by Neil Landau
MK: You mentioned the question of pacing and how we make those choices. Yes, we do have a roadmap, but we are also forced to deal with scheduling issues that suddenly make one slow things down or speed things up depending on when one can get a cast member to tell a particular story. That impacts pacing.
RK: This may be something interesting for the writers and readers of your book to understand that network TV on the casting front is a little bit of a clusterfuck—that might be too strong. You’re struggling to get actors who really want to do the show, but are now on Sons of Anarchy or are doing a three-episode arc on Private Practice. We find ourselves pacing based on the knowledge of when we can get an actor back.
MK: Again, that is because we’re choosing to do some serialized storylines. If we were only telling closed-ended stories, casting would not be the same kind of problem. You would need your new defendant and your new attorney. You can find those people. There’s no shortage of good actors— particular since we cast out of New York. Because we want somebody specific, that’s when we run into difficulty.
NL: How important is theme when you’re mapping out the personalized stories? When you’re coming up with the A legal cases, are you trying to marry them to a theme from the B or C stories?
RK/MK: No.
RK: Actually, we go out of our way not to. Whenever there’s thematic resonance, it feels more organic if it’s actually the writer bringing it out in the writing process. So if you have three very different stories, when you start marrying them on the board in the writing process, you’ll start to see echoes and resonance that you start dragging out as you’re writing. If you do that prosaically, it starts to feel imposed. It’s not arising out of these specific events. It feels more like the thematic resonance is built. The only time we marry stories is when events help in a domino effect. One story would start a beat of a second story.
MK: We always try to work from the reality of how things would feel to Alicia. So in that sense, she might feel at the end of the day that this week was all about X, but it’s not as though she created that, it just might feel that way to her in retrospect.
RK: One last thing I’d say, too, is that it allows the characters in this meta way which isn’t meta to comment on thematic connections. If it’s imposed on the writers’ room, it feels like it’s the long hand of the screen-writer. But, in fact, if the events are not similar at all, but the character starts to see thematic resonance, they can talk about it because I think in people’s lives more than on TV, people actually talk about when their lives are seeming like a TV show. The bottom line is that there’s such a fear of being meta on TV, but in fact, in real life if you have these things that thematically connect and you’re surprised by it, you’ll talk about it to a friend or a husband or a wife. And that’s what we want characters to have the freedom to do.
NL: What’s the internal process with story documents? Do you do beat sheets, outlines? How extensive are the outlines? What’s your process with your writing staff?
RK: Pretty dysfunctional. (laughs)
MK: In terms of what goes to the studio, it’s changed. Initially, we were doing a one- or two-page story arena which was just a brief synopsis of what the case and then the personal story would be. Then, we would give them an outline.
RK: The point of the arena document was just that if they knew of other shows in their wheelhouse that might be doing something similar, they could warn you off or if there was some legal difficulty. We’re doing one on the FCC, for example. It wasn’t to steer you away from it, but just to be a little more conscious of what to avoid.
MK: Then we would do an outline that was somewhere between twelve and eighteen pages. And then a draftof the script. But that was the first three seasons, and it is pared down, so that now what the studio gets is a couple page arena document and then the draftof the script.
RK: The only other thing that we do internally beyond that is that Michelle and I draw up a fairly extensive beat sheet which is not all that readable, but is to us and the writer of the sequence of events. Because the structure you put on the board is pretty bare bones. Sometimes the beat sheet will juggle those events or add elements. It’s just to see how the scenes would dovetail together.
NL: And you two are based in New York, is that right?
RK: We’re bi-coastal people. Our writers’ and editors’ room is in L.A. and production is in New York.
NL: When you bring in directors, do you have extensive tone meetings with your directors?
RK: Yes. Our tone meetings go on for four hours. They’re just nightmare affairs.
MK: But they’re done over videoconferencing.
NL: I’m sure you’ve been asked this question a million times, so I apologize if it’s boring. It’s fascinating that you’re doing a show about marriage and you’re married showrunners. How do you delegate your responsibilities, and how is it working together?
RK: I think it’s good because showrunning is very complicated. You have to multitask all the time, network-wise. I don’t know if this is the same for cable, but network-wise, there’s three operations happening at the same time, which is the writers’ room, production, and all the editing and postproduction. Those three things are happening simultaneously, but on different episodes. You might be building in the room episode 4, shooting episode 3, and editing episode 2. There’s this multilayered effect that to have another head who shares your problems and can multitask while you’re multitasking is essential. You’re probably hearing that from the other showrunners.
MK: There’s so many little avenues of this stuff. There’s casting that must be dealt with, there’s standards and practices and the legal element. All these things have to be looked at, so it’s useful to be more than one person. Candidly, I don’t know how one person does the job.
RK: Then to be married on top of that has the added benefit of it’s really someone you don’t mind being with—at least with our marriage but not all marriages. They kind of share your same taste and instincts. So if I’m in a meeting, Michelle hopefully trusts that I will make decisions that she’ll approve or at least won’t grimace too big about it afterward. And I think the reciprocal is true. The only thing that I would say is complicated is that we have a thirteen-year-old daughter and that is a full-time job. Luckily she’s not bored by it, I think she’s amused by what we do. There’s never really a completely home life. We try to dovetail things nicely, but look, it’s a hard job.
NL: So much of it gets mirrored in Alicia’s life.
RK: You are so right.
MK: We’re lucky with that.
NL: That’s why it comes off so real. What’s the best thing about being the showrunners on The Good Wife, and what are the biggest challenges for you individually?
MK: I’ll start with the challenges. The challenge is the time. It’s trying to do this for twenty-two episodes. The benefit is that, just speaking for myself, I love the show, love the characters, the actors are spectacular; the writers are really some of the smartest, nicest people I’ve ever met. It is such a pleasure to spend time with them. The producers we work with happen to be people who are very smart and ethical and have a good sense of humor. It’s an amazing bunch of people we get to work with and that for me is the positive.
RK: I was in features for a while, and features always felt like you were clawing through mud to try and get your story on the screen. You rewrote the same script hundreds of times just to even get a listen. It never felt that you were actually telling the story to anybody other than your own head and a few studio executives. The amazing thing about TV is that before you were desperate for a drop of water and now you have a fire hose shooting at your face. What we have is final cut. I don’t think anyone gets final cut except Spielberg and some other people in features. In TV, the showrunner is given final cut on twenty-two to twenty-three little movies every year. People appreciate your opinion and don’t question it because they don’t have time to question it. There’s nothing better
in the world for writers than current TV production because there is so much handed over to the showrunner to say, “Here. Now go do it.” I think the only downside for me is time, as Michelle said, which is also the time that you want to make something perfect and they don’t give you time to make it perfect. It’s not about financial costs, although that’s a part of it, but it’s more that you don’t have the time to edit it for another week. The other aspect is ratings, which is hard because, for the best reasons, they take it very seriously. Our show is a moderate hit, which I think doesn’t fall correctly in the demo, which can be tough. I would say that, and not having a life, are the down sides.
NL: How has the newer role of social media—in being able to get feedback, not just from ratings, networks, and studio executives, but from people writing in and blogging and immediately tweeting—affected you? Are you aware of these things coming after episodes? Does it influence the storytelling?
RK: I think it’s probably a very comfortable pose to say no, but unfortunately, the answer is yes. I’m very aware of it. First of all, I think it’s fantastic. As a writer and a reformed screenwriter for features, every day was procrastinating by participating in social media. Now it has the added aspect of being slightly an echo chamber because the people that participate are usually hardcore fans who have sometimes similar opinions and sometimes not. What you’re looking for is very intelligent analysis that you don’t get from mainstream media, but you might get the loner in some Brazilian town who saw the show and has exactly crystallized the thoughts that you were thinking. What you do is you take that Brazilian kid in that town and you make that who you’re going to write the next episode for. I think social media is not about the mass of people. It’s finding those people in the audience that I think Groucho Marx was talking about. There was someone he’d always look at and know that he made that person laugh. Otherwise, you don’t have real access to the audience. I think it’s the best thing that happened to TV since the product. I think the only danger of it is it becomes an echo chamber. I’m someone who, unlike someone like Kurt Sutter [Executive Producer on Sons of Anarchy], doesn’t get involved by answering back or having a Twitter account. I think it’s much more where the voice of the show is the show itself and the voice of the audience—[because now you can] get a sense of what people are saying.
5
Make us Care
As writers, we find ourselves creatively “in the zone” when the characters start speaking for themselves on the page—as if they’ve taken on a life of their own. As readers, this same process happens when we forget that we’re reading words on a page and feel as if we’ve been transported into the world of the story.
Cultivating Viewer Investment
For a TV series to prosper and become a classic, the audience needs to become emotionally invested in the lives of its characters. We need to worry about their problems, big and small. We need to care about their hopes and dreams, triumphs and misfortunes. We need to bond with them, consider them part of our lives: as friends or coworkers or family members.
In a sitcom, we need both to laugh with them and, at times, at them. When they suffer humiliation, we need to cringe, not only because of the awkward situation, but also because we can identify with the universal feelings of shame, best intentions gone wrong, heartbreak, disappointment, and insecurity.
Must great TV characters be likeable? Not necessarily. Must they be compelling? Absolutely, yes. But what makes for a compelling, iconic character at the center of a TV series?
Well, it depends on genre, tone, and the network’s wheelhouse. As we explored in Chapter 1, CBS has successfully remained faithful to its brand of wholly positive, heroic characters on its one-hour procedural dramas by relegating the outcasts, underdogs, and flawed protagonists to its sitcoms: The Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, Two and a Half Men, Mike & Molly. Other networks have their own viewer and advertiser needs, and therefore “cast” their programming models accordingly.
What makes a character compelling to an audience for the long haul? If you’re thinking he or she must merely be likeable and “save the cat,” you’d be wrong. If a character’s main personality trait is being “nice,” then you’re probably going to have a boring, superficial protagonist. Why? Because “nice” is generic and suggests harmony, whereas good comedy and drama is all about conflict.
Sure, a great, iconic character can have a heart of gold, but he/she also needs to have a streak of inconsistency or contradiction. Maybe she had always been the nicest person in the world, but in each episode she’s going to be tested and forced by circumstances beyond her control to get mischievous or jealous or competitive or petty or selfish or greedy—every color in the spectrum—over the run of the series.
If all movies are, on some level, coming-of-age stories—no matter the age of the characters—then I would argue that all TV series are about characters struggling to succeed in life on their own terms—and usually butting up against the expectations of others, causing the protagonists to recalibrate, reconsider, and reevaluate.
Generally, in sitcoms, this recalibration results in nothing fundamentally changing in the characters’ universe. In other words, most sitcom characters do not change. We embrace them for their flaws and foibles, and faithfully watch as they consistently make the same mistakes and repeat their same psychological patterns—and we love them for being so thoroughly rooted in who they are.
Creating Iconic Characters
In the classic TV series All in the Family, Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) was a stubborn, petty, mean-spirited bigot from start to finish. He was maddening to watch every week, but also very funny because he (almost always) unwittingly became the butt of the joke.
If the common link between all iconic characters is a core contradiction— both positive and negative traits—then Archie’s iconic status was his ability to be simultaneously bombastic and befuddled. He hated that his little corner of the world in Queens, New York, was being invaded by his “little goyle” Gloria’s (Sally Struthers) husband, Michael (“Meathead”) Stivic (played by Rob Reiner). It wasn’t just that Gloria and Mike would be living under the same roof with Archie and his dimwitted, but surprisingly wise wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton). It was also what Mike and Gloria’s younger generation represented to Archie’s ideology.
If Archie was the self-anointed king of his castle, then anyone who didn’t agree with Archie was viewed as an adversary. Ironically, Archie—and all iconic characters share this trait—was his own worst enemy.
And even though Archie ostensibly loved his family and worked hard to support them, he was so narrow-minded and intolerant that he’d invariably find himself swimming against the tide, trapped in his own belief system, and (humorously) drowning in his own misery. His gruffside was his defense mechanism against all perceived threats. His “nice” side was his softspot for his daughter. You always got the sense that Archie would do anything for his daughter—anything but accept Meathead in her life. Gloria was his softspot; Mike was his Achilles’ heel.
In order for us to root for iconic characters, we need to have a grasp of their vulnerabilities.
In Cheers, Sam Malone (Ted Danson) was a recovering alcoholic. On The Sopranos, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) suffered from clinical depression. On Mad Men, Don Draper’s Achilles’ heel was/is his past. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison’s (Claire Danes) vulnerability is due to Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) as well as her struggle with bipolar disorder. It’s these characters’ vulnerabilities that help stoke the fire of our rooting interest.
All iconic characters are willful and possess strong desires. They’re driven. They’re control freaks. Sometimes they succeed, but if they always got their way, the lack of turmoil and struggle would cause the series to dramatically flatline. What’s much more important is that they continue to strive for success as they define it. It’s usually their inability to redefine the meaning of “success” that gets them into trouble.
In Archi
e’s world at the time, women, minorities, and gays were gradually being liberated, and his inability or unwillingness to accept change marginalized him both inside and outside of the Bunker household. With his ever-loyal wife by his side, Archie the misanthrope became the underdog of the series. And American TV audiences can’t help but root for the underdog— even when their own actions and belief systems are what undermine their ability to evolve and grow up.
If Archie Bunker ever became a self-actualized Zen master, he would cease to entertain us.
In the wry HBO series Enlightened, Amy Jellico (Laura Dern) bounces back from a nervous breakdown and attempts to live the next chapter of her life as a nonjudgmental, unconditionally loving being of light. Having been a live wire of anxiety and ambition, Amy aspires to remain serene, forgiving, and to transcend the petty disturbances of daily life. Unfortunately, she also needs to get back in the saddle and make a living, so she goes back into the workforce—at the same corporate behemoth that had brought her down. In spite of all the psychological tools Amy had learned in rehab, she’s always just a trigger point away from a full-blown panic attack. Amy can be delusional and ridiculously sanguine, but we continue to root for her because she’s trying to be authentic and strong, even as she suffers humiliation, puts on airs, and remains incredibly fragile. The last thing Amy wants is to end up like her mousy, pragmatic, lonely mother (played by Diane Ladd). Amy is an idealist and, like her spunky predecessor Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), she might just make it after all. But in the meantime, it’s going to be a rough road—and that’s good news for fueling the story engine.
