Welcome to TV Week, my five-part series on the vast television kaleidoscope — with tips, explainers and insights into this vast landscape, including the hidden strategy of meetings. Click here for my earlier How-To series. Today’s installment: winning at development.
It is the briarpatch where promising careers falter and die, great projects are ripped to shreds and all of Hollywood’s worst instincts come together.
Welcome to development.
Going from acing the meeting to getting your show in front of an audience doesn’t happen with the snap of a finger. You have to walk through a minefield before getting to the other side — notes, drafts, disagreements.
One writer who spoke to me invoked a quote from HBO’s World War II miniseries Band of Brothers: “The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse.”
“Honestly, I think that’s how you got to think about the development process in TV.”
In reality, the path to development begins with the pitch. What we call development used to refer to the period after a deal was made and before shooting started. That is to say, work being done after money was put in the creators’ hands.
These days, the development process has been pushed out into the land once known as “spec.” Creators are expected to have done much of the work before they ever come into the pitch meeting. And then the work, the notes, the demands can ensue from there before there is anything resembling a deal on the table.
Which means that if you don’t have a good sense of where you’re headed and what you’re doing, you are in for a world of time-wasting heartbreak.
“I have been out with too many things that are good. I don’t have a doubt in my mind that they are TV shows. I’ve worked with younger writers, and they’ve just written an absolutely gangbuster script. We attached an A-list comedic talent and a great TV director, and it was all set,” one writer and producer tells me. “And we were at a place with no vertical integration, so they couldn’t make the numbers work.”
But how do you avoid that trap? How can you steer clear of the quagmire and become an honorable television writer or showrunner? Here are tips, guidance and insights from working writers who continue to survive a system designed to waste their time, test their ego and kill their shows.
And remember: Your project probably won’t live, but your career has to.
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