Photo: James Minchin III

FOURTEEN CREATORS ON INFLUENCES, FAILURE, AND THE SHOWS THEY WISH THEY’D WRITTEN





Kurt Sutter

Master of the anti-hero and the grimy, violent, Machiavellian evil that (primarily) men do—as evidenced by his FX biker drama Sons of Anarchy.

Previous job: The Shield (writer).

(Read the full interview).



















Robert Carlock

With fellow master jokester Tina Fey, runs the most hard-core meta comedy on TV, NBC’s 30 Rock.

Previous jobs: Joey (exec producer), Friends (producer), SNL (writer).

(Read the full interview).

















Michelle and Robert King

With network TV’s most provocative drama, CBS’s The Good Wife, the Kings have stealthily enriched the common procedural with deep thoughts on corruption, race, and marriage.

(Read the full interview).

















Mike Schur

Together with Greg Daniels, has managed to humanize and sweeten the sitcom mockumentary by populating it with beloved eccentrics, first with NBC’s The Office, then Parks and Recreation.

Previous jobs: The Comeback (writer), SNL (writer).

(Read the full interview).

















Vince Gilligan

The X-Files’quirkiest, most earthbound writer has evolved into TV’s “out there” truth-teller with his disturbing and dangerously funny vision of desperate, middle-class America, AMC’s Breaking Bad.

(Read the full interview).

















Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel

Co–executive producers of the proudly silly, mean-yet-sweet, weirdly addictive (must be all the drinking!) post-Friends sitcom Cougar Town (ABC).

Previous jobs: Scrubs (Lawrence, creator; Biegel, producer), Spin City (Lawrence, co-creator).

(Read the full interview).

















Dan Harmon

The sitcom savant has turned Community (NBC) into a launching pad for ingenious parodies of everything from comedy clichés to war movies—without ever sacrificing story or character.

(Read the full interview).

















Shonda Rhimes

Her Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice (both ABC) have pushed the nighttime soap to juicy, melodramatic, and stylistically over-the-top heights.

(Read the full interview).

















Graham Yost

Excels at smart, droll, character-driven dramas like his charmingly gritty FX series Justified.

Previous job: Boomtown (creator).

(Read the full interview).

















Jason Katims

His family drama, NBC’s Parenthood, is as irresistibly flawed and moving as its central characters.

Previous jobs: Friday Night Lights (exec producer), Roswell (exec producer), Relativity (creator).

(Read the full interview).

















Craig Thomas and Carter Bays

With CBS’s How I Met Your Mother, the duo has successfully merged unabashed romanticism and genuine emotions with an extremely hard-to-pull-off high-concept premise (it’s the Lost of comedies!).

Previous job: The Late Show With David Letterman (writers).

(Read the full interview).

Photo: James Minchin III

MY BEST FAILED PITCH

The Pitch:

“There’s a real script floating around for a show called Time Jack, about a guy who, every time he masturbates, he travels through time. If he hates the time, he whacks off and he’s gone. If he loves it, he can stay—as long as he doesn’t masturbate. The idea is the low point of us as a society, but such a tremendous low point that I wish I’d created it.” —Kevin Biegel

REJECTED

The Pitch:

“The Line followed Tijuana and San Diego police officers who combine to solve border crimes. ABC bought it, and it was our first experience with TV. We were very Bambi-eyed and sure it would get on the air—and then, um, turns out no one really wants to see such a grungy show on network TV.” —Robert King

REJECTED

The Pitch:

“The characters on my show worked in the dream industry, creating the dreams of people assigned to them. The collective unconscious as a Hollywood type of industry. Good luck getting that on air. It’s too Showtime-y even for Showtime.” —Dan Harmon

REJECTED

The Pitch:

“We pitched a bit when we were at Letterman: ‘Don Rickles Insults Animals at the Zoo,’ which is exactly what it sounds like. It kills me that it never got produced. Maybe Letterman will read the inevitable outpouring of support in your comments section and reconsider.” —Carter Bays

REJECTED

The Pitch:

“I wrote a script with my friend Remi Aubuchon called Quarto, about four guys at Cambridge in 1595 who do secret missions for the queen— basically Mission: Impossible meets Shakespeare in Love.” —Graham Yost

REJECTED

Photo: James Minchin III

THE SHOW I WISH I’D CREATED

The Wire

Mike Schur

Shakespeare is the greatest playwright in the English language because every character was three-dimensional. On TV, that was most true of The Wire, which juggled hundreds of characters expertly. And you knew all of them!

This Old House

Kurt Sutter

Not that I’m not creating something, but what we do is very heady, and there’s something satisfying and tangible about a guy with a hammer who, at the end of the show, is looking at something he built.

The Simpsons

Robert Cartlock

More than 400 episodes, some perfect. And think of the back end: the toy sales!

The Deadliest Catch

Craig Thomas

Proves you can take the monotonous act of catching 80,000 identical crabs and turn it into riveting TV. Side note: Watching the exhausted captains guzzling coffee and chain-smoking, terrified they’ll miss their deadline and let everyone down? Closest thing to showrunning I’ve seen depicted on TV.

Breaking Bad

Robert King

The inevitability to the moral slide of the lead character is extraordinary. Even Tony Soprano had to feel he was better than those he killed. Breaking Bad doesn’t have that moral superiority.

Saturday Night Live

Carter Bays

Steady employment for decades, huge cultural impact, and you get to live in New York!

The Twilight Zone

Vince Gilligan

Rod Serling was the first showrunner whose name the country at large actually knew.

The Sopranos

Jason Katims

But I would never have been the guy to make that show.

Lost

Graham Yost

The way they brought in a character and devoted a whole episode to his or her backstory. There’s never been anything like it—other than Gilligan’s Island.

Photo: James Minchin III

ONE THING I’D CHANGE ABOUT NETWORK TV

Mike Schur:

Episodes would vary in length from week to week.

I’m not sad that there are commercials, but every episode of our show has to be exactly 21 minutes and 17 seconds long. It’s unlikely that the optimal length of every episode of our show is exactly 21 minutes and 17 seconds.

Carter Bays:

No more notes from the networks.

Oh God, please don’t let me be the only one who says “No more notes.” If that’s the case … ha ha, just kidding, guys. I’m not Spartacus. I’m just some gladiator. Hail, Caesar!

Vince Gilligan:

Take more risks and assume the audience will go along.

Dan Harmon:

In a world where everyone can watch anything all the time, and where we spend all this money making lots of shitty pilots, why don’t we have special website events where all the pilots are aired and people vote for their favorites? Make this populist medium genuinely populist.

Shonda Rhimes:

The wonderful Mad Men, in its first four seasons, has made as many episodes as we made in seasons one and two of Grey’s Anatomy. After twelve episodes, I’m tired, the crew is tired, everyone is tired. The break of a few months that cable shows get would be amazing.

Jason Katims:

Thirteen-episode cycles twice a year would also allow the writers to write all their scripts before shooting starts. It would raise the level of storytelling, you’d have more time to prep, and that would make the show less expensive to produce. And you should be allowed to say “Jesus” and “goddamn.” How offensive is it? I guess it is. I guess I don’t understand it all.

Graham Yost:

More patience.

Don’t be so quick to cancel shows.

Kurt Sutter:

Stop making decisions based on research data, and hire development executives with degrees in art, literature, and theater instead of marketing, business, and law. If people followed those two rules, TV would be a fuckload better.

Photo: James Minchin III; Makeup by Lizbeth Williamson/Cloutier Remix for Dior Cosmetics (Sagal)

THE SHOWRUNNER CHALLENGE

We asked our panel of creators the following question. “The network is pressuring you to incorporate five trends popular on reality TV into your show: pawnshops, sextuplets, an elaborate ice sculpture, rehab or addiction, and weight loss. How would you do it?” 30 Rock’s Robert Carlock, off the top of his head, came up with the loopiest solution by far, giving you a glimpse into how the wickedly funny and occasionally creepy world of Liz Lemon is created.

“It’s funny, the sextuplets thing touches on something we’ve been talking about all year and I’m hoping we’ll do next year. Which is that Jenna, when she was in Chicago, was constantly selling her eggs to get money to buy a Vespa, and over the course of a couple of days she meets twenty daughters that she has from having sold her eggs. Pawnshop? That would be a way for Liz Lemon to realize her earnest and heartfelt desire to adopt a child by buying a used doll with a crack in its skull and pushing it around in a stroller on the Upper West Side for the rest of her life, until she and Radio Man get married and raise it. Um, ice sculpture? Jack Donaghy is at a fund-raiser for a charity he runs for raising awareness among the poor about not calling non-French sparkling wine Champagne, and there’s an ice sculpture of a mermaid at the event, which he falls in love with and she comes to life. It’s sort of a Mannequin-Splash conceit. And then he’s torn because of his love for both the mermaid and his fellow millionaires at the rich-man club, who would like to serve the mermaid as sushi. Then it becomes sort of an O. Henry conceit, along with The Freshman. So it’s multiple conceits, and then it’s a conceit conceit. He eventually lets her escape into the ocean, never to see her again, after having eaten only a little of her. At the end of the day, Jack’s romantic tendencies get the best of him every time. He wouldn’t eat the mermaid, that’s the thing. He would let her go. At the end of the episode, we’ll discover that the entire series up until this point was a hallucination being had by a celebrity in rehab while straining a stool. So we’ll just pull out, like at the end of St. Elsewhere, on Gary Busey on the toilet. We’ll realize the whole thing was in his imagination. That takes care of rehab, and then for weight loss we’ll weigh every member of the cast before and after the show with their shirts off, because it does work. Especially with Lutz. We keep making him take his shirt off. It’s unfortunate.”

THE SHOW THAT MADE ME WANT TO WRITE FOR TV

Photo: © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved/Everett Collection

The X-Files

The first show I worked on made me want to work in TV—I was a fan before I was a writer. Watching it, I realized how truly cinematic television could be.

Vince Gilligan









Photo: Everett Collection

Late Night With David Letterman

He was my hero as a kid, and I loved SNL and Cheers. The Trojan horse that got me in was that Sam Malone played for the Red Sox. But I ended up loving every character.

Mike Schur









Photo: 2009 FOX Broadcasting

The Simpsons

I learned basic storytelling from all those crazy, violent Hanna Barbera cartoons. And I remember watching The Simpsons and thinking, Wow, it would be fun to sit in a room and write those voices.

Kurt Sutter









Photo: Getty Images

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I was writing films and I adopted a baby and was stuck at home. I watched every episode of Buffy and 24 all at once. I realized TV was where character development was.

Shonda Rhimes









Photo: Everett Collection

The West Wing

The West Wing brought auteurism to TV. And The Sopranos’ first season was a turning point: Feature films were just starting to slide, and TV was becoming the place where adventurous stuff was done.

Robert King









Photo: Robert Phillips/Everett Collection

Hill Street Blues

There were ambitious shows before it, but Hill Street bucked the tradition of stand-alone episodes and wove its characters’ lives through satisfying weekly stories.

Graham Yost









Photo: NBC/Courtesy of the Neal Peters Collection

Late Night With Conan O’Brien

Craig and I were college seniors in ’96 when we started watching Late Night With Conan O’Brien. We had no idea what to do with our lives. The Masturbating Bear changed everything.

Carter Bays









Photo: Everett Collection

M.A.S.H.

I wanted to do comedy but didn’t want to just write jokes. M.A.S.H. showed how to mix goofy with life-or-death stakes.

Bill Lawrence









Photo: © Paramount TV/Everett Collection

Cheers

It had an intriguing darkness in its DNA: a washed-up relief pitcher and ex-alcoholic (who owns a bar!) surrounded by people who drink all day. And yet we understood and cared about them all.

Craig Thomas

TO TWEET OR NOT TO TWEET

I’m obsessed with Twitter—it’s my whole identity.

Dan Harmon













I love it. It’s the closest thing we have to a live studio audience.

Carter Bays













Yes. When a 2.8 [demo rating] keeps you on the air, you can maintain that just by treating your fans with respect and answering their questions.

Bill Lawrence













No. Writers by definition are people who are observing things. It’s important for me to be just a person and not singled out.

Jason Katims













Absolutely not. It seems like the biggest waste of time to me.

Vince Gilligan













I don’t get tweeting about TV. Don’t you have to go back and watch the show again after you’ve tweeted through it?

Robert Carlock

CONTROL FREAK OR COLLABORATOR?

MY WORST WRITING EXPERIENCE

Photo: Todd Williamson/WireImage

“Getting fired–slash–quitting The Sarah Silverman Show. I was just getting my sea legs as a head writer, and when Comedy Central asked me what my strategy was going to be, I made the mistake of being sincere and saying, ‘I’ve never done this before, so my philosophy is, Let’s jump in and start doing it wrong and adapt.’ And they smiled and nodded, and the first day of work there was a writer, hired without my knowing and getting paid twice as much to effectively run the show from underneath me.”—Dan Harmon

“Joey. It was a talented staff, but we couldn’t figure out how to make it work. We were up until five in the morning, pounding our heads and watching it become a punch line before our eyes. The Dana Carvey Show wasn’t a bad experience, but the show also failed with incredible talent bringing their A game [cast: Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert; writers: Louis C.K., Robert Smigel, Jon Glaser, and Charlie Kaufman]. Which proves there are no sure things in this world.”—Robert Carlock

GREATEST MOMENTS IN SHOWRUNNER HISTORY

Photo: © Paramount TV/Everett Colleciton

Mike Schur: When Coach died on Cheers and Woody Harrelson just showed up and started working and there was no stutter step even. Vic Mackey shooting Terry Crowley in the pilot of The Shield—breathtaking and kind of insane: The show’s hero kills a fellow cop in the first episode! It was the difference between a really good, compelling, well-written show and legendary TV. The addition of Giancarlo Esposito’s character on Breaking Bad. Up to that point, you didn’t understand how big the crystal-meth business is or where the main characters fit in. That ticked the show up a whole level for me. And when Tony Soprano killed Christopher in The Sopranos’ final season—at once inevitable and shocking.

Photo: Comedy Central

Kevin Biegel: South Park’s handling of Chef, when Isaac Hayes left. Parker and Stone could have ignored it, or been petty and mean, or mad. Instead, the episode was sweet, bewildered, sad, and incredibly loving. Chef shit himself when he died—I thought it was perfect. Also, every time Miami Vice was funny: I have always been impressed that it could be badass and humorous at the same time. And how Jason Katims and his staff at Friday Night Lights made every damn game exciting, even though almost every one included some version of “The Lions/ Panthers are down with three seconds to go.”

Photo: WB/Courtesy of the Neal Peters Collection

Craig Thomas: There are so many daring Buffy the Vampire Slayer moments, like the musical episode, or the one with no talking at all, or when Buffy’s mother dies and there’s not one drop of music, creating an eerie silence that felt all too real. Each announced “Wake up, people, we’re doing something different!”









Photo: Reisig and Taylor/ABC via Getty Images

Graham Yost: The “Walkabout” episode of Lost in the first season, when they reveal that John Locke was paralyzed but can walk on the island. When the character played by Diana Muldaur on L.A. Law fell down the elevator shaft to her death—at once dramatic and absurd; twenty years later, and I’m still laughing. And I’m one of the few people who liked the end of St. Elsewhere. I understand why people hate it—it feels like a cheat—but it’s a TV series, and let’s have room for a little poetry.

Photo: © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All Rights Reserved/Everett Collection

Bill Lawrence: Colonel Henry Blake dies on M.A.S.H., and Radar tells the cast and audience simultaneously. Woody replaces Coach on Cheers. Arrested Development—the first TV show only for comedy writers.











Photo: CBS/Courtesy of the Neal Peters Collection

Michelle King: The creation of Archie Bunker. That you could build a whole world around a racist is one of the chanciest things imaginable.

Dan Harmon: Cheers, because they proved lack of flukiness over and over—not only Woody replacing Coach, but the huge will-they-or-won’t-they between Sam and Diane. And then they jumped the shark and did it and it was still great. And Frasier becoming a lovable character.

Photo: © HBO/Everett Collection

Kurt Sutter: Tony killing Big Pussy in The Sopranos—to see one anti-hero knock off another—and a regular—was huge.

When Dick Van Dyke skips around the ottoman during the intro, after tripping over it for the first few seasons. It was the first time I thought, Oh, there’s someone making creative choices behind the scenes. Ultimately, I heard it was because he got sober—that was his acknowledgment, to say, “Hey, I’m not tripping over shit anymore.”

MY SHOWRUNNER PHILOSOPHY

Remain calm, no matter how desperately your brain is trying to convince you to freak out. —Mike Schur

Care deeply about your characters—so deeply that you delude yourself into thinking that they’re real human beings and quite possibly your best friends—does this sound as lonely and creepy as I’m hoping? If you don’t care that much, how can you expect an audience to? —Craig Thomas

Story first, jokes after. I often hear myself saying “Jack and the Beanstalk” in the writers’ room, in response to too much logic employed early in the story-making process. Community is story-driven, so in the early phases, I insist there be no wrong answers until they’re proven wrong. Later on you shore things up, to make sure your foot doesn’t fall through the deck. —Dan Harmon

You can always create more plot; you can’t create more audience.We heard of a showrunner who was holding on to his reveals; the first six episodes were set up, with all these surprises popping up in the season’s second half. The show was canceled after the first three episodes. In other words, don’t save a kiss between Will and Alicia until the fifth year; you’ll never make it. —Robert King

Listen to yourself at the end of the day, but listen to other people a lot. —Kevin Biegel

Hire as many different kinds of writers as possible.We’ve got a midwestern hick girl, a couple of Boston Harvard douchebags, including myself, a Southern California burnout genius, and an African-American standup comic. What makes it work is that we all speak the same comic shorthand. You can get the most talented people in a room, and they can spend the whole time butting heads. —Robert Carlock

When I was making the pilot for Grey’s Anatomy, the director said, “You answer questions so quickly. You don’t take any time to think, and you don’t obsess over the right or wrong answer.” I looked at him like he was crazy, because it had never occurred to me. I realized there’s no time for perfection. And that’s coming from a perfectionist. —Shonda Rhimes

See Also

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Interviews by Joe Adalian, Kera Bolonik, Kyle Buchanan, Mike Flaherty, Willa Paskin, and Jada Yuan.