Canceled
Posted by ashley on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 in Articles • Featured Articles • Writers • Margaret Dunlap • Script Development • Business Tips • (2) Comments • Permalink •
Work on a first-season show, and you get the joy and excitement of getting in on the ground floor. You get to see characters take shape, wrestle with structure as the show’s unique brand of storytelling evolves, be there as each department figures out the alchemy that will become the distinctive look, rhythm, and elements that will make this show this show. Also, 90% of the time, you will get to share the experience of learning that the first season of your show will also be its last.
The television winnowing process is brutal. Every year networks hear thousands of pitches. From those pitches they will order mere hundreds of scripts. Of those scripts, they will make only a handful of pilots. Of the pilots, a scant few will make it to air. And for every ten shows that have a first season, only one will have a second.
By the time last season rolled around, I had already done this dance a couple of times, and thought I was becoming familiar with the variations. But then, I was on a show where when word came down, it wasn’t that we wouldn’t be coming back for a second season, but that we weren’t going to be premiering with a first. That’s right. Our show had a staff, offices, a big pick-up announcement in the trades… And then it slowly and quietly died.
Sure, we’ve all heard of projects languishing in development hell in the feature world, but in television? Besides, we were past development. We were in production. Or so everyone thought.
The show was called Day One, and when the writers’ room started in August 2009, we were working on a 13-episode order for midseason 2010. Everything was pretty normal for a first-season show. The room met every day. We outlined a season, broke episodes, wrote outlines. But as time passed, it became noticeable, even to someone at my level, that things outside the writers’ room had gone subtly off track.
By October it was less subtle: If we were going into production in November, shouldn’t we have gotten approval to rent stages and start building sets by now?
Also: Why weren’t we getting any feedback from the studio or network on our outlines? Even if they didn’t want to approve us to go to script, surely they would tell us what they wanted in the way of changes, right?
Note for if you’re ever in this position. Not getting notes isn’t a good sign.
Finally we did get feedback, but it wasn’t about our work. Instead, we got word that the network had decided that instead of a one-hour pilot plus twelve episodes, they wanted a two-hour pilot (already shot) and two episodes.
Okay, not the best news to say the least, but the writers room dove in to work yet again.
We broke the second half of a four-hour miniseries, and waited for word. And waited. And waited.
I wrapped out of the show in December, and we were still waiting. On my last day, the word was that the network wanted us to shoot 15-20 minutes of additional material so that they could air the pilot as a two-hour movie.
Five months later, the Internet informed me that wasn’t going to happen.
In some ways, I count it as a great professional experience. I got to work with a group of really giving and really talented writers, a combination of new faces and old friends. Day to day, it was pretty much like working on any other television show, right down to the baseball cap with the show logo.
The only difference, as it turned out, was that we never actually made a series.
I don’t know, and wouldn’t want to speculate on what led a network to film a pilot, order a show, hire an entire staff of writers, plus assistants, plus a line producer and his assistant, plus a published book author to write a prequel novel, and then pull the plug when it came to actually filming.
In addition to a shameful lack of gossip, I’m afraid I also don’t have much in the way of practical advice to offer. It’s a situation where unless you’re running the show, the issue is going to be above your pay grade, and even if you are running the show, it’s still largely outside your control.
I guess in the end all I can say is: Sorry Day One. It’s not that we hardly knew you. We knew you quite well, actually. But as it turned out, we were the only ones.
Margaret Dunlap is a television writer and writers’ assistant. She is still friends with Zack Adamski on Facebook, and a little disappointed she never got to work out a ruleset for Sargasso Planet d20. She earned an MFA in Writing for the Screen and Television from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a B.A. from Simon’s Rock College of Bard.
