he Olympics wind down, and although the baseball playoffs and World Series loom, it is premiere time for the major networks. All sorts of sci-fi series are being rolled out, from Dark Angel to FreakyLinks. The X-Files returns ...
Well, okay, it's premiere time for all sorts of Fox Broadcasting sci-fi series. The major networks aren't doing sci-fi right now, and the weblets--WB, for example--and syndicated suppliers have already made their traditional September launches.
But sci-fi writers, and by that I mean writer-producer-creator-show runners, the people who have the opportunity to create and sell a sci-fi television concept, are already thinking about Fall 2001. (Those who didn't sell anything may already be lamenting lost opportunities for that undeniably science-fictional date.) They are in development.
What this means is that sometime after the networks' Fall 2000 announcements, which were clustered around 10 days in mid-May, after the various network executives had their well-deserved vacations, and the studio executives returned from Cannes or other distant destinations, sometime around Aug. 1, writers faced pitch season.
Pitch season has become something like deer season as I remember it back in my misspent Wisconsin youth. One day the woods are peaceful, autumnal, inviting. The next they are filled with armed hunters of varying degrees of skill, some of them (by no means all) intoxicated, blasting away at a population of large animals affectionately known as "rats with hooves." Two weeks later, some hunters have bagged their limit. More have struck out. A few have suffered fatal or less-than-fatal mishaps. And the deer breed on.
The brutalized market
In Hollywood's television pitch season, hordes of writers descend on production companies and studios, where they team up to attack the major networks, the weblets, any moving target market. (Rats with station groups?) By mid-September, a lucky few have sold their concepts and are "in development," while others have struck out, and a few have suffered fatal career mishaps.
It's a tricky business, all the more so because the gains in potential markets due to the rise of syndicated outlets, pay cable like Showtime and "free" cable like our own SCI FI Channel, have been offset by, well, two words: Regis and Survivor. Game and "reality" series have brutalized the market for new dramas and comedies--especially comedies, since most of them compete for the same 8 p.m. time slots favored by Regis and his ilk.
It's also gotten trickier because studios and networks, with smaller development budgets, are increasingly drawn to "proven" names from outside the television world to provide television concepts: James Cameron doing Dark Angel, for example.
In this universe, a mid-level sci-fi writer-producer--say, someone like me--won't even get a meeting at a network. Network pitch meetings are often formalities. The project is usually presold, because the network is desperate to "be in business with" the writer coming in, or has heard enough of the concept to be drooling over it, or there is a pre-existing commitment of some kind.
Those lucky few who have succeeded in selling are heroes. For about a week.
Then comes the descent into development hell.
Development hell used to mean an unusually protracted and fruitless process in which a writer continually rewrote a feature film script to satisfy a constantly changing set of executives, directors and actors. My favorite example from the sci-fi world is John Varley's heroic 10-year struggle to see his story "Air Raid" turned into the movie Millennium.
Television, with its voracious appetite for material, and its lack of patience, used to be immune from this. No longer. Projects are frequently rolled over from one season to another. And with the increased pressure placed on any new series, given the smaller number of timeslots, you get increased attention from all levels of the studio and network. (The "vertical integration" of studios and networks, with Viacom owning Paramount and CBS, has added layers of executives to this process, too.)
So your concept must survive one or more story meetings before you can even proceed to outline. You not only need to prepare for each meeting, you've got to wait, wait, wait until the stars are in alignment--that is, until several sets of executives can "coordinate" their schedules.
Once you've agreed on a story, you can write your outline. This takes a couple of weeks. Then you have to meet with the studio, rework the outline,
and send it to the network, where the business of scheduling the meeting starts all over.
As you can see, time is being wasted. Networks say they want first drafts--the first one you dare turn in, that is--by Thanksgiving, but rarely act as though they do. I once received a final go-ahead to script on December 13. The network knew it was being a little silly, so they gave me until January 1 to turn in the script. It wasn't much of a Christmas around the Cassutt household that year. (Nor was it much of a script.)
Whiners and complainers
If you're lucky, you have your go-ahead by early October, giving you five or six weeks. Well, hell, you say, that's plenty of time to write 55 pages, isn't it? You TV writers are such whiners and complainers ....
It's certainly true that a one-hour pilot script can be written in much less than six weeks. It can be written in a week. Premise pilots--a story in which, say, a new captain goes aboard the next Star Trek vehicle--are often easier to write than a "center cut" episode, because you have the fun of introducing characters to each other.
But a script can't be written, read, modified according to several sets of notes at the studio level, then put through the same process at the network in that amount of time. Which is why most pilots are lucky to arrive at networks before Christmas. And lately they've been showing up in mid-January.
This results in a mad scramble to get a script approved for filming, then into pre-production, casting, budgeting, etc., so it can be in front of the cameras by mid or late March, rushed through post-production and delivered so yet more network execs can decide in May whether to put the series on the fall schedule.
Given the process, it's a miracle series are done at all, much less done well.
And what this process hurts most is sci-fi series.
Creating new worlds takes time
The thing that makes a sci-fi show different from your basic cop show, or lawyer-returns-to-hometown-show (a genre of its own, it seems), is its background. One definition of a sci-fi story is that it takes place in a world different from our own: the 23rd century; Middle Earth; the United States in the year 2000, only with aliens running amok.
Creating new worlds takes time. You need to be able to play out the implications of your faster-than-light starship. Who paid for it? Where does the fuel come from? How often does it stop, and where? (Joe Straczynski was able to do some of this for Babylon 5.)
It isn't until you can answer these questions that you can truly begin to see and hear your characters and to develop "real and true" stories for them.
Asking for more time isn't the answer, unless you are James Cameron. All you can do is what classic sci-fi series have done in the past: get yourself on the air and cling to the schedule long enough for your background to fill in. It happened with the first Star Trek, and with The X-Files, too.
Or you can simply give up. But where's the fun in that?
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, the forthcoming Red Moon (Forge, Jan. 2001).
