Television Development

by Bob Levy

  Aspiring screenwriters can find a wealth of advice about how to begin TV careers from numerous books, blogs, podcasts and videos. For the purposes of this book, I want to focus on one pathway to TV writing careers that many working writers recommend. Traditionally, aspiring TV writers arrived in Hollywood and hoped agents would read their portfolio of writing samples (I’ll talk about writing samples a bit later). This route to representation still works, but it’s difficult. Most legitimate agents don’t take time to read “over the transom” submissions (unsolicited submissions lacking a personal referral). Newcomers who have connections can get their material to agents and sometimes get that material read. If an agent reads a sample and likes the writing, she may consider signing a baby writer for representation. It still happens.

  Many agents, however, say they focus on new writers that are referred to them by existing clients. So how does an aspiring writer get a professional writer to refer them to his agent? One strategy young writers use is to get entry-level jobs working alongside writers, which then allows them to build those relationships. These aren’t writing jobs, but jobs that can lead to writing careers. Showrunner and creator Michelle Nader tells aspiring writers, “Try to work on a TV show. Get as close to the action as possible. You need someone to advocate for you that’s inside of it.”3

  Television shows all have entry-level positions, assistant and PA (production assistant) jobs. Many senior writers and producers on shows have executive assistants who answer phones, coordinate schedules and perform other clerical tasks like development assistants. Shows also employ numerous kinds of PAs: on-set PAs, office PAs, prep PAs, post PAs and writers’ PAs. Want to guess what the main responsibility of the writers’ PA is? Getting lunch for the writers. The writers’ PA takes lunch orders, picks up the food and delivers it to the writers’ room. It’s low-level scut work, but it allows the young person a chance to know working writers, and it can lead to the single best job in all of television for aspiring TV writers, the writers’ room assistant.

  Just about every TV show has a writing staff of anywhere from four to 20 writers, and every writing staff has one (sometimes two) writers’ assistants. A writers’ assistant sits at the table in the writers’ room along with all the writers on the staff and enters into a computer just about everything that every writer says (that’s relevant to the work at hand). Every time a writer articulates any kind of pitch – a story pitch, an adjustment to a part of a story, a line of dialogue – the writers’ assistant enters it into his notes so the idea won’t be lost. Writers’ assistants process, collate and distribute all the work of the writers’ room at the end of each day and distribute their notes to the rest of the writing staff and other EPs. If the writers’ day ends at 7:00 pm, the writers’ assistant might stay for several more hours, cleaning up and distributing her notes.

  An even higher level of assistant in writers’ rooms is the script coordinator (TV is so hierarchical there’s even a hierarchy of assistants). Script coordinators proofread and edit scripts, watchdog continuity and timelines of events in scripts, coordinate all the many drafts and rewrites of episodes and distribute finished scripts to staff, crew, studio and network personnel.

  Writers’ PAs who are liked get promoted to be writers’ assistants, and writers’ assistants who are liked get promoted to be script coordinators. Needless to say, most people who want these jobs, and get these jobs and are good at these jobs, are aspiring writers. Writers’ assistants and script coordinators often are assigned by showrunners to write an episode or two of a series and eventually they can be promoted to writers on the staff. These three jobs all allow young people to build close working relationships with writers and producers, insiders who can become the young writers’ advocates to whom Michelle Nader referred.

  When Kateland Brown graduated from college she knew she wanted to be a TV writer. She moved to LA, but didn’t know how to get a foot in the door. She got a job waiting tables to cover her bills and enrolled in a screenwriting class at UCLA Extension (UCLA’s evening classes for adults). She knew she could work on improving her writing skills while trying to figure out how to get her career off the ground. Kateland loved the class and hit it off with her teacher, who became a mentor.

  When the teacher saw a TV internship posted on her own college alumni website, she recommended it to Kateland who applied and got it, working three days a week on the second-to-last season of Smallville. Kateland loved it and kept the internship for a year and a half. When the series was ending, she asked people on the show if they knew of other jobs. A writing team told Kateland that their Melrose Place reboot had just been picked up to pilot and offered her a job. When the pilot got ordered to series Kateland was offered a job as a PA. On her first day on the series, she was assigned to help the new line producer set up her office, the two hit it off and Kateland found herself spending the season as the assistant to the line producer of Melrose Place.

  Melrose Place was cancelled after that first season, but Kateland’s boss got a new job on Pretty Little Liars and brought Kateland with her. After the first two years of the show, the writers’ room assistant got promoted to the writing staff, and Kateland moved from the line producer’s assistant desk to the writers’ room. Pretty Little Liars actually split the writers’ PA and writers’ assistant jobs between two people at the time, and, after two seasons sharing that arrangement, Kateland was promoted to script coordinator. Throughout her years as an executive assistant and writers’ assistant Kateland continued working on her own writing on her own time, improving her portfolio of material.

  In her first season as script coordinator she was assigned to co-write an episode with another writer, and in her second season she was assigned to write an episode on her own and got signed by UTA. When PLL creator Marlene King got a new show Famous in Love ordered to series, King hired Kateland as a fulltime writer. After her circuitous journey from waitress to intern to PA to assistant to script coordinator, Kateland was finally a professional writer. When Famous in Love got a second season order, Kateland was hired back, and her career as a professional writer was off and running.

  What lessons does Kateland Brown draw from her circuitous journey? First, to seek out mentors. The UCLA Extension teacher, the Pretty Little Liars line producer and Marlene King all became mentors, they encouraged her and opened doors for her. Once she earned the trust and respect of writers on PLL, she asked if they would look at her scripts and offer advice. She was always candid about her ambition to become a writer at every step of her career. The line producer was happy to reward Kateland’s hard work as her assistant by helping Kateland navigate her way to achieve her dream. Kateland says that, among TV assistants and PAs, not having a dream and not taking advantage of an entry-level stepping stone to a better career is frowned upon. Kateland stresses that building relationships is key to progressing up the rungs of the ladder. As she puts it, it’s about “being cool, not being crazy, not having an ego and working really hard.”

  The last lesson Kateland draws from her journey is something she wishes she’d done but didn’t. She recommends that students who know where their entertainment interests lie get internships as close to those career goals as early in college as possible. Because the industry is so relationship-based, working with professionals early on expands career opportunities upon graduation.

  As I was writing this book a new graduate of my old college moved to LA and invited me for coffee. I was about to make a call on her behalf a few days later when she emailed to say that she no longer needed my help. She’d done a six-week summer internship on a TV series shooting in Atlanta the previous summer, and an assistant director she met there, now working in LA, invited her to fill in for a sick PA for a couple of days, and it wound up leading to a fulltime job on the show. A summer internship paved the way to her finding a first job in Hollywood within a month of her arrival in LA.

  It’s not always that easy. Kateland Brown was lucky that a teacher tipped her off to an
internship that began her long journey. The first step is relocating to LA, and the second step is circulating among people with similar interests and aspirations. Taking an extension class is one way. Writers’ groups (weekly meetings of aspiring and working writers who share and critique each other’s scripts) are another. Lijah Barasz, another writers’ assistant turned professional writer, jokes that when she first moved to LA and heard of entertainment networking opportunities she assumed they were “gross and schmoozy,” but when she actually went she found them supportive and stimulating. “You have to come out of your shell and meet people,” she says. Lijah is a Co-Producer on The Bold Type as of this writing, she is repped by CAA, and has already sold her first pilot script.

  Entry-level jobs on shows are so competitive that they’re quickly filled by word of mouth. If you haven’t done internships that might lead to hearing about those jobs, find any way you can to any job at a TV studio, then figure out a route to meeting the people who work on the shows. Start at studios’ Human Resources offices and temp agencies if necessary, set your sights on getting onto a studio lot, navigate your way to a show and begin building relationships.

  As Kateland Brown’s story illustrates, this path to TV writing careers can take several years, but it’s fun, exciting and vastly educational along the way. Writers like Kateland and Lijah didn’t struggle to get their writing samples read by agents. They chose another path. They got their first professional writing assignments by earning the respect of showrunners through years of hard work, and those credits and the relationships they made with other working writers got them signed at top agencies.

  Writing Samples

  Whether aspiring writers can get their material in front of agents or try to work their way into entry-level jobs on shows in the hope of earning freelance writing assignments, they need great TV writing samples to demonstrate their talents and prove they can write at the highest levels. Baby writers typically need at least two great TV writing samples, a spec pilot and a spec episode. I’ve talked about spec pilots in the context of producers and studios packaging and shopping them to networks, but this is a different kind of spec pilot. Aspiring writers write spec pilots primarily as writing samples, as proof that they can create new characters with original voices. Yes, every young writer dreams that his spec pilot will sell to a network and get made into a hit series, but most know the script will only serve as a calling card to demonstrate his talents, to get signed by an agent and hopefully staffed on a series.

  The second script agents want to see is a spec episode, usually referred to simply as a “spec.” The writer chooses a series currently on the air, ideally the kind of show that snobby Hollywood people watch and love, and writes an original episode of that series with stories that could happen on that show. Agents and ultimately showrunners want to see that a young writer is adept at writing voices of existing characters and can capture the tone and style of series that are already up and running. Some showrunners and executives prefer to read spec pilots, some prefer to read spec episodes, some insist on reading both, so every young writer needs at least one great sample of both types of scripts to get signed and staffed.

  Once in a blue moon a young writer’s writing sample spec pilot does get made. And when that happens, it changes the writer’s life forever.

  In the fall of her senior year at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Vera Herbert got an internship in LA on the show Awkward. At the end of her internship the showrunner offered her a full-time job as her assistant, but Vera had to get back to North Carolina to finish her degree. Not wanting to let a great opportunity slip away, though, she worked out an arrangement with UNCSA to finish up school long distance and took the job. While an assistant on Awkward, Vera wrote a spec comedy pilot and one of her screenwriting professors in North Carolina got the script to agents at Gersh, who loved it and signed Vera. Days after signing with her new agents, she drove cross-country to walk her graduation in North Carolina.

  She returned to Awkward, got promoted to writers’ assistant and kept working on new material of her own. She wrote another spec pilot, a dark half-hour dramedy called Blink about a teenage girl whose family is disrupted when her father suffers a serious accident and ends up in a long-term coma. Part of the story was told from the point of view of the father, who couldn’t move or speak, but who was aware of his family’s life going on around him. Vera thought Blink was a solid writing sample and hoped it would help her get staffed, but her agent thought it was even better than that. The agent pitched Blink to the CW, and the execs there read it, loved it and bought it on Vera’s birthday. A non-writing EP was brought in to work with her to redevelop the script into a one-hour drama, and that winter the project was ordered to pilot production. At 23, Vera was the Supervising Producer of her own go pilot.

  Blink didn’t get picked up to series, but Vera was a produced writer, a phenom the entire industry took notice of. She sold another pilot pitch to the CW, then one to NBC and, the following year, another to Fox. None of them moved forward, and Vera began thinking about staffing instead of focusing on development.

  She read a pilot she loved and asked to meet on it. The pilot got ordered to series and the showrunner hired Vera to join the first writing staff of This is Us. That winter an episode Vera wrote won the prestigious Writers Guild of America award for Best Episodic Drama, cementing her status as not only one of the best new TV writers, but one of the best writers working in television today. As of this writing, Vera’s at work on Season 3 of This is Us as the show’s Co-Executive Producer.

  Dreams sometimes do come true.4

  Preparing for Careers in Development While in School

  What can students do to prepare for careers in development while they’re still in school? Students can do three things: 1) discover where your creative interests and passion lie, 2) practice your passion and start building a portfolio of work that demonstrates your talents, and 3) begin to establish a network of real-world Hollywood relationships to prepare yourself to get representation and work upon graduation.

  The first two goals above translate into one thing: Do the work. Tell stories. Make films. Make TV. Make web series. Make plays. Make stuff. If you know you’re interested in entertainment but you’re not sure in what capacity, make stuff and find out. Write. Direct. Produce. Act. Do it with your friends and at school however you can. Do it on your smartphone, with a cheap or borrowed video camera and with laptop post production software. You’re luckier than earlier generations; you can make filmed stories much more cheaply than ever before.

  For people who find themselves gravitating toward careers as writers, directors and actors, it’s about building a resume and a portfolio that demonstrate your talent and gets you attention, preferably in the form of student festival awards, film festival awards and other acclaim. Many film festivals have short film categories and there are even some festivals exclusively devoted to short films.

  If you’ve read this book and discovered your calling is more as a producer, agent or development exec, is there anything you can do while you’re still in school? First, study TV and films. Watch the old stuff and learn the history of TV and film genres. And watch as much of today’s vast amount of content as possible. Watch everything.

  Non-writing EP Warren Littlefield expects young people he interviews at his production company to speak thoughtfully about the shows they love:

  Know the content! You need to tell me what you’re watching and why. What excites you? In a sophisticated, detailed analysis, you need to tell me why that show resonates for you. What brought you into it, what connected you to it?5

  Read friends’ scripts and give them notes. Reread my chapter on Developing the Pilot Script and apply the checklist of questions to every script you read. Add to that list or change it to emphasize the things you look for in entertainment, the things that are important to the stories you love. Begin to apply that checklist and your own gut instincts to evaluating writte
n dramatic material and practice writing notes memos. In clear, constructive, encouraging language, articulate what’s not working in a script, why and how to fix it. Seek out schoolmate filmmakers and help develop their short films and web series.

  The third goal listed above is to begin making your own real-world Hollywood relationships. That means internships. If you’re in college or grad school think about summer internships in LA. If LA’s out of reach but you live near one of North America’s production centers – New York, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal – reach out to shows shooting there and see if you can get a summer internship. For students who aspire to more executive careers, search Human Resource offices at the dozens of networks, studios and talent agencies in LA and explore their internships. As Kateland Brown said, doing internships with working Hollywood professionals as early as possible will expand your career opportunities enormously when you graduate. It’s all about building personal relationships, winning people over and earning their respect.

  As much as this book and this chapter focuses on TV and entertainment in general, CBS Executive Vice President Thom Sherman offers an important reminder:

  Live life! At the beginning of your career you’re going to be a PA or an assistant. In order for you to get that job it’s not enough to show your resume and say, “This is what I’ve done in college.” The first thing that a lot of people in this business and I are going to look at is the bottom of your resume. What are the interesting things you’ve done? Did you do anything interesting in your life? Did you spend six months at sea? Those are the things I’m going to want to talk about. Creativity comes from interesting people with interesting stories to tell.6