Welcome to TV Week, my five-part series on the vast television kaleidoscope — with tips, explainers and insights into this vast landscape. Click here for my earlier How-To series. Today’s installment: the hidden strategy of meetings.
Running from 60 Minutes to Love Island to Euphoria, Jeopardy!, Stranger Things, Landman and Pardon the Interruption — TV has more tribes and customs than the United Nations.
But if the TV business has one ritual that unites everyone, it is the meeting.
With so many writers and talented people swirling around so many genres with so many ideas, and so many places to bring them, meetings are the basic organizing unit of the entire industry. Meetings are where relationships are forged, where shows are born (or killed) and where lots and lots of notes are handed along.
For most people on the development side of the industry, meetings make up most of their work. For everyone else, if you’re going to have a career in Hollywood, being able to acquit yourself at least half-decently in meetings is the price of entry.
But no one offers tips on how to do meetings. You don’t see seminars on how to excel at meetings, even though just about everyone in the industry could use one. Meetings are where careers are made, shows are born, projects die, and executives decide whether you’re the kind of person they can survive spending the next three years with — and whether hitching their career to yours will be the best or worst decision of their lives.
So I asked people who have lived through hundreds of them what actually works — and what gets you quietly crossed off the list.
Below, the best advice on becoming the person Hollywood decides is safe to bet on:
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