by Bob Levy
Consume as much television as you can, but don’t forget to live some interesting stories of your own.
Notes
1 “Phone sheets” are distinct, of course, from “call sheets,” the daily bible of the production side of the business, which lists the schedule of work to be shot on a given day of production along with the cast and crew required, location details, props, etc.
2 Author interview with Warren Littlefield.
3 Author interview with Michelle Nader.
4 The year the Blink pilot was produced Vera’s agent, Margaret Mendelson, moved to CAA. Vera moved with her and has been repped there ever since.
5 Author interview with Warren Littlefield.
6 Author interview with Thom Sherman. Sherman was the head of drama development at ABC in 2003, the exec who took Lloyd Braun’s “TV ensemble Cast Away” pitch and developed it into Lost.
14
Applying TV Development Strategies to Other Forms of Filmed Storytelling
The primary goal of this book is to introduce aspiring and entry-level development professionals to the processes of Hollywood TV development. The hope, however, is that strategies described here will have application beyond Hollywood, in other media and other industries. Specific steps that I’ve discussed in this book – like concept ideation, pitching and pilot story development – can hopefully inspire and inform approaches to storytelling in other formats, media and industries. In this chapter, I’ll look at four themes from Hollywood’s industrial process of TV development that readers can potentially apply to non-Hollywood storytelling, as well as in other fields like marketing, advertising and public relations.
Creative Collaboration
Many of us have a romantic image of artistic creativity. We picture a Victorian novelist, alone, hunched over a wooden desk, her quill pen dancing in the candlelight, filling the page with a work of lasting genius. Creative genius, true artistry, has, of course, always existed. But it’s rare.
When Hollywood finds an artistic genius and does its job well, it protects that genius, and shares her vision with the world. David E. Kelley wrote all the episodes of Big Little Lies by himself. Nic Pizzolatto wrote all the episodes of True Detective Season One alone. One artist, Cary Joji Fukunaga, directed all of them.
But there’s a scarcity of artistic genius, and Hollywood has a lot of hours of television to fill. In lieu of artistic genius it employs the next best thing, creative collaboration. Groups of people working together to create compelling characters, fascinating worlds and stories that entertain millions. One person has an idea, a second person finds inspiration in that idea and improves it and the first person, who never would have imagined the change by himself, elevates it even further.
Hollywood has evolved numerous industrial processes of creative collaboration. The television development process and the TV writers’ room are two of the most successful and lasting. Can you benefit from the processes of creative collaboration that Hollywood uses every day? Many of us who aren’t Lena Dunham or David E. Kelley can look to the lessons of Hollywood and apply some of its collaborative strategies to performing the hard work of creativity. (And of course Dunham and Kelley also required numerous collaborators at many levels to realize their vision and share it with the world. No one in entertainment can do it alone.)
Many young people endeavoring in their first creative projects look for freedom and space. “Let me do my thing, then I’ll show it to you when I’m done and ask for your feedback.” That’s how I thought when I was young. But young people aspiring to work in Hollywood might want to consider adjusting their approach, and welcome and even seek input early and throughout their creative process.
Small teams of people, three or four, or larger classes of students, can give themselves development assignments. Use some of the ideation techniques described in Chapter 5 or define your own ideation challenges. Create an assignment where everyone has to show up with three ideas, everyone’s got to pitch, then brainstorm together as a room, bouncing ideas off each other to develop and improve each pitch. Make a list of the five most interesting, exciting ideas that emerge from that process and convene a second meeting to further develop and flesh them out. One of the tricks to making this process work is a good leader (what the TV writers’ room calls the “room runner,” usually but not always the showrunner) who directs the room toward the best ideas without shutting anybody down and making them feel bad about ideas that don’t rise to the top.
When people ask me what’s my favorite part of my job, the answer is easy: creative collaboration. Two or three or twelve people bouncing creative ideas off each other, pitching and fixing and upping each other’s game. The best part of my job is being part of a creative session where ideas emerge from a group that never would have emerged from one individual in that group. It happens all the time. “That’s great, but what if we …?”
If you’re a young person making your first short films or your first scripted web series, and you know your concept and stories, great. Do it. But if you’re looking for ideas then consider implementing this kind of process. Bring smart, creative friends together and brainstorm. Teachers, devote class time to your own “development retreats,” provide development assignments and use the classroom for pitching and brainstorming. Other story-based professionals are probably already using team brainstorming processes, but are you using them to brainstorm stories? What stories are your marketing, advertising and PR messages telling, and can you use your staff to ideate more compelling stories that tap more deeply into the Zeitgeist?
Hollywood screenwriters grouse about notes all the time. No one gets excited about rewriting an outline or a script over and over. Some Hollywood development professionals give lousy notes on occasion (I’m sure I have). But the industry is set up the way it is, as dispiriting as it can sometimes be for writers, because it works. Notes usually make the story and the script better. If you’re a young person making a short film or a web series, are you using the smart people you know to give you feedback on your material at every step? If not, do it. Get used to it. They’re not paying you, so you don’t have to take their notes, but you should learn to be open to notes, open to feedback, be open to constructive criticism. Look for the “note beneath the note.” Is more than one person identifying a problem area in your outline, script or rough cut? Even if they’re not articulating the problem exactly right, are they helping you identify there’s a problem that needs to be addressed? Your loyalty isn’t to your ego, your loyalty is to your work, to your project. Overcome your doubts, fears and insecurities and open yourself to input. You owe it to your project, and you owe it to yourself to learn to listen and accept constructive criticism. Use criticism proactively. Incorporate it into your process to make the work better before you shoot and before you finish your cut. You’re in control; you don’t have to take every note. Figuring out which notes to take, what the underlying problem is that inarticulate notes are trying to identify and then translating them into good creative fixes, is part of the creative process and part of the job in Hollywood.
Producers and directors of feature films typically convene “friends and family screenings” of their films before they show a rough cut to studio execs. They want to tap the fresh eyes and smart opinions of respected friends and colleagues to make their work as good as they can. Most writers, directors and producers of pilots do the same thing in a more informal way. Learn to seek and incorporate input at the pitching stage, story development stage, script stage and rough cut stage.
Television writers joke about “anticipating notes.” Before showrunners deliver story outlines and drafts of scripts to network and studio current execs, they’ll ask the writers’ room, “What notes are they going to give us?” Do your own “anticipate the notes” process. What do you think people are going to say, and can you either fix it first or brainstorm creative solutions so you’re ready if the feedback you’re expecting comes? Seek out collaborative processes that ma
ke your work better.
Use What Came Before You
As I’ve discussed throughout the book, TV development is about reiteration, variation and experimentation. What came before, what worked before, and how can we change it enough to make it different and more contemporary? That’s what Hollywood development professionals do every day.
How can you do that? Whatever creative medium or format you’re working with, what are the best and most successful examples that came before you, how did they work, and how can you reinvent them for a new audience, a new generation of consumers, and how can you express the timeless underlying ideas and messages in a new way and with a fresh voice?
Identifying and exploiting universal themes is at the heart of the power of most successful TV. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad were both about family and masculinity and the tension between them. Gossip Girl was about female friendship and romantic love and the tension between them. Game of Thrones is about family and power and the tension between them. What are the universal themes at the heart of your creative work?
Study the past. What worked before? Just about every successful Hollywood writer I’ve worked with is a student of TV, knows TV history and has studied what worked before and why. They analyze genres so they know how they work and what’s essential to keep and what they can change and don’t need in their new re-imagining of it.
If you know what’s worked in the past and have an idea how to reinvent it, but you don’t have the skills or facility to express your reinvention yourself, who does? Who can you hire or partner with to lend contemporary voice to an idea that’s ripe for reinvention? This is what producers and development execs do. They’re not writers, but they have an eye for how to reboot the best old ideas, and they have an eye for talent to identify the best artists to execute a reinvention in the most contemporary ways possible. Be honest and critical of your strengths and talents. If you have good ideas but not the best skills to express your ideas, bring your great ideas to someone who does and sell them on your vision and the idea of partnering with you. Become a producer.
The Failure Factor
Remember Graham Yost’s “Pyramid of Death?” Most pitches don’t sell, most scripts don’t get shot, most pilots don’t get picked up to series and most new series don’t last. Most development fails. TV is hard. Creativity is hard.
Hollywood has devised business models to factor failure into the process. A lot of failure. Even those rare true geniuses fail from time to time. Creativity involves risk. Hollywood hedges risk with reiteration. But even then there’s got to be some creative variation that itself involves risk. The few hits pay for the many failures. Factor failure into your creative process. Don’t limit creativity because it’s rife with failure. Factor failure into the cost of successful creativity. Most ideation sessions don’t generate anything usable. Keep going. Come up with new development assignments. Teach your team to pitch and to brainstorm. You’re panning for gold; those nuggets are few and far between.
If you’re a young artist, grieve your failures, lick your wounds, then pick yourself up and learn from your mistakes. If you’re not failing from time to time, you’re not being creative.
New Technologies, New Entertainment Formats
The proliferation of TV technology as a commercial medium in the US in the late 1940s inspired the creation of new entertainment formats. Early TV programmers appropriated radio formats and transposed them to the new medium. The American radio industry had created regularly scheduled scripted series formats in the 1920s, formats inspired by serialized newspaper comic strips. Early TV writers, producers and TV programming executives also invented new formats to exploit opportunities presented by the new medium. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz worked with directors and cinematographers to create the multi-camera half-hour TV format in 1951. The first TV drama format was a 30-minute format, the length of radio drama formats. Television writers and producers discovered that the visual medium of television could sustain viewer interest for longer than 30 minutes, and that stories could be told more impactfully at longer length. In 1957 the half-hour TV drama format evolved into the one-hour drama format we know today.
As new content distribution technologies emerge and assume commercial prominence, what new formats can complement or supplant existing formats? Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s Quibi launches in 2019 with 15-minute scripted series formats. Who else will invent new TV formats? What will they look like?
The web series format, short episodes often produced on low budgets with typically low production values, have proliferated since practically the advent of YouTube in 2005.
For now, it appears the goal of most web series creators is to get their work optioned by large media companies and conform their work to traditional TV formats (like High Maintenance), or to propel a writer or performer (or both) into an opportunity to create her own new series for a media company and conform their work to traditional TV formats (like The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl).
Will programmers at Netflix, Amazon or CBS All Access invent TV formats and exploit new opportunities suggested by online distribution? Or will non-Hollywood scripted series creators lead the way? Indie content creators and marketing companies financing branded content have experimented with short-form web series during the past decade. Yet no single series has truly broken out and captured a mass audience. No true web series hit has succeeded in defining a new format. I Love Lucy succeeded in creating a new entertainment format because it worked, because it attracted a large audience. Hollywood imitates success. The world is waiting for a true breakout hit scripted series from a grassroots, non-Hollywood creator that can lay claim to inventing a new TV format. When that happens, the rest of Hollywood will follow and the scripted series TV industry will yet again be transformed.
15
What’s Next
TV Development in the Age of Media Disruption
There are more networks – broadcast, cable, satellite and streaming – developing and programming more scripted series on American TV than ever before.1 What this translates into for people like you and me is that there are more opportunities for writers to create new series and more jobs for TV development professionals in Hollywood than ever before. In short, these are boom times in TV development.
Not only is there extraordinary demand for the product of development professionals today, there’s an extraordinary opportunity for professionals to do great and exciting work.
While some industry skeptics contend that there are too many shows and that the industry can’t sustain the current pace of productivity, there is no indication that an end to these heady days is anywhere in sight.2 Disney launches its streaming service, designed to compete with Netflix, in late 2019. WarnerMedia has also announced plans to launch its own streaming service. Media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman have raised a billion dollars to create Quibi, the streaming service designed for viewers who consume content on their mobile devices, also slated to launch in late 2019. More and more competitors to Netflix and Amazon continue to come online, and more cable and satellite channels continue to add scripted series to their programming portfolios (while a smaller number of cable channels shutter their scripted divisions). As long as tech giants like Apple and Facebook continue to battle Netflix, Amazon and Hulu to establish online video as the next dominant TV distribution technology and to compete with each other for market share of that business, and as long as – on the other end of the technological spectrum – the legacy broadcast networks continue to operate in some form or fashion, there will continue to be more and more shows to make and consume.
Not only are we living in an era of enormous volume of TV development and programming, we’re living in an era of extraordinarily high quality. Freeing development professionals from the mandate of targeting mass audiences has allowed TV creators to make shows that no longer need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Newer distribution business models allow for shows that appeal to sma
ller, more targeted audiences. Many TV networks are content to develop and program quality shows that command relatively small audiences, but that elevate the brand and the value of the overall network and all its other programming. These factors combine to allow writers, producers, development execs and agents to focus on more original ideas and more sophisticated execution of TV content than ever before.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that now is a great time for young people who love entertainment and love television to come to LA to pursue their TV development dreams. For clear-eyed aspiring TV professionals prepared to approach their careers with realism and pragmatism (and tons of hard work and awesome ideas), now is a great time to go for it. There are more jobs and more opportunities in TV development than ever before. Television is a thriving, healthy, dynamic industry and there is no indication that that vibrancy will decline anytime soon.
As I first mentioned in the introduction to this book, the distribution of TV is being disrupted in enormous ways, but the development of TV isn’t. Of course there are evolutionary adjustments to the process, and new trends that I’ll look at more in a moment, but the fundamental practice of TV development is relatively unchanged. Development professionals still need to find or create great ideas and great concepts for shows. They need to translate those ideas into pitches, oral or written. They need to dramatize those ideas and pitches in the form of scripts, whether the title page refers to the script as a “pilot” or “episode one.” A vision for a series consisting of many stories and seasons beyond that first episode needs to be imagined and articulated. Ideas, pitches, stories and scripts have always been, currently are and will continue to be the primary work of development. Working with material, verbal, written material, is the heart of TV development. One of the two words that designate the medium of “scripted series” is essential to all development. As long as “scripted” continues to be part of “scripted series,” development will continue to focus on the traditional, essential focus of development, creating scripts that serve as the blueprint of a series.