While TV’s fraternity of comedy writers continues to recruit from Harvard or the local standup circuit, character-driven storylines and the need for realistic scenes in hospitals and on witness stands means eclectic drama-scribe ensembles.

“TV structure you can pick up in an afternoon,” muses Rene Balcer, “Law & Order’s” executive producer and 1997 Emmy winner who began his career as a combat cameraman. “Of the people I have on staff now, for half of them, this is their first professional writing gig. They were attorneys or other types of things.

“You also look for life experience, and that’s not tied to age,” he says. “It’s experience with a wide variety of people and cross-cultural and socioeconomic lines. People who have been through the mill a little bit.”

After struggling in the feature film trenches, Balcer plugged in to TV after success with a movie of the week he was asked to pen. He joined the staff of “Law & Order” as a result of the telepic.

“I am not necessarily looking for a background in television,” says “NYPD Blue’s” five-time Emmy-winning co-creator David Milch.

“You have to have, more than specific training, an enormous amount of stamina. When you look for someone who is capable of doing that amount of work, you don’t look for something extra, you look for something missing.

“To generate that intensity over a long period, there are aspects of a person’s psyche which, for one reason or another, don’t need to be gratified or don’t yet exist.”

Perhaps proving Milch’s point, “Homicide: Life on the Street’s” 1998 Emmy-nominated writer James Yoshimura landed “in the box” after an infamous run-in with his future boss, Tom Fontana.

“I was in New York in 1988 as a Juilliard playwright-in-residence, and I was at Eric Overmeyer’s, who was writing for ‘St. Elsewhere,’ ” recounts Yoshimura. “I ended up in an argument with some really drunk guy with a ponytail and an entourage. He came up to me and said, ‘Oh, you’re one of these theater assholes who doesn’t like television!’ We ended up in such an argument that this guy’s spittle was flying at me. I kept thinking, ‘If he spits on me one more time, I’m going to whack him!’ I called Eric the next day and asked who the jerk was. Eric said, ‘That’s Tom Fontana.’

“Funny thing is he just called and said the same thing about you, but he also wants to know if you’ll send him a couple of your plays.”’

After writing an episode of an ill-fated Fontana project titled “High” (a drama series detailing contemporary high school), Yoshimura became a Chicago-based freelancer for “Homicide” before relocating to Baltimore to join the series full time.

“What I look for is someone who has a point of view that moves me,” asserts John Tinker, an executive producer of “Chicago Hope” with credits on “St. Elsewhere” and “L.A. Law.” “I never want to read spec work. I’ll read pilots, features or even prose, but I don’t want someone aping David Milch or David Kelley. And if they understand drama, they can adapt to the artificial four-act form of television.”

“The Sopranos” creator David Chase began writing for TV after his dream of muscling into features was fitted with cement sneakers.

“I wanted to make short films, but realized they were of little interest to anybody in the business,” Chase says. “Then I thought since a paper and pencil are free, you could write a script.”

After stints on “I’ll Fly Away” and “Northern Exposure,” and five months in his native New Jersey to direct and produce his current HBO hit, Chase has found that dramas shot on location influence a show’s writing and look, rarely a concern for comedic fare.

“I insist the (‘Homicide’) staff lives in Baltimore,” agrees New York-based Fontana, who also executive produces HBO’s “Oz” and describes himself as a former wildly unsuccessful playwright.

“In my experience, you cannot write about a city unless you’ve eaten in the restaurants, tried to find a parking space and done things people cope with. More detail comes out.

“There are people who live in Los Angeles who write about the East Coast and then go to their Jacuzzi. I lived in L.A. for six years and my writing partner and I used to joke that we’d be there so long, we’d end up doing a story about someone being in someone else’s parking space.”