"The Wire," "The Sopranos," "Breaking Bad." They get rave reviews, tons of awards, and get watched religiously by tens of thousands of people. But how are they written, anyway? The Financial Times illuminates us.
From the piece...
“It’s all-consuming,” says Joy Lusco Kecken, a staff writer and script editor on The Wire, speaking of the two to three months before a show goes into production. This is when the hierarchy of writers – from the “show runner”, the various editors and producers, down to the assistants – assembles and the drama of creating drama takes place.
“The overarching vision is that of the show runner, who explains the signposts for the season,” Lusco Kecken explains. “A staff writer is part of the dialogue that shapes the colour, characters and storylines of a season or episode.”
Proving yourself worthy of a place at the writers’ table is done by writing “specs” – the rewriting of current shows to showcase a writer’s ability to observe the conventions of the genre and excel within them – “like writing the fourth act of a play”, says Glen Mazzara, a veteran of six seasons writing the gritty crime drama The Shield. Specs show that a writer can write seamlessly to someone else’s vision and to the voice of the show. “Good shows to ‘spec’ at the moment would be True Blood or Breaking Bad,” he says.
Under the supervision of the show runner, episodes are sliced up for individual writers to develop. The most common format is that 70 per cent of an episode will be the self-contained weekly plot, the other 30 per cent will be the overarching narrative that spans the entire season. Each episode runs to a “beat sheet”, each beat representing an emotional arc or plot development point (even a physical change of scene or a movement within a scene). A beat equates to about a minute of show time and there is roughly one page of script per beat.
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