he panic sets in shortly after the Ides of March. The fall drama pilots have been picked up and are in production. The current series have almost finished their orders.
It's the season when sci-fi television writers, from veteran show runners to rookie staff writers, start looking around. If they are on a show, they ask themselves if it's likely to be renewed—and if so, are they likely to be renewed with it.
If they aren't on a show, they watch their shrinking bank accounts (with April 15 looming!) and start wondering—who do I know? Who's got a pilot? Who's show is going to be renewed, and will there be openings? Where can I fit in?
It's like that old party game, where a group of people circle a collection of chairs as the music plays. There are more people than there are chairs.
The music stops. Everyone dives for the chairs. The lucky ones sit down. The losers are out.
This is the season of musical chairs for writers.
I was reminded of this not so many days ago, when a close friend of mine was hired to write and produce on a short-order series. That friend had been one of perhaps a dozen show runners (you'd recognize all of them, believe me) who don't have pilots and who are not on staff, and who have been meeting at studios ever since mid-March on pilots and series that might be renewed.
Once the news of this surprise hiring got out, a second friend—another member of this select group of show runners—could not contain his glee. "That's one less competitor!"
That is, one less participant in the game of musical chairs.
Have I mentioned that the pool of show runners exceeds the possible jobs by at least two to one?
And what are these jobs, this summer and fall of 2003? Enterprise and Stargate SG-1 and Andromeda and Smallville and Charmed and Mutant X and Angel are certain renewals, if they haven't been renewed already. The Dead Zone is getting six more episodes this summer. Jeremiah doesn't seem to need any writers besides J. Michael Straczynski.
It's too early to tell what's happening with Tremors. John Doe and Miracles are on the bubble. (Unfortunately, the news that fans have started a "campaign to save a show" is now taken as confirmation that a show has been canceled.) Twilight Zone doesn't look as though it has much chance.
Farscape is long gone. Buffy is going away. Odyssey 5 was a victim of a mysterious cancellation. (The end of each show adds more players to the game of musical writers.)
It's the new shows—the pilots in production—that get the most attention right now, since many (not all) were scripted by writers who haven't reached the show-runner level yet. So one of our participants can not only expect to find a nice-paying job, but also to bring one or more favorites with him or her. (Remind me some time to talk about patronage as practiced in Hollywood.)
Fledging shows flex sci-fi wings
There are a number of interesting new sci-fi projects this year. One of the network dicta, in fact, must have been to deal with sci-fi crime, because both Fox and NBC have future crime dramas in the works. Steven Bochco's 2069, written by Bochco with Nick Wooten and Matt Olmstead, deals with a present-day police detective who is wounded, frozen and awakened in the future.
The NBC project, which deals with a team of futuristic police officers (no refugees from our era, thank you), is called Future Tense, and is written by Javier Grillo Marxuach (formerly of seaQuest DSV, Charmed and The Chronicle).
Then there is the future law drama, Century City, from Ed Zuckerman (Law and Order), which tackles the moral and ethical issues we and our children will be facing a generation from now.
Kamelot is the futuristic adventures of a young King Arthur type set in a post-apocalypse world. Wes Craven and Marianne Maddelana produce, with writers Ron Milbauer and Terri Hughes. This one is for UPN.
UPN also has Weapon X, also known as Tech, the adventures of a lowly computer geek for the National Security Agency who becomes—well, a sort of superhero. The script is by Silvio Horta, who scripted the feature Urban Legends, and developed the late SCI FI Channel series The Chronicle.
A third UPN sci-fi project—do you think the network is going to miss Buffy?—is Shadow Walkers, the adventures of a married couple of scientists and their brilliant, quirky children. Writer-producers here are Dan Angel and Billy Brown.
Lifetime has 1-800-Missing, a supernatural series based on the novel 1-800-Where R U, by Meg Cabot. This one, like Wonder Falls, might be airing this summer.
For those of you who, like me, enjoy quirky shows (like Northern Exposure or even Eerie, Indiana), there is Wonder Falls from Fox. This series deals with a young woman in Niagara Falls. Wonder—formerly known as Maid of the Mist—has already been picked up for 13 episodes to air this summer, a cunning strategy by Fox to avoid having promising new programs (can you say John Doe?) murdered by the World Series.
Wonder was created by writer Bryan Fuller (who also created Showtime's upcoming Dead Like Me) and director Todd Holland.
My personal favorite is Newtown, the bizarre adventures of a typical American family that moves to a very unique city. The script for this UPN series is by Craig Silverstein, veteran of Invisible Man and The Dead Zone.
It's a little too early to tell which of these pilots will become a series. As of this week, most of them are in post-production. It's only when the first rough cuts start showing up in network offices (two weeks from now) that the rumors will start to circulate.
Excuse me, I've got to run. The music is starting up again. ...
While he waits for the game of musical writers to end, Michael Cassutt is writing for The Dead Zone. His new novel, Tango Midnight, will be published by Forge in November.
