Transcript: Should You Write TV With Friends or Strangers?

Rob Long on the right alchemy for a writers room

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

In olden times — or back in the day, as the kids say — as if they have any idea what that day was even like — but back in the olden day, if you were writing a television comedy, you'd gather the writing staff into a room, and they'd talk out — sometimes yell out — the rewrite, with each word or joke pitch copied down in furious shorthand, mostly, or something called "fast notes" or even, as the people in the world who knew shorthand were gathered up by the Reaper himself, there appeared a bunch of enterprising young assistants who could type really fast, and so computers began to appear in the writers room.

Which meant computer screens, which meant, eventually, large computer screens for everyone in the room to look at, which to my mind anyway was not progress.  

Was not an improvement.

Because a room where nine people, say, are all looking at a page of a script on a large computer monitor is a room where nine people are arguing about where a comma should be, or how sincerely is spelled, or whether the line needs a dash.  

In other words, it becomes a room of nitpickers and fine tuners, grammar mavens and ultimately people who stay late and exhaust themselves.

It's also a place where personal choices, like which keystrokes an assistant prefers to use to save or highlight text or cut something to the clipboard — and most software packages have at least three ways to do all of those things — is in full view, with everyone staring at the same screen, those choices also become part of the conversation.

“Shift click! Shift click!” a writer once snapped, over and over again, at a writers assistant who preferred to use the mouse.  

“Don't use the mouse!” shouted the writer. “Shift click! Come on!”

“But I like using the mouse,” said the assistant. “I don't care,” said the writer. “Shift click is more efficient.”  

But those are hard patterns to change, and the assistant couldn't change them, so every rewrite became, in addition to a battleground over commas and spellings, a turf war over the mouse. When the rest of the staff saw the cursor heading up to the Edit button on the big screen, they all held their breath.