TV’s growing love affair with playwrights
Having writers working for the stage and screen creates two happy mediums
LOS ANGELES— Shameless writer Molly Smith Metzler calls theatre her “secret lover.”
“I always want to be with her the most,” she says, “and when I’m doing anything else, I’m thinking about her.”
In this era of so-called peak TV, the demand for strong storytellers on the small screen has sparked a new love affair: television adores playwrights and the feeling is mutual.
In unprecedented numbers, playwrights are essentially answering an industry personal ad that might as well read: “Seeking skilled writers with a keen grasp of character development, nuanced dialogue, narrative structure and emotional realism. You love Ibsen, Camus, Alan Ball and Mary Tyler Moore. Ribald humour and existential angst a plus.”
In years past, this relationship was an illicit tryst, a badge of shame. Today, it is an artistic triumph. Many writers head to theatre school with dramatic polygamy in mind and those already established in theatre actively pursue meetings with TV executives.
Showrunners in turn are eager to recruit playwrights and it’s now common practice for them to read plays in addition to the spec scripts that aspiring TV writers crank out upon graduation.
“I’ve pretty much only gotten TV work off of plays and not off TV samples,” says Bekah Brunstetter, who writes for This Is Us and American Gods, and whose premiere of The Cake in L.A. was a hit with critics and audiences this summer. “People find it refreshing to read plays.”
Playwright Halley Feiffer got one of her first TV writing jobs on an as-ofyet unreleased show co-created by filmmaker Alejandro G. Inarritu called The One Percent after one of its other creators found a 10-minute play she’d written on the bar at a theatre festival.
“I interviewed and got the job, and I was like, ‘This is the best job ever, because I get to be creative and I’m not alone in my pyjamas,’ ” Feiffer says of her introduction to a TV writers room.
Television has provided unprecedented financial security to a whole class of scribes accustomed to subsisting on, as Feiffer describes it, “one bowl of gluten-free corn flakes a day.”
The result of this happy marriage of mediums, say those on the inside, is not a tragic brain drain in theatre but the opposite. With padded pockets and adequate health insurance, playwrights are now able to write the plays they want to write rather than the ones they need to write.
“I think the ironic thing is that TV is freeing writers up to actually take more risk and push the form a bit,” says playwright and Mindhunter writer Marcus Gardley. “I originally wanted to write for TV in order to pay rent and buy some nice things — and by nice things, I mean a car — and what I’ve learned is that I’m writing less plays, but the plays I am writing go to a deeper place. TV turned out to be a gift.”
Literary manager Dan Halsted has seen the trend explode. His company Management became a go-to firm for playwrights interested in TV after he started signing them 13 years ago.
His clients include Shameless writer Sheila Callaghan as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, part of the writing staff for Spike Lee’s new Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It; and Tarell Alvin McCraney, who co-wrote the Oscarwinning film Moonlight and recently sold a coming-of-age drama to the Oprah Winfrey Network. “The TV boom has made such a huge difference in these people’s lives,” Halsted says, recalling how one client transitioned from a cramped studio in New York to a sprawling Silver Lake home.
Callaghan remembers fearing her good luck wouldn’t last after United States of Tara showrunner Jill Soloway emailed her out of the blue, thanks to the strength of a play titled That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play that Soloway stumbled across.
“In the beginning, I was taking anything that anybody offered me because I was so afraid it was all gonna go away. It seemed impossible that I was going to be allowed to do this, because it was fun and challenging and artistically satisfying,” Callaghan recalls.
Last year, she had two plays open in L.A. while she was writing for Shameless. But she hasn’t forgotten her difficult path forward.
Struggle, the kind that almost every playwright can relate to, is at the core of many successful TV shows. That’s why, many say, playwrights tend to make great fits for modern writers rooms where anti-heroes are celebrated and richly detailed, characterdriven, dialogue-heavy scripts reign.
“Theatre, by historically being an art form for the dispossessed, was traditionally a place of experimentation,” says playwright and seasoned TV writer Craig Wright, who got his start on the HBO drama Six Feet Under.
“Now, the widening of the TV marketplace is such that experimentation is required to stay vivid and present in the mind of consumers.”
The result, he adds, is that the experimental esthetics of theatre have started to seep to the forefront of television. That’s why niche shows such as Transparent or Mr. Robot can enjoy multiple seasons and critical praise, says John Wells, an executive producer and showrunner whose series have included ER, The West Wing, Southland and Shameless.
Wells, like Transparent creator Soloway and Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan, is part of a growing consortium of showrunners who love hiring playwrights.
The key difference between writing a play and writing a TV show, Buffini says, is scope.
A play needs to be distilled into two hours, give or take, while a TV show can stretch for dozens of hours.
“The two forms that have the most in common are television and the novel,” she adds. “Television gives playwrights an opportunity to write their novel without ever having to go near prose.”
Sometimes it also gives them an opportunity to place theatre front and centre, say Glow co- creators and playwrights Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch of their Netflix show about female wrestlers in the 1980s.
“We don’t have to leave theatre behind because the ring is such a theatrical place,” says Flahive. “There’s a stage in the middle of our set and how we use that changes as what we decide to do narratively changes.”
Becoming a showrunner is the Holy Grail, because it affords a control similar to what playwrights experience in theatre. When showrunners write, they find that they are once again driving the show’s vision.
They can also make all their own hiring decisions.
“The starving playwright is making seven figures and remembering their starving playwright friends,” says literary manager Halsted.
Or, as Mensch says of stocking the Glow writers room with playwrights: “It’s almost like a bad habit. We’re like theatre junkies: ‘Another one?’ ”