Bridget Carpenter Interview, Part One

Bridget Carpenter is a producer on my favorite show, Friday Night Lights (now airing Wednesdays at 8pm on NBC). She graciously agreed to answer a few questions. I'll be running the interview over the next few days. Stay tuned!

Crafty TV: What specs got you the show?

Bridget Carpenter: I've never written a spec.

Crafty TV: [crashing sound] I'm fine. I'm fine.

Bridget Carpenter: Before I began writing for television, I was (am) a playwright. My first staff job was DEAD LIKE ME, and for that job I used two plays as my writing samples. After I got that staff job, I would (and still do) use a combination of tv episodes that I've written and/or one or more of my plays, whatever seems most appropriate. It's been my experience that the people who enjoy reading plays as samples are pretty much invariably people I'd be excited to work with.

Crafty TV: FNL seems to have a more fluid structure than a traditional hour drama. There's a main or "A" story, which belongs to Coach, but instead of having a secondary B and a tertiary C story that take up the rest of the episode, we get a weave of stories, where each of the characters seem to have their own stories that run in parallel. Y'know, like in life, but more interesting. Do you feel that's true?

Bridget Carpenter: That is indeed true. In fact we never, or almost never, talk about stories in terms of A/B/C. It always seems that we have an innante "room understanding" of the weight of each character's story in each distinct episode. We'll pay more attention to Smash for a few episodes when we get into his taking steroids, the pressure that he's feeling to excel, his drive to make "the list"--and as a result, another character's story for that episode/episodes may recede temporarily. We do tend to go back to Coach and his family more often, because he's the character that links pretty much everyone else in town.

And when you break story, how do Peter Berg and the rest of you track the stories?

We have to keep reminding each other when things happened. "Did that happen in episode 112 or 114?" It's fluid. And confusing. And fun.

Incidentally, while Peter Berg is a genius and we all adore him, he's not in the writers' room at all--he's off directing movies. Jason Katims is our showrunner, Exec. Producer, and boss. He, too, is a genius. We pretty much worship him.

Crafty TV: There's usually a football game, but it can come at the beginning of the episode or the end of one. Is there any sense of "the following things have to happen in every episode"?

Bridget Carpenter: It also can come in the middle! That was something that excited all of us from the beginning--that when we have a game, it should serve the story of the episode--it doesn't have to cap it. That said, a football game has a natural energy and drive that often makes its way into Acts 4 and 5.

As we break episodes, we ask ourselves, is there a football game in this episode? If there is, then we talk about when we want it to be and how it's helping to tell the stories of the characters within the game. We don't want the games to be interchangeable. We want them to be wholly connected to the episode they're in. In my episode "Crossing the Line" we didn't have a football game, but we did have a quad rugby game--the first time Jason Street has done anything athletic since becoming injured. That seemed to naturally replace the football--doing two hard-hitting games in a single episode would have been overkill.

Not a Good Sign

NOW Magazine has a mostly positive review of CBC's Little Mosque on the Prairie, but this paragraph is worrisome:

Unlike the usual fish-out-of-water scenario in which an ignorant and often arrogant newcomer is taken down a peg or two by the quirky but knowing locals (see Men In Trees), Little Mosque makes the locals (God-fearing white folks) ignorant and intolerant and the butt of most of the jokes, while the members of the Muslim community are peaceful, conciliatory and occasionally sharp-tongued.

That might fly with pointy-headed TV critics who may not think much of God-fearing white folks themselves. But it's not going to go over well with the largely God-fearing, white audience.

I haven't seen the pilot, so I'm whistling in the dark. But it seems to me they might have missed an opportunity to use the Muslim experience to look at the strangenesses and contradictions of Canadian culture, not just their own immigrant experience. I find Wim Wenders' movies interesting because as a German he has a different perspective on American culture. One of the best early books on America was De Toqueville's -- it took a French aristocrat to see clearly what was unique about the new nation.

I'll be tuning my PVR in on Tuesday...

Lost House 24

Ken Levine, in his neverending quest to reform television, has thoughtfully combined Lost, House and 24 into one show, and broken a whole year's worth of story...

That man makes me laugh.

Belated Post for Rogers

Thirteeeeeeeeen!

Amazing but True

DMc posts the new, famous story of the guy who leaped onto the subway tracks to save someone else. He didn't think about it. No time. It seemed like the right thing to do, so he did it.

Could you ever get away with a scene like that in a screenplay? Possibly not. We want to know why characters do the things they do. Yet people don't always know why they do the things they do. Yet movies exist partly to help us understand the events going on around us -- movies help us make sense of our relationships.

You could get away with this if it were the precipitating incident. Man saves someone else, that puts the two of them together, putting in motion a series of unexpected consequences. A man is stalked by the woman he rescues. A man is repeatedly helped by the man he rescued, but he doesn't want the friendship, it's too weird. A man becomes famous for saving someone else, but doesn't know how to live up to that one moment where he was a hero -- now everything else seems too mundane -- and his life falls apart.

If you're going for a very realistic and "loose" tone to what you're writing, it can sometimes be extremely effective to have an unexplained moment. A very human inconsistency on the part of one of your characters. So long as you're not doing it to get your character off the hook -- so long as it causes interesting complications -- it can work. You'll know it when you see it. You'll ask your character to go one way and she'll go another way. Go with it, see where it leads you. You can always go back to the logical choice in the next draft.

Bloggies

The Weblog Awards are open for nomination. You can vote for three blogs per category; you must name at least three blogs for your ballot to count. You can only vote once. Nominations (really votes) are due by January 13.

Present company excepted, who are your favorite reads?

David's Top Ten

David Sims (not to be confused with Dave Sim) of South Dakota Dark has a smart, thoughtful Top Ten TV Shows of 2006 post. Maybe I will tune into Dr. Who after all. When's it on again?

Proud Spouse

Lisa's book about collecting art is a Staff Pick at the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookshop!