Television Development

by Bob Levy

  The ideation process lasted several months of brainstorming among a handful of Alloy employees, bouncing ideas off each other, one member of the team keying off another’s idea, to create the fully realized PLL concept. Because Alloy Entertainment is a company and its employees’ jobs are to ideate new concepts, the company owns the idea.

  The Books

  Once the company had fleshed out enough of the core concept, it followed the path of its unique business model to first target the publishing industry and produce PLL as a book series. The Alloy book development staff identified a young novelist it had worked with once before and pitched her the emerging PLL concept. Twenty-seven-year-old Sara Shepard responded to the idea and agreed to spec a book proposal in collaboration with the Alloy staff. In TV, as we know, pitches are oral presentations delivered in network conference rooms. In the publishing industry pitches are written documents known as “book proposals.” Working with the Alloy book development unit, Shepard wrote a 70-page book proposal outlining the concept, the story of the first book (in what was originally designed as a four-book series), the overarching stories of the four books, and she wrote the first several chapters to give prospective publishers a sample of how the books would read.

  Alloy shopped the PLL book proposal to publishers in the summer of 2005 and received an enthusiastic response. HarperCollins won the rights to publish PLL in a competitive situation among several publishing houses.

  TV Sale

  Once a publishing deal was in hand, the project shifted to Alloy’s west coast office in LA which I ran at the time. We had a first-look POD deal with Warner Bros. Television studio, and the development execs at the studio agreed that the new book could make a great show. With just the book proposal and new publishing deal in hand, Alloy and the Warner Bros. development execs pitched the project to the studio’s sister network, the old WB network, and the network development execs responded to the concept enthusiastically and bought it over the phone.

  The top development exec at the WB knew exactly who she wanted to write the pilot, a writer she’d worked with the previous development season. The network development exec asked the studio and producers if they were on board and, after reading the writer’s sample material and feeling inclined to defer to the network’s preference, the studio and producers signed off on the writer.

  First Network Development: The WB

  With a TV writer on board, Alloy had two writers writing two separate versions of PLL on two coasts in the summer and fall of 2005, one in New York (Sara Shepard actually lived and worked in Philadelphia, near where she had chosen to set the story in the fictional idyllic Rosewood, Pennsylvania) and one in LA. We sent the TV writer Sara Shepard’s successful book proposal and a detailed outline of the story for the first book Shepard had written after the publishing deal closed. Then an interesting thing happened: The TV writer reviewed Shepard’s materials and decided she wanted to create her own mythology, different from the books. Where Shepard’s book proposal outlined the answers to the books’ many mysteries and explained what happened to Alison (and how and why she was – spoiler alert – murdered), the TV writer said she preferred a completely different backstory in which Alison was alive and had decided to run away. (Ironically, books five–eight in the series, ordered by the publisher several years later, pursued a similar story twist, but that wasn’t imagined on the book side at the project’s outset.)

  Here’s where a producer’s job gets tricky. On the one hand, we didn’t agree with the screenwriter’s creative instincts. We didn’t believe that the mythology the screenwriter created for Alison’s backstory was as interesting and entertaining as the one Sara Shepard created for the book. On the other hand, a producer’s job is to empower his writer. The screenwriter has to find a strong personal connection to her material, a deep wellspring of belief in what she’s working on. What I learned as a producer at Alloy, focusing primarily on adaptation, was that TV writers need to have ownership of the ideas they’re working on if they’re going to imbue them with a genuinely creative and artistic spirit. Their job wasn’t merely to translate the original author’s vision to the screen. The screenwriter needed to own it and make it hers. We realized that, at the end of the day, our job was to support and empower the writer, and we gave her as much encouragement as we could. She wrote a strong pilot script, despite its differences from the book Shepard was still writing, and we crossed our fingers that it would be a contender for a pilot pickup.

  The project then encountered a twist no one saw coming. The WB’s parent company announced the WB was folding, merging with the UPN network, forming a new network, the CW, which would unite the WB’s and UPN’s networks of stations.

  The WB’s entire season of development was tossed out and written off.

  PLL was dead.

  For the moment.

  Second TV Development: The CW

  Although they rarely use them, TV networks typically get two cracks at developing projects once they buy them. These are known as “bites.” If a network buys a project, develops a script it doesn’t like or even shoots a pilot it doesn’t order to series, the network gets a second bite on the project, allowing the network a contractual option to develop the project a second time the next development season. Networks rarely take a second bite on development. Failure leaves a bad taste in execs’ mouths, and they’re usually eager to move on and explore new concepts.

  When the CW began in the summer of 2006, a new team of executives was hired, including an entirely new team of development execs. The first thing the new CW development team did was to look at the projects the WB and UPN had developed the prior year, and, after that process, they decided to take the second bite on Pretty Little Liars and to develop a new script with a new writer. We, the producers, didn’t have a say in the matter – the CW was contractually due a second bite by dint of inheriting the WB’s projects – and we were excited to keep the project alive and get a second chance at bat.

  Then the CW threw us a curve ball: The network announced a surprising development strategy. They weren’t going to be the teen-oriented network the WB had been, they said. They were going to be a 20-something network, focusing on shows with 20-something lead characters. The CW development execs told us their plan was to age up the four 16-year-old girls at the center of PLL to 20-something women and some of them, they suggested, should be married. We producers secretly knew the inspiration for PLL was Desperate Housewives; now the CW execs were asking us to turn PLL back into a kind of poor man’s Desperate Housewives. It didn’t feel organic to the PLL concept, and we struggled to wrap our heads around it.

  The four lead characters of PLL, the titular “liars,” hide the truth about crimes they’ve been tangentially involved in (among other things). Their sense of complicity in those crimes is essential to the concept. An audience can understand teenage girls lying to cover up a sense of guilt, but we feared that an audience wouldn’t be as sympathetic to adult women behaving so immaturely. The CW was due its second bite, though, and we crossed our fingers that we were wrong and the 20-something PLL would be better than we feared. The studio recommended a writer who embraced the rejiggered concept and she did her best to wrestle the pilot script into shape.

  While we were developing the 20-something PLL at the CW, progress continued on the east coast. The first book was published. And blew up. Sara Shepard’s first Pretty Little Liars book became a hit, making the New York Times’ best-seller list. We got a call from a sharp-eyed development exec at ABC Family (now Freeform) who spotted the book on the best-seller list, read it, loved it and wondered if it was available to develop. I had to tell her it was already in development at her competitor. “Good luck at the CW,” she said, “but if it doesn’t work out, let me know. We’d be interested.”

  Our doubts about the CW’s creative adjustments to our concept were realized and, come January 2007, when the CW announced its first round of network pilot pickups, PLL did not make the cut.1


  PLL was dead again.

  For the moment.

  Third TV Development: ABC Family

  Once the CW passed on PLL, the rights to the underlying book reverted back to Alloy Entertainment, and we let ABC Family know the book was available again. The exec who had called months earlier said they definitely wanted it. The books were continuing to blow up in the publishing world, though, and we no longer just had a great book proposal with a catchy title or one best seller, we had a huge best-selling series of books, a much more valuable and attractive commodity. A second bidder emerged, MTV. Since its first scripted series in 1999, Undressed, MTV had vacillated between committing to scripted series programming and backing away from it, focusing instead on its core unscripted programming. In the spring of 2007 MTV had revamped its scripted development department once again and was aggressively chasing new projects for its teen demo target. They entered a bidding war for PLL against ABC Family, and, after a couple of months of back and forth, ABC Family won, and PLL was in development at a third network.

  At ABC Family the project was again an open writing assignment.2 We implemented a bake-off and brought in three writers who pitched their takes on the books to the network.3 ABC Family passed on all of them. Meanwhile, the network development execs had a general with Marlene King, a feature writer one of the top ABC Family execs had developed a pilot with when she worked at the WB a decade earlier (King’s one prior TV experience). The network execs gave King a copy of the Pretty Little Liars book at that meeting, she took it home and loved it. Our development execs at Warner Horizon, the division of Warner Bros. Television that produces for basic cable, the division our project had shifted to upon the sale to ABC Family, asked us to meet with King and hear her thoughts on the adaption.

  We met with King, and she articulated her strategy simply: “I love the book, and I just want to do the book.” Her take was simply to write a pilot as faithful to the book as possible. After our previous two development experiences that was music to our ears. With the network, studio and producers on board, a deal for King to write the pilot script was made and work began.

  From her very first story outline, we could tell that King was locked in. She chose to cut important characters from the book, like Noel Kahn, and to cut significant events like the big field party that climaxes the first book, a set piece our modest basic cable pilot budget never could have done justice to, and to focus the pilot instead on introducing the four lead characters and the mysterious, offscreen “A.” Our challenges were daunting: to introduce four lead characters, make the audience care about them, and also to introduce the layers of series mysteries. As King said at her first meetings on the project, she chose to trust the books and not try to reinvent the wheel. We knew if we succeeded in telling enough of each lead girl’s “dirty secret” personal story, we could develop a strong viewer connection to them.

  There were three romantic stories and one family story. Aria fell for her new English teacher, Mr. Fitz, and wanted a relationship with him despite the obstacles. Spencer fell for her older sister’s fiancé, Wren. Emily fell for the “new girl” Maya, calling into question her entire identity and opening the door to embracing her truer self. Hanna got busted for shoplifting (a cry for her absentee father’s attention?), and her mom had to make a self-sacrificing gesture to protect her daughter. Each girl’s story was sexy, a little naughty and secret. As discussed earlier in this book, secrets are a powerful device in pilots, and PLL was nothing if not layers and layers of secrets, lies and mysteries.

  The second major goal, after introducing the four lead girls and their secret foreground stories, was introducing the overarching mystery of Alison’s disappearance and murder, and introducing “A,” the is-she-or-isn’t-she-Alison offscreen character who haunts the four girls. We knew if we could hook the viewers into the concept’s central mysteries (along with making them care about the four lead characters), we had them. Who killed Alison and why? Who was “A” and how did she know things only Alison could have known? If the viewers finished the pilot episode and wanted to know the answers to those questions, we knew they would want to come back for episode two, the goal of every pilot. Along with the five main stories the pilot told (five stories!), another undercurrent of a story emerged, the reconnection of the four best friends. In the pilot the arrival of “A” and the discovery that Alison has died reunites the four friends and bonds their friendship forever. In King’s telling, that emerged as a sixth pilot story.

  We gave King minimal notes on her first draft, notes aimed mostly at bringing to the surface the girls’ fear of “A” and doubts about whether “A” could possibly be Alison (whom they hoped, until the end, might still be alive), and, after a quick rewrite, we delivered the pilot script to the studio. The studio gave an interesting set of notes: King’s initial drafts compartmentalized the four girls’ stories into separate acts, and the studio said the girls felt too disconnected from each other and from the core ensemble. They said the script played too episodic, rather than establishing a world of interconnected relationships. King responded by finding ways to intercut the four girls’ stories more smoothly, connecting the girls structurally if not actually interacting in scenes (unlike most friendship stories, the PLL girls couldn’t talk about their stories with each other because each girl’s story needed to stay secret). The studio was pleased with the rewrite and delivered it to the network.

  The script sailed through the network development process with minimal input and arrived on the desk of its then president, Paul Lee. We heard that Lee loved it but had notes. Lee suggested that we reset the crucial Alison-goes-missing backstory event from three years in the past (as it is in the books) to one year in the past. His thinking was that the difference of two years didn’t matter to the effect it had on the girls’ drifting apart from each other. The past was the past. Because the pilot needed to show the event of Alison’s disappearance – along with other flashbacks to the time before Alison disappeared – it would be easier for our actresses to play 15-year-olds rather than pre-adolescent 13-year-olds. We knew we’d cast actresses older than 16, and asking an actress in her early 20s to play 13 risked stretching the audience’s credibility. Great note! The original drafts had begun with a scene-setting montage of Rosewood; Lee urged us to cut it and begin by introducing the audience to our characters and to start the story as soon as possible. Another good note! We knew that would save us time and money in production, and starting the story sooner is almost always a smart strategy (and a very common development note!).

  After King made Lee’s changes, he greenlighted the pilot. King and I jumped into pre-production (I was coordinating our work with my fellow Executive Producer and my boss at Alloy Entertainment, Leslie Morgenstein, who was based in New York). At the suggestion of the studio and network casting departments, we hired Zane/Pillsbury, a casting company with a great reputation. Gayle Pillsbury, one of the company’s two principals, took the reins and dove into writing breakdowns and compiling lists of actresses for each character. Gayle had been an assistant in the casting department at NBC 15 years earlier when I was a rookie network programming exec, and it was fun to reconnect after so many years and at such different levels of the industry. Careers in the entertainment industry are rife with interweaving, overlapping connections like that – one of the industry’s many exciting qualities.

  A couple of days after Pillsbury was on board I got a call from a talent manager I’d worked with before. She represented Lucy Hale and said Lucy had read the pilot script, loved it and was interested in joining the cast. I was thrilled. I had worked with Lucy on the short-lived CW series Privileged and knew how talented she was. I called Marlene, who didn’t know Lucy’s work, and Gayle, who loved Lucy and said she would take the network and studio’s temperature while also getting Marlene tape on Lucy so she could get up to speed. Gayle called us back and told us that not only did the network and studio love Lucy for PLL, but that the network had been trying to get Lucy to
sign a talent holding deal, and they officially approved her for any role she wanted in our pilot. Things were suddenly moving fast.

  Marlene viewed Lucy’s tape and agreed she was awesome. I called Lucy’s manager back and told her we all loved Lucy for the pilot and she was approved by the network and studio. I asked if Lucy knew which character she wanted to play, and was told Lucy was interested in Aria or Hanna. I told Marlene, Gayle and Les, and we agreed we’d ask Lucy if she was comfortable coming into Gayle’s office and reading both roles so we could see which role felt best and she could get a better sense of which role felt most comfortable to her. Via her manager, Lucy agreed.

  It was a fun, super-low-pressure session chiefly because it wasn’t an audition. She already had the job. It was just the people making the pilot figuring out which role suited her best. Lucy read the sides for both Aria and Hanna opposite Gayle, and she was great. We thanked Lucy for coming in, she left, and Marlene, Gayle and I immediately agreed she was much more of an Aria than a Hanna. We called Lucy’s manager and said we preferred Lucy as Aria, and if Lucy was comfortable with that we would let the network and studio know. Lucy’s manager said, yes, absolutely, Lucy felt completely comfortable reading Aria, and that was it. We’d barely begun the casting process and we had one of our four leads already on board with a brilliant young actress every member of the project’s extended team loved. The rest of casting would not be nearly as effortless.