by Neil Landau
NL: I love the choice you made because now they’re rivals and you get new kinds of stories. I would imagine that anytime you come across a story that has tentacles, and you go, “Now, we can go here, and here, and here” and it will enable us to go different places, story-wise.
MR: That’s absolutely right, and what it allowed us to do was to introduce this new character, Dr. Jeremiah Sacani, played by Ben Shenkman, who never would have existed if these guys hadn’t split. What you said is completely true which is we have found new ways to tell stories, and of course, the brothers will get back together, but with it we now have this fresh real estate where we have a Dr. Sacani and we have Kyle Howard playing Dr. Van Dyke. And, after our fifty-something episode, it gives us new places to go without feeling like we’re recycling the same stories.
NL: I think that the heart of the show works so well because for every case, you infuse a strong emotional investment for Hank. He genuinely cares— which makes us care about the outcome. But I would imagine that one of the biggest challenges for you and your writers is not being too predictable— because we know that everything’s going to be OK in the end. I mean, basically, it’s a feel-good show. The mystery is not whether they’re going to solve the case, but rather how. But every once in a while you’ll throw us a major curveball, such as in the episode titled “After the Fireworks” that ended with a scary explosion, lives hanging in the balance.
MR: That was the season premiere, and it was unusual for us to have something that big and that dramatic and also to play as a cliffhanger at the very end of an episode. Usually our cliffhangers are more character oriented. You know, the one where Evan lost all of the money, or where their father, Henry Winkler, shows up. It felt both as a premiere, it was a fun way to kick things off and also, in a way, that action was a microcosm of the fireworks that we’re happening between the brothers. It felt like something we could play out dramatically that also touched on the theme of what we were doing in the opening of the season.
NL: When you’re in your writers’ room with your team, are you thinking about cliffhangers within each episode as you’re structuring your act breaks?
MR: We are. We have an amazing writers’ room.
It’s funny because we began the show thinking that every act in every episode had to have a medical cliffhanger. We worked so hard for that, and finally, at some point, the network said, “You guys are so strong with character—don’t feel the pressure to have to…”—and it was such a relief to us.
And, now we do try to balance, so we don’t force anything, and if we have a great—obviously it’s a medical show and we need to have strong medical stakes, but we’ve built up enough of a character series now where there is that soap element and now people truly care what’s going to happen to Divya [Reshma Shetty], what’s going to happen to Hank, Evan and Paige [Brooke D’Orsay], and we can end acts with Campbell Scott [as Boris Kuester von Jurgens-Ratenicz]—not is he going to die, but what’s going to happen in this world he’s now entering. It takes the pressure offus medically and helps balance the tone of the show because tonally USA network has a very specific thing which now they’re trying to change because they’re growing so much. But, for us, the tone of the show is where we live and it’s a sweet spot of as you said, “happiness is buoyant,” but at the same time people get sick. When we’ve done things that are dramatically very extreme, like in season 1 Andrew McCarthy, his character was in drug rehab, we balanced it with a very silly storyline of a woman who was turning blue. That’s how we try to manage to keep the tone in a comfortable spot where the audience knows what they’re going to get and all of a sudden we haven’t turned into CSI: Miami or something.
NL: Because you’re a cable show and you have a shorter season, do you arc the whole season at one time or is it more—a lot of shows it will be according to how many members are on staff—you’ll go maybe five or six?
MR: We try to have a sense of where we’re going to go. Inevitably that changes because you start writing a story that you thought was so wonderful and then you cast it incorrectly or it’s not coming to fruition like you thought it would, so you shift. Traditionally, we’ve been a summer and winter show with two-thirds of our episodes in the summer and one-third of our episodes in the winter. So, what we’ve done is we’ve structured the summer season as one season and the winter season as another. This year [2012] in season 4, we’re actually doing fourteen episodes in the summer and a double episode in the winter. This has been very different for us. We’ve been breaking the fourteen as one long arc. We started this year at the end which was very helpful for us and then went back to the beginning, but having a very strong sense of where we wanted to take each character. We have these flags we’ve planted that every three episodes or so we want to hit. We have preemptions for July 4 and for the Olympics, so it breaks our season up into little mini-seasons: we have a four-episode season, a six-episode season. So, we build little mini finales and premieres into this larger being.
NL: And, because your A stories always close or I think almost always…
MR: Almost always, yeah…
NL: They’re self-contained enough that you can just tune in and watch them—and if you have a break you’re not going to be lost like in Lost.
MR: Exactly.
NL: When you’re arcing, do you have a central question? I know that with Henry Winkler as Hank and Evan’s father, there was that mystery with what happened with dad. With Boris’ illness, there’s a central question of is he going to live or die and what’s going on. Do you think of that in terms of arcs as well?
MR: More often than not, we do. We will raise a question for ourselves as with this new character, Dr. Sacani. He’s someone who came in with very high social deficits. Now, we have to be, as a medical show, especially authentic to what that means if someone’s on the spectrum or not. We don’t want to fudge that for dramatic purposes, but the challenge that we raised is how does someone like that fit into a practice like HankMed? And, how much growth can a character like this have when he rubs up against Hank and Divya and Evan. So, for this character, that was the question we raised and that we’re playing out and developing throughout, and so far, we think very successfully. Ben’s done an amazing job of bringing it to life with nuance and subtlety, but still drawing you into this person and hoping that they can overcome or manage some of the deficits.
NL: You’ve used the term blue sky, and I’ve heard it used in different contexts: one is you just sort of blue sky the whiteboard thinking about where you’re going this season; but I’ve also heard of blue sky as kind of the tone of the show which is not dark storm clouds, but more a blue-sky kind of show—that’s sort of been USA’s brand. Can you clarify and elaborate on what it means to you?
MR: Yes, I think both of those things are true in this case. USA is a blue-sky network. This show is specifically a blue-sky show; it exists in the Hamptons—in a make-believe Hamptons where the skies are always blue and where the houses are always beautiful. I think USA has successfully defined that tone for the network. As they are expanding, they’re moving probably into semi-blue skies now because they don’t want to repeat the same thing over and over again. So, I think the skies can be a little cloudier at times and the tone a little bit edgier as they evolve as a network. But, for us, it really is a very nice way of describing what the tone is and, in fact, Henry Winkler’s company that he was a part of when he first came in was called Blue Sky. It was just a nice way to call attention to the fact that this is what we’re doing. And, yes, in terms of breaking episodes, the beginning is that it’s all just clear blue skies until you start filling it in. And how, at times, unfortunately, the clouds do roll in.
NL: When you and your writing staff gather at the beginning of the season before you start production and you’re just tossing around possible story ideas and arcs and character things, how involved is the network in approving stories? Do they ever kick something out or kill it? Or, probably by now, becaus
e they trust you and you have a hit show, are they less involved?
MR: The way this network works is that they’re incredibly respectful of our creative process. On this show, during the first couple of weeks of a new season, we’ll just talk big picture. We’ll talk about what worked in the previous season and what didn’t work in the previous season. What we owe from the previous season to this and what we want to try to do that we haven’t done before. And start trying to put some things up of places we’d like to go, and then we start getting into specific story ideas and episode ideas. Usually about four to six weeks after we’ve started, Andrew Lenchewski (who created the show) and I will go into the network to Jeff Wachtel [Co-President, USA Network] and Bill McGoldrick [Senior Vice President, Original Scripted Programming, USA Network] and Michael Sluchan and the studio will come with us and we’ll pitch in about fifteen or twenty minutes, “here’s where we want to go this season. Here’s where we want the show to go; here’s where we want Hank to go, Evan, Divya, Boris”—and then they’ll chime in. Usually in a very supportive and helpful way and sometimes in a less enthusiastic way which is their job and their right—they’re paying for the show. Just to make sure that if there are any course corrections to be made, they’re made before we get too far down the line. They, as a network, are incredibly good at knowing their audience and know the shows and the details of the show in a way that is remarkable when you think about how much work they have and how many shows they have on the air. I mean Jeff Wachtel can literally quote lines from season 1 from the sixth episode which Andrew and I have forgotten about, “Didn’t this character once say this or how can they do that?” So, they keep us on our toes, but yes, that’s what happens and then once we start handing out outlines, we’ll get notes and then we’ll do a script and we’ll get notes and it’s usually nothing too destructive, and then the next time we’ll get notes, it’s in a cut, and then we’ll go on from there.
NL: What’s the page length range of your outlines?
MR: The outlines we do on this show are usually ten to twelve pages. They’re pretty detailed. Because we’re a summer show and we air in the summer, we also have to shoot in the summer. So, a lot of cable shows are able to finish all their scripts before they go into production. Unfortunately for us, we are always battling air dates with our scripts because we’re airing the same time we need to be shooting. So, it’s a pretty quick turnaround, and therefore, the outline needs to be a very good jumping off point for the script. So, a writer doesn’t go off and spend four days writing an outline and then three weeks to get the script done. We do it more as a team—we get the outline to a good place and then the writer takes it over, puts it in his or her voice and then within a week, there’s a script. And, that keeps us on schedule. With the schedule we have here, we can’t fall behind, we just can’t afford to.
NL: And do you do a polish on each script?
MR: It’s important that the scripts have a singular voice. We have a very senior staff and a very talented, experienced staff, so that the amount of polishing every season gets reduced. Sometimes a script comes in that doesn’t need to be touched. Sometimes it just needs some polishes here and there, and, of course, there are times when a script needs more work. But, we’re very lucky to have the writers’ room that we do, and, more often than not, the scripts come in in fantastic shape unlike any show I’ve ever been on.
NL: And therein lies the longevity of your franchise.
4
Deliver the Verdict
In the old days, the verdict at the climax of an episode would strictly adhere to a tidy resolution because that’s what TV audiences wanted: truth, justice, and closure. A good TV series was like putting on a comfortable pair of slippers; viewers wanted to be entertained, not overly taxed with moral complexity. Networks were notoriously controversy-averse. The bad guys always got caught. Crime never paid offwith anything but a prison sentence. Scumbags were always prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Nice guys and gals didn’t always succeed at their missions, but love and friendship always saw them through in the end.
But then something happened: as technology progressed, audiences became more restless. Attention spans shortened. Channel surfing and Internet downloading/streaming became the national pastime. And audiences wanted to be challenged, surprised, even shocked. The proliferation of reality TV is based upon the unpredictable outcome happening live. Contestants have the potential to win big, but are much more likely to suffer some form of humiliation. The appetite for TV audiences shifted from complacency to participatory. Kids don’t just want to sit there and watch—they want to interact and play along on their PlayStations and Xboxes.
Influenced by reality TV and provocative news reporting, dramatic programming across the board became more edgy and envelope pushing. Heavily flawed protagonists combating their neuroses and addictions popped onto our TV screens. These protagonists didn’t need to be wholly positive role models—they could be antiheroes (Dexter Morgan, Walter White, Don Draper, and Patty Hewes). And series centering on dark, edgy, flawed characters from both one-hour dramas (Dexter, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Damages) and half-hour dramedies (Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Enlightened) are too complex to shoehorn into a predictable, closed-ended episodic formula. If a case can be setup and resolved that easily, then the world of the series starts to feel too easy or too black and white as opposed to more nuanced shades of gray.
Defining Series Type
Episodic television can be categorized by the following three types of endings:
Closed-ended episodes: The main plotline (aka A story) is set up in the teaser or act 1, complicates in the middle acts, and is resolved by the end of the episode. Viewers can tune in at any time and easily be able to follow the action without a crib sheet explaining all the backstory and series mythology. It’s not essential that they watch each episode chronologically because each show features a self-contained mystery. In a legal procedural series (Law & Order, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, The Practice), the closed-ended episode is usually the verdict of the trial (guilty, not guilty, or a settlement).
In a police procedural series (CSI, Rizzoli & Isles, Bones), the closed ending comes in the form of revealing the perpetrator of a crime (whodunit) as the solution to the crime of the week mystery. The story resolves when the perp confesses or is brought down by irrefutable evidence.
The phenomenally successful CSI and Law & Order franchises are not shows about criminals; they’re shows about justice. In the old days, the prosecutors needed eyewitness testimony; now they just need DNA. The science lends itself to closed-ended A stories because these kinds of plotlines, based on forensics and ballistics, are truly irrefutable and absolute. Open and shut cases.
The CSI franchise has been so durable because, at its inception, it broke new ground. It wasn’t a who-dunit; it was a how-dunit. CSI gives us a glimpse into the science of crime solving. We know the team is heroically going to solve the case by the end of each episode. It’s never a question of IF the criminal is going to get away with murder. Instead, we get to watch how our slick, resourceful, super smart investigative team tracks clues and gathers incriminating evidence to nab the perp.
Our interest in these kinds of cases hinges on our emotional investment in the outcome. Maybe the perp is sympathetic and his actions were mitigated by special circumstances. Frequently, there will be some dissension among the team about the case.
At times, the case of the week will trigger some kind of personal, emotional reaction from someone on the team. However, if this strategy is too on-the-nose or author convenient and happens in every episode, the writing can start to feel contrived. Ideally, the case of the week will resonate within the cast of regulars, but in subtle, oblique ways. The case may resolve in a tidy fashion, but even in closed-ended procedurals, there are going to be ripple effects that emerge in subsequent episodes.
In a medical series (House, M.D., Grey’s Anatomy, Royal Pains), the closed-ending usually comes in
the form of healing (diagnosis, treatment, or possibly a cure).
In the majority of situation comedies, the A-story situations have a beginning, middle, and end. The problem(s) of the week resolves without having any substantive, lasting impact on the characters, and then next week’s episode features another tremendous trifle. For decades, the golden rule of sitcoms was that characters do not change. Audiences would tune in each week to see their favorite sitcom character face new challenges based upon their quirks and character flaws, but they fundamentally would revert to form by the end of the episode— and that’s OK because of the second golden rule of sitcom characters: we love them not only despite their unique flaws but also because of them. It’s their imperfections that make them fallible, also vulnerable, and funny. In fact, sitcom characters tend to become more rooted in their identities when they’re under stress—and if it’s a viable, funny comedy series, they’ll be under stress every week. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules as single-camera sitcoms evolve: the jury is still out on Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) on Modern Family, but he does seem to be changing with the times and becoming more tolerant.
Serialized, open-ended episodes: Multiple plotlines play out over the course of several episodes or the entire season before reaching a cliff-hanger type “resolution” which might be the answer to an extended mystery. Most serialized TV series track the progression of each main character’s love life and (possibly) work life with an emphasis on the relationships between characters. Character progression is what is known as a “character arc.” Where does he or she start off at the beginning of the season and where does he/she end up at the end of the season? What dramatic conflicts does he or she face? Serialized series borrow from the playbook of daytime soap operas—with the marked difference being that nighttime serialized dramas (such as Desperate Housewives, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Revenge, and Dexter) air once per week (versus five times per week for a daytime soap), tend to move much faster (versus daytime, where a character might be pregnant for several years!), and are much more nuanced when it comes to character development. Damages is an example of a legal procedural series told in a serialized form: one main case per season.
