Tying up loose ends
Writers room is where the real drama unfolds on Quantico
In a Montreal studio, the stars of Quantico are filming a new episode of this ABC thriller about hotshot trainees at Virginia’s FBI Quantico Base. With their sworn mission to uncover domestic terrorists, these recruits would never guess that less than a year down the road, one of them, Alex Parrish, will be framed for orchestrating a ghastly crime: blowing up New York’s Grand Central Terminal.
Quantico is a fast-paced saga filled with action, intrigue and hanky-panky among its sprawling ensemble. It unfolds along two timelines, whipsawing between training sessions and, months later, the bombing’s aftermath as Alex (series star Priyanka Chopra) tries to prove her innocence and flush the real culprit from her FBI ranks.
With storytelling this knotty, it’s always worth remembering that Quantico just doesn’t write itself. Knock on a door far south of Montreal, in a converted factory space in Brooklyn, N.Y. — that’s where the multi-layered narratives come to light.
The season’s 15th episode airs Sunday. But 15 is old news for the four-man, four-woman team of writers who gather around a conference table led by Joshua Safran, the series’ creator and executive producer. They are there to tackle Episode 21.
Weeks earlier, 21 had been, in writers’ lingo, “broken” — painstakingly charted from start to finish, then transformed into a sceneby-scene memo for submitting to the network for approval. But ABC had balked at one throughline, so before the episode’s designated writer, Cameron Litvack, can start the script, the room must tie up the loose ends.
While they’re at it, Safran wants to ensure 21 paves the way for Episode 22: the season-ender, which he will write.
“Getting to the end and making sure we resolved everything and didn’t leave anything out — that’s been the toughest thing the last couple of weeks,” Safran says. “Everything has to connect!”
Did we mention that Litvack must have his script done in less than a week?
“Right now,” says Safran, “the issue for me with 21 is that it’s very talky. I want to add a little bit of energy.”
Energy seems to be Safran’s stock-in-trade. Animated and boyish-looking (though a veteran with Gossip Girl and Smash among his TV credits), he crackles with energy, propelling ideas quickly, while kneading a well-thumbed deck of playing cards. (“I don’t smoke,” he notes, “so I shuffle cards.”)
“Cam, are you OK with this idea?” he says after making a suggestion.
“It’s better that way,” Litvack agrees. “Not TOO much Alex.”
“We won’t get her in the story right now,” says Safran, “but we set up what her point of view is with Shelby (a fellow FBI trainee and frenemy of Alex), so we can get to it in 22.”
The vibe of this writers room suggests a spirited seminar in a graduate writing course. The air fills with story twists, character refinements and other interplay that keeps as- sistant writer Braden Marks busy at his laptop capturing the giveand-take while, on the wall, a white board mapped out scene by scene is continuously tweaked.
Safran says he wanted to create a show that challenges the viewer, “something that requires active watching as opposed to ‘I’m going to drink wine and play Candy Crush while my television is on.’ For some people that’s too much. But for other people, going on that ride is the way to hook them.”
And if at season’s end any viewer wants to re-cut all 22 back-andforth-plotted hours chronologically, “everything would line up so neatly that what might seem confusing when we fold it over every week, like a calzone, would be a really delicious pizza once it was unfolded.”
Already, Safran has “a thought,” he says, for next season’s “calzone” (Quantico has won a sophomore renewal). But that remains to be seen, as does whether filming will remain in Montreal or migrate somewhere thriftier.
A geographic gulf between writing and filming, while not ideal, isn’t uncommon in series TV, and such tools as Skype, email and stopovers by a visiting writer help bridge the gap.
But it doesn’t really matter where the writers room is.
However distant from production, wherever the writers convene, this inner sanctum contains the brain trust that devises how the actors perform and what the viewers see.