How do they make them shows on the teevee?
January 31, 2008 7:39 PM 
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How are
serial television dramas, like "Deadwood," written?
I'd like to know about the mechanics behind television shows that run for several seasons, and have involving, complicated plots and complex characters. The kinds you kind of have to watch from the beginning to really enjoy or understand what is going on. Other examples I'm thinking of would be "The Sopranos," "Weeds," "The Wire," etc.
Are entire seasons, or even entire series outlined in the very beginning so writers know what each character's arc will be? Does a team of writers write each episode, or is it one writer per episode? In a show like "Deadwood," for instance, how is the stilted, inferring language kept consistent from episode to episode if there are different writers?
Blogs or "HowStuffWorks"-style articles or other references would be great. I've read Jane Espensen's blog.
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! to media & arts (15 comments total)
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The West Wing was similar: Aaron Sorkin had less a writing staff than a team of researchers, and he'd cook up episodes around their suggestions. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
Many hourlong dramas go something like this: the writing staff convenes in summer to pound out the big stories. The split the year up into episodes, then go hour by hour, breaking each ep's story (outlining, figuring out where each scene needs to go, etc.). This often happens on a whiteboard split up into 'acts' (separated by commercial breaks). For HBO shows, no act breaks (no ads), so there's more freedom in structure, i.e. less help. Once the story is shaped and its scene-by-scene requirements established, a writer or two will then go off and work up a detailed outline, get some notes, then bang out a draft. This means improvising specific responses and so forth, but the structure has more or less been set. More notes, another draft, etc. Eventually you get to a shooting draft. (This process varies, show to show, but those are the broad strokes.)
On shows with looser structure, there's room for freelance writers to pitch episodes, which the staff writers will then go over in the writing room, fitting the one-off's events into the arc of the season. On a show like The Wire you wouldn't have freelance work; indeed the era of entirely staff-written shows is a relatively new thing.
No U.S. yearlong series is entirely written in advance; you have to leave room for the exigencies of production, like actors' schedules, etc. The Wire is tightly plotted in part because it's only 10-13 eps/year, unlike e.g. the arc-heavy Buffy, which left lots of wiggle room for production in its 22 yearly episodes.
It is frustrating to admit, but these continuity-heavy shows evolve away from their initial conceptions in response to production choices and new ideas. Lost is an example of this process leading to an incoherent mess; Buffy was a similar production style with much, much greater integrity and thematic coherence. But also a very slipshod approach to mythology (so showrunner Joss Whedon et al. could get away with taking narrative shortcuts). The one year Whedon planned out a yearlong arc in its entirety, it was fucked up by the lead actress's pregnancy, necessitating the total rethinking of the year's story. And...incoherent mess.
If you want more rigorous construction, consider a BBC miniseries like The Singing Detective, which is a single six-hour work.
posted by waxbanks at 7:53 PM on January 31, 2008 [63 favorites has favorites]