Defining Series Type

Episodic television can be categorized by the following three types of endings:

1. Closed-ended episodes: The main plotline (aka A story) is set up in the teaser or act 1, complicates in the middle acts, and is resolved by the end of the episode. Viewers can tune in at any time and easily be able to follow the action without a crib sheet explaining all the backstory and series mythology. It’s not essential that they watch each episode chronologically because each show features a self-contained mystery.

   In a legal procedural series (Law & Order, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, The Practice), the closed-ended episode is usually the verdict of the trial (guilty, not guilty, or a settlement).

   In a police procedural series (CSI, Rizzoli & Isles, Bones), the closed ending comes in the form of revealing the perpetrator of a crime (whodunit) as the solution to the crime of the week mystery. The story resolves when the perp confesses or is brought down by irrefutable evidence.

   The phenomenally successful CSI and Law & Order franchises are not shows about criminals; they’re shows about justice. In the old days, the prosecutors needed eyewitness testimony; now they just need DNA. The science lends itself to closed-ended A stories because these kinds of plotlines, based on forensics and ballistics, are truly irrefutable and absolute. Open and shut cases.

   The CSI franchise has been so durable because, at its inception, it broke new ground. It wasn’t a who-dunit; it was a how-dunit. CSI gives us a glimpse into the science of crime solving. We know the team is heroically going to solve the case by the end of each episode. It’s never a question of IF the criminal is going to get away with murder. Instead, we get to watch how our slick, resourceful, super smart investigative team tracks clues and gathers incriminating evidence to nab the perp.

   Our interest in these kinds of cases hinges on our emotional investment in the outcome. Maybe the perp is sympathetic and his actions were mitigated by special circumstances. Frequently, there will be some dissension among the team about the case.

   At times, the case of the week will trigger some kind of personal, emotional reaction from someone on the team. However, if this strategy is too on-the-nose or author convenient and happens in every episode, the writing can start to feel contrived. Ideally, the case of the week will resonate within the cast of regulars, but in subtle, oblique ways. The case may resolve in a tidy fashion, but even in closed-ended procedurals, there are going to be ripple effects that emerge in subsequent episodes.

   In a medical series (House, M.D., Grey’s Anatomy, Royal Pains), the closed-ending usually comes in the form of healing (diagnosis, treatment, or possibly a cure).

   In the majority of situation comedies, the A-story situations have a beginning, middle, and end. The problem(s) of the week resolves without having any substantive, lasting impact on the characters, and then next week’s episode features another tremendous trifle. For decades, the golden rule of sitcoms was that characters do not change. Audiences would tune in each week to see their favorite sitcom character face new challenges based upon their quirks and character flaws, but they fundamentally would revert to form by the end of the episode— and that’s OK because of the second golden rule of sitcom characters: we love them not only despite their unique flaws but also because of them. It’s their imperfections that make them fallible, also vulnerable, and funny. In fact, sitcom characters tend to become more rooted in their identities when they’re under stress—and if it’s a viable, funny comedy series, they’ll be under stress every week. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules as single-camera sitcoms evolve: the jury is still out on Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) on Modern Family, but he does seem to be changing with the times and becoming more tolerant.

2. Serialized, open-ended episodes: Multiple plotlines play out over the course of several episodes or the entire season before reaching a cliff-hanger type “resolution” which might be the answer to an extended mystery. Most serialized TV series track the progression of each main character’s love life and (possibly) work life with an emphasis on the relationships between characters. Character progression is what is known as a “character arc.” Where does he or she start off at the beginning of the season and where does he/she end up at the end of the season? What dramatic conflicts does he or she face? Serialized series borrow from the playbook of daytime soap operas—with the marked difference being that nighttime serialized dramas (such as Desperate Housewives, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Revenge, and Dexter) air once per week (versus five times per week for a daytime soap), tend to move much faster (versus daytime, where a character might be pregnant for several years!), and are much more nuanced when it comes to character development.

   Damages is an example of a legal procedural series told in a serialized form: one main case per season.

   The Killing is an example of a crime drama serialized over the course of two seasons (at its own peril) but is returning from cancellation (licking its wounds), and the revamped series will now resolve by the end of the same season.

   Lost, Game of Thrones, Once Upon a Time, and The Walking Dead explore an actively unfolding central mystery that’s heavily linked to each series’ mythology. These shows use a serialized structure that tends to leave viewers with more questions than answers by the end of each episode.

3. Hybrid series (also referred to as “semi-serialized”): This type of series seems to be the most prevalent in today’s marketplace. The hybrid series offers an A story that reaches some kind of resolution, but the more personal stories unfold slowly as extended subplots over the course of the entire season. The rules of the structure are much looser. Sometimes a case or plotline will resolve by the end of an episode, but even as one element is resolved, there will often be fallout that will spill into subsequent episodes.

   The Good Wife is a good example of a hybrid legal series. In the early episodes, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) would work on a case which would be settled by the end of the episode. But, as this series has progressed, the single-case, closed-ended episodes took a back-seat to the more serialized personal drama stories. You could say that the A stories became the B stories, and vice versa.

   Grey’s Anatomy tends to offer closed-ended medical cases at the fore-front of each episode, but the characters’ love lives are the core of this series.

   Scandal is another series that started out with “scandal of the week” A stories that Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and her associates managed to resolve by the end of each episode. But, as the show has developed, the ongoing scandals inside the White House and the accompanying political machinations have taken center stage. I suppose this was to be expected given that Olivia was having an affair with the president of the United States. Scandal doesn’t seem to be foreclosed on returning to closed-ended cases from time to time, but the show has evolved into one of the juiciest political intrigue shows on television. See also: House of Cards.

As you can see, hybrid and serialized series are much more complicated than their closed-ended counterparts. The truth is subjective depending on point of view. Walter White operates according to his own moral compass, so Breaking Bad is never about good versus evil or right and wrong. It’s all a matter of perspective. When you play by your own rules, you can always win.

Similarly, Dexter Morgan on Dexter, Don Draper on Mad Men, and Nancy Botwin on Weeds are skilled liars and manipulators, justifying their actions to suit their needs—often motivated by good intentions. They’re antiheroes because they’re not ruled by conscience; they’re ruled by impulse. And if the show is going to be “must-see” TV, their impulses must override our impulse to change the channel.

Predicting the Future of Television

Up until 2010, the broadcast and cable networks tended to prefer closed-ended, self-contained episodes to retain viewers who may have missed an episode from time to time. The conventional wisdom was that it’s hard enough to launch a new series, so why make it even harder by airing a series that’s dependent upon loyal, dedicated viewership? Broadcast networks were always skittish during premiere week in September because they were concerned that if an audience didn’t tune in for the pilot episode, would they be able to follow the action in episodes 2 through 22? Networks were also able to rerun series with closed-ended episodes and post decent ratings. Conversely, if viewers missed too many episodes of a serialized series like Lost, then ABC ran the risk of alienating and losing their viewers.

But audience trends have changed significantly in the past few years— and continue to evolve even as I write this. Viewers don’t need to make an appointment with their favorite shows anymore when they can watch them on their DVRs or download them on Hulu or Amazon or even via the broadcast and cable networks’ own websites. Rather than being daunted by a serialized story, viewers seem to like making the time investment and even look forward to “binge viewing” many episodes back to back. For decades, networks would offer “marathons” of The Twilight Zone during the winter holidays, showing every episode in a twenty-four-hour cycle. Now it’s Christmas all year long.

In 2013, most networks and TV studios are still partial to closed-ended episodes because they sell better and more reliably in foreign television markets. Outside the United States, audiences are more likely to watch series in their predesignated time slots (without the benefit of a DVR). Furthermore, closed-ended episodes can be watched in any order and easily understood and digested—even if the foreign broadcaster arbitrarily places commercial breaks at dramatically inopportune times.

NL: This chapter is about crafting an inevitable, but surprising conclusion. I also want to discuss the specific challenges of working on a legal series. But before we even get into that, I wanted to talk to you about the pilot. You made very specific choices in the pilot in that you started with the scandal and then cut ahead six months. How did you decide that that would be your way in to the series?

RK: Our spark for this series, and what we initially pitched to the studio and network was that first image of the political scandals—that would usually involve a candidate at a podium talking to reporters. Then, there would always be this cosmetic attachment—this wife who was there to share his shame—even though she was this innocent party. Is there anything more sympathetic in this world than this woman who is being dragged through the mud even though she didn’t do a single thing wrong? In fact, she was just as injured, if not more injured, than anyone else. And yet, she had to swallow her pride and do this. We felt that (1) this was a character that we couldn’t help but sympathize with and (2) that this was an opening that you could get hooked into the situation even without knowing what was going on in the woman’s head because you were so drawn in by that image and knew it from the news.

MK: And in terms of the next scene [jumping ahead six months] of Alicia [Julianna Margulies] as with almost everything in the series, it’s Alicia driven. And what is the reality? How long would it take this woman to recover her bearings, find a position, and get her life in order to start work? So that was the reason behind that choice.

NL: Obviously, you could have decided to have her wake up the morning after that scandalous press conference and show her slowly picking up the pieces of her life. But you chose to cut to six months later, I would imagine, in order to launch the legal franchise of the show: getting her in a courtroom, getting her first legal case, and getting her first verdict.

MK/RK: Yes, that’s right.

NL: My favorite thing on the pilot teaser is that little piece of thread in Peter’s (Chris Noth) sport jacket and her instinct to reach out. It’s just such a wonderful detail. When I teach Writing the One-Hour Drama Pilot at UCLA, I always show that scene. It’s just beautifully shot.

RK: What’s fun is that TV is becoming more cinematic where you can do things like that. What we find fun with it is that old TV shows might have had a monologue about the woman being a housecleaner or the wife as caretaker to this husband and she was worried about his wardrobe or that it’s the moment where she’s trying to remove herself from her surroundings because they’re so embarrassing. But if all you do is show this little image—it does tell you everything you need to know in that moment.

NL: When the series first went on the air, I know that at CBS, in particular, they were very much interested in closed-ended A stories. Their wheelhouse is procedurals, but what seemed to happen with The Good Wife pretty early on was that the personal stories and the love stories started to take over. While you still have the case of the week, the serialized elements became much more pronounced. Did that shiftfrom the original intention of the show? Are A stories still your cases or have A stories become more of the personal stories?

MK: For the most part, even in the fourth season, we still think of the case as the A story. Very occasionally, we’ll speak in the room in terms of twin A stories where a personal story will rise up in significance.

RK: I think part of the reason for that is that it’s easier to talk about it that way in the room. Writers’ rooms are built on talking about very specific logical aspects of the story. That’s what we find most helpful and I’m sure the writers themselves find the most helpful. Usually the best way to access emotion and character is by starting with what is the most concrete aspect of your story which then allows you to put flesh on it. Regarding whether we moved from cases toward emotion, there was a very great moment in development with CBS where we got notes from Nina Tassler [President of CBS Entertainment] where she asked for more emotion out of the scene. She asked for an additional scene that showed Alicia’s mindset now that it’s six months later. We added a scene which was not in the original script, where Alicia talked to the Mary Beth Peil character playing her mother-in-law, Jackie, who was this Eisenhower-type wife who thought Alicia was being a little bit rebellious and dismissive over her husband and dwelling on his interlude with prostitutes. It was a good scene, but what was really great for us was to hear the executive say, “Could you go in more of an emotional direction?” Because there was a split personality up until that point where some executives said, “You’ve got to do more with the case,” which usually means you’ve got to explain more. It felt like we could get away with a lot because everyone is so fucking familiar with the genre of the courtroom, so that they could fill in the gaps with anything they’ve seen. What that gave us was the freedom to do less with the procedural. TV is all about real estate. You only have forty-two minutes to tell your story. So if you do less with the procedural, it opens the door to do more with character.

NL: Starting with the pilot, you also seem to structure your shows differently. The pilot has a sixteen-page teaser, and your teasers tend to be quite long—almost like first acts. Where did that come from?

RK: With the pilot, before our first commercial break, we wanted to set up all the main characters. And I think all of the characters, except for Chris Noth’s character, were set up in the teaser and we wanted to establish relationships. It’s not enough to say he works in the office and that he’s garbage. It’s more about, “What is the relationship?” You need to set up that it was Will [Josh Charles] who brought Alicia in and that Cary [Matt Czuchry] is a little suspicious of Alicia because they’re going for the same job. All of that needed to be done which meant that it had to be a fairly long teaser because if they go away on commercial break … you kind of have to bring them along kicking and screaming into what you’re trying to entertain them with.

MK: In terms of calling it a teaser, that’s really just a remnant of what studios and networks call it. As far as we’re concerned, it’s an act.

NL: So it’s like a five-act structure?

RK: Yeah, I think so. You know that ABC and even NBC are doing a sixact structure because they don’t want to have a commercial between the end of one show and the beginning of another. When we were at ABC that was a nightmare. You should talk to Damon Lindelof about that. The six-act structure, I think, is sort of killing drama on other shows. Just because each act out … they say they don’t mind softact outs, but when you do one, they say, “Oh, that’s not a very good act out.” It keeps you from getting a rhythm going.

NL: When you’re breaking your stories, you’re very cognizant of where those act breaks need to be, right?

MK: We are.

RK: That’s the first move. After we decide what the case is, we ask, “Where are the highpoints in the story?” If you have two highpoints right next to each other, there needs to be some drama that leads up to one another and that’s clearly an act out. We’re a little traditional that way.

NL: Do you sometimes start with the verdict? Knowing who done it?

MK: I don’t think we’ve done that even once.

RK: We’re doing a law show, but we kind of hate law shows. The usual predictability of there’s a case that comes through the door, you’re in court, and “oh, oh,” the witness is not working for you, then another witness collapses on the stand, and then the jury goes away and comes in with a verdict. So bullshitty. It’s either guilty or not guilty and it’s just what the screenwriter wants it to be. We’ve always tried to avoid it. I think we’ve had a verdict maybe four times over four years.

NL: And also in reality, those verdicts would not come within one or two days that the episode is taking place.

RK: Yeah, I know.

MK: That’s the other thing. What we’ve tried to do is suggest that sometimes justice or the lack of justice is accomplished through the negotiations of the lawyers while the trial is going on which feels a little bit closer to life. We try to honor the fact that lawyers are often not just waiting for the jury to come in, they’re trying to negotiate a plea bargain or, in a civil case, reach a financial settlement. Some of our shows are just about the depositions because those are interesting and have their own sort of verdict, in that if you reach a settlement, that is the verdict. Also, then the verdicts don’t have to be yea or nay. They can be about whether this is a financial amount that is good for us or there can be more split verdicts where we lose something financially or there’s a gag order. Just gives you more options to make it surprising for the audience.

NL: Do you have a legal consultant on staf for do either of you have a law background?

MK: Neither Robert nor I are lawyers. However, we’re very fortunate. There are eight other writers on the staff this season, and four of them are attorneys. In addition to that, we have a legal consultant in Illinois.

NL: Right, because it is so specific to Cook County. I was thinking about other metaphorical verdicts on the show which are more like central questions for each season. There’s always the one about whether Alicia and Peter are ever going to get back together which, with the current state of things, it looks like yes, they are going to. Then you have Peter’s campaign and where that is going to go. Do you map out a whole season in broad strokes on where you want to take each character? Or do you do it in blocks of seven episodes or thirteen? What’s the strategy?

RK: We split the year in two. The first part of the year usually goes to episode 13, but that varies. This is based on the first year when you never were sure you were going to go past episode 13. We wrote toward knowing that we could end a story by episode 13. Our years have been both twenty-two and twenty-three episodes. We’ve been putting the back nine or back ten as their own self-contained arc. After our first year, we plotted out for a big reveal somewhere within the second half of the show which was the milestone we needed to build toward. In the second year, it was the discovery that Kalinda [Archie Panjabi] slept with Peter which was episode 17. So you could then have the first half of the year build up toward that. What we’re trying to give the audience is a sense of completion when they reach the end of the story. But what we have found is as much as we want to be like cable, we have such a long year. Instead of their eight, ten, or thirteen episodes, we know our years are twenty-two and twenty-three episodes, that’s why we’ve split it up into two. What we’re trying to do is tell two seasons worth of cable stuff in one year. Again, so that the audience doesn’t get lost in the idea of where is the beginning of the story and where is the end. There’s always something tending to conclusion or coming from the beginning. You’re always within reach of one or the other, no matter where you are in the year. We do have a very big roadmap for ourselves of what the year is. It’s complex though because there’s one for the first thirteen and one for the back ten.

NL: Because you’re doing so many episodes, can you talk about the challenges of pacing—how much story you reveal at one time? I don’t know if you’re watching Homeland, but I’m amazed by how they’re burning through story. I would imagine that would be incredibly dangerous for a network show because you’d start to run out of story quickly when you have to spread things out over so many episodes.

RK: I think that’s right, and the difficulty in network is network tends toward melodrama because there are so many events you have to have happen. The bottom line is no matter how complicated somebody’s life is—it would never be as much as happens on a network show. You just get exhausted by the end of the year with how many events have to happen in twenty-two episodes. That’s the advantage of cable of telling a little more self-contained stories. You can tell a story that is more mimicking reality. We get around that by playing characterization really slow. We’re trying to juggle a lot of balls at the same time. A lot happens in theory, but a lot happens across five characters. Alicia is not ripped from place to place every episode. Sometimes it’s Cary’s problem or Kalinda’s.

MK: You mentioned the question of pacing and how we make those choices. Yes, we do have a roadmap, but we are also forced to deal with scheduling issues that suddenly make one slow things down or speed things up depending on when one can get a cast member to tell a particular story. That impacts pacing.

RK: This may be something interesting for the writers and readers of your book to understand that network TV on the casting front is a little bit of a clusterfuck—that might be too strong. You’re struggling to get actors who really want to do the show, but are now on Sons of Anarchy or are doing a three-episode arc on Private Practice. We find ourselves pacing based on the knowledge of when we can get an actor back.

MK: Again, that is because we’re choosing to do some serialized storylines. If we were only telling closed-ended stories, casting would not be the same kind of problem. You would need your new defendant and your new attorney. You can find those people. There’s no shortage of good actors— particular since we cast out of New York. Because we want somebody specific, that’s when we run into difficulty.

NL: How important is theme when you’re mapping out the personalized stories? When you’re coming up with the A legal cases, are you trying to marry them to a theme from the B or C stories?

RK/MK: No.

RK: Actually, we go out of our way not to. Whenever there’s thematic resonance, it feels more organic if it’s actually the writer bringing it out in the writing process. So if you have three very different stories, when you start marrying them on the board in the writing process, you’ll start to see echoes and resonance that you start dragging out as you’re writing. If you do that prosaically, it starts to feel imposed. It’s not arising out of these specific events. It feels more like the thematic resonance is built. The only time we marry stories is when events help in a domino effect. One story would start a beat of a second story.

MK: We always try to work from the reality of how things would feel to Alicia. So in that sense, she might feel at the end of the day that this week was all about X, but it’s not as though she created that, it just might feel that way to her in retrospect.

RK: One last thing I’d say, too, is that it allows the characters in this meta way which isn’t meta to comment on thematic connections. If it’s imposed on the writers’ room, it feels like it’s the long hand of the screen-writer. But, in fact, if the events are not similar at all, but the character starts to see thematic resonance, they can talk about it because I think in people’s lives more than on TV, people actually talk about when their lives are seeming like a TV show. The bottom line is that there’s such a fear of being meta on TV, but in fact, in real life if you have these things that thematically connect and you’re surprised by it, you’ll talk about it to a friend or a husband or a wife. And that’s what we want characters to have the freedom to do.

NL: What’s the internal process with story documents? Do you do beat sheets, outlines? How extensive are the outlines? What’s your process with your writing staff?

RK: Pretty dysfunctional. (laughs)

MK: In terms of what goes to the studio, it’s changed. Initially, we were doing a one- or two-page story arena which was just a brief synopsis of what the case and then the personal story would be. Then, we would give them an outline.

RK: The point of the arena document was just that if they knew of other shows in their wheelhouse that might be doing something similar, they could warn you off or if there was some legal difficulty. We’re doing one on the FCC, for example. It wasn’t to steer you away from it, but just to be a little more conscious of what to avoid.

MK: Then we would do an outline that was somewhere between twelve and eighteen pages. And then a draftof the script. But that was the first three seasons, and it is pared down, so that now what the studio gets is a couple page arena document and then the draftof the script.

RK: The only other thing that we do internally beyond that is that Michelle and I draw up a fairly extensive beat sheet which is not all that readable, but is to us and the writer of the sequence of events. Because the structure you put on the board is pretty bare bones. Sometimes the beat sheet will juggle those events or add elements. It’s just to see how the scenes would dovetail together.

NL: And you two are based in New York, is that right?

RK: We’re bi-coastal people. Our writers’ and editors’ room is in L.A. and production is in New York.

NL: When you bring in directors, do you have extensive tone meetings with your directors?

RK: Yes. Our tone meetings go on for four hours. They’re just nightmare affairs.

MK: But they’re done over videoconferencing.

NL: I’m sure you’ve been asked this question a million times, so I apologize if it’s boring. It’s fascinating that you’re doing a show about marriage and you’re married showrunners. How do you delegate your responsibilities, and how is it working together?

RK: I think it’s good because showrunning is very complicated. You have to multitask all the time, network-wise. I don’t know if this is the same for cable, but network-wise, there’s three operations happening at the same time, which is the writers’ room, production, and all the editing and postproduction. Those three things are happening simultaneously, but on different episodes. You might be building in the room episode 4, shooting episode 3, and editing episode 2. There’s this multilayered effect that to have another head who shares your problems and can multitask while you’re multitasking is essential. You’re probably hearing that from the other showrunners.

MK: There’s so many little avenues of this stuff. There’s casting that must be dealt with, there’s standards and practices and the legal element. All these things have to be looked at, so it’s useful to be more than one person. Candidly, I don’t know how one person does the job.

RK: Then to be married on top of that has the added benefit of it’s really someone you don’t mind being with—at least with our marriage but not all marriages. They kind of share your same taste and instincts. So if I’m in a meeting, Michelle hopefully trusts that I will make decisions that she’ll approve or at least won’t grimace too big about it afterward. And I think the reciprocal is true. The only thing that I would say is complicated is that we have a thirteen-year-old daughter and that is a full-time job. Luckily she’s not bored by it, I think she’s amused by what we do. There’s never really a completely home life. We try to dovetail things nicely, but look, it’s a hard job.

NL: So much of it gets mirrored in Alicia’s life.

RK: You are so right.

MK: We’re lucky with that.

NL: That’s why it comes off so real. What’s the best thing about being the showrunners on The Good Wife, and what are the biggest challenges for you individually?

MK: I’ll start with the challenges. The challenge is the time. It’s trying to do this for twenty-two episodes. The benefit is that, just speaking for myself, I love the show, love the characters, the actors are spectacular; the writers are really some of the smartest, nicest people I’ve ever met. It is such a pleasure to spend time with them. The producers we work with happen to be people who are very smart and ethical and have a good sense of humor. It’s an amazing bunch of people we get to work with and that for me is the positive.

RK: I was in features for a while, and features always felt like you were clawing through mud to try and get your story on the screen. You rewrote the same script hundreds of times just to even get a listen. It never felt that you were actually telling the story to anybody other than your own head and a few studio executives. The amazing thing about TV is that before you were desperate for a drop of water and now you have a fire hose shooting at your face. What we have is final cut. I don’t think anyone gets final cut except Spielberg and some other people in features. In TV, the showrunner is given final cut on twenty-two to twenty-three little movies every year. People appreciate your opinion and don’t question it because they don’t have time to question it. There’s nothing better in the world for writers than current TV production because there is so much handed over to the showrunner to say, “Here. Now go do it.” I think the only downside for me is time, as Michelle said, which is also the time that you want to make something perfect and they don’t give you time to make it perfect. It’s not about financial costs, although that’s a part of it, but it’s more that you don’t have the time to edit it for another week. The other aspect is ratings, which is hard because, for the best reasons, they take it very seriously. Our show is a moderate hit, which I think doesn’t fall correctly in the demo, which can be tough. I would say that, and not having a life, are the down sides.

NL: How has the newer role of social media—in being able to get feedback, not just from ratings, networks, and studio executives, but from people writing in and blogging and immediately tweeting—affected you? Are you aware of these things coming after episodes? Does it influence the storytelling?

RK: I think it’s probably a very comfortable pose to say no, but unfortunately, the answer is yes. I’m very aware of it. First of all, I think it’s fantastic. As a writer and a reformed screenwriter for features, every day was procrastinating by participating in social media. Now it has the added aspect of being slightly an echo chamber because the people that participate are usually hardcore fans who have sometimes similar opinions and sometimes not. What you’re looking for is very intelligent analysis that you don’t get from mainstream media, but you might get the loner in some Brazilian town who saw the show and has exactly crystallized the thoughts that you were thinking. What you do is you take that Brazilian kid in that town and you make that who you’re going to write the next episode for. I think social media is not about the mass of people. It’s finding those people in the audience that I think Groucho Marx was talking about. There was someone he’d always look at and know that he made that person laugh. Otherwise, you don’t have real access to the audience. I think it’s the best thing that happened to TV since the product. I think the only danger of it is it becomes an echo chamber. I’m someone who, unlike someone like Kurt Sutter [Executive Producer on Sons of Anarchy], doesn’t get involved by answering back or having a Twitter account. I think it’s much more where the voice of the show is the show itself and the voice of the audience—[because now you can] get a sense of what people are saying.