Showrunner Transcript: Robert Corlock (“30 Rock”)

In conjunction with the annual broadcast network upfronts, New York magazine is running a series called “Showrunner Transcripts.” We will feature one each day for the next two weeks on GITS. What’s a showrunner? For a primer, you can go here to Wikipedia. The short answer: “The person who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of a television series.” It’s more than just managing a series. Someone has to guarantee to a network they can deliver 12, 22, or however many episodes for which the series is contracted. That’s the bottom line of a showrunner’s reality.

Today: Robert Corlock (“30 Rock”)

The thing that makes the show so great is that you have all of these wonderfully bizarre, well-fleshed-out characters.

It’s always our goal to have that, with a few exceptions. We don’t know too much about Dr. Spaceman, and that makes him one of the funniest people, because he’s easy to write jokes for because he isn’t quite a human being. He’s just the worst doctor ever, but I guess writes prescriptions easily. We always make it a goal to have everyone be as rounded as they can, but hopefully in a way you haven’t seen before or in a way an audience member doesn’t anticipate. Yeah, they should have a mother, but that mother should be trying to destroy her daughter, and we try to give everyone a full life in our weird idiom. We want to let people in, but we have a certain sensibility that we want to stay true to. If Liz is going to have a conversation with her mother about true love, her mom isn’t just going to say she didn’t tell her that her father wasn’t the first or only man she ever loved, a scene you’ve seen before. In our world, it’s gonna turn out that that first love was Buzz Aldrin, and she’s going to go meet him and scream at the moon with him. And hopefully you get all that value of, “Okay, Liz has this emotional journey and she’s learned something about her mother, and maybe she’s learned something about herself and her own expectations in life, but she’s also gotten to yell at the moon for being out in the day with Buzz Aldrin.” What we try to do, and I don’t think this is too interesting but always helps me as a writer, is that we try to tell emotional stories in as odd a way as we can without distancing ourselves from the emotion and we try to tell our weird stories in as grounded a way as possible.

For more of the article, go here.