EPISODE 104: THE TIME OF THE PREACHER

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

EPISODE 104: THE TIME OF THE PREACHER
For much of the last year I had the incredible opportunity to work as a consultant and then a staff writer on the new AMC television show “Preacher”.

It was an extremely interesting job, and one a lot of people ask me about. So I thought I might share a little bit about what that world is like from the inside.

TEASER: WHO'S (NOT) THE BOSS
So here’s the first thing – and it’s the one that often surprises people: in television the writer, not the director, rules the roost.

When you hear about movies, you almost never hear about the writers who wrote them (which by the way writers REALLY love; #ThanksObama). No, you hear about the director, and that’s because ultimately the vision of a film rests with them. Once a writer sells their script, it’s usually out of their hands. The studio, the director, the stars all make their own adjustments, sometimes radical ones, maybe even hire other writers to rewrite the whole thing. And then the director sees it to fruition.

In television, on the other hand, the central person is the showrunner, aka the head writer. Every aspect of what you see on screen – the stories, the look, the casting, the editing – goes through them. The showrunner hires the directors who shoot the episodes; and their job is to fulfill the vision of the show. The director who shoots the pilot can be very important, as they help establish the look and style of the show. But even that director is there to serve the vision of the showrunner, rather than vice versa.

SUCK ON THAT, SPIELBERG!

There are literally no funny pictures of Steven Spielberg online. The man is untouchable.

ACT I: THERE IS NO “I” IN TEAM (BUT THERE IS ONE IN "CONTRIBUTE", SO I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO THINK)
The second (and main) thing you have to know about television, though, is that it is endlessly collaborative. Every step, from the creation of story ideas to the final edit that we see on our television, is the effort of groups of people, led by the showrunner.

The “Preacher” writing staff this year consisted of the showrunner, seven writers and the writers’ room assistant (who has the awful/incredible/impossible job of trying to keep track of everything the writers say and then sending that out in a form that is coherent each night, and also having a life/surviving). Our senior writers – who were listed onscreen as co-executive producer and consulting producer had tons of experience. One had run a show herself, and could generate thousands of ideas a minute (really); the other had written movies, been on a show, and knew really well how to contribute.

The rest of us had almost no experience in television. One guy had written on a television show and done lots of theater. Two of the others were also playwrights; one was having a script produced as a film. One had worked as an assistant on another show and done a bunch of other things.

And then there was me.

If you’ve been wondering, this is what I look at. Some people say I look like Tina Yothers. I don’t know, I don’t see it.

To have so many young writers together on one television show is really unusual. Generally you might have one newbie and lots of others with different levels of experience. But our boss liked the idea of taking a lot of fresh talent and then helping them grow as a group. Which is an incredibly generous way of thinking when you’re trying to create your first television show.

ACT II: TIME TO EAT...ER MAKE...THE DONUTS
So here’s how "the room" (as it's called) worked: each day we would come into a conference room with one long desk in the center, couches and comfy chairs in the back – good places to move to when you were SICK OF LOOKING AT YOUR EMPTY SMILING FACE -- and corkboards on all the walls with past and present episode beats (aka significant moments) laid out on long series of notecards. So basically, crazy person walls.

No really. It was sort of like that. And time in the room was definitely a flat circle, too.

Bizarrely, out the window from our room we could see Blessed Sacrament Church, one of the two Jesuit churches in Los Angeles. CLEARLY, it was a sign.

(Disbelievers (aka sign-haters), try to get your head around this: our room “broke” (aka finished writing all the episodes) on Holy Thursday. We debuted on television on Pentecost. And we finished our first season – wait for it – on the feast of St. Ignatius.

DON’T YOU EVER TELL ME THIS ISN’T ALL ABOUT ME

Each day, we’d start with a little conversation about stuff going on with us or stuff we’d seen -- writers love to talk shop about other shows/movies (and also smack). Then, when there was absolutely no further way of stalling, we would choose a place to get lunch from.

(There is always a further way of stalling.)

Then, finally we'd look to where we had left off on whatever episode we were working on, and start pitching new ideas.

And with the exception of an hour break, we would be in that room doing that, all together, 10-6pm every day.

Yes, there are endless snacks (provided for us by another generous assistant, who I’m pretty sure wanted to get us fat. There is definitely such a thing as the freshman 15 in Hollywood).

Yes, you're allowed to leave the room when you need to.

Yes, it is possible for an entire group to get stuck at the same time. (And it's awful.)

And yes, at times you do drive each other crazy.

“Preacher” was I think a little different than some other shows, in that our hours were very reasonable. As I understand it, on some shows there’s no clear sense of when you’re going home day to day. It’s whenever the work gets done/the showrunner wants to leave.

Our show was also very different in the level of our collaboration. Every single image and bit of dialogue that you see in “Preacher” was workshopped together. Every opening shot, every closing shot, camera move. Everything.

Other shows, you definitely sketch out the main moments in each character’s story, pitching great/key/funny bits of dialogue. But the writer assigned the episode ends up doing a bit more of the legwork themselves.
But our showrunner had spent five years on “Breaking Bad”, which also used this beat by beat together approach – and to great success, I guess, if you like “Breaking Bad”.

And if you don’t like “Breaking Bad”:

ACT III: KILLING YOUR DARLINGS
That’s not to say that everything you saw on “Preacher” came from the room, though. Because here’s the third thing you learn in a room: everything changes over and over and over and over again.

This was one of the hardest lessons for me on the show. Imagine your group has come up with some great idea that you can’t stop laughing about and you just know is exactly on point for the show, it’s the best thing you guys have come up with ever and it’s going to blow people’s minds and make your parents finally love you and get your shrink to admit that your constant need for affirmation and chocolate covered fruit products is not pathological, you’re absolutely fine. It is everything and oh my God and altogether yes.

But then when you read the outline it’s not there, because the showrunner found it doesn’t work on the page, or it really didn’t work for the producers or network. Or maybe it gets into the outline, but when it’s written up as a scene, it doesn’t land the way you hoped, so it gets radically changed, or dumped.

And you’re like:

Or it makes into the script, but when they go to shoot it, the practicalities of the set means it has to change, maybe significantly, or maybe the time required to shoot other things in the episode (I think we budgeted for eight days per episode) means they had to get creative with this, or maybe just cut it and get what we wanted from it in some other way.

Or maybe it gets shot but it didn’t work with the actors. Or maybe there was some sort of production glitch, like we lost the sunshine.

Or maybe the shoot all went well, but when you start to edit the episode together you realize you don’t need this beat after all, or it’s dragging the momentum from other parts of the episode, or you don’t have the time for it (our episodes were usually 42 minutes), or not for all of it.

Or it makes into your cut, but then the network or your production company has notes that again force it to be reedited or just plain eliminated.

And even if none of that happens, you can still count on most things being altered along the way. Hopefully for the better, usually for the better; but at some point you have no more time to work on it and you have to give up no matter what because even though this is not live, it’s still really true, you’ve got a show to do.

And then you’re sitting there watching the episode on television and you’re wondering, wait, what happened to that precious little snowflake we came up with that was everything and oh my God and altogether yes?

Or – because we’re all crazy creatures underneath – sometimes you see it there and it’s now way better, way smarter, all those layers of chocolate-finger-stained schmutz you put on it scraped away, and you want to be happy but part of you is like WHO MESSED WITH MY PRECIOUS LITTLE SNOWFLAKE? THAT WAS MEANT TO MAKE MY PARENTS LOVE ME!

ACT IV: DESPAIR IS NOT JUST A RIVER IN WEST LA
They say in a writers’ room you can’t be precious with your ideas. That is, you can’t over-invest on any one idea, or on trying to make sure some of your ideas make it into the show. Because sometimes we really are all not too different than this:

Smeagol good. Gollum bad.

That sort of letting go only makes sense, but it’s also really hard. Not only because some ideas came from you or you fell in love with, but because being on a show is not only exciting but scary. You’re sort of always auditioning (at least in your head), always trying to prove you were worth hiring in the first place, always trying to contribute in a meaningful way.

And when your stuff doesn’t land – oh God, is it painful to pitch ideas and get this in response:

When awkward silence happens to me at Mass I kind of love it because it's so incredibly awful. But in the room, with so much feeling on the line it is the entrance to hours or days in an “I am so terrible at this” quicksand hellsuck of your mind.

Seriously, being in a writers’ room is at times like being Jesus in the desert. All your fears, all your inadequacies, all your worst qualities – your jealousies, your pettiness, your neediness -- are going to come at you, bro, as well as occasionally some of the worst qualities of your peers, because they’re going through all of it, too. And you’re going to have to learn how to accept that and deal with it all.

What I hope my life will be like eventually.

I can’t say that after a year in the room I really have a clear sense of how to manage all that. It was a lot, a lot of the time.

But I will say a bit part of it all seems to be about gentleness, patience and self-acceptance. Sometimes you can’t control how bad you feel, any more than you can control the weather. You just have to be kind to yourself and wait it out.

This is especially not easy when what you’re seeing is the worst parts of yourself; who doesn’t want to cram those awful portions back in their boxes. (If only someone could come up with liposuction for your mind.)

The harder you push that stuff down, though, the stronger it’s going to come back at you. It’s like a Jack in the Box wearing boxing gloves. You can take a tap now or a beat down later. You decide.

When things go well, though, when you feel on the same page as everyone else or the ideas in the room are flowing, man is it euphoric. It’s like you and these other people are improvising a little show right then and there that only you are ever going to see. Our own weird and often hilarious version of Buddhists making those sand designs.

There are also no funny images of Buddhist sand mandalas. But I choose to believe as these two paint one monk keeps making disgusting noises to annoy the other.

(Can I just say, I now really want there to be a "Despair River" in West LA.)

ACT V: TRACK AND FIELD
They say there are two big hurdles in television. One is getting into a writers’ room as a staff writer. The other is getting asked back.

Well, one out of two ain’t bad!

When “Preacher” got renewed last month (huzzah!), it dropped a couple of us younger writers in favor of a few with more experience. Which is frankly the smart move; the show is going to do thirteen episodes next year instead of ten, and they’ll really benefit from more experience in the room. It’s cool to have that Gremlin as your first car, but at some point you gotta get some wheels that can really ride.

And frankly I’ve got a couple ideas of my own that I’d like to try to sell. So all to the good.

It’s a funny thing, this business. When you’re in school all these successful industry people come in and tell you their story. And you’re constantly trying to figure out how to use those tales to work for yourself, what the path is or the secret password.

But it turns out everyone’s road into this business is completely different. I have friends who moved up from assistant into a writers' room, which is sort of the classic and logical path. I know others who got in because they sold a movie script, or won a contest, or had an interesting play, or got the right internship early on.

As a priest when I step back I realize that none of what has happened was anything I could have predicted. And that’s kind of the way it all works, I guess. Your life is not in your hands (#!%!@!). It’s awful, but also kind of what I've signed up for.

Really, so much of the whole scene seems to be about waiting – waiting for inspiration, waiting for the dark clouds to part. Being patient with yourself in the meantime. And -- at the risk of driving you crazy with this image:

++LINKS++

My new favorite tumblr, which posts pictures of Donald Trump alongside quotes from the great TV show "30 Rock", including this one:

(The craziest part is, no matter which quote from "30 Rock" you use, it feels like Trump may very well at some point say it.)

A hilarious bit on the Fallon show about texting fails while dating. (I want to do a sequel about texts your parents send.)

Review of a fantastic comic book series about the Iraq War. (Seriously worth a look, whether you like comics or not. Brilliant writing.)

And other ridiculous things that I was doing when I wasn't writing you and/or reading Harry Potter on Ignatius Day:

See you next week. Keep your chin up. Remember, you're kind of a big deal.