Fixing TV: Shawn Ryan, Damon Lindelof on How They'd Change Development
I survey dozens of smart scribes for solutions to 'death by a thousand paper cuts.' And OMG, did someone really say bring back mini-rooms? Yes, yes they did
Lesley Goldberg reports from L.A. She recently interviewed former CBS entertainment president Kelly Kahl about life after the big job and his Milwaukee Brewers doc and wrote about the rise of open writing assignments.
“It’s supposed to be frustrating — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” That’s how TV veteran Damon Lindelof feels about the industry’s development process. And while the Lost, The Leftovers and Watchmen grad has an affinity for the way the industry has made television for the past few decades, many of his peers feel there’s an opportunity to reinvent the wheel and avoid long stretches of work that often leave scribes executing endless rounds of notes and rewrites for free.
Between the rise in if-come deals that my colleague Ashley Cullins wrote about recently and the popularity of open writing assignments, which I reported on a couple of weeks ago, there are multiple variations on the theme of “how many hoops can a creator jump through?”
As the industry grapples with seemingly endless rounds of contraction and belt tightening, I asked scores of writers what they felt was the most frustrating part of the process and how they might change it. And because, let’s face it, they’re mostly at the mercy of studios and buyers when it comes to the development timeline, I also asked, given the current pressures on budgets at every turn, how writers would change up the part of the process they can control: the workings of the writers’ room.
While they all object to working for free (of course), the deeper frustration among creators is with the length and seeming randomness of the road to a greenlight. “So many steps before the real decision makers actually engage with your project,” says Shawn Ryan, creator of Netflix’s The Night Agent, who has served five times on the Writers Guild of America’s negotiating committee, which establishes the union’s Minimum Basic Agreement with the Hollywood studios every three years.
“The lack of any clear end date,” is Burn Notice creator Matt Nix’s key gripe. Adds one up-and-coming scribe, who served as a lot coordinator during the 2023 WGA strike, “I don’t know that execs realize that to put together a pitch for a TV show we essentially have to break a whole TV show.”
“Deals take so long to make that sometimes the executives who commissioned the work get fired before the writer can even begin!” says another writer, one with dozens of credits in his decades-long career. “They genuinely seem more interested in waiting you out for months until you capitulate on some petty, death-of-a-thousand-paper-cuts concessions that undermine the MBA than in actually striking while the iron is hot.”
Another former showrunner with broadcast and cable series experience points to the pressure to have a show’s budget shaped much earlier in the process, a newer demand from studios and buyers. Until recently, “not everything had to be ‘figured out’ before someone got paid,” this person says. “And ‘figuring it out’ is very uninspiring if you can’t pay your bills.”
If these complaints seem familiar, it’s because they are persistent and significant challenges for writers trying to sustain a career in Hollywood. But my survey doesn’t just reveal the flaws in the system — I also pressed respondents to come up with actionable solutions, and being the creative souls that they are, they had a few great ideas. Their insightful, funny and bold pitches follow.
Before we get to all that, here’s a reminder that sometimes it can take less than a year to get to the series pickup finish line. This just in: Netflix has formally handed out an eight-episode order to the live-action Scooby-Doo series the streamer has been developing since last April. The show, from Berlanti Productions and Midnight Radio, is a prequel that tracks the Scooby Gang’s formation. Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg (Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop, MGM+’s From) serve as writers, exec producers and showrunners. Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and Leigh London Redman of Warner Bros. TV-based Berlanti Productions also exec produce alongside Midnight Radio’s André Nemec and Jeff Pinkner. Casting and a premiere date have not yet been revealed.
Now, read on to learn from Lindelof, Ryan and many more:
Three ideas for making pitches and development more efficient
How the writers room can be a better training ground for new scribes
How actors who become producers are part of the problem
The “power thing” at the studio/buyer level that is keeping the development process so stagnant
Why some are rethinking the WGA’s deal with the studios on mini-rooms
How showrunners are training up-and-coming writers to work within a contracting industry
What rising scribes can do, before they’re hired, to be invaluable in the writers room
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