40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
…Um, as long as you have an iSomething or other access to iTunes, that is:
Our Beloved Leader, LB, has seen this film and thinks it’s “Perfect. Exactly what it’s like to run a show. Except with less terror. Every aspiring TV writer should see this before it’s too late.”
Are we thrill obsessed? Well, yeah, kinda. Oh, heck, admit it, we are. As writers we’re even more aware of it than average.
You don’t think so?
How about this? Notice most stories we tell end when the good guy wins, when the hero marries the heroine, when the dragon is slain (literally or figuratively). Lots of people run around and do lots of stuff before that happens. There’s movement, action of some type. As writers we don’t pay much attention to the quiet times, the things people do every day like sitting on the couch reading or walking the dog or fixing dinner – at least not unless it’s a precursor to more action. That stuff would create major yawns in readers or watchers of movies or TV shows.
Not a joke! Not a parody! Not an imaginary post! The following is a fascinating tale of treachery and deceit in the TV trenches. Cuz getting a series on the air is guerilla fighting at its most intense. (Well, without the bullets.) It’s read and learn time, gang, so…well, um, you know, read and learn:
Lost was a television show that explored the human condition through charged notions: good vs evil, nature vs nurture, free will vs predetermined destiny, the philosophy of mortality and the redemptive nature of man. The ABC show used devices such as mysticism, scientific exploration, and religion — all permeated by an overwhelming sense of survival — to get there.
by John OstranderOnce upon a time, when I was a boy, TV consisted of the three networks, one independent channel, and before long, one “education” channel. (“They actually had TV when you were a boy, Uncle John?” Yes. Quiet, you.) Every fall, each of the networks took a week to trot out their new and returning shows and they each took turns. And, if memory serves, that pretty much was it for the season.
If you were into superhero comics (and I was despite my mother), there were damn slim pickings. There was The Adventures of Superman, of course, and that was played pretty straight albeit it was considered a children’s show. Later on, there was the Batman series that was fun and interesting to me at start but got old real fast. Something along the superhero lines was Zorro. I loved that show. Guy Williams was my Zorro. Dressed all in black, masked, fighting injustice – yeah, I’d group him in with the superheroes.
But that was essentially it.
This profile from The Guardian does a good job of convincing some of us here at TVWriter™ that we ought to be in, oh, London, or Cardiff than the smouldering bowels of LA:
Despite having been up late last Monday night at a party marking the transmission of his latest TV drama, Jack Thorne was back next morning at the north London library where he writes seven days a week. He aims to work from 10am to 8pm, shifting to a coffee bar when the library closes early.
Thorne, 35, needs to put in those shifts because his scripts are in such demand, having achieved the rare double of winning two Bafta awards at the same ceremony (in 2012): best mini-series for Channel 4’s This is England ’88 (part of a longrunning recent-historical project with director Shane Meadows) and best drama series for BBC3’s supernatural show The Fades.