Interview (Part 3): Amy Berg
My Q&A with a top Hollywood TV showrunner.
Amy Berg is a writer and TV producer whose credits include Leverage, Person of Interest, Eureka, Caper, Da Vinci’s Demons, and the current hit STARZ series Counterpart. I crossed paths with Amy several years ago the way many writers do nowadays: via Twitter. In 2017, I reached out to Amy to do an interview and what followed was a months’ long back and forth via email.
Today in Part 3, Amy walks us through her career as TV writer-producer on such series as Eureka, Person of Interest, Counterpart, and her original series Caper for Hulu and YouTube:
Scott: Okay, let’s talk about your writing-producing career and I think it could be instructive for people to delve into the hierarchy of writers and producers on TV series. Let’s go all the way back to when you were a writer’s assistant. Could you chart your progress from writer’s assistant to writer to supervising producer and so on?
Amy: For my first three years in town, I wrote for two live-action shows on Nickelodeon where I started out as an assistant. I advanced quickly, within months instead of years, but the hard reality of Hollywood set in once those shows ended.
I didn’t want to write kids shows… it was never really an endgame. But I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to make the transition. No one took me seriously. It was like those credits didn’t exist. I needed to start from scratch all over again, but first I needed to buy some time to build up my specs. So I took a couple of temp jobs to learn more about the business. Nickelodeon was such an insular place to work, I really didn’t know much about the industry as a whole. I worked at a talent agency, then a production company. Wrote a pretty good West Wing spec and ended up on the Fox summer drama North Shore.
While there I had time to churn out another spec. It was the first season of Lost and I was really into it. They started out doing POVs of each character on the island and I had an idea to do the dog. So I wrote a spec of the show entirely from the dog’s perspective and it ended up making a bit of a splash in town. I landed on a CBS show calked Threshold that was about the government’s response to an alien invasion. That didn’t last, and I bounced over to a show called The 4400 on the USA Network. I was there for the last two seasons before it was cancelled unceremoniously during the writers strike.
From there I wrote my first spec pilot. It was about an FBI agent tracking a con man that turns out to be her father. Still one of the best things I’ve ever written. And I would never say my spec inspired a certain show with a similar plotline, but I won’t stop anyone else if they want to go there.
The pilot was only on the market for a hot second before I had to take a job to make some cash after the strike. That show was Leverage, where I started as a co-producer for the first season then was double-bumped to supervising producer for season two.
I left after season two to join one of my BFFs who was taking over as showrunner on Eureka. I joined as a co-executive producer and stayed for three wonderful seasons, finishing out the show’s run. I loved that show and loved the people even more.
From there, Syfy hired me to write a miniseries for them. After some infighting at the network about the tone of the project, I let them know I was jumping ship. The next day I joined season one of Person of Interest, which was already in progress. The studio tasked me with helping to breathe a little more life into the characters by infusing the show with a little humor. My first day I was assigned the next script, which was prepping the following week. So I put my head down on went to work. I asked out after the first season. Honestly, I don’t have the stamina anymore for 22-episode seasons. Maybe I never did. That shit is rough.
After that I shot a pilot for TNT starring Geena Davis and Scott Bakula which should have made it to air. And probably would have if we shot the draft I originally wrote. Bygones. But the annoyance of that experience is what led to my creating my own series called Caper for Hulu and YouTube, which I wrote with my good buddy Mike Atherton. We had a budget to shoot nine episodes and it was the most joyous experience of my life. I was both the studio and the showrunner. There was no interference. It was a great reminder of why I wanted to do this for a living. And as a bonus we won top prize at a bunch of festivals and were nominated for a Writers Guild Award.
But after that I needed to work again and so I interviewed to be the showrunner for season three of Da Vinci’s Demons, which had just gone through a creative purge after the second season. I’d been the #2 on a bunch of shows before elevating to showrunner on the Syfy miniseries, the TNT pilot, and then Caper. I didn’t get the gig on Da Vinci’s Demons, but I needed the money so I accepted the job as the #2. The talented gentleman they did hire to run it already had a project in development with the network, so from the beginning I ended up in a quasi co-showrunner position with him and was elevated to full executive producer. By the time we finished shooting, he was already gone and I was running it solo.
And then Counterpart came along…
Scott: Yes, let’s talk about ‘Counterpart’, the Starz series starring J.K. Simmons which debuted this year. Since I follow both you and ‘Counterpart’ creator Justin Marks on Twitter, it was interesting to track the genesis that show’s writer’s room via social media. In fact, I seem to recall one of your tweets about how you had read three pilot scripts for which you had the chance to come on as a producer, and that one of them in particular you hoped would be the one you ended up on. And that turned out to be ‘Counterpart’. So first, did I get that right? And second, how did the series come together? Next, how unusual is it to go from pilot script to a 2-season commitment? Finally, what has your experience been working on that series?
Amy: Starz knew they weren’t going to pick up Da Vinci’s Demons for a fourth season before season three even started because of the high cost and little return for them… they weren’t the studio on it and had none of the foreign rights, which is where the show got its ratings and made its money. So as I was finishing up the show, Starz offered me a couple of their existing series but I declined. I had two different projects in development and didn’t want to hop on anything else right away. At the same time my agents sent over a bunch of scripts to read so I knew what else was out there. I was making my way through the stack, kind of bored, when I got to the script Counterpart. It wasn’t perfect, but it was smart and complicated and didn’t talk down to the audience. It checked a lot of boxes for me. And the arena was similar to something else I’d been toying with. It felt weirdly kismet. So I sent my agents an email saying, “I know I got a lot of other stuff going on, but I kind of want this.” They wrote back, “You know that’s set up at Starz, right?” I had no idea. The cover page only had the title and author.
Justin and I were friendly on Twitter, but we’d never met until the studio bought us lunch. Coming from features he was new to the TV, so they were looking to pair him with an established showrunner. He and I hit it off creatively and that was that.
We got a small writers room together and started breaking stories. At that point the two-season order hadn’t yet been secured. That we earned with two more finished scripts and a pitch meeting in which Justin and I took everyone at Starz and MRC through a season’s worth of character arcs and story ideas. I’d also had the staff help me put together a bound employee handbook for the Office of Interchange, which is the agency where the majority of our characters work. More than just a fun prop, it also showed the network how much thought we’d put into the rules of our world(s). They loved what we’d come up with, so we got the order. Without having shot a single frame, which is pretty remarkable.
Tomorrow in Part 4, Amy shares her thoughts about the changing landscape of television, movies, and streaming services.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Follow Amy on Twitter: @bergopolis
For more exclusive Go Into The Story interviews with screenwriters, TV writers, filmmakers, and industry insiders, go here.
