by Bob Levy
Who else is on that team? Who are the other development professionals who participate in the TV development process in addition to the writer? Another member of the TV development team is often the producer. As we’ve discussed, “producer” is a word that can have many different meanings and refer to many different kinds of participants in TV, but the kind of producer who participates in the development process is the non-writing EP, the producer who works as a partner to the pilot writer and helps navigate the creative, strategic and diplomatic steps of the development process, the person who helps protect the writer’s vision. Typically the producer initiates the project either by identifying and optioning a piece of IP or by coming up with a commercial idea for a new series. In some cases a producer may be partnered with a writer by the studio if executives think a writer could benefit from a seasoned producer’s guidance.
The next participants among the team of development professionals are the executives, of which there are two and sometimes three kinds. Almost all TV pilots in development have a team of network development executives and a team of studio development executives (both teams typically consist of two or three execs each). Each team represents its company’s interests in making the pilot as good as it can be and in tailoring the project as much as possible to its company’s development and programming strategies.
A third kind of development executive is the production company development executive. The term “production company” is a bit misleading. The better term would probably be “development company.” Many of us think of production companies doing what the phrase implies, overseeing the actual physical production of TV episodes. Outside of Hollywood that’s what commercial and industrial production companies do. They do production. But in Hollywood “production company” usually means a company owned and run by a producer, typically an experienced and successful producer. Experienced and successful producers not only produce movies and TV shows, they also legally incorporate to make their own deals, rent office space and employ people including executives who do some of the day-to-day creative work for their employer, the producer. In most cases in TV the actual physical production of episodes is the job of the TV studio, as discussed above, not the so-called production company. The creative executives at production companies typically focus mostly on development, working on behalf of their producer employers alongside the network and studio development executives, shepherding the pilot through development.
Sometimes the producer at the head of a production company is a writer like Shonda Rhimes or Greg Berlanti. They’re two of the most successful writers working in TV today and they have created numerous successful shows. They’re so successful as writers, creators and showrunners that they expand the number of shows they can be involved with (a showrunner can’t really run more than one or two shows at a time) by employing creative execs to develop and oversee the creation and production of more shows. Sometimes the producer at the head of a production company is a non-writing EP like Jerry Bruckheimer or Mark Gordon, who also run production companies to expand their ability to produce more than just a couple of shows.
Production company executives are effectively day-to-day representatives of the producer who heads their company. Their creative intellects are hired and trained to reflect the ideas, tastes and practices of their boss, the producer. On a day-to-day basis they’ll rely on their own instincts and trust that those instincts will be in sync with their boss, but sometimes they’ll let their development partners know they need to consult their boss to find out exactly what he or she thinks and wants to do in a given situation. In some cases, especially at smaller production companies, the producer will work hands-on during development, and in some cases, especially at larger production companies, the production company exec will perform the day-to-day duties on most of the company’s development projects.
There’s one last development professional in TV whose role is essential to the process but who typically isn’t involved in the day-to-day work of development itself. The agent. Agents (and talent managers) who represent writers are the grease that keeps the machinery of development going, and agents tend to have close relationships with all the other development professionals, writers, producers and network and studio execs. One of the many things agents do is package their clients into development projects, as discussed earlier. While agents’ primary job is to help their clients get work, agents can also initiate new shows by cleverly packaging the right creative elements that their agencies represent.
Once an agent’s writer client is placed into a piece of development, the agent typically steps away from the day-to-day work of the project’s development – receiving occasional updates from his writer client or a producer – and then only resumes hands-on contact with the project if and when it’s ordered to pilot production. At that point other potential clients of the agency (directors and actors) may have opportunities to find jobs on the pilot as well.
It’s important to note that the phrase “development professionals” is a helpful one for the purposes of this book, but not actually a term used in the industry. When industry professionals refer to the writer, they say “writer.” When they mean “network execs,” they say “network execs.” But the team of people involved in developing a new TV project is implicit and nobody refers to that group as the team of “development professionals” on a project. For the purposes of this book, however, it’s a helpful academic term.
The development professionals who do the work of developing new series, then, are writers, producers, network development executives, studio development executives and production company executives, along with agents and managers who dip in and out of the project as talent (writers, actors and directors) is needed. In the next chapter we’ll follow this team of entertainment professionals as they proceed through the development of a typical pilot.
Notes
1 Author interview with Graham Yost.
2 Author interview with Karey Burke.
3 Author interview with Warren Littlefield.
4 The most successful producers can be compensated in the form of development deals at TV studios where the producer is paid a salary to develop a number of projects for a specific period of time rather than on a per-project basis. Studio deals with non-writing TV producers are known as “POD deals” (pronounced “pod” as in “peapod”), short for production overhead deal. Many producers, however, do develop TV projects without any upfront salary or fees.
5 The traditional network–studio corporate structure described here has applied to the American TV business for nearly 70 years, but, interestingly, the last several years have witnessed the first cracks in the wall separating the two corporate entities.
6 We’ll continue to occasionally reference the feature film business throughout the book to compare and contrast the way movies are developed versus TV, but from here on in our primary focus will be on television.
7 If a series is based on existing IP, the writer of the pilot typically receives a “Developed by” credit rather than a “Created by” credit per the WGA. Unofficially, these writers are still often referred to within the industry as the “creator” of the series.
2
The Industrial Process of TV Development
In this chapter we’re going to walk through the steps of typical script development. This process describes how most TV pilots are developed at traditional broadcast networks, cable channels and streaming platforms. While this chapter describes an industrial process that’s used industry-wide, every pilot project is unique and handmade; variations to this process may occur at every step, and we’ll discuss many of those variations and other TV development strategies in Chapter 10.1 But the steps outlined in this chapter reflect the process that’s used in the great majority of series development.
Step 1: The Idea Becomes a Pitch
The first step is to develop a pitch. The pitch is the tool that will be used to sell the project to a network. As we discussed in
the last chapter, someone’s got to pay the writer to write the pilot script, and those someones are the network and studio. Networks and studios have large development budgets (comparable with other industries’ R&D – research and development – budgets). While networks hope all the series they have on the air become big hits, they plan for the future by anticipating failure and for successful series to grow old and eventually retire. Networks that program scripted series and intend to continue programming scripted series always develop new projects behind their schedule of current programming.
Not only does the team that initiates a new series need the network’s and studio’s money (to pay the writer to write the pilot), they also want the network’s partnership. If a network buys a pitch and puts the project into active development, the network becomes a member of the team, their development executives become part of the birthing of the project and become professionally and emotionally invested in the project and its success. They become true partners in the project and share a sense of creative “ownership” (if not true financial ownership – remember, that belongs to the studio). That sense of partnership, of group investment, is one of the things writers and producers seek – along with the network’s development money – when they bring their pitch into a network.
Every project starts with an idea. The idea can be an original idea or an idea based on an existing property like a book. An original idea can come from a writer, a producer, an agent, a studio development executive or even a network development executive, and a work of IP that becomes the basis of development can be found by any member of this group.
Whoever identifies an idea and however it’s found, it needs to be developed into a pitch. In the American entertainment industry writers deliver pitches (in both TV and features), and it’s the writer who does most of the heavy lifting of creating the pitch. (We’ll discuss some of the specifics of what constitutes a typical TV pitch in a moment, and we’ll discuss them in greater detail in Chapter 7.) The writer delivers the pitch orally, live, “in the room” at the network. Most TV pitches run at between 15 and 25 minutes (though pitches for straight-to-series projects may run much longer). The writer creates the pitch and then seeks the creative input of her producer partner and her studio. The writer almost always scripts her pitch in written form and shares her pitch script with her partners who give her notes, i.e., specific creative feedback. The writer rewrites the pitch over and over, usually emailing revisions back and forth, until everyone – the writer herself, the producer and the studio development execs – are all confident it’s as strong as it can possibly be.
Every TV series is unique – or should be – and, as I said earlier, every development experience is unique. For the purposes of this chapter, this tour through the development cycle, I’m going to imagine a typical scenario in which a TV writer has partnered with a producer and they’ve agreed to work with a studio. Those three partner entities – writer, producer and studio development team – will travel through the journey of this process together. The writer and producer may have been packaged together by their mutual agency, or they may have found each other through other development processes we’ll describe later. In real-world scenarios a writer might not have a producing partner during development at all. Or he might have four producing partners who each employ production company execs. They might set up their pilot at a network without a studio and develop the pilot script directly with the network. There are many different possible configurations of this process, but the team of development professionals I’m describing in this chapter is typical today.
When everyone’s happy with the pitch “script” the writer typically meets in person with her producer and studio development execs to run a dress rehearsal performance of the pitch so the writer can practice delivering it orally in front of a group and everyone can see how it plays live. Final notes are given to the writer, addressed and the pitch is set.
Step 2: Network Pitch Meeting
Networks hear pitches. They’re the final target audience for the pitch. They’re the “buyer.” Once the pitch is in great shape, the studio development execs call their development exec counterparts at all the networks that might be interested in hearing the pitch and might make an appropriate home for the series. The studio execs preview the concept and the “auspices” (the creative elements behind the project, namely the writer, the producer and any underlying IP and its creators), and the network execs who respond to the concept and auspices ask to hear the pitch. Studio development assistants then coordinate with network development assistants and the producer’s assistant (who then coordinates with the writer) to schedule the round of pitch meetings.
The writer, producer and studio development execs meet at each network at the scheduled time and are typically shown to a network conference room where the network execs welcome them and everyone settles in for the pitch.
In the movie business pitches are relatively simple. In movie pitches the screenwriter tells the story of the movie from beginning to end. He may spend a little time introducing the characters and the world of the movie (the setting and time period), but the great bulk of the pitch is telling the story of the movie from beginning to end. Television pitches are more complex. Here are the sections of a typical TV pitch:
1. Writer’s Personal Way In (I’ll explain what this means in Chapter 7)
2. Concept of the Series
3. World of the Series
4. Character Descriptions
5. Pilot Story
6. Arc of the First Season/Arc of the Series
7. Tone
8. Sample Episodes Beyond the Pilot.
Pitch meetings are inevitably quite tense. The writer and producer are typically excited and nervous. A pitch meeting can potentially result in hundreds of millions of dollars of business – even billions of dollars theoretically – to the various parties in the room in the long term (and/or their companies). The writer and producer have enormous personal and professional investment in the project, have done months or years of work to get to this moment and desperately want to impress the network execs. At the end of the day, though, it’s a small group of experienced professionals talking about an idea for a TV show and, despite the energy and anxiety in the room, all the people involved do the best they can to make it feel like a human-scale, friendly, fun and conversational interaction.
There are usually two or three network development executives in the meeting to hear the pitch and usually one or two studio development execs supporting their writer and producer partners. There might be no producers or as many as three or four producers and production company execs (and sometimes more). There may be one or two writers.2 If the writer is very experienced and successful, the writer’s agent might attend the pitch to show his support, loyalty and agency muscle in order to try to impress the potential network buyers. In sum, there might be up to a dozen people sitting in a network conference room with all eyes zeroed in on the writer, who then effectively performs a monologue for 15 to 25 minutes, describing what his show is, how it works and why it’s going to be awesome (without ever actually saying “My show’s going to be awesome!” – the content of the pitch should speak for itself and be awesome).
Some writers memorize their entire pitch and recite it from start to finish like an actor reciting a long monologue. Some writers memorize an outline of their pitch (or glance at their outline on note cards) and extemporize the words of the pitch, hitting all the bullet points of the outline. Most writers simply read their pitch scripts. This is the least interesting to watch but the most common. It’s really hard to talk non-stop for 25 minutes without notes or without reading a script, but some of the best pitchers can do it. When I was a development executive at NBC the movie writer Christopher McQuarrie (who wrote and directed Mission: Impossible – Fallout) pitched a show and spoke for 40 minutes straight, never glancing at a note, never pausing for more than a breath, never having to say, “Whoops, I meant to mention earlier ….
” It was a spectacular pitch performance (needless to say, he sold the pitch, but alas the pilot never got made). That level of pitch performance is hard to pull off and quite rare.
After the writer finishes her pitch the network execs ask the writer a few follow-up questions, thank the writer and others for coming, then typically say something along the lines of “Give us a chance to discuss the pitch internally, and we’ll get back to you.” When I began my career, network development execs usually got back to studio execs within 48 hours, but these days it’s more often within two weeks (though sometimes quicker). The network either says yes and “buys” the project or says no and “passes” on the project. Writers, producers and studio development execs take their pitches to as many networks as might be interested to hear the pitch in the hope that several networks want it and create a bidding war, but also to cast as wide a net as possible in the hope that at least one network buyer bites. As a producer, I’ve brought pitches to as few as three networks and as many as 12.
Step 3: The Deal
If the writer and her partners have done a great job and a network buys their pitch, the next step is making a deal. All the parties – network, studio, writer and producer – have representatives who figure out the specific terms of their clients’ deals amongst the various parties.
Writers have agents and often have entertainment lawyers, producers almost always have lawyers and sometimes agents, and networks and studios have “business affairs executives.” Business affairs executives are full-time negotiators employed by large entertainment companies. All they do, all day every day, is negotiate deals on behalf of the companies they work for. Frequently they’re lawyers, but not always. Once the network commits to buy a pitch the agents, lawyers and “BA” execs representing the various parties of the project talk on the phone and exchange numerous emails back and forth to work out the details of the specific deal points.