A new affair is sparked between playwrights and the small screen
“Shameless” writer Molly Smith Metzler calls theater 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 humor 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 theater school with dramatic polygamy in mind, and those already established in theater 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 television 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” on NBC and “American Gods” on Starz, and whose premiere of “The Cake” at Echo Theater Company in L.A. was a hit with critics and audiences this summer. “People find it refreshing to read plays.”
When The Times cast a net for playwrights working in television, a list of a dozen names quickly grew to more than 50.
Playwright Halley Feiffer got one of her first TV writing jobs on an as-of-yet 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 theater 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 pajamas,’” Feiffer says of her introduction to a TV writers room. Since then, every room she has been a part of has had a playwright or four in it.
“We understand each other’s sensibility in a special way, because it takes a certain kind of wounded soul to gravitate to a business that will pay you $5,000 for six months of work,” says Feiffer, who is writing for the upcoming Showtimes series “Kidding” starring Jim Carrey, and who recently wrapped a Geffen Playhouse run of her “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City.”
After a scary year of paying for his baby’s vaccinations out of pocket, playwright and “Mad Men” writer Jason Grote got past the trope that writing for TV was more like carpentry than art. “As a writer with a family, it’s nice to be in a position to turn down work that isn’t artistically fulfilling,” he says. “Now, everybody aspires to have a play at Playwrights Horizons while a show they created airs on cable TV.”
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.” Or as playwright and “Shameless” writer Sheila Callaghan reacted to a TV-sized paycheck: “What? I can get dessert and a glass of wine?”
The result of this happy marriage of mediums, say those on the inside, is not a tragic brain drain in theater, 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.”
Playwrights can’t quit their initial calling, Metzler says. Rather, they feel compelled to succeed in both theater and television in ways that enrich each in equal measure. Love is an oft-used metaphor when discussing the parallel callings.
“Nothing replaces theater in my life,” says “Shameless” writer Dominique Morisseau, just in from Berkeley, where her musical “Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations” was playing. “But with TV, it just turns into two different kinds of lovers that have different skill sets, and as long as they all get along, we’re cool.”
Or, as Gardley, who is also an ensemble playwright at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, says: “I love writing for TV, but when I go to bed and dream, I dream about the play I’m working on.”
Where a playwright’s salary can be negligible, TV writers with the Writers Guild of America can make $6,800 to $7,200 per week.
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 antiheroes are celebrated and richly detailed, character-driven, dialogue-heavy scripts reign.
“Theater, 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 “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 aesthetics of theater have started to seep to the forefront of television. That’s why niche shows like Amazon’s “Transparent” or USA’s “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.”