By the time staffing season 1997 rolled around, things seemed different to me among the electric door–closer set. In short, the lines between development and current, between the cultures of those departments and those worlds, blurred. Most of the mid-level current managers and directors that I met started looking a lot like the development managers and directors. They got a tad hipper. A bit cooler. There was a sudden preponderance of goatees and so-called flavor-savers. More of those bookishly trendy glasses began to appear. I suppose this was partially an effect of the demise of Fin-Syn that allowed networks and studios to be owned by the same company, creating a sort of homogenization of the business. It was partially due to the even younger people joining the ranks. And partially because there was no need for the buttoned-down current executive who effectively managed a studio’s stalwart series for a decade, because the studio, as we once knew it, was gone, as were most of those blue-chip 30-share shows. That kind of programming was being usurped by upstart little shows on upstart little networks, and no one knew for sure the future of either. In short, everything, including current programming, started to be more speculative, more high-flying, more pie-in-the-sky. That was the nature of making TV during the age of what people would call media consolidation.
I had a staffing meeting with the director of creative affairs in the Team Disney Building (Eisner’s new monument that Roy Disney despised) on May 18, 1998. I’m still not clear if this particular hipster-suit was in current or development, studio or network. I think he was a representative of them all. Throughout the meeting, while I waxed poetic and did my best to give good meeting, he watched the stock ticker scroll across his muted television set, which was tuned to CNBC. He did this throughout the entire meeting, glancing back and forth between me and the ticker. Though I’d had seven or eight meetings in the past few days, I’m sure he’d had at least that many before I came in. I couldn’t help wondering if he was monitoring his DIS options, perhaps to see the market’s response to the fall schedule announcements. For me, this was a sign of the times, the state of the TV business during this era.
The real meetings, the showrunner meetings, start as soon as there is something substantive to discuss, when a show has been picked up or when it looks like such an event is imminent. This is the climax of the entire process, pickup season.
This happens during the two middle weeks of May, when “upfronts” take place in New York. Upfronts are an event, a sort of TV convention if you will, where television programming executives unveil their fall schedules to media buyers in order to presell ad time “up front” on those shows. This is when the official announcements of network schedules take place. In an average season, networks pre-sell about 80 percent of their advertising time during upfronts.
During this time, much of the L.A. television community heads to New York. Agencies and studios take over entire sections of hotels. Actors and showrunners are flown in. Held in fancy hotel ballrooms and theaters like Radio City Music Hall, the presentations feel like a cross between the Emmys and a pharmaceutical sales conference. The network’s celebrities are trotted out. Network presidents make flashy presentations. Executives lobby media buyers at extravagant studio-sponsored cocktail parties.
And in the middle of all this, TV lit agents are hard at work positioning their clients for staff gigs. Frequent and frenetic calls to the skeletal staffs at L.A. offices are made. Cryptic text messages are sent out to anxious clients all over the L.A. basin. It is a time of high, high drama.
During the last week of May writers rush around town taking meetings at a moment’s notice. I got an urgent call from Dan early on Monday, May 26, 1997, saying that despite how charming I was at my recent breakfast with writer Scott Shepard at the Riviera Country Club, Justice League of America was not getting picked up and he was sending me on meetings, starting tomorrow at 1:00 with a new show called Three, about three hip con artists all forced to work together. He then snapped at his assistant who was listening in—as assistants always do—to courier the script and a tape to me ASAP. The assistant said they didn’t have the tape yet. Dan said “get it” and hung up.
So after spending the entire afternoon reading and rereading the script, and thinking of story ideas, and the entire evening watching and rewatching the bootleg tape when it finally arrived, I drove to Paramount the next day, clean-shaven, nervous, focused. Throughout my entire fifteen-minute meeting with Evan Katz (the future EP of 24), the pilot’s writer, he sat behind a desk and quite literally shoved a foot-long meat sandwich into his mouth while going through the motions of asking me what I thought of his script. To me, he was a guy who might hold the key to my future. To him, I was another thing he was forced by the studio to look at. I remained professional, reminded myself that this fellow writer was probably just too swamped to find time to eat, and told him that I thought Three was “brilliant—dark, edgy, without ever losing its sense of humor.” He thanked me for my time and did not bother getting up from his lunch at the desk. On my way out, passing the next clean-shaven, nervous, and focused writer waiting to see Evan, I did not consider this to be the pinnacle of a career in television.
I called Dan from the car before I’d even pulled off the lot. He wasn’t available but his assistant had another meeting for me with another new show that had just gotten a go in New York—C:16 it was called, an FBI thing. My agency called me back moments later with a time and place: tomorrow, Brillstein-Grey’s offices on Wilshire. The script and tape were already at my house, sitting on the front doorstep, by the time I got back.
However, as I reached down to pick them up, the phone rang from inside. Grabbing the phone, tearing open the material for tomorrow’s meeting, I was told that I now had another meeting the day after tomorrow, with Paul Stupin for Dawson’s Creek.
So after another night of cramming and prepping—and trying to keep my mind on the FBI and off angst-ridden teens—I arrived the next day for my 4:30 meeting with Michael Duggan (former co-EP of Law & Order), C:16’s creator. Moody and charismatic, Duggan was described to me by a well-known writer as her “elevator man”: Meaning, he was the one person with whom, if she was ever stuck in an elevator with him, she could have sex and her husband would understand. The truth is, I hadn’t heard much buzz about C:16 that season; no one had. It was a show that nearly everyone had discounted. So when I saw the pilot, frankly, I was a little blown away by how great it was. Liking the show as much as I did made the meeting a pleasure. The meeting lasted for more than an hour, which in the climate of staffing season is a very good sign.
The next day, Thursday, May 29, I met Paul Stupin in his office on the Culver Studios lot. Paul was gregarious and animated from the minute I walked in the door. Part of this, as I would eventually come to learn, was simply his personality. (Even with his office door closed while he had highly sensitive conversations about the writers on his staff, the writers on his staff in the story room next door often heard every word he said.) But part of this can also be chalked up to a special kind of effusiveness that only comes from knowing that you have the hottest show in town and everybody wants to work on it. For a producer, especially a nonwriting producer, this is as close to stardom as one comes. This is “fuck-you” time, as in, “Fuck anyone who’s ever fired me, fuck anyone who’s ever not returned my call, fuck anyone who’s ever shoved a sandwich down his throat while in a meeting with me, fuck anyone who’s ever refused to fuck me, fuck you all—I have the hottest fucking show in town, so kiss my ass, and do it nicely.”
That said, I liked Paul a lot. I liked how totally excited he was about Dawson’s, and not just the response it was getting, but the show itself. We shared that in common and, in TV staffing, unabashed unambiguous love of a show goes a long way when it comes to getting a job on that show.
As always, I called Dan from the car on the way off the lot and told him I’d had a great meeting. I think I was even a bit giddy because I told him I thought I was going to get an offer. Dan did not seem even remotely co
nvinced.
Most shows, I knew, started the first week of June, which was Monday. On that preceding Friday, to say I waited by the phone would be like saying that a mother hen waits by her egg-filled nest. It was a long day. Dan did not call. At 5:55P.M., I called him. Nothing. “Try to relax,” he whisper-said, his voice nearly gone by now. “Enjoy your weekend.” Even for a man who never stopped speaking during a month of eighteen-hour days, this was much easier said than done.
The first day of the first week of June is a special demarcation point for TV writers. It is a day of celebration, or a day of grief. To have your staff gig lined up by this day means that your season is set. You know what you will be working on. You know that your mortgage will be paid. You know what your life will be like for at least the next few months, which is the most a TV writer realistically hopes for. But if you don’t have a position by this day, then you join all the other writers still competing for a handful of errant positions still left during the first week or two of June. After that, the music has stopped. The jacaranda blooms fade, and the city is covered in a silent shower of purple. Like tattered confetti, they line the gutters along Hollywood Way and cover windshields of newly leased cars on backlots from Culver City to Century City. The party is now over. What passes for L.A.’s spring gives way to June gloom, a marine layer of thick clouds that settles over the city until mid-July, when the dry heat burns them off and TV production begins. Until that time, the thrilling buzz has been replaced by the quiet sounds of writers off working long hours behind closed doors. Sure, there will be a few shows that hire during the off-season, some cable series and first-run syndies. There will be a handful of shows that have some needs as a few writers wig out and walk out of contracts when they discover what they signed up for, and perhaps a few more as some shows decide they need different voices in the Room. And of course there will be the possibility of freelance scripts, which can be staff auditions, at some point. But by the second week of June, it’s pretty much a done deal. Like accountants on April 16, TV lit agents all go on vacation. And before they leave for the Ritz in Maui or the Four Seasons in Bali or a Viking cruise with the kids, they always tell their clients and colleagues and the trades the same thing, that this was by far “the most brutal staffing season yet” but that they “still staffed almost all of their writers.” This gives little solace to those writers who were not staffed. But those writers left without a chair will move on. They will start thinking about next season. Because development season begins again in earnest on July 4th, and the whole cycle starts anew. No matter what kind of staffing season you had, no matter how “brutal” this year really was, no matter how good or bad the entire business is, just as sure as the sun will rise again tomorrow, there will always be another TV season. It’s part of the natural rhythm of life in L.A.
“Enjoy your weekend,” rang in my ears. While many friends who had their gigs lined up headed off for one final quick jaunt to Cabo or Palm Springs, I got a large motorized tiller from Aaron Rents and, to the dismay of my wife, spent most of the next forty-eight hours digging up the backyard and replanting the garden. It was not a pretty sight, but I had to do something.
On Monday morning, still unable to get the mud out from under my filthy fingernails, I heard that I would not be receiving an offer for Dawson’s. My heart dropped. Had my carefully measured levels of deference and awe been too carefully measured? Or did I gush? Did I not reference his past work enough? Or did I know too much and come off as creepy?
Dan explained to me that I wasn’t hired because nobody was hired. He said that Paul was not in a position to take on a writing staff just then. As much as the WB made it known that they loved the show, they only gave Sony a pickup for eleven episodes, an atypically small order. Because of the odd size, the staffing needs were minimal and because of the odd premiere date, January, the writing staff would not start until August. This did not make me feel much better.
However, as I was beginning to think I would spend much of the next year writing another project for Yakov, ninety minutes later Dan called back with an offer from C:16. Evidently, my Profiler worked. After a little negotiation we accepted, and I went to work at 9:30 A.M. the next day, exhausted, relieved, and excited.
After the initial couple weeks in temporary offices at Sunset Gower Studios, the writers moved to our permanent space in an old office building off National in Venice. The building was pretty decrepit and bland, and the other tenants always thought we were up to something suspicious, seeing as how we didn’t seem to be dressed for a proper day’s work, but I loved the place. Aside from the fact that the office was just minutes from my home in Santa Monica, we were right over the See’s Candies customer-service department, so the story room often smelled of chocolate, particularly on hot days, which was most.
Produced by Brillstein-Grey for ABC, the new series was extremely promising. It was about the FBI’s major case squad. It was fast-paced, pulled no punches, and was very smartly written. The pilot looked awesome. It was the only show on television to be “letterboxed,” giving it a cool, movielike look. Those black bars you see above and below the picture when you watch a movie in its original wide-screen format on a television set is letterboxing. Michael Robbins, who was credited with giving NYPD Blue its distinguishing look, directed and was on board as a producer. The cast was great—Angie Harmon, Morris Chestnut, Christine Tucci (Stanley’s sister), D.B. Sweeney, and a bearded Eric Roberts. Even the critics, for the most part, were extremely enthusiastic. And the writing staff—Bonnie Mark (NYPD Blue), Anne Lewis Hamilton (thirtysomething), Patrick Harbinson (Law & Order: SVU), Marjorie David (Chicago Hope)—read like a who’s who of Hollywood’s best one-hour drama writers. However, the show did not work.
And this was not simply due to the simple winds of chance that end so many TV shows. No, C:16 is a textbook example of controllable reasons for why a show fails. For starters, anyone who saw Duggan’s pilot would have understood that C:16 was a 10:00 show. The tone was mature, the characters sophisticated. But ABC plugged us in at 8:00, which immediately clipped the show’s wings, significantly limiting the stories we could tell and the way we could tell them. In addition, they plugged us in on Saturday night, a graveyard for television unless you were a babysitter sitcom or maybe a movie, and we were most certainly neither. (In fact, the last time the American Broadcasting Company had had even a modicum of success with original programming at 8:00 on a Saturday night was in 1991, when they moved Who’s the Boss? there from Tuesdays. The series died the season it was moved there.) The C:16 pilot was shot in letterbox, as were the first four episodes, but in later episodes the format was changed upon directive from the network. This not only fundamentally changed the surveillance-like look and voyeuristic sensibility of the show, it also made production days longer and more expensive. When the network began promoting us, the ads made us look like the next NYPD Blue. And we wrote episodes accordingly, quick, procedural investigative story lines. But somewhere around September, the ads started featuring Angie in a short skirt with her gun. And we started to focus more on the personal stories. Not that any of that mattered by this point, though. By then it was clear, at least to me, that the show was a goner.
The network messed with us for all the expected reasons networks do these things: executives with an agenda, the politics of programming, simple inexplicable blundering. But at ABC, at this time, there was more than the usual share of this sort of thing. You see, the main reason we could never quite figure out who we were was that our network couldn’t quite figure out who it was.
At the 1997 upfronts, ABC tried to reinvent itself with the slogan “TV is Good.” This was the brainchild of ABC’s new head of network television, Jamie Tarses, whose struggles with the network and senior management are well documented. Most people I knew made fun of the slogan—which you could understand since it pretty much begged for satirization—but honestly, I liked it. I thought it was hip, self-referential. The trouble was the network’s shows
were not. Well, some were, but the rest, like our show, were all over the place. Rather than specifically positioning themselves, focusing on a specific demographic of the audience, ABC was pretty much trying to target everyone: the heartland base that loved Roseanne, urban men who watched NYPD Blue, young working white girls who showed up for Dharma. Hell, on C:16 we had full-on A-stories that featured black actors like Morris Chestnut involved in actual stories with other black actors, this on the same network that featured Ellen, TV’s first lesbian. And all of this, by the way, was ultimately managed by the network’s new owner, Disney, which was pushing for ABC to be “the family network.”
Despite some of the less than charitable comments that made their way through the rumor mill at the time, I actually thought Jamie had the right impulse. Trouble was, she could not have been at a more wrong place at a more wrong time. For in the mid to late nineties, being the new head of network entertainment was less about creating entertainment and more about creating a network. The fact is, in the 1997–98 season, whether they wanted to be or not, ABC was a network of true diversity, and this no longer worked in broadcast television.
By our second week, we were actually trailing Total Security at 9:00 in the ratings. This was the last series Bochco developed for ABC as part of his original 1988 ten-show commitment, and the show for which we were supposed to be the lead-in. By the end of October, we were the second-lowest-rated series on the network. We were barely getting 8-shares.
It’s an odd thing, working on a lame-duck show. There comes a point where no matter what kind of happy talk the network publicity department is pumping on the skewed ratings propaganda you find in your in-box—Congrats goes out to C16! Best in Males over 80 in the entire Metro Wichita market!—you know it’s time to start working on another spec. There’s also the odd phenomenon of having to write and produce several episodes that you know will never see the light of day in an English-speaking market. Stories previously deemed too weird are dug out. Assistants are given shots. People start casting spouses and significant others. There’s a lot of gallows humor. “Friday afternoon martinis” become simply “afternoon martinis,” and then it’s just a matter of time until a blender is running nonstop in the break room. It is a noise that ominously starts to bring to mind the sound coming from a heart monitor when the patient flatlines.
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