bridgerton – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

23 Production Company Influence from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Host: Do most production companies, most executives, once the pilot is out there and people respond to it, do they normally just kind of back up after that. They’re like okay it seems like you’ve got a show on your hands. We’ll let you do it the way you want to do it.

Rosanne: It depends on your relationship with the network. Obviously, the kinds of people like Shonda Rhimes, as I mentioned, someone who’s got a track record like that can say I know what I’m doing leave me alone. Netflix basically promises that. That’s how they wooed people away from broadcast and cable. They’re like we promise not to give you notes. Just whatever you like to do, you go do it, and yay for you, right? So Ryan Murphy’s doing Pose and things like that. They’re not going to give a ton of notes. If you’re new, they might still because they’re trying to form what is going to be a sort of a Netflix brand. If you’re new in the network world or the cable world yeah you’ll get that kind of stuff for a little bit until you have a track record and can say I don’t — or you’ll still get notes but you have much more ability to say no can’t do that changes the trajectory of the show or that’s wrong for my character. Whatever those things are and that’s part of what I was saying about them earlier, you learn how to manage notes. You learn how to say all right I’ll give you this but I’m keeping that. Or we going to do this because we want this kind of an episode and if you don’t like it that’s too bad. Next week we’ll do this kind of episode which will you know smooth down some feathers if people have a problem with whatever storyline we gave last week. So your ability to be more autonomous grows as your career grows.

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

Daniela Torres, a just-graduated (Congratulations!) student of the Columbia College Semester in LA program asked me to guest on a podcast she had recently begun hosting with another college student she met during her internship (good example of networking in action!).

We could have talked all morning (the benefit of a 3 hour class session) but we held it to about an hour and fifteen minutes or so. Hopefully, along the way I answered some questions you might have about how the business works. So often it amounts to working hard at being a better writer and gathering a group of other talented, hard-working people around you so you can all rise together.

Dr. Rosanne Welch is a television writer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. She also teaches Television Writing and the Art of Film at San Jose State University.

Rosanne discusses what made shows like Beverly Hills 90210 compelling, what to do and not to do when attempting to pitch a show to broadcast or streaming, what most young writers neglect in their writing process, and much more!

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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22 Bridgerton from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

For instance, Bridgerton came out of the blue and took everybody by surprise and it was like “Oh my god, Bridgerton. Oh my god, did you see Bridgerton?” and everybody’s talking about it, etc etc. I mean it had a little bit of a built-in audience because it’s based on a book series. So that’s why all the streamers and the networks, they’re desperate to take IP — intellectual property — because you bring in an audience, and then their just going to amplify that audience by making the film version of it — the tv version of it — the limited series version of it — and then they’re going to build and build, right? So they’re really interested in that and Bridgerton was a good example of how that works and then they added the Shonda Rimes sort of gloss to it and suddenly — I had never heard of the book series — I had never read the book series. I didn’t know it existed but I certainly knew Bridgerton existed and then I had to watch it because 3 or 4 people — and I’m not necessarily a fan of those kinds of romance dramas, but everybody said you’ve got to watch this so I gave it a shot. I gave it a first episode. I always try to give things a first episode as we were saying before and if it connects, I’ll go to the next one. Right? Sometimes even if the first doesn’t work I’ll give it a second one cause what I do know is when you are making a pilot you’ve gotten so many notes from the network and the production company and you’ve had to dance for so many people to make sure they all keep saying yes to you, then it’s not necessarily exactly what you originally wanted to do but once they say yes and you get on the air the next episode is going to look more like what you’ve always wanted. So, if it works on the second one then I will stick with it. If I don’t get it on the second one then I stop watching.

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

“Let us simply celebrate good television” and Bridgerton [Opinion]

“Let us simply celebrate good television” and Bridgerton [Opinion] by Dr. Rosanne Welch

Leave it to NPR to get it right, which is why I’m posting this piece they did on Bridgerton (Netflix), the new show executive produced by Shonda Rhimes and created for television by Chris Van Dusen from the romance book series by Julia Quinn.

See ‘Bridgerton’ Is A Delicious, Raunchy Tale Of One Very Hot Family

Far beyond explaining the show’s popularity, this article interested me because it understood instantly that what works best and most binge-ably about this show is that

“Let us simply celebrate good television, made by a shop run by a woman who loves good television and written by people who are experienced in television.”

In fact, I found one of the cleanest, clearest descriptions of the difference between movie screenplays and television screenplays while listening to this.

“Writing television requires writing to the rhythm of the episode, not just the season. An episode must have its own shape, its own rise and fall… Obviously, in a serialized story, one episode will not be complete on its own when it comes to plot, but it should work on its own structurally. It should have a beginning, middle, and end.”

You could spend a whole semester in a writing class and not yet be able to define it so cleanly – or create a piece that demonstrates having digested that delightfully delectable tidbit.

I also appreciated the note about how we may think streaming services invented binge-watching but

“Remember, binge-watching really came of age with DVDs, which didn’t have the Netflixian boosts of the auto-play and the credits-skipping and the part where they almost bodily shove you from one episode to the next episode. If you watched 10 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD, it was because you affirmatively said yes, over and over.”

I would go so far as to say TV in general invented that because before streaming it had to make characters and stories so compelling you would remember to be in front of the TV set at the same time every week in order to keep up.

That’s quite a lot of television writing (and history) information to glean out of one short public radio piece. Kudos to NPR pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes. And because we learn so much from any writer’s origin story – don’t miss her story at the end of the online post:

“She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living-room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.

Holmes was a writer and editor at Television Without Pity, where she recapped several hundred hours of programming — including both High School Musical movies, for which she did not receive hazard pay. Her first novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over, will be published in the summer of 2019.”

Rosanne Welch serves as Executive Director of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting. Television credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Nightline and Touched by an Angel. Award-winning publications include When Women Wrote Hollywood, runner up for the Susan Koppelman Award for best edited book in feminist studies and Women in American History, named Outstanding Reference Source and added to the list of 2017’s Best Historical Materials, by the ALA.