The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

by Neil Landau

  NL: Did you know from the beginning that you would get a slow burn relationship going?

  DS: It was written in the pilot. I think Wilson makes some smart-ass remark about there being a thin line between love and hate. However, even if I hadn’t written that in, when I saw Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein working together, it was pretty obvious that there was going to be sexual tension in a big way that we were going to have to deal with. That was fun.

  NL: What is your process for constructing story in general? Do you start with character? Do you start with a thematic within an episode? Do you start with the medical mystery?

  DS: There was no hard-and-fast rule, but I tried to have a hard-and-fast rule. The hard-and-fast rule was that I needed both: character, but theme basically got subsumed into the patient of the week. Who is this patient of the week? Going back to the whole point of having an interesting team, what’s interesting about House was how he reacted to people. What he reads in people. Is he right? Is he wrong? What does that say about that person? What does it say about him? That applies to the patient of the week as well. Somebody comes in who claims to never lie. What is House’s opinion on that? What is his opinion on lying? Obviously, he says everybody lies. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Does he think the person is lying in saying that? Why are they lying? Is it a pathological thing? Is it a medical thing? It was that notion of character that I needed right up front. I also needed a good medical story. I needed both. Every now and then, a writer would come in with just a really interesting medical story. And I would say, “That’s great, but you need to find some character thing too.” Likewise, they’d sometimes come in with a really great character with some medicine to go with that. Then you would also try to match it up with where you were in the story arc. I wanted both in a way that was thematic, but not obvious.

  NL: So your A stories would generally be the medical cases. What would make a worthy A story? When you came up with a medical condition that had to be rare and mysterious, I would imagine what would make it worthy is that there would have to be twists and turns to it.

  DS: In that regard, it was like a cop show. You needed twists and turns. You need to be going down a road and have that road be wrong. That was the formula for the show, and I don’t apologize for that at all, which we did depart from on occasion.

  NL: If it was too obvious of a medical solution, then it was not a worthy story?

  DS: The type of conditions that we were attracted to were the ones that were serious enough that they could cause life-threatening symptoms, but vague enough that they could mask as a whole bunch of things which is why it became a running gag that Lupus kept getting mentioned. Unfortunately for those Lupus sufferers, it can be very serious, but it is also very difficult to diagnose. If there’s one crazy condition in the world that causes your left ear to fall off, on the face of it, that’s fascinating and very visually dramatic, but if there’s one condition that does that, that’s not going to work for us.

  NL: Did you take dramatic license, or did you try to stay true to science and medicine?

  DS: We tried very hard to stay true to science. We tried to make it as much about the character and as little about the medicine, but you needed that medical core and that medical spine. That was an excuse to do the story that we wanted. You do have a responsibility. You have millions of viewers. Even if it’s a disease that afflicts 0.1 percent of the population, then that’s still thousands of people watching your show. You don’t want to give false hope or false fear. There are also all sorts of studies now that indicate that people are getting a shocking amount of their medical knowledge from watching TV.

  NL: Did you know a full season arc for each character when you would start?

  DS: We would usually arc half a season—more or less. We would meet as a group for a couple weeks and figure out where we wanted to take the characters in the first half of the season. Hopefully, as far as we could take it, but it usually ended up being a half a season. Then, as we were getting closer to the end of that arc, we would discuss what we wanted to do next. So, if it’s after House and Cuddy breaking up, what is the follow from that breakup and where do we take them next?

  NL: Because this chapter is called “Who Changes?—what’s interesting when you look at all the seasons from Dr. House that “nobody changes.” In your mind, did your characters change or was it just temporary challenges that got them to adjust behavior?

  DS: The tricky thing in TV, particularly if you’re doing a show that’s 100 percent procedural, it’s very easy in that regard, you don’t have to worry about that. If you’re even a hybrid, then you run into this difficult territory of “Well, how did that affect him? How does he change?” Hugh used to say that the difference between TV and movies was that with movies the main character changes while everybody around him stays the same and with TV it’s the exact opposite. There’s some truth to that. My characters didn’t change that much and I have multiple excuses for that and I’m not sure excuse is the right word, maybe explanations: (1) it was the theme of the show that “nobody changes,” I believe that, I believe that people don’t really change that much. (2) I didn’t want them to change. The show was about him and I didn’t want him to change because I liked him. So people think they want him to change, but they don’t really. They want to see him find love and happiness, but they don’t really.

  I do circle back to that I truly don’t believe that anybody changes, and I think it’s more interesting to watch somebody strive to change and maybe … maybe in tiny little ways and then maybe fall back.

  But we are who we are in how we react to the challenges in that moment. I don’t think that writers should quote themselves, but there was a line that I liked from one of the earlier seasons after Foreman [Omar Epps] almost died where House says something along the lines of, “Almost dying changes everything forever for two months.” How do people react to not changing and the disappointment with themselves? It’s about treading water and not falling back. Not being miserable and staying just above miserable.

  NL: In terms of addiction and AA, they say, “Hitting rock bottom is that you change or you die.” That was always a tightrope he was walking as well.

  DS: You can change your actions, but even that’s so difficult to do. With AA, it’s not that you’re no longer an alcoholic, you’re just an alcoholic who doesn’t drink. Changing who you fundamentally are is possibly impossible.

  NL: In terms of vulnerability of characters and finding new places to take them, there was a season when House fired virtually his entire staff, and when he hired new people, it gave him new opportunities for him to abuse them.

  DS: That was exactly it. Having House explore new people and new situations and analyzing them and making them learn something about themselves in the process.

  NL: House could always find someone’s Achilles’ heel and then exploit that weakness. Did he ever do things that just shocked and surprised you— like when he drives into Cuddy’s house?

  DS: That was the most controversial thing we did—more than I expected it to be. I knew it was shocking. People seemed to react that he was trying to kill her. I never thought of it that way which maybe was stupid on my part, but I never thought of it that way. It was scripted and shot that way: that he looks through the window and sees her leave the room and then he does it. It was intended to be an act of violence, but not an attempt at murder. It was also an irrational act by a very, very rational man. The other thing that I think said quite clearly that he was not trying to kill her is that he walks away with a smile on his face feeling better which tells me that he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. So clearly injury was not part of what he wanted to accomplish. Stuff that he did that shocked me … there were moments where you go, “Yeah, I think he would do that,” and the whole idea was that it would surprise the audience and yet make sense. That’s fundamental with all the twists and turns you do on a show like this. It gets tricky as you’re going along. It’s about
trying to find that third way. When you have House do exactly what everybody expects anybody to do, you could have him just do the exact opposite, but for the sake of doing the exact opposite, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Or you find something that is a different take on it, but that makes sense. Surprising an audience that expects to be surprised is a bit of a challenge. I’m proud of that. It was very satisfying. I wish I could give you a specific example, but let’s say you had a patient who felt one way and House had a certain attitude that you would not have expected, but then he’s got this defense of it. And then you go, “Oh, yeah.”

  NL: One that comes to mind was the death row episode where there was a guy who was going to be executed, but House wanted to treat him and yet he’s going to die. That patient was more of his priority than another patient who is terminal. That was a controversial episode because of the surprising position that he took. He had this interesting bond with the guy because it was somebody who had been so condemned by society and he related to that on some level—which provided more insight into House’s character than I’d seen before. It was a great moral gray area and reinforced House’s one-man-against-the-Establishment sensibilities.

  Regarding the Establishment and dealing with network or studio guidance and interference, did they leave you alone as you got more successful or did they continue to give you notes?

  DS: Very, very few notes. We would get a note on every single script. Well, that’s not even true—there were some scripts where we wouldn’t get a single note. But there would be a call set up after every script went out, and they would give us notes. They were invariably very small which actually started to worry me because you want notes, you don’t want notes on some emotional level, but you want an outside source to look at it and be objective. And, hopefully, you have executives who can do that and have an honest reaction to the script.

  NL: I was asking Veena Sud about The Killing and Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos), who was very unlikeable. She has some dark traits which she shares with House, and yet she is also very good at her job. Any interference early on about House or on any of your past or future shows about character like-ability?

  DS: I think every writer in the world has an attitude about that. I got surprisingly little interference on that. I think there were some internal battles that went on at FOX, but I was protected somehow there. Maybe on some unconscious level I made him nastier than I needed to, so I’d have some place to fall back on. He is nastier than what you’d typically see on network TV. They do say they want likeable characters. Every writer in the world wants to write complex characters. We want to write characters who we want to watch. We’re not idiots. You have to have a commercial sensibility, but you have to write it in a way that people want to come back to. That’s the job we’re in. We want to tell stories that people want to hear. Unfortunately, the networks interpret likeable too often as nice. Nice is just boring. I had very little resistance. I think I would have had more resistance on another network. FOX was still in the glow of Simon Cowell.

  NL: But you also paved the way because after House and its success, all of these cable shows sprung up with these dark, heavily complex characters.

  DS: If I can take credit for that, I’m happy to do it. If I somehow made it easier, then I am thrilled. Because that’s what every writer wants to write and audiences want to watch if it’s done well. He’s good at his job. He’s not simply lining his pockets. He’s miserable. And he’s saving lives. Whatever the reason—which is something we discussed a lot was, what matters, intentions or actions? And his intention, for example with that death row guy, was that he found that more interesting and therefore he did it.

  NL: I’m sure I read this somewhere in my research, but would you say that he cares more about solving the puzzle than the patient?

  DS: I think he absolutely cares more about the puzzle. Having said that, it is a good thing for the show that the audience wanted to believe that it was more than that. And the audience may have been right to a certain extent. Because they liked him, the audience wanted to impose a positive viewpoint on him. Had he just been going around saying, “Damn it, I’m saving lives,” it’s not as interesting. A guy who says, “I could give a crap about saving lives,” is too fundamentally horrible and boring. But this is an interesting case and maybe he learns something about the person. And maybe … maybe on some level grows to respect that person and save their life. That’s much more interesting and compelling.

  NL: Was it your perspective that he wasn’t capable of empathy—maybe even borderline autistic?

  DS: That was speculated out. I never wanted to pigeonhole him quite that much—probably there was something of that nature going on. His reasoning was that it didn’t help. There’s no reason to do that. It doesn’t make the case easier to solve. If anything, it makes it more difficult. Objectivity is your friend in trying to find truth. Truth is truth. So he just wanted to take a very clean look at everything. I always hated when people would ask why this happens. It starts with the writers being interviewed. Just don’t answer those questions. Number one, I don’t want to take that away from the audience. Number two, I don’t think any simple answer is true. I think I can have a reason House did something and the writer of that episode could have a reason that House did something and Hugh Laurie could have a reason why the character did something. By the way, the three of us should be basically in agreement, but Wilson could have an attitude about why House did something and the team can have an attitude why House did something and Cuddy can have an attitude why House did something and so can the audience. And every one of those should be true. It should never be as simple as he did it for X. House says he did it for X. Wilson says he did it for Y. His team says he did it for Z. And all three of them are part of why he did it.

  NL: It sounds like part of what sustained the show itself for so long is that House was so mysterious. You didn’t answer some of those questions. If you show the wizard behind the curtain, it’s not as interesting.

  DS: It’s not as interesting, but it’s also not true. The answer is never going to be true. The expression “everybody lies,” which is used all the time on the show. I never meant it as people say black when the answer is white. The answer is always gray and people see it as dark gray or light gray. People see the truth they want to see. We all have biases. That’s what it really meant to me and House is trying to rise above that.

  9

  Determine the POV

  There are many ways to tell a story, and each approach differs depending on what your series is about and around whom the series orbits.

  So let’s start with this basic question: whose story is it?

  You have several options. Following is a breakdown of different types of POVs employed on one-hour dramas, sitcoms, and half-hour dramedies. Please note that there is a great deal of overlap between several of these categories:

  Single-lead protagonist POV. Primarily utilized to show the world of the series through one dominant perspective. In the cases of Dexter, Revenge, The Big C, and Nurse Jackie, this limited POV is particularly important because each of these series’ leads has something to hide. Dexter is a police blood spatter expert who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer. Revenge centers around a beautiful young socialite (imposter) with a ruthless vendetta. In The Big C, Cathy Jamison (Laura Linney) had a terminal cancer diagnosis that she prefers to ignore in order to live the rest of her life to the fullest without pity or remorse. Nurse Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) is a supereffective E.R. nurse, wife and mother—who also happens to be a drug addict, fueling her propensity to regularly cheat on her husband and lie to her kids.

  In each of the preceding examples, the audience is privy to their vulnerabilities whereas all or many of the people in their daily lives are (mostly) presented with a façade or persona of the protagonist versus a more open character willing to disclose their secrets and ulterior motives.

  See also Enlightened, Justified, The Following, My So-Calle
d Life, Rescue Me, Californication.

  Single main protagonist with one main sidekick. Series such as Sherlock (U.K. version) and Elementary (U.S. version), Breaking Bad, House, M.D., The Killing, and Royal Pains feature a brilliant yet flawed lead character who is usually socially awkward, misanthropic, and/or lacking an essential skill— necessitating the need for a partner in business, love, life, and/or crime. Sherlock Holmes needs his Watson to help him navigate the technological world and to compensate for Sherlock’s key “blind spot” in life: his lack of empathy. Sherlock is an expert at figuring out riddles and mysteries, but he’s lousy at interpersonal relationships—which tends to be Watson’s strong suit. Watson also serves as a vital sounding board for Sherlock’s hypotheses, as well as being Sherlock’s (only) true friend and confidant. Sherlock needs Watson but he’s loath to admit it, which fuels their bromance with humor and conflict.

  In Breaking Bad, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) begins as a milquetoast, high school chemistry teacher, loving husband and father—a far cry from the badass drug lord with delusions of grandeur that Walt will eventually become. For the first few seasons, Walt is completely dependent upon Jessie Pinkman (Aaron Paul), a young hotshot renegade drug dealer who also happens to be one of Walt’s former students. These two guys have zero in common, except their mutual goal to cook the purist, most potent crystal meth on the black market. With Walt’s brain and Jessie’s street smarts, they’re a match made in heaven.