Showrunner Transcript: Robert & Michelle King (“The Good Wife”)

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 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: Michelle King and Robert King (“The Good Wife”).

And what’s the style of how you write a script together?

RK: When we actually sit down and write the pilot, it’s very much like all hands on deck. We’re structuring it together; we don’t have a writers’ staff at that point, so it’s Michelle and I bouncing ideas off each other. I would say Michelle is probably the more structuralist. I’m probably more about developing character. And then when we get to the show, I would say probably — 

MK: Probably Rob gallops ahead …

RK: We do the outline together; I write the script, Michelle then basically — we talk through the rewriting. The producing duties are split pretty much down the middle. I probably take the lead on editorial, unless Michelle takes the lead on editorial and I fall up. And producing duties are kind of hard. We just kind of split them right down the middle.

How do you decide which ones you’re going to do versus which ones you’re going to have someone else write?

RK: It’s a little bit — we get behind. So we did four in a row, like 213, 214, 215, 216. The thirteenth episode through the sixteenth, and that was really because we were falling behind and it was like we needed to catch up. So we did those four. That was not the original plan. We did the first one just because we could dive in right away and set the tempo. 

MK: Occasionally, ideas are so goofball, like we have something upcoming where Hugo Chávez is a character, the Venezuelan dictator, where you think, Okay, we can’t foist that on a staff member.

RK: And The Social Network one was like that, too. We just, you know, it was like a lot of times it’s like no one else can see, like, “Well, what is it?” Because it’s very particular and it doesn’t touch upon — there’s nothing that kind of has a shared language about it. I mean, usually, if there’s a shared murder, there’s a shared language you can talk about it. But if it’s like, “Okay, this is about suing a movie and it’s Social Network–ish,” I mean, how do you talk about what should that even be about?

For more of the article, go here.