will have already thought of the things the note-giver wants, thought about them, tested them, and rejected them.
Because THAT, people, is what a writing staff does, and the fucking disrespect being blurbed out on blogs and news sites is really offensive.
If you want to break into television and your fantasy about writing involves you sitting at a computer, then you're not ready. Go write features. Television is, as I said above, a collaborative medium. First of all, you will need to collaborate with your fellow writers. You will be facing that empty white board at least 13 times, and as you face each new episode, you will have previous episodes with story and character development to consider. You will have upcoming episodes as well, especially if your show is serialized. You will have budgets to consider in your story breaks. Actors. Production. Crew. Studio and network executives. You will have to become a serial killer of your story children and let your great ideas go. And all of THAT is before you even get to the script. What bothers me about writing programs at schools is that they don't generally teach this. Sure, they'll teach you how to write a solid script, but they won't teach you how to be on a staff. But geez, given the utter lack of understanding of how a writing staff works, I'm not terribly surprised.
A good showrunner depends on his (or rarely her) writing staff. These people have the showrunner's back, and he has theirs. It greatly disturbs me that people with NO understanding of this are being given shows, and it accounts for the upswing in horrible treatment of writers in TeeVee. TeeVee IS a writer's medium, but it shouldn't be a tyrant's medium. And it shouldn't be about someone's misunderstanding and misuse of writing staffs. I don't know why Darabont decided this (if he has), or why his experience with his staff was apparently so wretched that he doesn't want anyone around anymore. Sometimes, showrunners are just lousy communicators and aren't able to impart what they want to the writing staff. And sometimes it's just not a good fit. But again, it's up to the showrunner to use his experience and if someone doesn't actually HAVE experience, then THIS happens.
If Darabont wants to go this route, he'll have a somewhat easier time of it because this isn't a network show. He doesn't have the layers of executives and producers he has to go through to get something done. So his process is going to go smoother anyway. But it's a seriously bad example that's being set for the rest of the industry. If our system was set up for freelancing, that would be one thing. But it isn't. This isn't the BBC. And frankly, using Steven Moffat's S5 of Doctor Who as a shining example of freelance genius is rather Goddam stupid. Moffat was clearly overwhelmed, and it showed.
Maybe a writing staff could have helped him out with that.
16 comments:
Actually, it's a great example to set for the industry--in that, when it fails completely and utterly--how could it not?--staff writers might get a wave of backlash-to-that-format respect as deserved.
Just a thought.
Agreed.
Amen.
I worked for a non-Guild low-budget animation company in New York a few years ago, and after freelance writing a string of webisodes for them was hired on as a staff writer.
I worked there for a little over year and in that time contributed significantly to the breaking of upwards of 30 half hours of animated teevee, and the actual writing of maybe 15. The handful of other staff writers carried similar loads. A strange irony of the company's budget emerged quickly on: to "stay on schedule" they would occasionally hire a freelancer from outside (most of whom didn't live in the city and spent little to no time at the actual offices). Now, these freelancers were very good writers--some of them friends whose work and abilities I truly respect--but I can honestly say that in 90% of cases the work they delivered was, for a variety of reasons, 90% unusable. What invariably ended up happening was we--the staff writers--would have to slam the brakes on the scripts we were writing to rewrite, heavily revise, or punch-up the scripts the freelancers wrote. Which isn't even to mention all the work we had to do on those scripts after the production team--and subsequently, the network--got a look at them. Now, also keep in mind that these writers were delivered finished approved outlines to work from...outlines WE had pitched, repitched, broke, and then written.
The sickest joke of all? At a certain point these freelancers were earning between $4500-$6000 a script. Each. For one or two valiant but mostly unusable scripts a year. Meanwhile, I was making in the mid-50s a year. Had the work I contributed been remunerated at the same scale as the freelancers, I would have cost the company...oh, I dunno, 300K a year?
I'm not even complaining about my time there...it was mostly great. Just saying that in this--admittedly non-HW, non-Union--particular instance freelancing was a HUGELY inefficient choice.
I'm kinda surprised as a baby writer that I had any relevant experience to contribute to this discussion...but I did! Wheeee!
I think you just saved me from writing part two of my rant about this on my blog. Well done.
I'm not sure there will be a whole lot of pitching going on. I have a feeling Darabont has very specific ideas about the show and will be handing out very specific assignments.
I suspect your resistance to the idea is revealed in your words, "Since that's not how we do it here..." It not unusual for methods that go against established procedure to be looked on with suspicion. But that doesn't mean they don't or won't work.
And what could be worse for TV writers than this way of working becomes a trend and the staff jobs disappear. I'm primarily a novelist and in my time in Hollywood only worked staff on a non-union animation show, but I can tell you that getting that weekly salary gave me a real sense of security. So I can understand the trepidation staffers might feel when confronted by something that could potentially be the new reality.
But none of this means Darabont is ignorant, as you suggest, nor does it mean his method will fail.
One of the things that bothers me is not only do most of the people talking about the situation, as you mentioned, not know anything about what a writing staff does or how a writing room is run, THEY DON'T CARE TO KNOW. I bet they've never spent any time in a writers' room or even bothered to source actual TeeVee writers.
There's all stuff we don't know -- but when we're responsible, we bother to learn it. The lack of caring to bother to learn (talk about a badly written sentence, but it's exactly what I mean) bothers me as much as some of the other elements.
I think this has a better chance of working than not, because it's based on -- and follows -- source material. Stories are already broken. Darabont or any freelance writer can take a look at an illustrated outline over at Meltdown Comics. Some of the heavy lifting is already done.
The same can be said of Benioff and Weiss tackling "A Game of Thrones." George R.R. Martin did their beat sheets for them, with his novels. Unless and until they veer from his stories and characters, they can do more with fewer writers.
The source material has nothing to do with it. It's not how TV production works. And it doesn't matter if one writer can pump out 13 beautifully polished scripts before production starts. TV writing isn't just about being creative, it's also about being nimble and responsive.
What happens when halfway through the production, that prison set you were counting on falls through? What do you do when one of your leads breaks a leg, or the actor you cast for that 3 ep arc just isn't delivering? Or a director goes way over budget on ep. 4 and you have to dump ep. 8 and 9 because of it. You have to put out those fires, while your recutting ep 3 for time and going to a million meetings a day for tone and casting and wardrobe and EPK and on and on and on...
A writing staff is there to help respond to those issues. When story needs to be adjusted to practical reality. A showrunner, no matter how talented, can't do it on their own. There is just too much to do, too many moving parts.
I wasn't in the room on "Walking Dead," so I can't speak to what went down there, or what the scripts looked like, but I've been watching the show. On the basis of what I've seen, something had to change.
When a writers' room is working well, shows don't air with major story logic problems all over the place. If there are some obvious questions the viewer might have, then one of the characters will give voice to them sooner or later in the first couple episodes. But this is not the case with WD, which leads me to think that either Darabont either never respected his staff, or he lost respect for them early on, and in either case, the show suffered.
I really don't care how shows get made, or how many writers they hire in the process -- I should, since it affects my standard of living, but I don't. All I care about is whether I have something to watch tonight, and it must be said, room-driven shows do tend to be much more watchable.
There is something about having to argue why you think this character would do X -- and sometimes being dissuaded -- that makes for tighter stories, more believable scenes. But that only works if your writing staff has the judgment to argue with you, and you have the faith in them to trust them when they do. If both of those elements are missing, then you might as well scrap the whole thing and start over. Here's hoping Darabont will come to realize that a strong writing staff can only make his life easier, and he'll make an effort to line up the help he needs for S2.
Your indignant posts are always your best.
Terrific post. As one who works at the opposite end of The TV Machine -- lighting, not writing -- I'm fascinated by your dissection/explanation of the unique dynamics in writing for television. Every week I watch a covey of writers come on set clutching their scripts and pencils, and each time I can't help wondering exactly what is is they do while locked away The Room.
Thanks for opening a window and shedding some light on a process that remains opaque to so many of us on every show's working crew.
Wil, you're absolutely right, and I made the mistake of addressing a part of the original post (the one about story breaking) without specifically quoting it.
That said, there are production models that work, even at AMC. I saw an interview with Vince Gilligan where he described the process for that season of Breaking Bad. He and his writing team managed to get all the episodes written before production began. Then, Vince flew to location and stayed there throughout, overseeing production and making those tough decisions. The writers room was gone by then. Having been present through the writing of those scripts, he knew what "hill to die on" in terms of budget and locations, versus what could be cut or adjusted according to the problems of that particular shoot. He had to do more writing on set, yes. But coming there with all those episodes already written made production much more efficient. They could shoot scenes for episodes 1, 4, and 7 with minimal setup and/or wardrobe changes. And they knew where they were going.
I'm not saying that's what Darabont has planned, but obviously it's been in the brains at AMC as a possible way to work. Get all the scripts in, then go to production.
And it's not just AMC. Plenty of cable shows have a sort of "limited engagement" work period for the writers room. Twenty weeks. Eighteen weeks. Sometimes the nets or the studios try to get the writers to accept a "work furlough" where they're in the room for eight weeks, then off for six, then back on for eight. But the WGA doesn't like that. Point is, a lot of writers rooms close up shop long before production is finished, and the kinds of decisions you mention have to be made by the showrunner alone anyway. Is it incredibly stressful? Yes. Does it get done? Most of the time.
With all of that said, I am not an advocate for eliminating writing jobs. At all. This work is hard enough to get on its own.
What disturbs me the most is how we're ready to excoriate one of our own without first learning the real facts of the situation. In this case, EP and number-two guy on "Walking Dead" Chic Eglee quit because he wanted to be the number-one guy for season two of the most successful AMC show to date, and Darabont decided to remain as showrunner. That's what happened.
The fate of the writing staff may still hang in the balance, and I imagine there will at least be some shuffling if Eglee did most of the cherry-picking for the staff. Right now it's just too soon to tell... And too soon to bitch and moan.
I think we all need to be careful not to turn on ourselves too hastily. There is this unspoken animosity between TV writers and feature writers (or hyphenates) crossing into TV. Obviously the TV writers know more about The Way Things Work, and as such are the greatest allies to the ones crossing over from features, but there's also opportunities to help break from habits and processes that have been broken for too long.
As soon as Deadline ran the story that Darabont fired the staff, a frightening number of TV writers made remarks to the effect of "He's so stupid! He's from FEATURES!" Guns were drawn. Had Darabont physically been in the same room as some of them, blood would have been drawn too.
Since all it took was a Deadline article for this backlash, maybe there's been some resentment or distrust building for a while now. I don't know. But if Darabont looked around and discovered his staff resented him for being "from FEATURES" then I imagine he would prefer to let that staff go and find writers who don't say "feature writer" like it was "mudblood."
A lot of us feature writers with TV deals follow TV writers online. I don't know of anyone who wants to hire a writer with no respect for their showrunner. Let's not pull out the torches and the pitchforks just yet.
Eric, to be fair, Kay prefaced with an "if this is true." And Kay isn't talking about a variation on a theme of the writers room--obviously Breaking Bad has one, and Vince Gilligan has a staff upon which he depends--but a throwing out of the theme all together. We all know that writers are laid off regularly and that that is part of the system. That's not what the story is here. It's simply the possibility that someone might write a show without a writers room at all. And that's not a great idea, and it's a pretty egocentric idea. I think that's the essence of the post.
Two quick responses:
1. I think a lot of people who point to Aaron Sorkin as an example of one writer doing a whole series on their own don't realise how much work his writing team did to support him in writing The West Wing, or how regularly his scripts were delayed - in one case by so much that he finished a script on the same day it finished shooting.
2. I actually found Moffat's first year of Doctor Who to be the strongest since the second season, and certainly didn't see any sign he was "overwhelmed" at all.
Eric, I don't know about anyone else, but my problem isn't with Darabont or the situation at hand (hey, the guy and the team handed AMC the greatest cable numbers ever) because there really is no way to know what exactly happened. But there is a problem with the reporting and commentary.
My guess is that there will be a writing staff of some sort to handle what usually happens during a 13 ep. production. Or maybe not. But I know from experience that to produce 13 hr of television without a staff... there be tigers.
This has nothing to do with creative choices and is solely about Cablevision planning to spin off Rainbow Media. Budgets for all their cable channels are constricted at the moment, especially for one of their most successful shows that draws high ad revenue. All their product is undergoing belt-tightening.
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