If you thought the flood of new shows being presented on, well, on all manner of video media for the last half decade was overwhelming, prepare your water-treading skills, brothers and sisters, because the deluge has barely begun!
The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV
by Jonah Weiner
When Nick Weidenfeld heard what happened at HBO last summer, he was thrilled. “Everyone I knew was texting that article around, saying, ‘What the [expletive]!’?” Weidenfeld, an independent TV producer, recently recalled. A lot of people who work in Hollywood were spooked by the news, but not him: “I thought it was amazing.”read article
EDITOR’S NOTE: Current Writers Guild of America policy regarding agents, agencies, and TV series packaging were backed by a solid 77% of the voters in this year’s election. Solidarity! for the win. Here’s the Guild’s official announcement.
The Writers Guild of America West today announced the results of its 2019 Officers and Board of Directors election.read article
Cord Cutters News’ Luke Bouma gives us a heads-up about what not to expect – and not to do – when you move forward into what appears to be the inevitable future of Home Electronic Entertainment.
By which we mean the home entertainment medium formerly known as – yeppers! – TV.read article
In this excerpt from his book, Generation Friends, Saul Austerlitz meets the past of successful TV writing and discovers that it’s the present and future as well.
by Saul Austerlitz
Generation Friends, by Saul Austerlitz, to be published on September 17 by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Every writer knew the sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. David Crane would enter the room, toting a script full of notes scribbled in the margins. He would sit down in his chair and begin drumming his fingers on the table before announcing, “All right, we’ve got a lot of really good stuff here.” The assembled writers would silently groan, knowing that this was Crane-ian code for a full script rewrite. Everything was out, and it was time to start again.
“Good enough” was not a concept Crane, or Marta Kauffman, understood or accepted. One day during the first season, writer Jeff Astrof approached Crane with a proposal. “Look,” he told Crane, “right now we work one hundred percent of the allotted time and we have a show that’s one hundred. I believe that if we worked fifty percent of the time we’d have a show that’s seventy-five, so maybe we work seventy-five percent of the time and have a show that’s like a ninety.” Crane instantly rejected the proposal: “Absolutely not. The show has to be one hundred.” There might have been a faster way to get the work done. But this was Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s show, and their room.read article
