Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show Page #2

and see if people like it.

And people liked it.

We feel the same way

about this season.

This season,

people are still trying to find it.

If you have to remember only

one thing, it's four words.

Quality scripts on time.

If you don't have quality scripts,

then what's the point

of doing any of this?

But if quality scripts

don't come on time,

you're gonna be off the air.

If your script is late,

it's not enough

to simply say, well, it's good.

I don't care if it's

the fourth day of prep.

You got 180 people that are

trying to do their job,

and you've just made their job

so much more difficult.

You've made your budget soar

and when push comes to shove,

all things being equal,

when the network and the studio

look at the hot costs

and look at what the show has done,

they'll say, either we wanna be

in business with that person

again or we don't.

Nothing will get you out of it

quicker than arrogance,

ignorance and being, uh,

over budget and behind schedule.

You know,

studios tend not to like that.

I think there is

a renaissance going on in TV.

I think it's a combination of

so much of feature writing

has gone downhill,

and the middle class of feature writing

has disappeared.

So, I think a lot of people

who really felt frustrated,

come to TV and go, "Oh, my god,

who gave us all this freedom?"

It might be less money but, wow,

I have stories I wanna tell.

I'm gonna tell them.

As difficult and as time

consuming and as stressful

as it can be, I mean,

creatively to be able to, you know,

tell these stories and uh,

have the control over it that I do,

uh, is, is such a rare thing.

You know, there are a lot of people

who are great writers

who really don't necessarily

enjoy the process.

And I really do.

I love the first draft

as much as I love the rewrites.

The idea of

really having those characters

come alive in my head

and hearing the words is just...

it's, it's the rush for me.

Your ambition every time

you're making an episode

is for it to be the best episode

that you've ever made.

But the reality of the situation is,

we're writing a script every ten days.

And, you know, we began to

realize like, every episode

is not gonna be a home run.

And we started looking

at the seasons as a whole,

as opposed to a sort of episode

by episode analysis.

But at the end of the day,

the legacy of the show is gonna be,

there's six seasons up on a shelf

and you can watch 'em

one after the other.

So the bad episodes are gonna

come out in the wash,

and the good episodes are also

gonna come out in the wash.

All that's gonna matter is, you know,

what are the peaks and valleys

of the storytelling as a whole?

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