THR Roundtable: TV Showrunners

From THR:

Despite achieving golden-boy status this year for his debut series True Detective, Nic Pizzolatto, 38, briefly reverted to starstruck fanboy on an April evening when five giants of television joined him inside a downtown L.A. warehouse to swap tales from the TV writer trenches.

And who could blame him? Present was last year’s drama series Emmy winner, Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan, 47, who braved a gnarly commute from Burbank, where he and his team were prepping the first episode of the Bad spinoff, Better Call Saul. Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, 48, a four-time Emmy winner for best drama series, was fresh from his season-seven premiere but quick to share his stress over the dreaded task of writing the show’s final episodes. Carlton Cuse, 55, the Zen-like Emmy-winning executive producer of Lost and co-creator of A&E’s Bates Motel, caught up with pal Gilligan as Oscar winner and Emmy veteran Aaron Sorkin, 52 — shooting the third and final season of The Newsroom and casting his Steve Jobs biopic for Sony — joked that his plan, for once, was to “not talk at all.” (Didn’t happen.) And Ann Biderman, 62, an Emmy winner for NYPD Blue, happily took a few hours off from shooting season two of her gritty Showtime drama Ray Donovan to meet peers and talk shop — so long as no one asked her the dreaded question: What is it like to be a woman writing such a manly television series?

Excerpts:

Some say killing off characters has become a lazy plot device, designed to shock and help a series stand out in a crowded TV environment. Is there any truth to that?

BIDERMAN I don’t think you’re doing it for that reason. You’re not thinking, “I must have that happen in episode seven.” It has to feel inevitable in some way or it’s gratuitous to think, “I need this many bodies.” Really good storytelling should have this sense of inevitability to the characters dying.

WEINER But the audience does have expectations. I remember being on The Sopranos, and people asking me, “When’s Tony going to whack somebody?”

BIDERMAN There are those.

WEINER More people died on The Sopranos than the mob had killed during those seven years!

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You’re [Pizzolatto] writing season two with a new story and characters. How will you keep the essence that makes it True Detective?

PIZZOLATTO I’m treating it like this year’s novel. It’s going to be the same genre, and what carries over is the authorial vision, the authorial voice. The same way you can pick up a book by a particular author. You have your favorite book by that author, and then his lesser works. I might have built myself a nice coffin here. But writing got me into this, and writing’s going to have to get me out. There’s a way in this business — I mean, I just started — but you have to get off on the pressure, right?

WEINER But you have to find a way to not become incapacitated by the pressure. What I found is that I am a person who feels better when I’m writing — as hard as it is.

CUSE I think it was David Milch who says, “Never believe anything you think about yourself as a writer when you’re not writing.”

SORKIN That’s great.

WEINER But we’ve all sat next to somebody in the trenches who was completely incapacitated, unable to think as well as they can when they’re not, and you’re sort of like, “Just do it.” There is a lot of luck involved — it’d be stupid to pretend like there wasn’t — but there is a tenaciousness that requires multiple rejections and keeping your head when you see people being incapacitated next to you.

SORKIN A healthy fear of failure helps, too. I have a lot of experience with failure, and I hate it. It’s going to happen again, but it’s like electroshock therapy. So combined with the pressure that you put on yourself, that’s pretty much the jet fuel for writing. You know when you’re not [writing well], when you’re slogging through it and it’s all coming like molasses, you know something’s wrong. But when you’re writing well, there’s nothing like it. It’s like the golfer who hacks his way around a golf course all day long, but then for some reason, you don’t know why, just hits a beautiful shot. That’s the reason they keep coming back to the golf course.

WEINER Do you have a nonsports analogy for some of us? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

SORKIN I don’t play golf, either, but surely you can understand the metaphor.

WEINER I’m perpetuating a stereotype, which is 100 percent accurate.

GILLIGAN I think about failure all the time, and I’m the same as you — I hate it. It scares the hell out of me, keeps me awake at night. But when I’m being really honest with myself, the only thing

I ever learn from is failure. Because Breaking Bad is the rare success I’ve had in my career, I don’t know what to take from it. I’ve never actually solved a Rubik’s cube, but …

WEINER This [metaphor] is working better for me. (Laughs.)

GILLIGAN Finally, you get it right, and you’re like, “Wow, I got that. How the hell am I ever going to do that again?”

WEINER I think we don’t learn from it, on some level. Going to [Mad Men’s season seven] premiere and seeing the show go on the air, I was like, “I just keep sticking my neck out there. Why do I keep doing this?”

PIZZOLATTO “I’m painting a target on my back.”

WEINER Yeah, it’s like, “Who needs punching?” But the glory is the work and coming here and having people say that they watch the show and enjoy it. I don’t want to get too deep into the psychological profile of a writer, but we have a lot in common. There is something about being heard and the chance to have that sort of controlled communication that I think is worth all the failures.

PIZZOLATTO But maybe we should differentiate between the types of success because there’s something that might hit an audience really big that you’re not satisfied with.

SORKIN I know exactly what you’re talking about.

PIZZOLATTOI think there needs to be a kind of personal meter there. It’s important for any creator to always have the audience in mind, but be careful of what your yardsticks are.

GILLIGAN That’s good advice [but] hard to take.

PIZZOLATTO Well, if you stay off the Internet, it’s easy.

GILLIGAN That’s the first rule: Stay the hell off the Internet. Except for the porn. (Laughs.)

WEINER That is a very hard thing.

PIZZOLATTO Yeah, the first month of the show, I was still reading comment sections.

WEINER You can’t do that. Don’t do that!

PIZZOLATTO They had an intervention with me. Everybody sat me down.

WEINER Good luck if you can [stay away]. You’ve got to go to Promises Malibu or something. You’re going to have to go into rehab every once in a while. It’s irresistible; especially if things go well, you get drawn back in again.

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