Category: By TVWriter.Com

Anybody Remember ‘Ironside?’

Over the course of 196 episodes from 1967 to 1975 on NBC, Raymond Burr and his crew fought crime on the back lot of Universal City troubled streets of San Francisco thanks to Ironside’s (Burr) wheelchair and specially equipped van. (Hey, it had room for the wheelchair.)

Among the many big name writers of that time who joined Ironside’s pool of freelancers were such luminaries as:

  • Collier Young
  • Sy Salkowitz
  • True Boardman
  • Robert Van Scoyk
  • Sandy Stern
  • Stephen J. Cannell
  • Mark Rodgers
  • Adrian Spies
  • Evan Hunter
  • Robert Ward
  • Liam O’Brien
  • Joel Oliansky
  • Hindi Brooks
  • And many others, including – wait for it – a newbie named Larry Brody

That’s right, our Beloved Leader himself. And now, TVWriter™ is proud to present the following newly discovered and highly beloved mementos of one of the 3 occasions LB ventured onto Ironside’s  turf, discovered by the King of Golden Age TV himself, the illustrious Herbie J Pilato: read article

Allie Theiss: Daniel Thomsen’s Approach to TV Writing Success – Part 2

by Allie Theiss

Time now for the second part of our conversation with writer-producer Daniel Thomsen of TIME AFTER TIME, WESTWORLD, ONCE UPON a TIME, and other fine TV shows. Making it in Hollywood is hard in itself but isn’t the end of the road. You have to keep your career going too! Danny tells us how he’s handling the challenge:

What path do you recommend a budding TV writer take to get hired onto a show?

I’ve worked in a lot of writers rooms over the years, and if you’re going by the numbers, the vast majority of first-time staff writers get their gigs in one of two ways: They’re promoted from an assistant desk, or they come through a studio program. (Most of the studios have great programs that are designed to help writers from underrepresented backgrounds.) I always recommend that people try to go through one of those doors because that’s the path of least resistance. read article

TVWriter™ Don’t-Miss Posts of the Week – August 21, 2017

Happy Eclipse! Take good care of your retinas because it’s time for TVWriter™’s  Monday look at our 5 most popular blog posts of the week ending yesterday. They are, in order:

Looking for TV Pilot Scripts? read article

Time to Get Your Script in for the Humanitas Prize Competiiton

The Writers Guild of America wants us all to know that “HUMANITAS is pleased to announce a Call for Entries for the 43rd annual HUMANITAS Prize Awards. The winners will be announced at the HUMANITAS Prize Awards held in February 2018.”

Well, not exactly all of us. The Humanitas Prize has been a profoundly important contest over the years, but it has a catch. A production based on the submitted teleplay “must have had a national release on Television (Broadcast, Cable, Internet and Satellite),” and a screenplay must have been released theatrically in the year of the contest, in this case, 2017.

So, yikes!, yeah, to enter you’ve got to be some kind of a pro. While you’re mulling that over, here are the full deets: read article

Allie Theiss: Daniel Thomsen’s Approach to TV Writing Success – Part 1

by Allie Theiss

Writer Daniel Thomsen has been at the top of TVWriter™’s radar for a long time and has worked on some of this  minion’s favorite shows (TIME AFTER TIME, WESTWORLD, ONCE UPON A TIME, among many others). I’m delighted to have had the chance to talk to him about his enviable career.

When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?

I grew up during the 1990s, in the rural rustbelt, before there was much attention given to writers in television. I was a passionate STAR TREK fan, but all that meant was I watched every new episode of TNG and DS9. It fed my storytelling imagination, but I didn’t pay attention to the names of the writers or anything like that. It just never occurred to me that I could write stories to make a living. That wasn’t my world. read article