"Show Runner"

I was just interviewed by SLATE for an article about the origins of the word "showrunner." Google Books traces the word back to 1991, and my friend Lee Goldberg things it goes back to at least 1988. But it doesn't seem to go back any further than that. Nor does anyone seem to have consciously coined it.

It's a funny title, because it isn't a credit. You don't get a "showrunner" credit, you get an exec producer credit, and so do some other people who aren't the showrunner. That's like Head Writer, for which the actual credit can be anything from Exec Story Editor to Supervising Producer.

Does anyone know any lore about the origins of "showrunner"?

The Vision Thing

I was in Burbank the other day, chatting with a network executive about the Telefilm program that brought me down to LA. She was surprised that so many of the other projects were being pitched by Canadian producers, with the writers not invited along. She thought it was odd that a producer would pitch a series, as if the network was buying a concept. They're not, of course. They're buying a concept to be written by a writer.

There are so few truly original series. A lot of what the networks buy are either old ideas rebuilt or ideas that are just out there. E.g. THE GLADES is about a city cop who moves to the country -- clever! -- while dozens of writers, including me, pitched shows set in the Kandahar combat hospital. What makes a show fresh is the writing, and that comes from the vision of the writer.

A fortiori, shows that truly are fresh. Who would have bought a show set in an ad agency in the 1960's? What they bought was Matt Weiner's vision of a time and a place and some characters and a style and a way of life. DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES wasn't a great concept. It was a bravura pilot script that proved that Marc Cherry had a vision.

At any rate, that's how they think about it in LA.

Ricky Gervais at Banff

I didn’t make a lot of notes at Ricky Gervais’s talk at Banff. Gervais is a very funny man to listen to, but he wasn’t talking much about craft. I did learn that his name is pronounced "Gervaise. I had a great time at William Shatner’s panel moderated by Bill Prady too, but I can’t say I learned much beyond the importance of doing Shakespeare.

Towards the end of his talk, though, he mentioned having a list of do’s and don’t’s for THE OFFICE. He mentioned some of them:

“No exposition. ‘You know your brother who just came back from the Yucatan.’ ‘Yeah... he’s my brother, of course I know him.’

"No people entering just to do the important thing.

"No Eye of God camera coming between two people dancing. I mean, whose point of view is that?

"No director’s jokes. Nothing the character wouldn’t say just because it’s funny. We cut out half the jokes that were too smartass for the character. For example, Tim and Dawn weren’t supposed to be having a good time if they’re not together. Tim was supposed to be Norm from Cheers. But he was too smart. And the audience would think, if he’s that smart and happy, I don’t care. So what we did was no one laughs at his jokes. Only Dawn laughs at his jokes. That meant more than getting the laugh.

"Also, jokes sometimes ended with an embarrassing silence. That excited us as well.

"The reality of the piece excited us. The realer it was, the more it would resonate.

"It was about a man in free fall, who confused respect with popularity.

"Oh, and we knew we had to keep reminding people it was a fake documentary. Otherwise all we had was a slow sitcom without enough jokes.”

Vince Gilligan at Banff, Part Three

Q. How much did you have with the pilot script? How detailed a series arc did you have?

A. Great question. It really depends on the kind of people you’re selling to. With the people I was pitching, I didn’t have to give them anything but the pilot.

A lot of people did say, this is a great pilot, but I don’t get where it goes after the first episode. I told them, it's Mr. Chips turns into Scarface. I've said that 100 times.

But I'd give a few highlight moments. Most of them in fact never happened. Like, Jesse Pinkman dies. I always assumed he'd die in a big season ender at the end of Season One, in a drug deal instigated by Walt. That would be a terrible burden of guilt for Walt to carry, and guilt and rage are great fuel for further drama.

But I so enjoyed working with Aaron Paul from the pilot onwards… it must have been very early, I realized, there's no way in hell I’m going to kill this guy off. By episode 2 or 3 I sat him down and told him, "Hey, by the way, I was going to kill you off." And he really freaked out. I said, "No, this is a compliment to you that I’m not going to kill you off."

For a long time after that, every time Bryan Cranston (playing Walter White) would get the script first, he'd tell Aaron, "Ohhh, buddy, it was nice working with you!"

Anyway, when I was pitching, I’d pitch these crazy moments -- what Stanley Kubrick calls non-submergible moments, moments that don't submerge into memory -- that we have never done in 3 years on the show. But for Sony/AMC I didn’t need those.

Still, it’s good to be as prepared as you can, even if it’s only a sales too that you’ll never use later. Once they’re pregnant, they’re pregnant.

I don’t know how you figure out something 100 hours in advance. It has to be a free flowing story telling process. There are so many realities that you can’t foresee. Like, Jesse Pinkman's house was sold out from under us. The owners of the house sold it. So we needed new plot elements to explain why he’s no longer in the house. So we had his mom and dad find the meth lab in his basement, and his name isn't on the lease.

The important thing is to believe in it. If you're selling something you don't believe in, that if you're successful you're going to have to live with for years … there's easier ways of making money.

Vince Gilligan at Banff, Part One

Vince Gilligan is the creator and showrunner of BREAKING BAD, which AMC has just renewed for a fourth seasons. I attended his master class at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival. Here are my notes from the session.

Gilligan “hadn’t had a paying gig in a while" even though he'd worked on the hit long-running show THE X-FILES. He and a friend in a similar predicament were on the phone discussing what they could possibly do to feed their families, and (if my notes are right), his friend talked about "buying an old RV and building a crystal meth lab. So during this phone conversation this character named Walter White came into my head, which is very unusual for something to hit me like that.

[The question nobody asked in the session was: whatever happened to the friend? Normally if you're in a phone conversation with a fellow writer trying to figure out shows to write, and one of you gets an idea, both of you should work on the idea, since it came out of "the room." On the other hand if they were just shooting the breeze about being out of work, Gilligan was free and clear to write up his idea on his own.]

"The first question when you get an idea is of course: is it a movie or a tv show? Is it two hours or 100 hours of story? I don't know if we can get to a hundred, but…"

Gilligan had a "pre-existing relationship with Sony TV. I had a blind TV commitment -- I'd done an ill-fated CBS pilot for them. They read BREAKING BAD and kind of looked at me oddly, 'what the hell is this?' But they bought it"

(I thought it was interesting and rather inspiring that of five master-classes, two were from writers who were wondering where their next paycheck was coming from immediately prior to setting up their hit show.)

"Once the studio bought the idea, they were my partners. We went around town to different networks. I knew what AMC was, but AMC never entered the equation. We thought there were three possibilities: HBO, Showtime, and FX. We approached all three. FX was interested for a while and then passed. So I tried to turn this into a movie."

(Lisa and I have done this a number of times. I have a movie under option that I'm attached to direct that started out as a TV pitch I couldn't set up; and we just got a grant to write another movie that started out as a TV pitch. A TV series and a movie are very different animals, but when you have a great character and a compelling situation, why waste it?"

"My wonderful agent Mark Gordon was at the time assistant to my other agent, and unbeknownst to me, he sent the pilot script to AMC, which he knew at that point was interested in making the jump into scripted programming and was about to open MAD MEN. So I got a call: 'AMC is very interested in your pilot script, would you like to meet with them?'"

"I'm eternally grateful that nobody asked me to make the characters more likable. You go to a lot of these meetings where people have read the material and you get glad handed to death and then the death by 1000 cuts begins. 'Does he have to be a meth dealer? Does he have to be 50 years old? Our research shows that 50 year olds are not interesting to our audience.' You have to be willing to walk the heck out the door. But Sony and AMC were courageous. And AMC had the courage of their ignorance because they’d never done scripted TV before."

"They only called once, when we had Walter White give Jesse's girlfriend extra heroin so she'd OD. They called, “are you sure you want to go that dark? Let's talk about this.”

"Now, executive notes are not always wrong. And when people tell you you're drunk, maybe you'd better sit down. If something scares you and excites you at the same time you really want to examine it from all angles. You want to hear what people have to say. Not polling them. But it was such a scary thing we felt a need to do a gut check with a bunch of people and see if we’re going too far too fast. So we thought about it, and we decided to let Walter just watch Jesse’s girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit."

(Oh, and here is BREAKING BAD NOW ON ABC!!!)

Breaking Bad is now on ABC - watch more funny videos

James Manos at Banff, Part Three

(Continuing my notes from the James Manos master class at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival...)

Manos stressed that he never writes with an actor in mind. “I can’t write with Bobby DeNiro in mind. I know the person, but it’s an amorphous vision.”

That makes sense to me. Producers sometimes ask me if I have cast in mind. I find it a bit dangerous to write for a star. If you’re writing for Jack Nicholson, for example, who invests so much personality in his delivery, you might tend to underwrite the lines. Underwriting the lines is exactly what you want to do if you actually have Jack Nicholson, or Clint Eastwood, or even Dennis Leary. But if you’re trying to create a character in the reader’s mind, you have to write dialog that is as distinctive as possible — not just only lines that that character would say, but lines that only that character would say.

If you get to write for a star, of course, it’s a joy. When I wrote lines for Colm Feore for BON COP / BAD COP, I knew what he’d be able to do with them.

Manos’s first choice for DEXTER, in fact, was Greg Kinnear; he thought Michael Hall was too nice a guy to play a cold serial killer.

(Actors run into this all the time. Even though we all know they’re actors and that they play characters, we sometimes assume they’re best basically playing themselves. Some actors can only play themselves, more or less. But I know one actress who was rejected because “we’re looking for a blonde.” And a francophone casting director told Lisa a funny story about a francophone actor whom she refused to ever cast in English projects because he was so Québecois. The guy had to call back pretending to be an American actor who’d just moved to Montreal; only at the end of the phone call did he admit he was the guy she knew.)

Manos stressed how important it is for actors to have solid theatrical craft. He basically feels you shouldn’t show up in Hollywood until you’ve spent years in New York doing theater. (Theater in LA tends to be second rate because the actors are only doing it in order to be seen by casting directors, and they quit the shows as soon as they get a gig.) “Michael Hall was singing cabaret in New York when we cast him.”

Manos doesn’t read spec episodic scripts. He’s only interested in reading “a script that shows your voice ... that shows your anger. Be committed to what the story is. You can tell when a writer doesn’t really care. Is this really what happened to you? Is this what your really felt? You can tell when someone’s really lived through it.”

He also finds that a major flaw in scripts he reads is “geography. ... I’m reading a script and I’m thinking, where am I? A moment ago I was in an alley. Make sure the reader sees what you see. You are writing pictures. Stop, now and then, and look at the imaginary screen. Where is he? Where is she? It’s a lost art. If a character shows up in the middle of the scene and he wasn’t there before, I stop reading, because I know the writer isn’t really seeing the scene.”

In the ‘whatever works for you’ department, Manos doesn’t like outlines. “Outlines are deadly for me. I know the beginning, middle and end, but then I like to write. Too many drafts and pieces get overdeveloped. I’m also not a fan of telling people what I’m working on. I do believe the more you talk about something the less chance it’s going to get done. You lose the inspiration to finish the piece. I think writing a very specific outline is killing yourself.”

(Yeah, that’s a direct contradiction to my “pitch your project over and over” advice. And if pitching your project makes it lose its juice for you, don’t do it. On the other hand, having read literally thousands of scripts, I would say that 90% to 95% of them would have benefited from being pitched at least a few times out loud.)

“And executives make you stick to the outline. You become a slave to your own outline. Let me find my way through it. I knew where I’ll end up.”

Manos agrees with Hemingway: don’t end your day’s work by finishing a scene. If you know how the scene will end, leave it for the next morning. That way you’ll start the day finishing something and feel good and have momentum, instead of starting with a problem you don’t know how to solve.

Manos does another thing I don’t do and don’t recommend. He starts every day rereading from page one, and rewriting and polishing anything he doesn’t like.

Personally, I don’t reread anything while I’m writing it. I find it slows me down. The only time I’ll look at something from a previous day is if I need to put in a setup for a payoff I just invented.

Manos’s technique results in fairly polished first drafts. Mine results in very fast first drafts that I can start tinkering with. For inexperienced writers, rewriting from page one is dangerous, I think. I think it’s really important to finish things before you start criticizing them. Reading your first draft can be demoralizing. But also, endlessly polishing your first draft can feel more rewarding than writing new pages; but it doesn’t get you to the end.

Manos doesn’t write on index cards. He hangs butcher paper on all his walls, and then writes on his walls. “Until you actually see the whole movie, you can’t write it. I write down character stuff, scenes, all around the office in different color inks. You wouldn’t be able to read it, but I can. When I can see the entire movie on the wall, I can write it.”

Manos says “You can learn more watching a bad movie than a good one. You can watch THE GODFATHER for two hours and never know what happened to you. But a bad movie, you’ll watch and think, don’t do that, that didn’t work, I could fix that...”

James Manos at Banff, Part Two

Manos got to write DEXTER because he was one of a few lucky writers asked to read the underlying book, DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER, and give Showtime his “take.” He’d never adapted someone else’s material before – and he swears he never will again. But he thinks he was the writer the network wanted in the first place, because he’d written black comedy called “The Slow and Complete Decompensation of Jim Manos” which was about a writer named James Manos and his terrible marriage. (Moral: write something close to your heart, and even if it doesn’t get made, it may get you the job. Lisa has a strangely compelling pilot about growing up in California in the 70’s. Hard to set up, particularly in Canada, but close to her heart.)

His questions were: how do you give a serial killer series legs? How do you make it not predictable? He was interested in Dexter’s efforts to try to be a “real boy” – the Pinocchio story if you will. He liked Dexter’s relationship with his stepfather, who knew he was a psychopath but chose not to separate him from the world. He “taught his kid how to live with the way he’s broken.” Manos calls that “a Christian act,” even if he was teaching his son how to get away with murder:

Because who wouldn’t kill a pedophile, a rapist, a murder? Because I do believe in violence. Look at IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Jimmy Stewart is pissed off throughout the movie. He can’t do what he wants to do. And Jesus was angry. Anger initiates some very positive things. I have a friend who’s a Buddhist, and I told him: name me a Buddhist who’s invented something.

Anger is a great fuel for writing scripts. If you can tap into that, it will give you something to write about.

James Manos at Banff, Part One

I sat in on James Manos’s “master class” at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival. Manos, the creator of DEXTER, talks a mile a minute, but I was able to scribble down some of the most important points.

Backstory

Manos avoided a career in pro basketball when he realized that at 5’ 10” he was going to have to work too hard to keep up with the other players. He went into acting, did summer stock, and wound up at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

He says he “wasn’t intending to be an actor,” but “it’s imperative to know what you’re asking someone to do.” (I found the same thing: one of the most useful writing and directing classes I took was two years at the Joanne Baron Studio studying Meisner Technique acting. I didn’t want to act either, but it taught me a lot about how scenes work, and it helps me listen to my characters.)

I would not necessarily be surprised if he was eliding a few fits and starts here – no one likes to talk about things that didn’t work – but soon he read about a Texas mom who allegedly tried to help her daughter get on the cheerleading squad by hiring a hit man to kill her daughter’s rival’s mom. Figuring he was never going to get into Hollywood unless he had something that everyone else wanted, he “borrowed $150,000 from a friend” and went down to Channelview Texas, wondering if there was something in the air that made everyone down there nuts. He was surprised to discover the town flooded with limousines – Hollywood producers who were also down there to buy the story. But he got the rights.

If I scribbled this down correctly, he wrote up a 20 page treatment and took it to Bob Cooper at HBO, who immediately optioned it, and they hired a writer, and Manos was off to the races – as a producer.

To be continued...

What Is a Showrunner?

The Writers Guild of Canada has posted The Showrunner Code, a nifty pamphlet outlining what a showrunner is and does, and why. Worth a look, whether you're in Canada or elsewhere.

"I Want to Talk Briefly About Pandering"

An audience wants a story to be over, an audience wants a happy ending, and an audience wants to relax. Those are all things that someone who’s purveying to a mass audience can’t possibly put up with. Can’t have that happen.

T. L. Reid went to the Future of Story conference in Edmonton last weekend, where Hart Hanson, showrunner of BONES, was the keynote speaker, and went to the trouble of transcribing Hart's fascinating talk. What I find most interesting about the talk was his thoughts on what makes a mass audience show, what the audience wants and what keeps them watching. (He loves THE WIRE, but his show gets twelve times as many viewers.)

Definitely check it out.

Malcolm MacRury Interview, Part Four

CRAFTY: One of the big problems with a show about peacekeepers, I would think, is how little they can actually do. Did that worry you? How did you handle it?
MACRURY: We talked a lot about that. Here's a fresh idea: these people don't have guns. They can't solve their problems by shooting. They can't blow the bad guys away. But then you have a problem: the heroes can't take dramatic action. And of course you end up with kind of cheating it. To make them compelling, they gotta break the rules. One's a spy, one will commit murder, one's sleeping with everyone, and the other one is having psychotic visions. And the one who's the moral center is breaking rules to do the right thing. So that's how you get around "what do you mean they can't use guns?"
CRAFTY: It's sort of the difference between the US and Canada, encapsulated in their TV shows. On 24, it's all, "hey, let's torture this guy!" And on THE BORDER, it's, "Okay, we can't torture the guy, so what are we gonna do?"
MACRURY: America doesn't have peacekeepers, doesn't have UN observers. This is something we [Canadians] do, Indians do, Austrlians do. In fact, the school you go to learn to be an observer is in Kingston, Ontario. Americans don't do it. No peacekeepers ... unless it's a military action.
CRAFTY: The show goes pretty dark. I mean, there's a rule you can't kill an animal on screen and you can't hurt a kid. You kill a kid on screen. And that's not the worst thing that happens in that episode.
MACRURY: Yeah, I ... you're writing something and you have to trust how it's going to be conveyed and you write the images. How it's shot, how it's portrayed, that's the director's job. Mario comes out of the theatre of the absurd. And there, you do show the horror. I'm a little more squeamish than that -- I might have pulled back. But I think you have to show enough to honor the situation, so it doesn't feel like a fairy tale. And that's the great thing on pay cable, they encourage you. Is it exploitative? I hope not. I hope that in fact it draws you into the reality , as close a you're going to dare to go. It's something you wrestle with. When you read about the real stories, that's what you're drawn to. To try to write about it in a way that wouldn't disturb people would be phony. It would be, "I copped out." I didn't take the audience into the world I said I was going to convey.

That's again why we didn't want to do something happening right now. The stories we're drawing from are ten years old. You can't underestimate the passage of time. These aren't raw wounds. The fact that it isn't ripped from the headlines allows you to take a bit more care that it isn't more exploitative.

And yet you're walking a line. Yes, we killed a kid onscreen - and we also saved a kid on screen. Could we have just done the second? But that wouldn't have taken you the places you need to go. It would have been THE A TEAM, with no cost to our character.
CRAFTY: The show is almost entirely serial, whereas your typical broadcast show would be strongly episodic with overlying season arcs. How did you make the decision to go serialized?
MACRURY: Again that's funny because the first drafts were for the CBC. But a serialized show is what The Movie Network and Movie Central wanted. Something that is a page turner. You put one down, you want to see the next. And in the writing of it, that's immediately where we went to. I can't even remember any discussion. The show always went from day to day. The second episode could be the second day.

That's how we did the first season of DEADWOOD. First day, second day, third day. Those first 4 eps are 4 days in a row. I don't know if that was unconscious or not. It can work to give you some dramatic energy. It's always in real time. End of the day. I think every episode is one day. To have, you know, act two is a different day -- there was never any sense of that.
CRAFTY: When I write hour drama, I'm always pulled to make each episode about 24 hours. Sometimes I have to force myself not to compress things so much. An hour of TV feels like it wants to be a day of narrative.
MACRURY: On the show I've been working on, REPUBLIC OF DOYLE, each episode is like 3 days. But it's an investigation show.

I think I would argue that if you look at the episodes, they are completely serialized yet there is a thematic closure to each one. Each writer got to tell a complete story within the episode. And often we ended up using montages at the end to highlight that. In the first episode there's the parade, the burial, the murders, ending with two of our characters on the steps, "You want to have a drink?"
CRAFTY: Pay cable doesn't have act outs, but did you write in terms of acts, or was it all just fluid storytelling, movie-style?
MACRURY: I think that varied from writer to writer. Some people found it easier to think in acts. Leaving the act structure aside, there is a natural progression of things are going to happen.
CRAFTY: But do you think in terms of, there are five acts, and in each of them I have to serve each of these story lines?
MACRURY: Yes. We'd find the main story that we're following. And then things would be following from that. The story structure gets more complicated as we get into the series, we start pulling in those three grunts [Canadian peacekeeping soldiers], and once they're in, we've got to keep servicing their story, even though they're not our main guys. We always tried to tie the stories together, for example when Kulkin comes to the mass grave.
CRAFTY: You tied things up pretty well at the end. Do you think there's a ZOS 2? Would that depend on the numbers, or do you feel you've said what you wanted to say?
MACRURY: I think we're done in Jadac. If there were a ZOS Season 2, it would be more along the lines of a PRIME SUSPECT model where you take the lead character and put them in another world. Maybe because we only had eight, we really put everything into it. I don't know where else we'd go in Jadac.
CRAFTY: So what's next?
MACRURY: I recently did a pilot for Showcase called LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY.
CRAFTY: Great title.
MACRURY: I wrote it originally for HBO -- in fact that's what got me the job on DEADWOOD. And I just got back from Newfoundland, where I did a half hour pilot, directed by Jim Allodi. with Allan Hawco. He was the Brit Captain in ZOS. It was a half-hour called THE REPUBLIC OF DOYLE. They asked us to turn it into an hour, so we were trying to figure out how to do that.
CRAFTY: Of course they did. Because comedy, drama, really, what's the diff?
MACRURY: There was always a lot of comedy in it, but we're adding more mystery. It's a private detective show set in St. John's. Yeah, it's ROCKFORD FILES.
CRAFTY: That's funny, because Kay Reindl was just blogging about how everybody wants to write a light detective show, but you just can't sell them.
MACRURY: Yeah, everybody wants to write ROCKFORD FILES. Fortunately, everybody's funny in St. John's.
CRAFTY: Thanks so much for talking to us!

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Malcolm MacRury Interview, Part Three

CRAFTY: Let's talk business. At what point did this become a pay cable show? Did you have other versions in mind for other networks?
MACRURY: It actually began at the CBC [the Canadian public broadcaster]. There's a credit in the title scroll -- "Developed with the assistance of the CBC." The first 3 scripts were developed at the CBC -- the same exact show you saw. They were trying to figure out what they were going to be -- it was the middle of the transition to the new regime -- and there was a space for experimentation. They were interested in Paul Gross -- so we developed the script for the CBC that you saw.
CRAFTY: And I'm thinking they read the scripts and came back at you with, "have you ever actually watched our network?"
MACRURY: We kept saying "this is a ten o'clock show, at least, maybe eleven o'clock or twelve" -- and they don't even have a ten o'clock spot. And they kept saying "we love the arena and the people." But to their credit, and maybe partly because of Paul's credentials, they let us have the show back once they realized, this is just not a CBC show. We took it to The Movie Network and they snapped it up within, I think, 3 weeks. We were never being disingenuous -- we told them, this is the show, do you like it or not? But it was originally developed for a public conventional broadcaster.
CRAFTY: I'm thinking, with Colm Meaney and all the others, this must be some sort of international co-production?
MACRURY: It's not a co-pro, it's completely Canadian. Of course there was a gap in financing after the distribution advance, tax credits, etc. We still needed a couple million bucks, and that gap was filled by a German company called Alive Entertainment. And for that investment they got the world outside Canada.

That's the funny thing, in terms of the actors and the sales, it wasn't Europe pudding. We started with the four UN observers, and they have to be from four countries. It's one of the rules we inherited from the reality.

Colm Meaney, yes, was sparked by the international distributor. Of course Lolita [Davidovich] helps. But when we got Colm that was exciting for them. He's been on TV for fourteen years playing the chief engineer on STAR TREK. But the part was already written as an expat Brit, we didn't rejig it for Colm.
CRAFTY: And Lolita Davidovich is Serbian.
MACRURY: Lolita was really interested in the Serbian connection. She grew up in London, Ontario, but her dad is Serbian. She had the language, she was really interested in the terrain. She was scared to go to Bosnia, she thought, they're going to hate me. But she really liked the people. To get the part of someone who's the figurehead for this warlord, getting caught up in this strange affair, her dead son -- obviously she was attracted to the character, But she was also thinking, "this will be my homage to my people."
CRAFTY: I notice you didn't try to make all the characters good in some way. This is a part of the world where there are real villains, and without being cartoonish about it, you were willing to let some of the characters be really bad people without redeeming them.
MACRURY: Titac (Colm Meaney's character) is an opportunist. But we give him his arguments against the imam. 'Sure, the guy's well-meaning, but he's going to get us all killed.' He does have a philosophy. But he's like a Mafia guy that's lost his way. It's become more about guns and money and girls than anything else. Pretty common in reality. We read about Serbia and Bosnia, but also Northern Ireland. 'We believe in the Provos but we're also kneecapping drug dealers who aren't giving us our cut.' It starts with the public ambition but soon the personal ambition takes over.

It's tricky when you're writing about other cultures. In Hollywood you can just make them the villain. Or, our [Canadian] tendency is to make them saints. You're afraid of any backlash. Any character who's Native has to be a saint, any black has to be a saint. I think that's dehumanizing. When I write characters that are not my ethnicity or religion, I try to give them the same dimensions that I give the nice Canadian girl that's going to be a peacekeeper. They have to be as flawed as I am.
CRAFTY: And in Titac's case, much more flawed than you.
MACRURY: Titac is never non-interesting -- and non-interesting is the worst thing you can say about a character. You do want to understand him. He's a real presence the way Colm plays him.

I think in some regards we may have failed in this: it's always harder to write about good than evil. One of the most positive characters is [character redacted to avoid spoilers]. We gave him moments of flaw, but maybe should have given him more. If anything we erred to make him more positive because Titac isn't.

I think I would have liked to have spent more time with some of the good characters. Like the woman doctor. The cop, Kulkin, who's just trying to be a good cop.
CRAFTY: Yeah, I kept thinking, why didn't they get 13 episodes?
MACRURY: The fun stuff are the evil guys -- we're drawn to that. But the little girl, Anna, was important to me, because people who are in these situations, working, like Sean, often it comes down to, I can't save the world, but let me have one victory, let me save this one person. And as we heard from our military observer, you end up focusing on the little things you can do.

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Malcolm MacRury Interview, Part Two

CRAFTY: Did you have the whole series arced out when you wrote the pilot?
MACRURY: We had that week together where it was the four of us. By the end of that week we had sketched out in broad strokes the 1st three episodes.
CRAFTY: And those three episodes really feel like an Act One, with a strong ending to them--
MACRURY: Then I went away and wrote the pilot, and Pete and Jason were working on 2 and 3. But it was important to get the pilot in the hands of the other writers as they worked on their outlines. So by getting the pilot first draft done quickly we could hear the voices.
CRAFTY: It sounds like you sort of had an unpaid writing room...?
MACRURY: We had three weeks paid, plus everybody got a script. One week to come up with the stories. Then we came back in the room and broke down three more episodes. Then another week for the last two. Somewhere Pete dropped out to do other things and Paul Aiken ended up co-writing with Jason. You don't need more than that, especially if you're block shooting eight episodes and you know you're going to have all the scripts finished before you shoot anything. Still it might have been good to have one other person around as a story editor – another ear – somebody who can focus on the words.
CRAFTY: Talk about how the block shooting affects you as a writer.
MACRURY: On the one hand you think it's better for the writer, you get to think it all through before you shoot anything. But what it can hamper is the thing that makes TV great – the moments of connection – oh, these two actors are so good together. Speedo Boy – you start to see how we need him in the show – hey, Lolit'a's really good with him! You can miss that in block shooting. We had to fight hard to keep thinking, and not just go, "oh it's done." And in some cases we were able to do something, and in some cases we couldn't.
CRAFTY: You didn't leave a lot of loose ends for ZOS 2!
MACRURY: I'm pretty happy if this is the end. Trying to tell a story about how do you make peace – the absurdity of trying to make peace where it's not wanted-- my favorite show of all time is the Prisoner – I'm sad but curious to see they're remaking it – that's what I was going for, the ending of The Prisoner. "Take care out there."
CRAFTY: Which apparently they had to write in 24 hours when the network pulled the plug in the middle of the season!
MACRURY: And I knew we had to have a Tragically Hip cover band playing over all this chaos-- these innocents performing in the midst of it. Kind of a circus feel.

Talk about the block shooting thing – you do have to know the ending. It makes the show more like a miniseries or a movie. Contrast that with when I was working on DEADWOOD, David Milch never wanted to know the ending, not even of a scene. It's a different way of working and one I'm not good at.
CRAFTY: What did you take away from Deadwood?
MACRURY: The biggest thing I took away was how hard it is to get it right, the dedication you need. Early on, there were just the two of us lying on the floor while David [Milch] was writing a line of description – not even dialog – hour and a half to two hours, going over and over the same line of description. He'd change this word, that word, punctiuation – it was just a stage direction – finally he turned to me with a big smile – "I think that just about does it." And I laughed, and his mood changed – "what's so funny?" "This is hard work." "Yeah. It is. Because you gotta get it right."

That, and the use of the double dash in everything. People make fun of me. I never end a line of description with a period anymore. I don't use the triple dots any more – I use the double dash. This is writer wanker talk, maybe, but I find it so liberating. You look at a page and god damn it, it looks more dynamic! Even if it isn't. It's really flowing well. None of those horrible periods.
CRAFTY: Did you ever consider using a VO to get inside anyone's head? Some of these characters are sort of inscrutable and you play with that. E.g. we don't know what Simon's game is for a while. Or where Speedo Boy's loyalties really lie.
MACRURY: I think we made a decision about that. What I wanted to do – Sean, Michelle Nolden's character [who plays the head UN observer], was always crucial. Kind of the moral center of the show. We started her at the point of breakdown. Where's she going to end up, where's Simon going to end up. It's a complicated love story, and one, dare I say it, I don't think we've seen before. It's a story of a guy forced to do something terrible to a woman he loves and able to do it and feeling complicit – and yet there is love between them.

So she would be the character we privileged with the inner vision – we'd see things through her that would get at her state of mind in a way that she doesn't project to the world. So we didn't want to give anybody else the VO. We also didn't do a lot of backstory. We wanted to define them in what they're doing on the show. No "My father beat me" – revealing the character. We wanted to keep the characters more in the moment – what are they going to become – if they end up being a bit mysterious that's great.
CRAFTY: But you also didn't zoom in here and there to tell us where the characters stand, and I assume that was a decision, because you must have had network notes about "What's Simon really thinking?"
MACRURY: The thing was we had three scripts when we came to The Movie Network and Movie Central. And their only notes were more on the lines of "push it further." And it's a different piece than a lot of stuff out there.

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Interview with ZOS Showrunner Malcolm MacRury, part one

CRAFTY: It's a hell of a show. How did you guys come up with the idea for it?
MACRURY: There was a first attempt made driven by the director, Mario Azzopardi. It was peacekeeping more as a cop show. He wasn't happy, though. [Producer] Paul Gross approached me because he's kind of obsessed with DEADWOOD--
CRAFTY: -- and you wrote on DEADWOOD –
MACRURY: We met and the idea we came up with was, could you tell the story of a whole community in the same way that Deadwood told the formation of a civilization out of illegal opportunity and opportunism. Could you tell a story about a community that had had law and order and then descended into chaos and anarchy. Could you tell the story of that community, giving equal weight to all the partners, to see what happened to it. And clearly there are parallels to DEADWOOD and Westerns. I was just joking with Rick Roberts [who plays the head of the Canadian peacekeeping force] that he's the "new sheriff in town." And Colm Meaney's Muslim bar owner is the Al Swearingen character. Mila, Lolita Davidovich's character, is Tolliver... This was a place divided by ethnicity and religion, and right in the midst of it, these outsiders, who have the unenviable task of making peace where it's not wanted.

We wanted to tell it in the present rather than back in the 90's when the worst of the war was going on. Two reasons for that. One, I wanted to tell this post-9/11. How would all that paranoia affect the situation? I mean, the Americans were heroes in Croatia and Bosnia, but after 9/11 all these mujahedeen disappeared out of there. So we wanted to play with that.
CRAFTY: And you got a Donald Rumsfeld look-alike with a George Bush accent--
MACRURY (LAUGHS) -- This was a pretty secularized Muslim world. It's only a couple hours drive from Budapest but you drive through the hills of Bosnia and you'd see spires of mosques like you'd see church spires in Québec. These are European Muslims. Rooted there, intermarried, secularized-- though that's changing a bit. The Imam in ZOS asks if "only the Red Cross will be allowed to do this?" becaues in Sarajevo you have all sorts of Muslim money coming in. And religion is become more a mark of id. Sometimes you see women wearing the hijab. So the old Sarajevo model of everybody lives together has really been tested.
CRAFTY: Did you go there?
MACRURY: Sarajevo is a great city but not the meeting place that it once was. People live in their own neighborhoods. There are ethnic and religious identities that weren't so strong before. But you go to Belfast, and 10, 15 years ago you'd have said that was hopeless, and now everybody's getting along.
CRAFTY: And the other reason to tell it in the present?
MACRURY: We wanted something more like a fable than a historical recreation. That's why we use the terms “Christians" and "Muslims” rather than Croats or Serbs and Bosniaks. More archetypical. Because, who are we to try to tell this story in a historically accurate fashion?
CRAFTY: And somebody would always say you got it wrong--
MACRURY: --everybody would say we got it wrong. The good thing about setting it now but based in a struggle that had its climax over a decade ago is ... if you were to try to tell Iraq or Afghanistan now, you'd be too close. You want to take something that's got a little distance, a little time to settle – you can see things that you couldn't when it's in your face.
CRAFTY: What was the point at which you knew you had not only a territory but a show? Was there a point at which it crystallized for you?
MACRURY: That happened in the room really. We got together, Peter Mitchell, Jason Sherman, John Krizanc, and me, and the producers said okay, take a week, the four of you, sit in the room, see what you come up with. We brought in a military observer, Maj. John Russell, a real UN "swimmer" who'd been to all sorts of places, Sierra Leone, that sort of place. He gave us the overview talk that he gives to various places. It's therapy for him, giving this talk. That started us off. By the end of the week we had the bones of what the thing was.
CRAFTY: And you and Pete Mitchell are serious TV vets--
MACRURY: And Jason and John come out of theatre, Governor General Award winnning theatrical people, so that made a good combo. And we had a real freedom in that room. We realized, we can do anything we want. We're making it all up from nothing.
CRAFTY: But what was the moment creatively, the point where you knew you not only had a bunch of things you wanted to explore but a TV series?
MACRURY: A turning moment was coming up with the character of Speedo Boy. And that wasn't something Major Russell told us, that came out of John Krizanc's research. You come up with an image, and it sort of defines, "Okay, that's the kind of show we wanna do." It has some Monty Python sides to it. Or M*A*S*H, or CATCH-22. If you create a character like that, it informs how the world is going to be shaped. If a figure like that is allowed to exist in this world--
CRAFTY: John Boorman once told me that Nicol Williamson never really grasped his character in EXCALIBUR until he got that silver skullplate to put on his head, and then he felt he really had it. And for Laurence Olivier it was the nose -- he had to have the right nose for the role to come together for him.
MACRURY: Here's the weird thing – when we were actually filming in Tuzla, in Bosnia, they're very wary of the UN. It's no a happy history. We say in the show, "if all the sides don't hate your guts you'renot doing your job" but on the other side, there's a real skepticism -- So we're shooting, and Enrico came in late in the production -- we're doing block shooting – filming above the town – and he's wearing his leather trench coat over a Speedo, and the locals all come around and say, "who's he supposed to be?" And we explained, and they said, "Oh, I like him, he's real!" So that was kind of humbling. Four smarty-pants writers sit in a room in Canada trying to come up with something outrageous, and that's the thing they say, that's real.
CRAFTY: And on FLASHPOINT he's the most buttoned down guy in the world and on ZOS he's this flamboyant, crazy--
MACRURY: And by the way, talking about that, one of the things I learned on this shoot was, I really like actors. I hang out with them more now – I'm not uptight or precious about my words with them. Because what they bring to the character is so much more important. And you can write all the words and the actions – it's what they do on film that gives you anything you've got. They are creators along with the directors and the writers and the producers. I'm almost embarrassed to be learning this at my advanced age. I was at a writer's thing making this point and being shot down – showrunners were all saying "you can't let them go off script," "the script is what's vital to save." I think it's like the Bible. You have to let people interpret it and make it their own.
CRAFTY: But there's a difference, isn't there, between working with actors so they're comfortable with the lines -- which may mean rewriting them -- and having actors improvise. Because they usually start saying the subtext an sounding like they're from Southern California.
MACRURY: I had one guy come in, "I'm so used to coming onto shows and changing all the lines so I'm comfortable with them," and I didn't rein him in much, except here and there where he might have missed some information we needed to get out. But after a while he comes in and says, "I'm kicking myself, because I'm starting to hear the rhythms of what you wrote, and I'm starting to hear it in my head." So I guess we're saying the same thing. I do feel a bit liberated. When you have really good actors you can just trust them to run with it.

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Twelve Showrunner Rules

In case you missed it on DMc, Jill Golick has posted Jason Katims' 12 Rules for Showrunners. (Jason Katims is, as you know, the showrunner of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.)

Happy Fourth of July!

Who Addresses Notes, part two

Q. But what about the studio? The network pays the license fee, but the studio fronts the production costs, right? So doesn't the studio do a lot of hand-holding on both ends? giving notes, rejecting notes, and acting as a buffer between the showrunner and the network when it comes to network notes... any thoughts?

Ah, well. That.

American networks have enough clout that they unlikely to tolerate their notes being mediated by the studio. They're going to want to talk to the showrunner. However, the studio will have its own notes, because they have to make up their budget deficit by overseas sales. Overseas audiences may want more action and less talk. (Action is universal. Talk translates poorly.) They may want less sex (except in France, but they have their own shows). They may be more sensitive to how Muslims are treated. Or Asians. Or Asian Muslims. And, anyway, it's their deficit dollars, so that buys them the right to have their concerns addressed.

The showrunner has to reconcile all the notes. Sometimes they contradict. On Galidor, if I remember correctly, FoxKids wanted "more action." YTV wanted "less violence." Different countries and different audience demographics. Imagine what fun we had (the showrunner, Tom Chehak, and his staff) delivering more action and less violence. We wound up with a lot of guys in costume jumping around and missing each other.

As always, "addressing concerns" is not the same as "doing as told." Sometimes it's more important to make the execs feel they're being listened to, than to actually do what they think they want. Sometimes you have to do what they're asking. A showrunner has to be a bit of politician to know which battles to pick with the people paying the bills.