Week One

It's going to be tough to keep up with this blog, and I say that knowing that I didn't do a very respectable job when I was positively unemployed, but maybe what I'll try and do is update the major comings-and-goings of the week, once a week. Let's see how that works. So...

Week One:

We fixed up episodes two and three, and "broke" episodes six, seven, eight, and nine. By breaking, I mean we all sat in a room and stared at the writer's assistant poised with his pen in front of a dry erase white board. Then we teased out story lines from the past episodes and tried to figure out what Had to happen, Should happen, and Could happen in the following episodes, in order to make it believable, entertaining and dramatically plausible. This sounds very academic. Really it's a guessing game, it's six or seven people pitching ideas out to the crowd and doing a lot of head scratching and coffee sipping and saying "well what if he..." and "maybe she could..." and "fuck that, that's retarded." It's totally unscientific and completely entertaining in and of itself. I have to say that the show is very plot heavy and thus extremely confusing... and we're the writers. But for me, the new guy, it's fascinating to see how it's done.

I'm a screenwriter by trade and for the most part it is a solitary, lonely process. This is collaborative, and it is collaborative in the most crucial phase of writing, the phase when nothing makes sense and you need someone else to tell you if your idea sucks or the direction your taking is boring or if the way out of the jam that you came up with is totally implausible. It's great. Plus, the lunches are catered, so it's really a pampering.

There are some great people on the show, and I'm going to have to start being very careful about names and places and specifics on this blog from now on; it was one thing to be chatty about this stuff when I was a nobody, but now that someone might actually read this stupid blog, I'm going to have to figure out how to grant the people I work with the respectful anonymity they deserve. Plus, several of the "consultants" on the show are reformed criminals. I don't need to be stepping on any toes and unreforming their criminal tendencies. I could very well wake up in the trunk of a car somewhere far from the Mexican border.

So that's where it stands right now. We're going to be breaking more shows this week, so it will probably be more of the same: confusion, laughter, great ideas from everyone in the room, and lots and lots of coffee...