How to Make a TV Drama in the Twitter Age
LOS ANGELES — For decades, the TV viewing experience was much the same. Tune into your favorite show, week by patient week, all on the network’s schedule. Feedback was restricted to faceless Nielsen ratings and perhaps a plaintive letter or phone call to executives complaining about a favorite show’s cast change or cancellation.
No more. In a connected world of DVDs, DVRs, video on demand and, more recently, Web streaming, the calculus of control has shifted. Gorge on an entire season of a new show like Netflix’s House of Cards in one delirious 13-hour sitting the day it debuts. Tweet your delight/disbelief/fury (pick one, or all) about plot twists to your multitude of followers. Marshal an army on social media to demand a show return from the dead, perhaps even as a movie. (See Veronica Mars.)
Grappling creatively with this industry upheaval — the technological advances, the rapidly shifting economic underpinnings, the cacophonous online commentary — are the show runners, the writers who animate the characters bursting through our big screen TVs, tablets and smartphones.
The New York Times recently gathered the men and women who steer six of the best dramas on television — from the broadcast and cable networks, and the upstart Netflix — to talk about the challenges of making TV in the Twitter age. At the fitting location here of the Writers Guild of America, West, Shonda Rhimes (Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy), Carlton Cuse (Bates Motel and previously Lost), Robert and Michelle King (The Good Wife), Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), Scott Buck (Dexter) and Beau Willimon (House of Cards) shared their views on writing themselves into and out of jams, the broadcast-cable divide and the possible end of episodes and seasons as we know them.
They spoke about how and when to listen to an evermore assertive audience. (Ms. Rhimes’s Twitter page comes with this amusingly combative note to her more than 420,000 followers: “I make stuff up for a living. Remember, it’s not real, O.K.? Don’t tweet me your craziness.”)
And with the final episodes of Breaking Bad beginning Sunday, they tackled the thorniest of storytelling conundrums: ending a beloved show. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Q. With seismic shifts in viewing habits, audiences seem more engaged with TV than ever before. They’re definitely more vocal, thanks to social media. I’m wondering if these changes affect the way you create your shows?
Carlton Cuse Certainly the change in the way people watch TV has allowed for heavily serialized storytelling, which was an anathema to broadcast networks a few years ago, because they thought if somebody fell out of an episode, then they would never get them back. But now there’s so many ways for people to watch shows that they recognized that serialized storytelling actually hooks an audience, and they’re not as afraid about people missing stuff because they have so many ways of getting caught up.
Terence Winter It gives us the confidence to put something in that might be a detail that you’d normally be worried somebody might miss if a week goes by.
Shonda Rhimes At the same time, part of the creation of how we tell the story on Scandal is that we want it to feel like if you’re not watching it live, you’re missing a whole other experience. That’s why everybody got on Twitter, so that you’re part of this communal experience of watching the show and live-tweeting the show and all that goes on with it. But the binge-watching helps, because people who weren’t watching at the beginning are getting caught up, so that they can join in that experience.
Q. That’s an interesting divide. A lot of people feel that they have to watch certain shows on the night they were on, so they can be part of the water cooler conversation the next day. But with something like House of Cards, whose episodes are released all at once, when is the water cooler moment?
Beau Willimon I haven’t seen a water cooler since I was a kid. The water cooler moment, what is that really? At its core, it’s people having a reason to have a conversation about a shared experience, but there’s a lot of ways to have a shared experience. That can be live-tweeting. That can be people that have binge-watched a season of something and told their friend, “You have to binge-watch it, so we can talk about it.” Then they have a conversation two weeks later that’s about an entire season. I just think the water cooler is expanding in concentric circles to allow for more experiences.
Winter It always blows my mind when you think of the water cooler moments of our childhood, where everybody knows the same reference, say, in All in the Family or I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Literally, you can count on every adult of that era understanding what, “Pow, right in the kisser,” means. Now, because of the niche quality viewing, you’ve got, at least on cable shows, a much smaller amount of people who don’t have that. It’s going to be interesting to see 40 years from now if there’s going to be little groups of people who know references to certain shows; whereas before, everyone knew the same songs, the same jokes, the same routines.
Q. How do you approach social media with your shows? Do you feel more promotional pressure to have that “can you believe it?” moment in an episode to get everyone talking about it that week, to help cut through the clutter?
Cuse I do Bates Motel. It’s produced for Universal Television for A&E. And A&E wants people to show up and watch that show live. [With] social media, you can create enough of a sense that you have to be there to watch it, which is something that Shonda has done well. I resorted to live-tweeting Bates Motel with my mother to get viewers to show up live. I have no shame.
Q.[Turning to Ms. Rhimes] How did you start doing live-tweeting?
Rhimes Well, I was already on Twitter but tweeting things like “Watch Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday” or ranting about random things, much to the dismay of my publicist and ABC. But when we were talking about promoting the show, we didn’t feel like there was going to be a ton of promotion for our little seven-episode [first] season. Kerry [Washington, who is the power-playing fixer Olivia Pope on “Scandal”] said to me, “I think we should all get on Twitter.” I told the cast that they all had to get on Twitter, and everybody did. Our hairdressers tweet, our D.P. [director of photography] tweets, every single member of our crew, basically, has a Twitter account now. They love doing it, it’s fun for them.
Winter I would be horrified that while you’re tweeting, you’re missing a story point.
Rhimes They all watch it more than once. They watch it, and they live-tweet, and then the fans will watch it again and be like: I noticed this other thing.
Willimon It’s really no different than a fan sitting on the couch and commenting on the episode. You just expand that family to potentially hundreds of thousands, or millions of people. I didn’t tweet hardly at all until several months ago, and it was a shameless and admitted act of promotion for the show. But I started doing 30-minute Q. and A.’s with folks once a week, and I learned so much from people that were viewing the show. I mean they are not shy. The anonymity of social media allows for a pretty blunt form of dialogue, which I think one can only benefit from.
Robert King I’m a voyeur of social media. I watch it but don’t participate. It always felt to me like it was the editor commenting after a letter to the editor. I felt the best thing to do was to absorb criticism and understand it, and try to get a sense of where they were coming from. I think there’s negative criticism that comes from this kind of destructive place, and then criticism that comes from a very good place. Only when it was echoed by someone in real life would you go: Oh, I get it.
Michelle King I follow it, but I never feel inclined to jump into it. But it does seem very shrewd. Going into Season 5 that actually is the plan.
Q. Why haven’t you felt the need to jump in?
Michelle King Perhaps to avoid getting defensive.
Q. How do you avoid becoming defensive?
Cuse You have to have kind of a thick skin and try to maintain some perspective. There are definitely things that I’ve learned in that kind of communion with the audience. Even on Bates, for instance, we had certain scenes that we thought were very objective and the audience didn’t consider our storytelling to be a reliable narrator. Some people weren’t sure whether [the scene about] a sex slave in this basement was actually true. It’s amazing sometimes when you do stuff and you think it’s really clear that the audience is going to interpret things in one way and they don’t.
Robert King Sometimes there are lapses of storytelling not even in the script. But when you get to the execution, either in the editing or in the acting, a bead is lost. When you realize when 50 people on social media are misunderstanding that in the same exact way, that’s something we have to correct.
Cuse When you’re telling a story, no matter how rigorous you are with yourself and your collaborators as to the clarity and intention of the story, you’re still in a bubble. The moment that the audience becomes involved, that bubble dissolves. Perception is reality. So, however they perceive it, is actually what it is. I think the key, at least for me, is to allow it to inform, not necessarily to dictate.
Scott Buck A lot of audience members really take possession of the characters to the point that I’ll see messages or e-mails saying Dexter would never do that. It’s like, well, he did it. But if you get multiple messages like that, then you do have to stop and think.
Willimon When Dickens was writing his novels, and they were serialized once a month, he read all the letters that came in. His novels were actually a real dialogue with his audience. He was writing to entertain them, and he got paid by the word, and he wanted them to be pleased. But he also wanted to make sure that they got the story he was trying to tell.
Winter I’ve never written a letter, or an e-mail, or a tweet about anything. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I think the vast majority of people who are watching aren’t saying anything. They’re just watching the show. Are we letting that tail of the Twitter users wag the dog that is the show?
Rhimes If it’s something the audience didn’t get, that’s one thing. I like to use it for that. But if it’s “I hate that you broke these two characters up,” or “You’ve ruined the show,” I can’t change the course of where we’re going because somebody doesn’t like it. Otherwise, I would never get anything written.
I was amazed by how many people wanted us to have a happy ending at the end of Season 2 [wanting Ms. Washington’s character and the president played by Tony Goldwyn] to be married. People were tweeting us photos of wedding dresses. That’s a lovely idea, but the show has to keep going, so he can’t leave the presidency and get married.
Buck I was so surprised how many people were so upset that we had our character Debra realize that she had feelings of romance for her adopted brother. Dexter could murder someone every single week, and that’s O.K., but these feelings of love just didn’t make sense to them. That was certainly an instance where I hear what you’re saying, but I believe in this story, and we’re going to keep taking it to its logical end. You don’t want to suddenly start having your audience scare you to think I’m wrong with this idea.
Q. There’s a new Sundance Channel show called The Writers’ Room, and on the first episode, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, said, “People give us credit for having everything plotted out Bobby Fischer-style, 30 moves ahead.” But, as he says, the writers will often put characters in a jam with no idea of how to get out of it. How close to his reality is yours?
Robert King Oh, spot on. Maybe even more so on network [television]. We sometimes don’t know [which guest stars] we’re getting week from week. It’s like going into the kitchen and [seeing what] you can make an omelet out of.
Michelle King We’ll have things planned, it’s just inevitably those plans get yanked away.
Rhimes Oh, no. We don’t have a lot of that at all. [Everyone at the table laughs.] I remember at the end of Season 1 of Scandal, the big question was: Who is Quinn Perkins [one of the employees of Olivia Pope & Associates, played by Katie Lowes]? I remember the network saying: Who is Quinn Perkins? I said: When you pick us up for Season 2, we’ll tell you.
Willimon A show is much more like jazz than it is a symphony. It’s call and response, responding to what’s happening in front of you. On the positive side, Peter Russo’s character [the Pennsylvania congressman played by Corey Stoll] was never supposed to run for governor. But watching Corey and Kevin [Spacey, who plays Representative Francis Underwood] work together in that first couple of episodes was electric. We did have a pretty well-defined, plotted-out story, but I said to myself: I’d rather see more of Corey Stoll. So, I took this character that was running for governor, and I gave that story line to Peter Russo, which required massive rewrites. But what it allowed for was deepening his story, and that had a ripple effect into all sorts of other stories and characters. You can have a plan, but you have to be open and flexible to making that plan better if an idea evolves, or if you find yourself with an opportunity that if you don’t seize, you’re going to regret it.
Q. On The Good Wife this past season, there was a lot of uproar on social media about the plotline of Kalinda, an investigator for the law firm, and the return of her estranged husband. Did that negative reaction have any effect?
Robert King No. What had an effect was that one of our writers went into a coffee shop and a man confronted him and said: “Don’t mess with Kalinda. It’s not about me. My wife is giving you hell.” (He knew he was a writer on the show. He went in every day.) It was like: Oh, O.K., his family watches this show, and they’re not going to let us home if we don’t do something about this. So, it was a real sense of we didn’t know that we were venturing so off the tree limb.
Michelle King We had all these episodes in the can, and then they started showing, and suddenly there was this reaction, and then it was like: Oh no, we better start fixing.
Robert King It wasn’t stopping the story that we were telling, it was just kind of pacing it up. So instead of being 13 episodes, it was trying to tell it in 8, 10.
Q. Carlton, you had something similar on Lost.
Cuse We had all these characters who were just in the background who were on the plane, but we never saw them. Some people were saying: Who are those people? So, we decided we would introduce a couple of characters [Nikki and Paulo] out of the chorus. The moment we did it, the audience had a visceral, horrible reaction to them. I will say that we had actually decided before that, ourselves, that this was a bad idea. We had 16 series regulars on the show, so it was taking time away from the characters that they all loved. We had this whole story line worked out, which we sort of compressed into one episode. We buried them alive in the sand.
Ultimately, you have to rely on your own instincts. There’s nothing, I think, more important that guides how you make a show.
Q. Shonda, you’re juggling two broadcast network shows. Are there any times when you look at what’s happening with cable, and you wish you had that life?
Rhimes Are there any times? I think all of them. I’m going to do 46 hours of television this year, and that seems particularly painful all the time. I would love to live in a world in which we could do 13 episodes of each show. I have to be honest, I think the shows would be better for it. There’s a period of time in which somewhere in the storytelling, a few of the episodes are just filler. They can be interesting, and they can be lovely, but they don’t move our story forward.
Robert King The one aspect of 22 for us is a little more experimentation. You can take chances on episodes that I don’t know if you’d be able to as much with 13.
Willimon I don’t know that the 13-hour model constrains experimentation.
Michelle King Oh, don’t take this away from us. [Everyone laughs.]
Willimon By all sort of conventional measures of TV storytelling, we had a pretty strong narrative thrust going out of those first two episodes trying to establish a world in D.C. I wanted to suddenly stop it and go to South Carolina. That would seem like not a smart thing to do because it took us away from a lot of our characters and story lines. But I wanted to show that this show wouldn’t be relegated just to D.C.
If you don’t engage in that whiplash from time to time, you can become shackled to the narrative. The only thing more satisfying and powerful than fulfilling expectations is subverting them.
Cuse It’s easy to understand why there are so many acclaimed cable shows, because the process in cable eliminates so many of the stress points. Coming up with 22 really good stories a year is just harder than coming up with 10 or 13. On Bates Motel, Kerry Ehrin [the co-show runner] and I are doing 10 episodes. Honestly, I feel it’s right for that show because we’re moving inevitably to this place where Norman Bates is going to become a version of the guy from the movie. There just aren’t that many episodes until you get there without feeling kind of stall-y.
Rhimes I miss the time to think. What doing 13 or 10 [episodes] allows you is the time to sit back and look at it and go, is this right? The way a painter stares at a painting while they’re doing it. You don’t have that time in network television.
Willimon The only reason we do 13 episodes and in one-hour chunks is because we have international buyers that are actually airing the show week to week, and we have to fit in one-hour spaces. But I think that there’s a really exciting door opening where shows won’t have to be seasons. They could be in parts. Episodes won’t have to be an hour long. One episode could be 22 minutes, another episode could be 94 minutes. That could in total comprise 4 to 6 to 14 to 52 hours. There’s an idea I’m toying with of a show in which there would be no episodes. It would simply be six to eight hours straight, and the audience could choose when they pause or if they do.
Robert King Isn’t that what’s exciting about TV these days? It seems like all the excitement is moving to TV because of the flexibility of the structure and the amount of subject matter we can pursue.
Q. Ultimately, given the economics of their business, how much can the broadcast networks really change?
Robert King Weren’t there two good signs this year, both on CBS, with them going to the 15-episode model with Hostages and [13 episodes for] Intelligence? And Under the Dome, [a summer series] worked well for them.
Cuse The thing that still is really completely out of whack is pilot season. I mean having gone through that and having six weeks from a green light to shooting the pilot, competing with 100 other shows for talent, it’s crazy. It just seems completely out of date in the current ecosphere of television.
Q. Networks have long complained about that, but it doesn’t seem to change. Why not?
Robert King You talk to executives, and you get it, which is they have vacation a certain part of the year, and then they’re going to get pitches this part of the year, they’re going to get scripts in this part of the year. If everything shifted, they wouldn’t know when to go on vacation. [Everyone laughs.]
Cuse They’re still making money, and that’s the bottom line. As long as the ad sales model is producing revenue, they will persist in doing things in a traditional fashion. When that starts to fall apart, or if they really see that other people are cleaning their clock, then they’re going to have to adapt.
Q. Scott, you’re ending Dexter with a series finale on Sept. 22, and that can be treacherous. At what point did you figure out that you knew how the show was going to end and are you worried about the reaction?
Buck When I went into the network to pitch the last two seasons, I had already known for a while how I wanted to end this show, because it’s essentially a show about one character, it’s where do you want this person to end. So, it’s not necessarily the most exciting thing I can think of. I know some people are going to hate it and hate me for it, but it is what I feel is exactly the right ending.
Q. Terry, you’ve been through an ending before, as a writer on “The Sopranos,” that was controversial.
Winter Yeah. I caught some collateral damage. I mean that was one of the most famous endings in the history of the medium, and people freaked out. It’s interesting, months later people seemed to have calmed down, and in a lot of cases people I spoke to arrived at the conclusion that it was a good ending. Of course, we’re talking about The Sopranos Cut to Black. I liked it. David [Chase, the show’s creator] had pitched it to me and Matt Weiner [who went on to create Mad Men] about a year before, and I guess I had been living with it for so so long that I wasn’t prepared for the reaction.
Cuse Did he explain it to you?
Winter He didn’t explain it. I really just took away from it that if you’re Tony Soprano, one night somebody’s going to be coming out of a men’s room somewhere. It might have been that night or it might have been another night, but your legacy is looking over your shoulder. Even going out for ice cream with your family is fraught. That’s a Members Only jacket, that’s never good. It left you to draw your own conclusion.
Q. Any lessons for when you end Boardwalk Empire?
Winter I always say I’m going to end Boardwalk with having a very old Nucky walk into a diner and kill Tony. [Everyone laughs.]
Q. One of the issues show runners face is as long as the show’s popular, it’s going to keep going. At what point are you struggling to find plotlines that can be as substantial as you had before?
Winter Every episode you do is one more episode you can’t do.
Rhimes That phrase is going to haunt my dreams now.
Winter Grey’s Anatomy, you’re at 190 or something.
Rhimes Two hundred is the fourth episode of the season.
Q. How do you manage to keep it going?
Rhimes Grey’s is endless. I mean there’s always some crazy medical story that’s happening out in the news. It’s a hospital, so we’re constantly adding new doctors. I’ve always said as long as it feels interesting to me, I’m going to keep being a part of it. Something like Scandal is different. To me, I feel it has a finite length of time that you can tell that story. I don’t know how the network feels about that, but I feel like there’s a limit.
Q. What is that limit?
Rhimes I don’t want to say because it always makes people upset. [But] you can’t tell Scandal for 10 years.
Q. Beau, you’re working on Season 2. Do you have a sense of how long House of Cards can be?
Willimon None whatsoever. I think TV shows are sort of like life. People die of old age, or they die violently and tragically. No one ever knows when they’re going to go. With a story, you aspire to an end, and an end that is satisfying. We all aspire to that in life, too, and rarely get it. I think it’s a sort of impossible task to end a TV show. The reason people watch TV is because they don’t want something to end. Unlike a movie where they go in knowing that two hours later they’ll walk out, belly full of popcorn and on to whatever they’re doing next.
So, you’re trying to do the very thing that the audience doesn’t want to happen.
How to Make a TV Drama in the Twitter Age
LOS ANGELES — For decades, the TV viewing experience was much the same. Tune into your favorite show, week by patient week, all on the network’s schedule. Feedback was restricted to faceless Nielsen ratings and perhaps a plaintive letter or phone call to executives complaining about a favorite show’s cast change or cancellation.
No more. In a connected world of DVDs, DVRs, video on demand and, more recently, Web streaming, the calculus of control has shifted. Gorge on an entire season of a new show like Netflix’s House of Cards in one delirious 13-hour sitting the day it debuts. Tweet your delight/disbelief/fury (pick one, or all) about plot twists to your multitude of followers. Marshal an army on social media to demand a show return from the dead, perhaps even as a movie. (See Veronica Mars.)
Grappling creatively with this industry upheaval — the technological advances, the rapidly shifting economic underpinnings, the cacophonous online commentary — are the show runners, the writers who animate the characters bursting through our big screen TVs, tablets and smartphones.
The New York Times recently gathered the men and women who steer six of the best dramas on television — from the broadcast and cable networks, and the upstart Netflix — to talk about the challenges of making TV in the Twitter age. At the fitting location here of the Writers Guild of America, West, Shonda Rhimes (Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy), Carlton Cuse (Bates Motel and previously Lost), Robert and Michelle King (The Good Wife), Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), Scott Buck (Dexter) and Beau Willimon (House of Cards) shared their views on writing themselves into and out of jams, the broadcast-cable divide and the possible end of episodes and seasons as we know them.
They spoke about how and when to listen to an evermore assertive audience. (Ms. Rhimes’s Twitter page comes with this amusingly combative note to her more than 420,000 followers: “I make stuff up for a living. Remember, it’s not real, O.K.? Don’t tweet me your craziness.”)
And with the final episodes of Breaking Bad beginning Sunday, they tackled the thorniest of storytelling conundrums: ending a beloved show. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Q. With seismic shifts in viewing habits, audiences seem more engaged with TV than ever before. They’re definitely more vocal, thanks to social media. I’m wondering if these changes affect the way you create your shows?
Carlton Cuse Certainly the change in the way people watch TV has allowed for heavily serialized storytelling, which was an anathema to broadcast networks a few years ago, because they thought if somebody fell out of an episode, then they would never get them back. But now there’s so many ways for people to watch shows that they recognized that serialized storytelling actually hooks an audience, and they’re not as afraid about people missing stuff because they have so many ways of getting caught up.
Terence Winter It gives us the confidence to put something in that might be a detail that you’d normally be worried somebody might miss if a week goes by.
Shonda Rhimes At the same time, part of the creation of how we tell the story on Scandal is that we want it to feel like if you’re not watching it live, you’re missing a whole other experience. That’s why everybody got on Twitter, so that you’re part of this communal experience of watching the show and live-tweeting the show and all that goes on with it. But the binge-watching helps, because people who weren’t watching at the beginning are getting caught up, so that they can join in that experience.
Q. That’s an interesting divide. A lot of people feel that they have to watch certain shows on the night they were on, so they can be part of the water cooler conversation the next day. But with something like House of Cards, whose episodes are released all at once, when is the water cooler moment?
Beau Willimon I haven’t seen a water cooler since I was a kid. The water cooler moment, what is that really? At its core, it’s people having a reason to have a conversation about a shared experience, but there’s a lot of ways to have a shared experience. That can be live-tweeting. That can be people that have binge-watched a season of something and told their friend, “You have to binge-watch it, so we can talk about it.” Then they have a conversation two weeks later that’s about an entire season. I just think the water cooler is expanding in concentric circles to allow for more experiences.
Winter It always blows my mind when you think of the water cooler moments of our childhood, where everybody knows the same reference, say, in All in the Family or I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Literally, you can count on every adult of that era understanding what, “Pow, right in the kisser,” means. Now, because of the niche quality viewing, you’ve got, at least on cable shows, a much smaller amount of people who don’t have that. It’s going to be interesting to see 40 years from now if there’s going to be little groups of people who know references to certain shows; whereas before, everyone knew the same songs, the same jokes, the same routines.
Q. How do you approach social media with your shows? Do you feel more promotional pressure to have that “can you believe it?” moment in an episode to get everyone talking about it that week, to help cut through the clutter?
Cuse I do Bates Motel. It’s produced for Universal Television for A&E. And A&E wants people to show up and watch that show live. [With] social media, you can create enough of a sense that you have to be there to watch it, which is something that Shonda has done well. I resorted to live-tweeting Bates Motel with my mother to get viewers to show up live. I have no shame.
Q.[Turning to Ms. Rhimes] How did you start doing live-tweeting?
Rhimes Well, I was already on Twitter but tweeting things like “Watch Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday” or ranting about random things, much to the dismay of my publicist and ABC. But when we were talking about promoting the show, we didn’t feel like there was going to be a ton of promotion for our little seven-episode [first] season. Kerry [Washington, who is the power-playing fixer Olivia Pope on “Scandal”] said to me, “I think we should all get on Twitter.” I told the cast that they all had to get on Twitter, and everybody did. Our hairdressers tweet, our D.P. [director of photography] tweets, every single member of our crew, basically, has a Twitter account now. They love doing it, it’s fun for them.
Winter I would be horrified that while you’re tweeting, you’re missing a story point.
Rhimes They all watch it more than once. They watch it, and they live-tweet, and then the fans will watch it again and be like: I noticed this other thing.
Willimon It’s really no different than a fan sitting on the couch and commenting on the episode. You just expand that family to potentially hundreds of thousands, or millions of people. I didn’t tweet hardly at all until several months ago, and it was a shameless and admitted act of promotion for the show. But I started doing 30-minute Q. and A.’s with folks once a week, and I learned so much from people that were viewing the show. I mean they are not shy. The anonymity of social media allows for a pretty blunt form of dialogue, which I think one can only benefit from.
Robert King I’m a voyeur of social media. I watch it but don’t participate. It always felt to me like it was the editor commenting after a letter to the editor. I felt the best thing to do was to absorb criticism and understand it, and try to get a sense of where they were coming from. I think there’s negative criticism that comes from this kind of destructive place, and then criticism that comes from a very good place. Only when it was echoed by someone in real life would you go: Oh, I get it.
Michelle King I follow it, but I never feel inclined to jump into it. But it does seem very shrewd. Going into Season 5 that actually is the plan.
Q. Why haven’t you felt the need to jump in?
Michelle King Perhaps to avoid getting defensive.
Q. How do you avoid becoming defensive?
Cuse You have to have kind of a thick skin and try to maintain some perspective. There are definitely things that I’ve learned in that kind of communion with the audience. Even on Bates, for instance, we had certain scenes that we thought were very objective and the audience didn’t consider our storytelling to be a reliable narrator. Some people weren’t sure whether [the scene about] a sex slave in this basement was actually true. It’s amazing sometimes when you do stuff and you think it’s really clear that the audience is going to interpret things in one way and they don’t.
Robert King Sometimes there are lapses of storytelling not even in the script. But when you get to the execution, either in the editing or in the acting, a bead is lost. When you realize when 50 people on social media are misunderstanding that in the same exact way, that’s something we have to correct.
Cuse When you’re telling a story, no matter how rigorous you are with yourself and your collaborators as to the clarity and intention of the story, you’re still in a bubble. The moment that the audience becomes involved, that bubble dissolves. Perception is reality. So, however they perceive it, is actually what it is. I think the key, at least for me, is to allow it to inform, not necessarily to dictate.
Scott Buck A lot of audience members really take possession of the characters to the point that I’ll see messages or e-mails saying Dexter would never do that. It’s like, well, he did it. But if you get multiple messages like that, then you do have to stop and think.
Willimon When Dickens was writing his novels, and they were serialized once a month, he read all the letters that came in. His novels were actually a real dialogue with his audience. He was writing to entertain them, and he got paid by the word, and he wanted them to be pleased. But he also wanted to make sure that they got the story he was trying to tell.
Winter I’ve never written a letter, or an e-mail, or a tweet about anything. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I think the vast majority of people who are watching aren’t saying anything. They’re just watching the show. Are we letting that tail of the Twitter users wag the dog that is the show?
Rhimes If it’s something the audience didn’t get, that’s one thing. I like to use it for that. But if it’s “I hate that you broke these two characters up,” or “You’ve ruined the show,” I can’t change the course of where we’re going because somebody doesn’t like it. Otherwise, I would never get anything written.
I was amazed by how many people wanted us to have a happy ending at the end of Season 2 [wanting Ms. Washington’s character and the president played by Tony Goldwyn] to be married. People were tweeting us photos of wedding dresses. That’s a lovely idea, but the show has to keep going, so he can’t leave the presidency and get married.
Buck I was so surprised how many people were so upset that we had our character Debra realize that she had feelings of romance for her adopted brother. Dexter could murder someone every single week, and that’s O.K., but these feelings of love just didn’t make sense to them. That was certainly an instance where I hear what you’re saying, but I believe in this story, and we’re going to keep taking it to its logical end. You don’t want to suddenly start having your audience scare you to think I’m wrong with this idea.
Q. There’s a new Sundance Channel show called The Writers’ Room, and on the first episode, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, said, “People give us credit for having everything plotted out Bobby Fischer-style, 30 moves ahead.” But, as he says, the writers will often put characters in a jam with no idea of how to get out of it. How close to his reality is yours?
Robert King Oh, spot on. Maybe even more so on network [television]. We sometimes don’t know [which guest stars] we’re getting week from week. It’s like going into the kitchen and [seeing what] you can make an omelet out of.
Michelle King We’ll have things planned, it’s just inevitably those plans get yanked away.
Rhimes Oh, no. We don’t have a lot of that at all. [Everyone at the table laughs.] I remember at the end of Season 1 of Scandal, the big question was: Who is Quinn Perkins [one of the employees of Olivia Pope & Associates, played by Katie Lowes]? I remember the network saying: Who is Quinn Perkins? I said: When you pick us up for Season 2, we’ll tell you.
Willimon A show is much more like jazz than it is a symphony. It’s call and response, responding to what’s happening in front of you. On the positive side, Peter Russo’s character [the Pennsylvania congressman played by Corey Stoll] was never supposed to run for governor. But watching Corey and Kevin [Spacey, who plays Representative Francis Underwood] work together in that first couple of episodes was electric. We did have a pretty well-defined, plotted-out story, but I said to myself: I’d rather see more of Corey Stoll. So, I took this character that was running for governor, and I gave that story line to Peter Russo, which required massive rewrites. But what it allowed for was deepening his story, and that had a ripple effect into all sorts of other stories and characters. You can have a plan, but you have to be open and flexible to making that plan better if an idea evolves, or if you find yourself with an opportunity that if you don’t seize, you’re going to regret it.
Q. On The Good Wife this past season, there was a lot of uproar on social media about the plotline of Kalinda, an investigator for the law firm, and the return of her estranged husband. Did that negative reaction have any effect?
Robert King No. What had an effect was that one of our writers went into a coffee shop and a man confronted him and said: “Don’t mess with Kalinda. It’s not about me. My wife is giving you hell.” (He knew he was a writer on the show. He went in every day.) It was like: Oh, O.K., his family watches this show, and they’re not going to let us home if we don’t do something about this. So, it was a real sense of we didn’t know that we were venturing so off the tree limb.
Michelle King We had all these episodes in the can, and then they started showing, and suddenly there was this reaction, and then it was like: Oh no, we better start fixing.
Robert King It wasn’t stopping the story that we were telling, it was just kind of pacing it up. So instead of being 13 episodes, it was trying to tell it in 8, 10.
Q. Carlton, you had something similar on Lost.
Cuse We had all these characters who were just in the background who were on the plane, but we never saw them. Some people were saying: Who are those people? So, we decided we would introduce a couple of characters [Nikki and Paulo] out of the chorus. The moment we did it, the audience had a visceral, horrible reaction to them. I will say that we had actually decided before that, ourselves, that this was a bad idea. We had 16 series regulars on the show, so it was taking time away from the characters that they all loved. We had this whole story line worked out, which we sort of compressed into one episode. We buried them alive in the sand.
Ultimately, you have to rely on your own instincts. There’s nothing, I think, more important that guides how you make a show.
Q. Shonda, you’re juggling two broadcast network shows. Are there any times when you look at what’s happening with cable, and you wish you had that life?
Rhimes Are there any times? I think all of them. I’m going to do 46 hours of television this year, and that seems particularly painful all the time. I would love to live in a world in which we could do 13 episodes of each show. I have to be honest, I think the shows would be better for it. There’s a period of time in which somewhere in the storytelling, a few of the episodes are just filler. They can be interesting, and they can be lovely, but they don’t move our story forward.
Robert King The one aspect of 22 for us is a little more experimentation. You can take chances on episodes that I don’t know if you’d be able to as much with 13.
Willimon I don’t know that the 13-hour model constrains experimentation.
Michelle King Oh, don’t take this away from us. [Everyone laughs.]
Willimon By all sort of conventional measures of TV storytelling, we had a pretty strong narrative thrust going out of those first two episodes trying to establish a world in D.C. I wanted to suddenly stop it and go to South Carolina. That would seem like not a smart thing to do because it took us away from a lot of our characters and story lines. But I wanted to show that this show wouldn’t be relegated just to D.C.
If you don’t engage in that whiplash from time to time, you can become shackled to the narrative. The only thing more satisfying and powerful than fulfilling expectations is subverting them.
Cuse It’s easy to understand why there are so many acclaimed cable shows, because the process in cable eliminates so many of the stress points. Coming up with 22 really good stories a year is just harder than coming up with 10 or 13. On Bates Motel, Kerry Ehrin [the co-show runner] and I are doing 10 episodes. Honestly, I feel it’s right for that show because we’re moving inevitably to this place where Norman Bates is going to become a version of the guy from the movie. There just aren’t that many episodes until you get there without feeling kind of stall-y.
Rhimes I miss the time to think. What doing 13 or 10 [episodes] allows you is the time to sit back and look at it and go, is this right? The way a painter stares at a painting while they’re doing it. You don’t have that time in network television.
Willimon The only reason we do 13 episodes and in one-hour chunks is because we have international buyers that are actually airing the show week to week, and we have to fit in one-hour spaces. But I think that there’s a really exciting door opening where shows won’t have to be seasons. They could be in parts. Episodes won’t have to be an hour long. One episode could be 22 minutes, another episode could be 94 minutes. That could in total comprise 4 to 6 to 14 to 52 hours. There’s an idea I’m toying with of a show in which there would be no episodes. It would simply be six to eight hours straight, and the audience could choose when they pause or if they do.
Robert King Isn’t that what’s exciting about TV these days? It seems like all the excitement is moving to TV because of the flexibility of the structure and the amount of subject matter we can pursue.
Q. Ultimately, given the economics of their business, how much can the broadcast networks really change?
Robert King Weren’t there two good signs this year, both on CBS, with them going to the 15-episode model with Hostages and [13 episodes for] Intelligence? And Under the Dome, [a summer series] worked well for them.
Cuse The thing that still is really completely out of whack is pilot season. I mean having gone through that and having six weeks from a green light to shooting the pilot, competing with 100 other shows for talent, it’s crazy. It just seems completely out of date in the current ecosphere of television.
Q. Networks have long complained about that, but it doesn’t seem to change. Why not?
Robert King You talk to executives, and you get it, which is they have vacation a certain part of the year, and then they’re going to get pitches this part of the year, they’re going to get scripts in this part of the year. If everything shifted, they wouldn’t know when to go on vacation. [Everyone laughs.]
Cuse They’re still making money, and that’s the bottom line. As long as the ad sales model is producing revenue, they will persist in doing things in a traditional fashion. When that starts to fall apart, or if they really see that other people are cleaning their clock, then they’re going to have to adapt.
Q. Scott, you’re ending Dexter with a series finale on Sept. 22, and that can be treacherous. At what point did you figure out that you knew how the show was going to end and are you worried about the reaction?
Buck When I went into the network to pitch the last two seasons, I had already known for a while how I wanted to end this show, because it’s essentially a show about one character, it’s where do you want this person to end. So, it’s not necessarily the most exciting thing I can think of. I know some people are going to hate it and hate me for it, but it is what I feel is exactly the right ending.
Q. Terry, you’ve been through an ending before, as a writer on “The Sopranos,” that was controversial.
Winter Yeah. I caught some collateral damage. I mean that was one of the most famous endings in the history of the medium, and people freaked out. It’s interesting, months later people seemed to have calmed down, and in a lot of cases people I spoke to arrived at the conclusion that it was a good ending. Of course, we’re talking about The Sopranos Cut to Black. I liked it. David [Chase, the show’s creator] had pitched it to me and Matt Weiner [who went on to create Mad Men] about a year before, and I guess I had been living with it for so so long that I wasn’t prepared for the reaction.
Cuse Did he explain it to you?
Winter He didn’t explain it. I really just took away from it that if you’re Tony Soprano, one night somebody’s going to be coming out of a men’s room somewhere. It might have been that night or it might have been another night, but your legacy is looking over your shoulder. Even going out for ice cream with your family is fraught. That’s a Members Only jacket, that’s never good. It left you to draw your own conclusion.
Q. Any lessons for when you end Boardwalk Empire?
Winter I always say I’m going to end Boardwalk with having a very old Nucky walk into a diner and kill Tony. [Everyone laughs.]
Q. One of the issues show runners face is as long as the show’s popular, it’s going to keep going. At what point are you struggling to find plotlines that can be as substantial as you had before?
Winter Every episode you do is one more episode you can’t do.
Rhimes That phrase is going to haunt my dreams now.
Winter Grey’s Anatomy, you’re at 190 or something.
Rhimes Two hundred is the fourth episode of the season.
Q. How do you manage to keep it going?
Rhimes Grey’s is endless. I mean there’s always some crazy medical story that’s happening out in the news. It’s a hospital, so we’re constantly adding new doctors. I’ve always said as long as it feels interesting to me, I’m going to keep being a part of it. Something like Scandal is different. To me, I feel it has a finite length of time that you can tell that story. I don’t know how the network feels about that, but I feel like there’s a limit.
Q. What is that limit?
Rhimes I don’t want to say because it always makes people upset. [But] you can’t tell Scandal for 10 years.
Q. Beau, you’re working on Season 2. Do you have a sense of how long House of Cards can be?
Willimon None whatsoever. I think TV shows are sort of like life. People die of old age, or they die violently and tragically. No one ever knows when they’re going to go. With a story, you aspire to an end, and an end that is satisfying. We all aspire to that in life, too, and rarely get it. I think it’s a sort of impossible task to end a TV show. The reason people watch TV is because they don’t want something to end. Unlike a movie where they go in knowing that two hours later they’ll walk out, belly full of popcorn and on to whatever they’re doing next.
So, you’re trying to do the very thing that the audience doesn’t want to happen.