The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

by Neil Landau

  On a supernatural series, the mythology deals with the rules of magic. Here are some basic questions for you to ponder as you conjure:

  Who has special powers?

  How do they work?

  What is their limitation?

  How are they activated?

  Can they be neutralized or reversed?

  Is there a totem or book of spells or amulet or material device needed to invoke the magic?

  In the pilot episode of Once Upon a Time, we learn that the sleepy town of Storybrooke, Maine has stopped and that every resident is a fairy-tale character with no memory of that life. Henry (Jared S. Gilmore), a young resident of Storybrooke convinced that he knows the truth, runs away to Boston and persuades bounty hunter Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison) to come back home with him. Once Emma enters the town, time starts moving again, telling us that Emma is an important cog in Storybrooke’s clockwork.

  When Setting Up the Rules for an Unfamiliar World, Bring an Outsider into the World to Help the Audience Get Up to Speed

  In the Once Upon a Time pilot, we cross-cut between the fairy-tale world and Storybrooke and learn that the Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla) has placed a curse on Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas) and relegated them to Storybrooke where there would be no more happily ever afters (which is the Evil Queen’s own happy ending). Emma’s arrival upsets the balance and overrules the curse. We also get to witness how each character in Storybrooke has a double (or doppelganger) counterpoint in the fairy-tale world. The creators and showrunners (Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz) were careful to ensure that the rules of their Storybrooke world were clear, simple, and easy to understand. And they provided us with Emma as our guide to navigate it. As an outsider trying to make sense of the place and her role in it, Emma got to ask questions that the audience would ask and investigate for us.

  The Ethos of Westeros and Essos

  On Game of Thrones, created for HBO by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, adapted from a series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, seven noble families (the houses of Stark, Lannister, Baratheon, Greyjoy, Tully, Arryn, and Tyrell) fight for control of the mythical land of Westeros. The political tensions between houses build to an epic “modern” war. On the continents of Westeros and Essos, summer has lasted a decade, and the impending winter is foreboding as the lore of its mythical monsters (or “White Walkers”) foretells.

  Showrunner David Benioff tagged the series “The Sopranos in Middle Earth,” referring to the ruthless rivalries among powerful families; killing sprees, steely coercion, murder, and a self-serving code of ethics within its medieval Europe–inspired, fantasy setting.

  The series also offers allusions to Hadrian’s Wall, the decline of the Roman Empire, the legend of Atlantis, Icelandic Vikings, and the Mongols (known on the series as the Dothraki), along with elements of the Hundred Years’ War and the Italian Renaissance. Author George R. R. Martin and series creators/showrunners, Benioff and Weiss, brilliantly succeed at weaving these contrasting elements into their own alternative history, replete with balls of fire, White Walkers (reminiscent of a zombie apocalypse), and flying dragons.

  With its enormous cast of hundreds (the largest of any TV series, ever), it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of every character and subplot without a crib sheet. Nevertheless, the series succeeds by tapping into mythic structure that’s hardwired into our DNA. Its legions of fans across the globe aren’t daunted by backstory, and can recite the show’s complex mythology, chapter and verse, as if it’s a badge of honor.

  What’s truly amazing about Game of Thrones is how all the rules of the world relate to each other and the theme of “fire and ice.” By creating rules around these opposing forces, it fuels constant conflict. And who is to say which is stronger: fire or ice? There is speculation that the final battle will come down to Jon Snow (Kit Harington), representing ice, and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), representing fire. The main quest is to take the Iron Throne (although Jon Snow isn’t after the throne), so it seems for each character that the main obstacle will either be fire or ice. If you wanted to get obsessive you could probably link each of the main contenders to either of those elements. For example, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) used wildfire to win the battle at Blackwater Bay. Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) worships the Lord of Light (fire). Robb Stark (Richard Madden) is from the North (ice).

  In terms of Game of Thrones’ mythology, here are the lists of rules for the dragons, White Walkers, and Lord of Light.

  Rules for the Dragons:

  They were thought to have died out 150 years ago.

  They hatch from eggs exposed to extreme heat (fire).

  Humans can have some dragon traits (extreme heat doesn’t affect Daenerys), but it’s not clear how she can be a descendent of dragons.

  They are extremely loyal.

  They can be trained. Can learn to respond to a vocal command. (Daenerys can command them to breathe fire.)

  Rules for White Walkers:

  They have not been seen for eight thousand years.

  The wall was erected to keep them out.

  If you are killed by a White Walker, you can also be reanimated by them in order to become one of their servants.

  White Walkers have scaly white skin and blue eyes. Servants have pale skin and blue eyes.

  Both fire and a special artifact can kill them. (Interesting tie-in with the fire and dragons.)

  Considered by most to be legend. (I consider this to be a rule about them because it sets up how people react to them or any mention of them.)

  Rules for Lord of Light:

  Centered on one, all-knowing god—the Lord of Light. (What does that sound like?)

  Lord of Light is represented by fire. (More fire tie-ins.)

  Priests/priestesses have the ability to bring people back from the dead.

  Shadows can be manipulated by practitioners to do their bidding. (Shadows are created by Light.)

  Taking Dramatic License

  There is also historical mythology. These series, such as The Tudors, The Borgias, Vikings, Hatfields & McCoys, and Spartacus, are loosely based upon (and in some cases merely “inspired by”) “true” historical events. But they all take dramatic license to serve the needs of drama, suspense, and overall marketability. They are historical series, not documentaries, so the audience is willing to suspend their disbelief to come along on the journey. Henry VIII was an unattractive, corpulent, sickly, petulant bully. And yet on The Tudors, Henry was portrayed by the virile, handsome movie star Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Don’t get too bogged down by meticulously adhering to historical details.

  Do your research, avoid anachronisms, and aim for verisimilitude. As long as the time period and setting feel right, the audience will allow themselves to get swept away in the dramatic action. Of course, there will always be history scholars that cry foul. You can’t please everyone. Off with their heads!

  Interview: Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis

  Horowitz and Kitsis Credits

  Best known for:

  Once Upon a Time (Creators/Executive Producers/Writers) 2011–2012

  TRON: Legacy (Film) (Writers) 2010

  Lost (Executive Producers/Supervising Producers/Producers/Writers) 2005–2010

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Drama Series) 2008–2010

  WGA Award Winner (Dramatic Series) 2006

  WGA Award Nominated (Dramatic Series) 2006–2007, 2009–2010

  Felicity (Producers/Writers) 2001–2002

  Popular (Writers) 1999–2001

  NL: The question for this chapter is “What’s the mythology?” I read that you had this idea for awhile—even before you were on Lost. Where did the idea come from and why did this interest you?

  AH: The idea came from almost ten years ago now. We had been writing on Felicity on the WB. That show ended its run. We were sitting around talking about what’s the kind of show that we would want to do.

  EK: Because our
agent was like, “Why don’t you guys think about a pilot?”

  AH: Yeah, which led us to talk about things that we loved, stories that were formative to us, that got us going which led to a discussion of fairy tales. I had just read this book called, The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim, which was about fairy tales and their influence on kids.

  EK: At the time Smallville was out, but no one had really done fairy tales. We realized what we loved about them was the open canvas. What was great about Lost was that one week you were writing a show about a guy who won the lottery and the next week it was about a con man. You never just wrote only cops or only lawyers. So when Adam read this book, he started talking about fairy tales and about how much it would suck to be the Evil Queen [Lana Parrilla] because you were literally in a place where everything had a happy ending, but everything you do, fails. You get a working oven inside a gingerbread house and that stupid blind witch can’t kill two kids? So that was our genesis of: “Where would she go to win?” And that was our world. That was our premise.

  AH: And what we had cooked up almost ten years ago is pretty similar to what it is now. In terms of there was this woman [Emma played by Jennifer Morrison] who came to this town who is the daughter of Snow White [Ginnifer Goodwin] and Prince Charming [Josh Dallas]. And there was a curse and a kid. But there were various incarnations.

  EK: In one she had two kids and in one she had no kids. In one, she didn’t know she had a kid which was a weird one.

  AH: We played with a version where she didn’t know she had a kid. She didn’t know she was pregnant. She was in a coma and the kid was delivered, but she never knew. We thought it was a cool idea, but we could never figure out how to make that work as a series. I think the problem was that in 2002 or 2003 that we just weren’t ready to concoct such a big canvas. But I think what we did know that if we wanted to do our own show, we wanted to do something that would allow us the freedom to do many types of stories but finding an umbrella under which they all could exist.

  EK: It wasn’t until we got to Lost that we thought, “Oh, this is how you could do it.” That was our learning experience. I remember going into the last season we were having dinner with Damon Lindelof [Executive Producer/Creator, Lost] and he asked us what we were thinking of doing after this, so we pitched him our show. He said, “That’s a good idea.” And then once the show ended, we said this is what we wanted to do.

  NL: Did you go in and pitch it to ABC?

  EK: Yeah. We had a general meeting with ABC Studios with Barry Jossen and Patrick Moran. They had a couple of books and properties in mind, but they asked, “Do you have anything?” And we pitched our idea. And they said, “This one.” What happened was that Adam and I went to Damon about going to pitch Paul Lee at the network.

  AH: We pitched them what the broad strokes of the pilot would be. Paul Lee said to go ahead and write the pilot. Everybody seemed very enthused and excited. All these ideas from all these years that had been swirling around. It was a huge, massive challenge to figure out how to turn that into a fifty-page script.

  EK: We literally had four outlines that we threw out. We just couldn’t figure out the way in. Plus, we had a movie coming out called Tron. It was our first experience having a movie coming out which was very stressful and distracting. We came back after Christmas and ABC said, “You understand you have two weeks before you’re out of the cycle.” So we were like, “Fuck, this can’t be done. We have a good idea that we can’t figure out.” Damon came down and the three of us were talking and we were just going to tell them that we couldn’t do it. And then it turned into, “Well, there’s really no show unless you do this.” And then someone said, “And then you do that.” And then all of a sudden, we found it.

  AH: I think one of the breakthroughs for us was that we always in the many incarnations of the outline had talked about opening it with the birth of Emma and the dwarfs seeing the curse come in. Then it hit us, “Wait. That shouldn’t be the opening of the pilot—that’s the story running concurrently.” Because we had so much backstory for all these characters and once we realized that we shouldn’t just shove it all into the pilot and be done with it. Let’s take all that mythology and all that backstory and make it part of the show.

  EK: We were so late in the process that we went in and pitched the outline. We literally pitched the pilot beat by beat.

  AH: We literally spent an hour with the network.

  EK: Scene 1, scene 2, scene 3 … and when we were done, they said, “Okay, go write it.” We had ten days to write it before it was the final deadline. They had already started picking things up.

  AH: This was late January of 2011.

  EK: We handed it in on a Friday and it got picked up on a Monday. Of course, there were still notes and things to be done, but that’s how late we were in the process. It was like we started six weeks behind.

  NL: Sometimes writing with that kind of pressure and terror, you don’t have a lot of time to second guess yourself.

  AH: I also think what was helpful was years of thinking about it. It wasn’t just a case of writing a pilot in ten days. Once we found the way we could see it and execute it, then all of those pieces fell into place with that script and we wrote it relatively quickly.

  NL: Where did the rules of the world come from? One of the things that’s so tricky about this show is that I watch it and think, “How did all of these elements come together?” It’s so impressive and seems so seamless—now that it’s come together.

  EK: I think one of the hardest things to do is to be simple. Figuring out the way to make rules for your world that are seamless that when you’re watching you don’t have to think about them. If you have a lot of scenes where you have characters always explaining what is going on and then your audience has to take notes on it, it just doesn’t work. If you can come up with rules that feel intuitive, then you’ve won.

  AH: And for us, we knew there would be a mythology, but we never wanted it to overwhelm the character. We were much more interested in why Grumpy was grumpy, why the Evil Queen is evil, why the Mad Hatter is mad. We may not have planned out the whole season, but for questions like, “Why does the Evil Queen hate Snow White?” We knew what her story was. Once we had those stories in place, then we were able to tie them together. The key was always what does the character want, and you build your mythology around that. We knew from the start of the pilot process that the Queen was casting this curse. We had come up with the story that she had lost her love and blamed Snow. Basing the curse around a queen who had lost her love, that became the cornerstone behind the first mythology that we unfurled in season 1. That’s how we make a mythology. Just thinking about what the character wants and what their issues are with the other characters. And then all the other stuff about the magic and curses just needed to be tailored to fit that. We feel that if an audience is invested in why a character wants her revenge then they’ll go with all the other stuff.

  EK: Damon and Carlton [Cuse, Executive Producer/Creator, Lost] gave us a great note when we were on Lost which helped our writing a lot. It was, “What am I supposed to be feeling in this scene?” It was this weird note that should have just seemed obvious. The thing about Lost is sometimes it would be two scenes about people trying to find water, but there was such manufactured intensity to it because of the emotions behind it. So what is the Queen feeling at this wedding? She’s feeling pain because she is staring at everything she wanted and never got.

  NL: Because you have two different sets of rules for the forest and the magical realm and for Storybrooke. It seems that right around the halfway point was a benchmark because it was the first place it’s been revealed that Belle (Emilie de Ravin) is being kept … it seems as though you have central questions running through both worlds. One is that Emma doesn’t believe what Henry (Jared Gilmore) is telling her and then by the end of the season, she finally believes. And then she is transported to the other world. It’s the first major crossover for Emma. Did y
ou have some of these benchmarks mapped out structurally?

  EK: It was one of those things when we started to break story for season 1 that we knew that it was going to be about Emma believing. We had to figure out where that would happen.

  AH: We actually thought we would never get away with it past eleven— that people would be horrified and annoyed. And then we got to episode 7 because the death of Sheriff Graham [Jamie Dornan] is going to hold her back. Then we started to realize that her believing was something important which was why we introduced Pinocchio [Eion Bailey]. We didn’t want to just put it in a middle episode. We wanted to try to earn it. Because the realness of it would help it sell better and, for us, she could not believe unless it was her son who got her to believe. Look, we thought we’d be cancelled after two episodes.

  EK: And, by the way, every critic in town predicted us to be the first cancelled. We were opening against the World Series and the Super Bowl and by the fifth critic I read who predicted us to be DOA, I was then like, “OK, fuck it Adam, let’s just do six great episodes.”

  AH: You just cannot predict what an audience will watch. We just tried to balance big ideas from where the series could go with the big ideas of where a season could go. We tried to set up things that hopefully we’d have a chance to do in season 1. Then we started to construct our tent poles around that. [Episode] 109 was when we introduced the Stranger [Eion Bailey] and there was no way we were going to wrap up that story in three episodes. We knew we wanted to do this bigger thing. By the time we were in the back half of the season, we were able to ramp things up and build to a finale with the curse breaking.