he rumors are everywhere, in my local Starbucks and at the post office, on the telephone and even at my daughter's fencing studio. I'm not even asking people what's up: I just overhear the stories. This show's already in trouble, one crew member proclaims; the producers are treating the actors poorly and driving the crew insane.
One writer on a different show admits, I haven't gotten home before 8:00 p.m. any evening so far! And they expect us to be in the office on Saturdays, too!
And a studio executive comes close to firing the show-runner he hired with much fanfare some months back, because said show-runner refuses to listen to any more of her notes. What do you expect? an agent says of the situation: You treat a writer like a god, pretty soon he starts acting like one!
And so on. Yes, it's that time of year, when the bright promise and giddy relief over that network pickup collapses into despair over the hard work involved in filming 11 movies in the space of seven months. (Which is one way of looking at a 22-episode television production schedule.)
And a writer who spent all of last year writing one script by himself is now a Show-Runner tasked with producing a score just like it--only cheaper and faster.
A day in the writing life
Here's what it's like when your series is in production and you're a member of the writing team.
Your working day starts at 10:00. (If you're smart, you go into your office at 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. and get some writing done.) But at 10:00 you join the staff in the Room, and start waiting for the Show-Runner.
While you're waiting, you decide to be good little soldiers, and start "breaking" the story for Episode Ten. One of you picks up a marker and goes to the white board, dividing it into four acts, plus a tag and a teaser. See, progress already! Then you remember one line the Show-Runner tossed out at 7 p.m. the night before, and start trying to see how it affects your hero. ...
The Show-Runner has been in since 9:00 or so, but he's been on the phone with the set, because there's a question about a scene in Episode Five, currently being filmed. In fact, this conversation is followed by a phone call from the network about yesterday's dailies ("What the hell did you guys do to her hair?"), then from the studio ("The budget for Episode Six is still way over.") and the Show-Runner doesn't even get to the room until 11:30, when you've got a teaser, act one and part of act two up on the board.
At which point he throws out most of what you've done. Fine--it's his show; you just play in it. You go back to the teaser and start act one in a different direction, and are really making progress when the phone rings: it's the star and he's just read the script for Episode Six ("Who gave it to him so damned early!") and he's got some problems.
Off goes the Show-Runner, while the staff tries to continue exploring this new direction. Twenty minutes later, the Show-Runner returns, likes most of what he sees (if he truly sees it, which you doubt), but you must break until 2:00 because everyone wants lunch, needs to make phone calls or look at 40 minutes of dailies from yesterday's filming or maybe even add a line or two to the scripts for Episodes Seven, Eight and Nine, which are theoretically being written.
When the writers return to the room at 2:20, one of your number is missing. Turns out the Show-Runner read the outline for Episode Eight and didn't like it, so he has summoned the writer for "consultation." Before you and the rest of the staff can digest that information, the Show-Runner and the offending writer enter the room, the Show-Runner announcing, "I know how we can fix this thing."
The white board containing the bare bones elements of Episode Ten is turned over, and Episode Eight gets written on the blank side. Ninety minutes later it is fixed and everyone seems happy. The Episode Eight writer needs to break off from the team in order to rewrite the outline ... tonight. (The immediate result is a phone call home to the Significant Other, canceling plans to take the kids to the Hollywood Bowl.) The Show-Runner, hoping to capitalize on this creative momentum, wants to return to Episode 10.
But it's time for casting, so he and one of the other writers disappear to another part of the studio. There is also an edit of Episode Five to be viewed. Even though it is now 5:00 p.m., Episode Ten still requires at least two hours of group effort. Since the production schedule waits for no one, the Show-Runner instructs the rest of the team to re-gather at 6:30. Now you have time to write!
Of course, the Show-Runner's 6:30 actually means 7:00. And results in perhaps 20 minutes of useful creative work over the next hour-plus.
Exhausted and frustrated, the staff departs. Tomorrow will be just as busy, if not worse, because there is a concept meeting for Episode Seven, during which sketches for an alien and a space telephone need to be approved.
This is not only a typical day, it's a good typical day.
A marathon, not a sprint
It would be easy--and unfair--to say that television series are often mismanaged. The level of production value demanded by today's television viewer is so high (compare an episode of Star Trek: Voyager to, say, Battlestar: Galactica, considered to be the most ambitiously mounted series of its day) that the ideal of a well-written, well-acted, well-conceived and well-executed sci-fi series on time and budget, which finds its creative legs in the first season, may be unachievable.
Heck, there are relatively few mainstream series that run smoothly.
Part of the blame falls on the system, which dictates (for economic reasons) remote productions: most sci-fi shows are written in one country and filmed in another. Logistics grow more complicated and actors feel cut off from the writers.
The other problem is that very few Show-Runners are equipped to manage a $30 million business and a diverse staff of 75 people. What do you expect? Relatively few writers have experience as a supervisor of other human beings much beyond being a Boy Scout patrol leader or possibly editor of the college newspaper. And writing a television series is not like managing a Good Guys outlet: writers are all quirky and they all work at their own speed. Some are slow and produce one brilliant draft that could be filmed as written.
Others will produce fast, multiple drafts, all of which need to be read and revised. Some play well with a team; others should be walled off in a remote office.
It's a terrible system. However, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, or possibly Glen Larson, it's still better than all the others.
I've been on the staff of 11 different series and learned one lesson, which I freely offer to those currently laboring in the Room or, especially, suffering through the role of Show-Runner:
Producing a television series is a marathon, not a sprint.
And to those of you watching the results: it's an achievement to successfully film 22 episodes of anything; to have them turn out good is close to a miracle.
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a
number of SF and fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, two dozen science fiction short stories and, most recently, a novel about NASA titled Missing Man (paperback from Tor, March 2000).
