The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

by Neil Landau

  NL: Do you think of different plot lines as A, B, and C stories—or does each family just have their own letter to represent them in each episode? Any in-house rules to breaking story?

  CL: It shifts. In some episodes, it might be one family who has more of a dominant story.

  NL: Is theme important to you when you’re coming up with stories in terms of how to unify and connect with three stories?

  CL: The big theme is not to become predictable and formulaic, so we do occasionally say, “Let’s tell an entire episode that’s about jealousy or about forgetting things or the road not traveled.” We couldn’t do that every week because people would start to say, “This is going to be the one about X.” We don’t want to do that. We want to do a show that’s about completely different stories that the three families are engaged in that have nothing to do with one another or a show that brings all the families together for the larger part of the entire episode, but has a different feel from the other two parts of the episode.

  As far as A, B, and C stories, we tend not to because we’re trying to service all of our characters. In order to do that, we usually apportion them about the same amount for each episode. The distinction we’re more likely to make is: which will be our more emotional story with more of a heart aspect to it and what might be our sillier story within the episode? We try to keep a balance there too.

  If we’re doing something that’s a little more farcical with Mitch and Cameron [Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet], we might want to do something for Phil and Claire that has a little bit more emotion to it so that the audience comes away feeling that they’ve gotten both things.

  The number of pages we give a story is almost always dictated by what’s the best way to tell the story. If we say, “Wow, we told a story here with Phil and Claire that’s very economical and has reached a nice moving place, but it’s going to take fourteen pages to do it. Now, we’ve also got this really funny farcical Mitch and Cam story that’s also seeming like it’s going to be fourteen pages, which doesn’t leave us much for Jay and Gloria. We would probably just take one of those stories out and put it in a different episode rather than give some of our other characters short shrift.

  NL: I want to talk about the way your writers’ room works. Do you break stories and pitch jokes as a group, and then does one person go off and work on that episode individually or do you assign different story lines to different people?

  CL: It’s always done by one person or a couple of people. We sit together and we very thoroughly break a story, and my rule of thumb is that it takes us three days to do that. That’s six or seven or eight writers in a room— sometimes even more—pitching away at something. It may start with an amusing thing that happened to one of us, and we try to build around that. Or it may start with a theme. It may start with a holiday that we want to do or with one of the markers of the season. We need to do the show where Gloria gives birth. What’s a funny way to do that? Whatever the starting place is we pitch on that for a solid two to three days until we have a lot of notes accumulated and a pretty good idea of what our lead story is going to look like. We have cards that we put up on the board, so that we can see every step of it all the way through. Once we’re convinced we’ve got a whole episode that works—stories with beginnings, middles, and ends with lots of opportunities for fun with this component of heart as well—we say, “Okay, it’s ready to be written.”

  At which point, one person or a team of writers from that group will go out and write an outline. After a few days with the outline, which is just an expanded version of what we talked about with sentences, sample dialogue and some jokes, then we all come back and read it again. In the interim, we’ve been off on other episodes and figuring out other stories. It’s usually a week or two later by the time we come back to the outline and we have a fresher perspective on things. You look at it and you say, “Alright, I like this part or maybe we can work on this part or maybe we can put a better joke here or maybe we can move the act break up in the story.” And maybe take about a half a day or less giving notes to the writer. Then that writer (or writers) goes off and writes the script. He comes back two to three weeks later—at which point the staff sits with it and does a rewrite on it. It usually takes a day or two—and that should be just for refining jokes. You shouldn’t be changing story at that point because that should have happened at an earlier stage. It should just be a matter of finding some better jokes, sharpening up some speeches, maybe giving a little contour to the scenes. Then we have our script that’s ready to be read at the table which is the actors coming in for its first performance out loud which, of course, gives a whole new life to the script because you’re actually hearing the characters’ voices and you’re able to say: “That speech, that line is great for that actor,” or “That didn’t sound quite right, or “That scene felt a little slow,” or “That moment seemed a little bit rushed.” With the new information from the table read, we go back and do another rewrite, which is a day or two, and then we have our final script which is what we shoot.

  NL: Given that you’re a single camera show and don’t shoot in front of a live studio audience—providing an immediate reaction—what’s your personal barometer to know if something’s funny?

  CL: The table reading gives you a certain measure because, in addition to the writers and actors, there’s the department heads and other invited guests. We have a room of about a hundred people to listen to it, so we have a pretty good gauge right there. When you’re on stage and you’re shooting it, then you’re trusting your own instincts. There are again people on stage while we’re rehearsing—lighting people, hair people, makeup people, electricians—who do watch. They laugh or they don’t. You get a little bit of feedback right there, but at that point, you’re trusting your own instincts. The nice thing about doing single camera is you can stop and you can say, “We need a better joke here or a little bit more going on between these two actors. Let’s take a minute and see if we can polish up this speech.” And you sit down for fifteen to twenty minutes and you can change it and get it the way you want. That’s not a luxury you have in front of a live audience because you’re taxing their patience. The benefit in a multi-cam is you’ve gone to rehearsals all week—you’ve seen it performed at least three or four times in front of a big group of people laughing. All of these jokes have essentially been auditioned. Going into a multi-cam with an audience, you’re almost always sure it’s all going to work, but you can’t stop. With a single cam, we take eight or ten hours to shoot four minutes worth of a show, so we can stop and refine it.

  NL: I once heard Larry Gelbart talk about running the writers’ room of M*A*S*H, and he said that his golden rule was, “Never be afraid to say something stupid,” because it might spark something smart and valuable from someone else in the room. Do you and Steve have any governing rules of how to run a functional, successful writers’ room?

  CL: We have many different kinds of writers on our staff. Some are more extroverted, some more introverted. I wouldn’t want to have a room where everyone was the same, where everyone was pitching jokes in the same way. So we try to encourage quieter, more thoughtful writers to come forward, and sometimes need to butterfly net the more aggressive ones.

  NL: What are the best and worst aspects of being a showrunner on Modern Family? I would imagine all the Emmys and critical acclaim and high ratings must feel great. Everybody loves Modern Family…

  CL: Well, I’m sure not everybody—

  NL: Everybody I know, anyway. All ages. It must be incredibly gratifying for you.

  CL: The best part of running this show is that, even though I’ve been in this business for a long time, this is my first hit as a series creator. I ran Frasier, but didn’t create it. And I get to go to work with smart, funny people and laugh really hard every day. It’s also rewarding to see how well the show is received by audiences. Back in the days of Frasier, the series would get reviewed at the beginning of the season, and m
aybe a paper would write something about it during or at the end of the season. But with Modern Family, we get immediate feedback from viewers from social media—hundreds of reviews sometimes even before a full episode has finished airing. We get a lot of feedback.

  NL: Does that feedback influence you and your writing staff, or do you pretty much try to shut it out and write the stories you’d like to tell?

  CL: We generally write what we want because even though there are hundreds blogging and posting, that’s still a small fraction of our audience. So we try not to let those online views dictate what we’re doing. On the other hand, if there is a big, loud consensus about a new character or plotline that people just don’t like, then that might influence us going forward.

  The most challenging part of running this show is that it’s a grind. We have an incredibly talented group of writers on our show right now, and fortunately they’re all staying put—so that helps a lot. But we do twenty-four episodes per season. That’s a lot of pressure. And because the show is so successful, that sets the bar high; we don’t want to repeat ourselves and be formulaic. But we also need to come up with many, many stories that are fresh, unpredictable, and hopefully generate a few laughs. And each story we tell means we can’t tell that story again, so there’s always the challenge of coming up with new material—new ways in to stories. But the positives far outweigh any negatives, and this is a great experience.

  Interview: Carter Bays and Craig Thomas

  Carter Bays and Craig Thomas Credits

  Best known for:

  The Goodwin Games (Creators, Executive Producers, Writers) 2013

  How I Met Your Mother (Creators, Executive Producers, Writers) 2005–2013

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics) 2010

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Comedy Series) 2009

  American Dad! (Supervising Producers, Writers) 2005–2006

  Oliver Beene (Co-Producers, Writers) 2003–2004

  Late Show with David Letterman (Writers) 1997–2002

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music, or Comedy Program) 1998–2002

  WGA Nominated (Comedy/Variety—Including Talk—Series) 2000–2002

  NL: How did you originally come up with the concept for How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) in terms of its signature style: use of V.O., flashbacks, and intercutting between characters and time periods?

  CB: I think initially we wanted to write a single-camera show, but the wisdom at the time was that single-camera comedy wasn’t working (this is nine years ago, remember), so we took a lot of elements from that style—like more scenes, more edits, more cinematic camera work—and shot it with four cameras and added a laugh track. The style developed naturally out of that.

  As far as flashbacks and intercutting and all that, our style is probably just a hodgepodge of the film and TV that inspired us enough for us to want to rip it off. I mean, Annie Hall, is the Tigris and Euphrates of modern romantic comedy. Turn to any page of that script and you’ll find something that we and a hundred other people have co-opted over the years, wittingly or otherwise. The split-screen therapist sessions, the subtitled first date subtext, the story told out of sequence … the artistic message of that movie is that there are no rules. The audience is sophisticated enough to buy in on a little magical realism here and there, if they connect with the characters and the story you’re trying to tell.

  For what it’s worth, my favorite part of Annie Hall’s nonlinear storytelling is the fact that you hear the end of the story right at the beginning: “Annie and I broke up.” There’s something beautiful about that, and looking back I think the ending of our first episode—“That’s how I met your aunt Robin”— is an homage to that moment, and by homage I mean we totally stole it.

  CT: Carter and I love packing as much story, as many ideas, into an episode as possible. (That’s either ambition or poor attention span, depending on how you look at it.) We love twists and turns and reveals and mysteries and setups and payoffs, so our episodes can get pretty intricate. Traditional multi-cam shows often have fewer scenes per episode, and the scenes are longer. Some might have fifteen to twenty scenes in an episode. HIMYM sometimes has eighty scenes in an episode, and rarely fewer than forty to fifty. We wanted to take the multi-cam form and impose a single-cam (or even a feature film) editing style onto it, which meant shooting over the course of three days instead of the more conventional recipe of a live audience show with a few pre-tapes cut in. The fact that our entire series is a guy telling a story to his children informed this style—when you tell a story, you tend to stop, start, jump back, jump forward, digress (not to mention embellish a few details!). So that’s built into the DNA code of the series.

  NL: I love your show, but I’m wondering if you were worried about it being too limited as a construct (perhaps too much of a gimmick?) to sustain a series for so many seasons, or did you plan to break out of this style and reboot (such as revealing the mother sooner) as part of your original plan?

  CB: Maybe it’s me, but I love a good gimmick if it’s well executed. The problem is, there’s this feeling with TV where you can’t enjoy a high concept show even from the first episode, because you’re just sitting there thinking, “This is great, but how are they going to sustain this?”

  I guess that’s the difference with movies and TV. Movies are like dating to get laid, while TV is dating to get married.

  But as far as our gimmick goes, it felt like it was incidental to the real meat of the story, which is the friendships of these five characters. For that reason, we always wanted to see if we could stick to our guns and take the concept as far as we could take it, and wait till the very end for Ted to meet the mother. Our feeling was, when it feels like the audience is going to start getting sick of what we do week to week, we’ll have Ted meet the mother, end the series, and move on to another show. As it turned out, the audience didn’t get sick of it. I mean, some did for sure, but the numbers continued to hold up, and we never felt like we were running out of story, so we kept going with a show about these five characters and their lives before Ted’s wife showed up. We had eight very happy years like that. But once we started discussing the possibility of a ninth season—taking the show past its two hundredth episode—the conversation became, “What would we like to write? What would excite us?” And that’s when the idea of meeting the mother before the series finale first took hold. So we kind of made a deal with our past selves: we’re going to keep going with this rule that Ted can’t meet the mother until the last episode … but in the meantime, we’re gonna meet her first. And we’re gonna play every variation we can think of around that idea without breaking the central rule.

  CT: We pitched it as “a guy’s hundred best stories about his crazy twenties.” Ironically, we are now approaching our two hundredth episode and our characters are all in their thirties. So it went further than we ever imagined! And that’s because the audience connects with and cares about the characters and the actors, not the title or the gimmick. The construct of the future narrator telling the story also provided a sort of safety net to do realer, darker, emotional stories—the tacit implication being that, by 2030, even if there was some turbulence along the way, things all worked out okay for Ted and by extension, his friends.

  NL: Where did your core ensemble characters come from—based upon people you knew or purely from imagination or both?

  CB: There was a lot of autobiographical stuff in the pilot. I was single and coming to that crossroads, and Craig was in his first few years of marriage and still figuring out how to be a grownup. And we were newly living in Los Angeles after five really fun years in New York. We were homesick. We had been hired to write for Letterman right out of college, so we were kind of cannonballed into this whirlwind of living in New York City, working and hanging out with a bunch of really entertaining folks, and drinking and running around and taking cabs and kissing unlikely people and making huge mistakes and being young enough to wa
ke up the next day and not be all that hung over. It was a great time, much more fun than high school and college, and after a year or so in Los Angeles, we really missed it. It was the first time in my adult life that I understood what nostalgia was, and that newly discovered feeling went right into the pilot script.

  CT: Our core characters are a mix—some are based on people we know, some are more original inventions. Marshall and Lily are based on my wife Rebecca and I—we’ve been together since the very beginning of college. When we wrote the HIMYM pilot, Carter was single and in his twenties and still searching for “The One,” so that was the inspiration for Ted: A guy who really wants to find the right girl and whose two best friends have been an old married couple since they were eighteen years old. Barney is more of an original invention, although some aspects are inspired by dudes we used to hang out with in New York in our twenties. Robin was also not literally based on any one person, although certain traits of Robin are based on Cobie Smulders—her Canadian-ness, for example, or her independence. Over time, the characters—no matter how much you originally based them on known entities—become their own people, a collaborative construct between actors and writers. Still, it’s important to us to hold on to what’s fundamentally human and recognizable about each character. So we’re always stealing from real life.