The writers' room is the place where the stories of our favorite TV shows are born. At first, it was only used in television comedy. Due to the rise in serialized stories, dramas' writers' rooms appeared in the 1980s. Until then, creators of TV dramas wrote each episode on their own. However, this practice would not have been suitable for high concept dramas like Lost or Prison Break. Although writing 22-24 episodes a season is not an easy task, a big table, a whiteboard and some clever co-workers can help to get the job done. These rooms can include anything from flipper machines to pool tables, or, when the showrunner wants the employees to concentrate, nothing at all. In the writing room of Weeds, the sweets were replaced with foods and the cellphones were banned to increase creativity. If you follow this link, you can read about the writers' room of several different shows, with pictures attached to them. Also, you can take a look at the writers' room of Lost below:



The showrunner is the leader of the group of writers. Basically he has authority over everything and he is the one who gets the last word. This group can consist of 3 to as much as 40 writers. In the case of American network shows, their number is closer to 40, while in Britain, the groups are usually small. Additionally, in America, these groups must include an outside employee for each season who is a WGA member. Once the storyline is clear, a writer takes it home to develop it into a script. His job involves writing the dialogues and the details. Once it's finished, the showrunner will review it and hopefully move things onto the next stage.

The showrunner is usually the person who came up with the idea of the show, although that's not always the case. Sometimes the networks hire a more experienced person to run the show, or even the creator might pass it onto someone else, because running a new show does not fit into his/her time. This happened in the case of Lost, where Carlton Cuse took over JJ Abrams's showrunner position, because he was busy making movies. This is a success story, which is very rare. Just take West Wing, Alias, or Gilmore Girls for an example. In these three cases, the ratings, as well as the quality has dropped once the creator had left the show. Therefore, the best thing is to let the creators carry on with their shows. This is the idea that most cable executives follow by putting a lot of authoritative power into the hands of the creators. For example, they do not tell the showrunners which order they want to air the episodes. These shows, especially if they're serialized, air in order of their production code number. Some people, such as Aaron Sorkin, David Lynch, Jerry Bruckheimer or Joss Whedon have a high enough reputation to be left alone by network executives as well. There is one thing that every showrunner has to fear though, and that is being cancelled.

There are cases when the thought of being cancelled doesn't even come to mind, but somehow things turn out differently than expected. Veronica Mars wasn't renewed for a fourth season despite the fact that the CW network would kill for the ratings it had in its third season. And of course there is the most famous cancellation, Twin Peaks's, which stroke abruptly. On the other hand, there are showrunners who never dreamed of a second season, but somehow their series kept being renewed for years to come. David Simon was one of these showrunners during The Wire era. Last, but not least, shows like Scrubs or FNL get cancelled but other networks save them from certain death.

This year and for the past couple of years, Heroes has been one of the shows that had to be afraid of cancellation, and if it wasn't showing on NBC, it'd be long dead by now. You can see the creativity problems its writers face if you click on this link. On the other hand, there are shows that are very easy to write and doesn't matter if they're repetitive or not. Entourage is just like that. You can watch a very funny sketch of its writers' room here:

One writer who doesn't have to be afraid of being cancelled any time soon is Kirt Sutter, the creator/showrunner of Sons of Anarchy. The show's ratings have been on the rise during its second season and the critiques praised every minute of it, so he must be doing something right. Thanks to his blog http://sutterink.blogspot.com, we can take a look at how he does his job and what makes his product so great.

He says that during the writing process, he gives more time to his writers and allows several drafts to be made. He says that he gives "shitty notes", but his vision of the tone of the series has to come first and has to lead the writing process; otherwise, the episodes wouldn't be held together and the seasons wouldn't feel like whole epic stories. After he receives the network's/studio's notes on his first draft, a production draft is generated and distributed to everyone involved in the production process. He likes to be ready with as many scripts as possible before shooting begins, because then he has to oversee everything and cannot concentrate that much on writing. That's why he is in the finishing stages of the third episode of the third season, even though he doesn't even know when the season will start to air.

While he was an exec. prod. on The Shield, he saw Shawn Ryan let the writers produce their episodes as well. He says he tries to follow this path too. He gives the writer of the particular episode the authority to go and help everyone understand what the story is like, and what it needs from the departments of props, casting, locations, etc. Before the shooting, Kirt sits down with the production crew and makes sure everyone understands the episode and what their job is. When the shooting is finished, the material goes through the hands of the editor, the director and the showrunner. This is a two week long process, the result of which is the studio/network cut. The network then gives notes and then the picture is locked. After all this comes the music-picking part, which is followed by special effect coordination (sounds and dialogs). The last stage is the preparation of the Final Mix. Sounds and pictures get mixed here and once the audio levels are determined and Mr. Sutter has given a green light, the episode is ready to air.

Based on this description of the writing and production process, it must be a tiring, but effective way of making a TV show. This is how you can achieve success: hard work and friendly working environment.

The Pacific, a "sequel" to Spielberg's & Hanks's Band of Brothers, premiered on HBO last Sunday. On Monday, HBO started airing it here in Hungary as well. I cannot recall any TV show that arrived to our country with such a small time-gap, so I was really happy about it, even though I never watch Hungarian television. The reason why I always admired HBO is because they produced the most unusual and most intelligent dramas on television until the end of The Sopranos three years ago. Since then, they were trying to find their place. After two years of unsuccessful attempts, I can honestly say they've found what they were looking for. Bored to Death, How to Make It in America, the long-awaited Treme and The Pacific, also the upcoming Boardwalk Empire, all feel worthy of following the footsteps of Entourage, Six Feet Under, The Wire and The Sopranos. The other thing I find respectable about HBO's business decisions is that they're never afraid to take risks or to keep shows that only attract a small audience alive.

The Pacific had a budget around $200 million, which made it the most expensive show to be ever created for television. HBO also did a lot to market it properly; they even bought a 30 second Super Bowl spot for about $3 million. However, the ratings of the first episode, with a little over 3 million viewers tuning in on Sunday night, were disappointing. It cannot be compared to the Band of Brothers' 10 million, because we live in the age of DVRs, VOD, and the internet. Some might ask: Why did HBO want to air this expensive series then? Well, cable channels do not hope to earn money from the number of viewers tuning in each week, since they are not turning profit from commercials. In this sense, viewership doesn't even matter to them. The reason for ordering highly-anticipated shows is to boost the number of their subscribers because that's where their money lies. However, based on the number of viewers, they didn't succeed in doing so this time. Nevertheless, HBO is going to turn a profit on it eventually by DVD or Blu-ray sales and licensing, just like they did with Band of Brothers. This is the reason why cable channels can order a whole season of a new series; whereas, national channels only order a pilot at first. Their money comes from commercial spots, which they cannot sell for high prices if nobody watches a program, because it means that nobody is watching the commercials either.

You can watch the Super Bowl ad for The Pacific below:



But how can a series end up with such a huge budget? Well, in the case of such war-centered series as The Pacific or Band of Brothers, it's the explosions and the huge cast, including a significant number of extras that cost a lot. There are several things that an executive of a show has to consider when drawing up an estimated budget that he will present to the network executives. Expenses fall into two categories: above-the-line and below-the-line. Above-the-line means the licensing of songs, actors and scripts. Below-the-line means physical elements, such as sets, props, transportation, equipment, graphics, editing and technical personnel. Creators also have the choice of renting or buying equipment. Renting equipment is useful for small duration takes, while buying equipment is the more profitable choice if you plan on using the equipment for several years. This is what most of the series use, since they have to cover several years of recording. For example, The Sopranos and The Wire have used the same equipment throughout their production. This is observable from the quality of the recording, since, in 2007, the dawn of HDTV, the camera used for Sopranos recordings was clearly outdated.

The production of an episode for an average series is far more expensive than it is for a reality show or a late night talk show. National televisions have shown a tendency towards putting reality shows in the place of drama series increasingly often. Audiences seem to be attracted to these types of shows more than to original series, and their production costs are more less, so, based on these facts, television is unstoppably turning into a reality-centered entertainment, which, I consider to be a shame really. However, I hope that with like-minded people, we can still find refugee and joy in television channels like HBO, FX, or USA.