It’s June, which means TV writers’ rooms for the next season are opening for business. Most of the people in those rooms are veteran writers who (hopefully) need no advice. A lucky few are first-time writers who will need a lot of advice, but they’ll get none from me. (Y’all are on your own.*) No, this post is for the other people who make their living in a TV writers’ room; the true, unsung heroes of television. The Writers’ Assistants.
Tag: writers room
Anatomy of a TV Writers’ Room
One unexpected fruit of the internet: a million blogs dedicated to recapping every episode of every TV show currently on the air. Throw in all the people devoting their free time/lives to reexamining old episodes of Buffy, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Doctor Who, and you’ve got approximately 1 trillion web pages all devoted to one thing: Telling People What They Already Saw.
The AVClub, HitFix, TelevisionWithoutPity, and Entertainment Weekly — among countless other sites — have all figured out how to monetize the desperate need for TV addicts to have their opinions verified through consensus. No show is too small to be covered, no detail is too small to be obsessed over. Thanks to the explosion of the TV echo-chamber, never before has so much attention been given to the process of making television.
And never before have so many people gotten it so wrong.
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