Law Enforcement

In Person of Interest, Harold Finch (Michael Emerson) is a computer genius who invents an incredible surveillance machine that can predict acts of violence. He recruits former CIA field operative John Reese (Jim Caviezel) to help him stop the violent acts before they happen.

Castle works in a similar vein. Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a famous crime novelist with a vivid imagination, while his partner Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) is an experienced New York City detective who believes in the simplest explanation. Even though the show is grounded in reality, Castle’s insane theories and outside-the-box thinking help the team solve their weekly mystery.

Law enforcement shows often have main characters whose ethics clash. In the season 8 episode of Law & Order titled “Stalker,” police partners Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) come out on opposite sides of the law while investigating a murder. Lennie commits perjury to ensure the killer will get justice, while good Catholic Rey is unwilling to back his partner up in court. Due to their conflict in morality, the killer almost goes free.

In The Shield, Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) leads the corruptible Strike Team, and Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) desperately wants to take down the renegade cops. However, more often than not, their interest is the same: catch the bad guy. In the pilot episode, the police frantically search for a missing girl whose junkie father sold her to a pedophile. And even though they have the pedophile in custody, he’s unwilling to talk. As the girl’s life hangs in the balance, Aceveda reluctantly unleashes Vic who mercilessly beats a confession out of the pedophile. As a result, the police find the little girl before she dies.

Law enforcement shows invariably have a scientific/technological geek as a sidekick who helps the main characters solve a case or complete a mission. In NCIS, there are actually two of these characters: Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) is a gothic forensics specialist, and Timothy McGee (Sean Murray) is an MIT and Johns Hopkins grad who serves as tech specialist. However, some shows place this “geeky” character in one of the lead roles. In Bones, Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) is a brilliant forensic anthropologist who lacks social grace, and she’s partnered with savvy FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz).

The X-Files uses the common “skeptic versus believer” dynamic. FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) believes in aliens and the paranormal, while his partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a doctor who believes in what can be empirically proven. Their opposing viewpoints help them solve their bizarre slate of cases.

In Elementary, “geeks” comprise both lead roles. Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) is an aloof police consultant with unparalleled deductive reasoning skills, and former surgeon and current “sober companion,” Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), assists him with her medical expertise. The police detectives on the show simply help them.

Criminals and Antiheroes

Shows that deal with illegal enterprises also have characters who specialize in certain areas. In Sons of Anarchy, motorcycle club president Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman) is valuable because of his relationship with the IRA, which supplies the club with guns. Bobby Munson (Mark Boone Junior) is a level-headed member of the club who handles the books. Tara Knowles (Maggie Siff), wife of main character Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam), is a doctor who provides clandestine medical assistance to members of the club. Happy (David Labrava) and Tig (Kim Coates) are two of the more savage members of the club, willing to handle the jobs that are particularly despicable.

In Breaking Bad, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is the expert meth cooker due to his chemistry background and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), an experienced but petty drug dealer, handles distribution. Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), a low-rent attorney, serves as the “drug lawyer,” helping his clients launder money and evade capture. As the enterprise grows, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a former Philly police officer and corporate security expert, switches allegiances and joins Walt’s side as “cleaner” and hit man— after Mike’s former crime kingpin boss, Gustavo “Gus” Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) is literally blown away. Walter’s wife Skyler (Anna Gunn), an experienced bookkeeper, handles the accounting. As the operation expands, cold and calculating corporate executive, Lydia Rodarte-Quayle (Laura Fraser), helps the team expand into a global operation—but only to save her own hide.

Doctors

Medical shows also have characters with various specialties. In Grey’s Anatomy, the doctors each have different specialties: cardiothoracic surgery, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, plastic surgery, trauma, pediatrics, and other areas. The characters are defined by their specialty. For example, over-achiever Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) fights her cohorts for the privilege to work with the “cardio gods” on any and all interesting heart surgeries.

In Royal Pains, Hank Lawson (Mark Feuerstein) works as a concierge doctor in the Hamptons after being fired from a New York City hospital for tending to a poor patient in critical condition instead of a bigwig in stable condition who dies unexpectedly. In order for his new business to thrive, Hank needs the help of his business savvy younger brother Evan (Paul Costanzo) who serves as CFO and his highly competent physician’s assistant Divya (Reshma Shetty).

In Nip/Tuck, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) are best friends and partners in a successful plastic surgery business in Miami. Ranked at opposite ends of the spectrum in medical school at the University of Miami (Sean at the top and Christian at the bottom), Sean is the more skilled surgeon, while Christian is more adept at being charming and growing their client base. Nevertheless, they begin each new client consultation with the same question: “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself?”

In House, M.D., Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) purposely surrounds himself with doctors who disagree with him in order to come up with different ideas and approaches to solving their weekly medical mystery. In season 4, House is forced to assemble a new team from a pool of 40 applicants. He disqualifies the applicants for a host of reasons, but he cuts one doctor in particular because he’s too similar in thought process and logic; House doesn’t believe blanket agreement is conducive to helping patients. This is the method to his madness—and genius.

In The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling portrays Dr. Mindy Lahiri who runs a small ob/gyn practice with her fellow doctors, Dr. Danny Castellano (Chris Messina) and Dr. Jeremy Reed (Ed Weeks). They are constantly at odds with the “quack” midwives who work upstairs and start to lure clients away from them. It’s science versus naturopathy between the two practices until it reaches a personal level when the midwives steal Morgan (Ike Barinholtz), the hilarious and earnest, ex-convict nurse whom Dr. Mindy and her colleagues have come to depend on, but Dr. Danny fires for sending a letter to his ex-wife. They win him back by proving that he’s part of their “family.”

The Workplace: Execs, Lawyers, and Fixers

Teamwork and specialization applies to shows that center around an office. In Mad Men, each member of the Madison Avenue advertising firm has an important role to play. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is the wizardly word-smith who (almost) always manages to pull off a magical campaign to the clients. Roger Sterling (John Slattery) is the gregarious partner who placates the big clients with frivolous nights on the town. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) are the young account men who prove their worth by bringing in new business. Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) makes himself invaluable by becoming an expert in television before it became essential. Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) begins her rise from Don’s secretary to his protégé by providing a unique perspective on a lipstick product; and Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) is the glue that holds the office together. She wrangles all of the secretaries, manages the books, and later leverages her feminine wiles into a full partnership at the firm.

In Scandal, political fixer Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) runs a D.C. crisis management firm. Her team of “gladiators in suits” includes lawyers, investigators, and a former CIA agent who works as her technology expert. Each is beholden to Olivia for rescuing them from a disreputable past incident, and since she helped them reinvent themselves, they’ll do anything for Olivia now. See also: Ray Donovan.

Legal shows often have firm employees who bring a special set of skills to the table. In Suits, Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) is a brash partner in a top-tier New York City law firm who has a knack for anticipating his opponent’s move and coming up with a clever counterattack. Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), his young associate who secretly doesn’t have a law degree, is indispensable because of his eidetic memory and nonlinear thinking. Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), a surly partner in the firm, proves his worth with fastidiousness and skillful forensic accounting. In addition to the lawyers, the secretaries and paralegals play a vital role. Harvey’s secretary Donna (Sarah Rafferty) is a trusted confidant who knows all of the firm’s secrets, and Rachel (Meghan Markle), the firm’s best paralegal, provides key research assistance.

In The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) is a junior associate who’s fifteen years older than her competition at a Chicago law firm. However, her wisdom and motherly compassion give her an edge over the callous social-climbing young lawyers in the firm. Also, her husband Peter (Chris Noth), in prison for corruption while serving as state’s attorney, is uniquely qualified to give her inside information on cases and police misconduct. The firm also has a valuable investigator, Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), known for her assertiveness and discretion.

In The Office, we meet the people we see at work everyday: Michael Scott (Steve Carell) as the Regional Manager of the Scranton office of the paper company Dunder-Mifflin. Over the years, we watch as salesmen Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) and Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) compete to see who can sell the most paper, but also to see who’s really Michael’s right-hand man and later to be his replacement. Until poetically in the final season, Dwight is finally named Regional Manager of Scranton and Jim and Pam (Jenna Fischer) begin their new life in Austin at the sports marketing company that Jim’s been working at part-time. In addition to sales, accounting, reception, and the warehouse are all represented in this funny, irreverent, mockumentary-style workplace satire.

Out of Their Element

Sometimes characters are forced out of their specialty, which often leads to near disaster. In 24, Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is a skilled computer analyst for the counter-terrorist agency, CTU. She routinely helps Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) thwart terrorist attacks with her unmatched computer expertise. However, when she’s forced into the field out of desperation, the mission almost falls apart.

In The West Wing, each member of the president’s staff has a role to play. C. J. Cregg (Allison Janney) is the press secretary who deftly handles the White House reporters. On one occasion, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) is needed to brief the press. The briefing goes terribly awry when Josh’s sarcastic wit and cavalier answers causes a feeding frenzy amongst the reporters.

In The Wire, officer Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost) is an apathetic cop who’s practically useless. However, he finds his calling within the police department as an in-house investigator while working on a sprawling drug case. In season 3, Prez randomly finds himself out in the field while picking up food and responds to a radio call. He draws on a suspect and kills him, but being unfamiliar with working in the field, he fails to identify himself as a police officer. Tragically, the suspect he shoots and kills is an undercover police officer.

NL: What were the most significant challenges you had in adapting the Rizzoli & Isles novels?

JT: This was massively challenging partly because of where my head was at the time: I didn’t want to do (another) adaptation. I’d just had HBO pass on an adaptation I’d written of a memoir, so I was licking my wounds on a staff gig and in the middle of writing a spec pilot (coincidentally set in law enforcement). I probably said, “I’m never doing another adaptation,” on the day the project that became Rizzoli & Isles walked in my door.

The long boring Hollywood story (trust me, I’m so un-Hollywood, I do my own laundry and vacuum when I’m anxious) is the following: I’d changed agents and I was a new client at CAA. My agent, Rob Kenneally, called (here’s more un-Hollywood—Rob and I first met when I coached his kid and my kid on a soccer team. I’m sure he thought I was that loud soccer mom coach lady before somebody told him I was also a writer). He wanted to set up a meeting with a man named Bill Haber, who’d read a play I’d written and wanted to meet me. Haber is a legend in Hollywood—one of CAA’s three original partners who started that beast. He’s an eccentric, brilliant, kooky man. He’d optioned one of Tess Gerritsen’s murder mysteries. Here’s the part that is only getting funny four years later: he didn’t know which of Tess’ seven books he’d optioned. In fact, no one could tell me—not even my agent. Bill is busy and important and a jet-setter and a man with more energy than me, which is a fuck of a lot.

So I read all seven of them. (Yes. I overprepare. I did this when I was a reporter, too.) The hardest part of an adaptation is you feel like it isn’t yours. Like from the beginning, you’re wearing someone else’s clothes to something important—think your wedding. And you have to ask permission to cut off the sleeves or take up the hem. Or tear the whole thing apart and make a new outfit. I have a lot of respect for other writers—plus the fans of any adapted book will inevitably be disappointed. I’m an avid reader—but I’m also a screenwriter. What you envision in your head when you’re reading a book is different from what makes a good TV show. The biggest difference is probably that Tess’ books aren’t funny—they’re dark mysteries. In fact, I do believe the original mandate was to write something tonally that was more like The Silence of the Lambs. Fortunately, Tess Gerritsen is an extremely nice person—and, lucky for me, she’d had her books optioned before (don’t ask me which ones)—and nothing had ever even been developed past a pitch. She was so grateful that I was actually writing a pilot script that she gave me tacit permission to make it my own. Once I stopped worrying about the “other” writer, I made it mine.

NL: How does your conception of Jane Rizzoli (Angie Harmon) and Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander) differ from the books, and why did you choose to make those changes?

JT: Tess is a doctor—and she has a meticulous style—her books are dense and well-researched. They’re also page-turning, layered mysteries. But the mysteries and the forensics, not the characters, take center stage. I wanted the women and the supporting characters to be the reason people tuned in. It was important to me that the two women—Jane and Maura—be very, very different. Drama is conflict. I wanted them to not only look different, but to be very unlikely allies. They’re site-specific friends—they would never have become friends if they hadn’t been thrown together in their work. It was important to me to mine the organic humor that emerges when you have a job like Jane has (homicide detective) and like Maura has (medical examiner/coroner). They see plenty of dark shit. But they’re also people—and they take themselves and their lives with them to work every day. When I was a reporter, I covered some really terrible, sad dark stuff—I’m talking serial killers and school shootings on any given day. You’re committed to what you do, but you also have to find a way to do it every day—and survive the darkness. Laughter in this context is a coping mechanism, a pressure-release valve, a bonding agent. You hear humor all the time in police stations—it doesn’t mean they aren’t deadly serious about their work.

NL: How much of your life experience as an ex-journalist, wife, mom, and woman informs your series—especially when it comes to family, love, loss, and justice? Can you provide any specific examples of a real life event that impacted your storytelling?

JT: I said my head was in a strange place because of a failed pilot, but there was personal trauma, too. My best friend had been killed [in a car accident] right before I started writing Rizzoli & Isles. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time because so much of writing is your subconscious working things out, but what I was really doing by making a female buddy show was mourning the loss of my best friend. The loss of her was very raw. The unexpected piece of this show was their friendship—Jane’s and Maura’s. When you’re a writer and you’re grieving, you don’t really know how it will manifest. We should know what we’re writing, but we don’t always know where it’s coming from or why it’s finding its way on to whatever page we’re in the middle of writing. I spent ten years covering all sorts of crime stories and spent a lot of time around cops, FBI agents, and victims and their families. It was important to me that the people who populate the show feel real and are like the people that I came across all over the country. It was also important for me to come up with smart mysteries that could actually happen. If you talk to my husband or either of my daughters, they’d probably complain that’s it’s hell living with a writer … little bits and pieces of my life and their lives are all over this show. Steve and I were having one of those “we’ve been married forever” fights— and I went to the laundry room because that’s what I do when I’m upset: I clean. I was trying to find mates to socks. And so many were missing their mates. I felt a sudden pang at the thought of losing Steve—and that “sock” moment turned into a beautiful scene with Angie Harmon after her lover leaves. And yes, props used my family’s socks (which they complained about).

I steal their lines, too. Julia, my younger daughter, was in a really terrible “I hate middle school” mood one night. I tried to soothe her and said, “I’ll make you something. What do you feel like eating?” She said, “People.” Lorraine Bracco [as Angela Rizzoli] and Angie Harmon had this exchange in one of my favorite episodes.

It’s a Herculean task to come up with fifteen mini-movies in a short amount of time. The show chews through material. They are very densely packed scripts—potentially too dense; I’m sometimes forced by the format to give short shriftto things. But the one thing that has always been front and center is Jane and Maura’s friendship. It took me a year of producing the show before I realized how deeply the loss of my best friend had influenced this relationship on-screen. My friend and I had the kind of friendship that I’ve worked to build for Jane and Maura (another thing that really isn’t in the books at all). She wasn’t competitive. She didn’t judge. She embraced my flaws. She knew me. There was a purity to the relationship. She celebrated everything that I did. That’s a really hard thing to replace. I had also known her for seventeen years—I met her when I was pregnant with my first daughter. I knew there were things I didn’t want to do with these two women. I didn’t want them to be fighting over boys. I didn’t want them desperate to be married. I didn’t want them to be doing the “tick-tock my biological clock is ticking and the eggs are getting old” thing. I just thought that would be a big yawner for me. I’ve had really wonderful friendships with both men and women, but there’s something that happens when you’re with your own gender. You have that closeness even if you don’t see each other often. You pick up where you left offand you drop the mask and you are who you are. So Jane could be tough and a tomboy, but she could also be awkward and insecure. Those are the types of things that people close to us allow us to see. I’m also very interested in the extremes of the human condition. When do people snap and why do they snap? I do believe that a lot of that research about the brain is spot on: in the right situation, people are capable of anything.

NL: It seems like there’s a shiftback to doing more serialized stories on broadcast network television, probably from the influence of cable series, like Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Did you ever consider serializing Rizzoli & Isles with ongoing cases versus closed-ended crime stories that start and resolve within each episode?

JT: I would love to serialize this show. Writers in general love to serialize. But those shows are harder to sell—and harder to get people to “sample.” It’s like showing up late to a play or a movie—you don’t want to go at all if you feel like you’ve missed too much. Non-serialized shows also tend to sell better to foreign buyers because they then have the freedom to run the episodes out of order or even blend seasons. It’s purely a business decision that gets made for you. This was always a “closed-ended procedural.” And the fact is, it’s not my money. I feel creatively like it’s “my show,” but it’s not really “my” show. I work for people. Warner Horizon is the studio and TNT is the network. We’re in a funny period where I do have to think about the mandate and the series’ future resale value. Or I have to stop making this show.

So far, the total number of series that started on cable and made it to domestic syndication is zero. So we could make a hundred episodes and it may not syndicate. And the hope with Rizzoli & Isles is that the people who pay for it (and are essentially my clients) will eventually be able to syndicate it. Hart Hanson [creator of Bones] taught me how to find my way in and how to turn the car in the direction that I felt it needed to go while also infusing the characters with humor and life. Finding a way to keep both art and commerce in the same “car” isn’t easy.

But you have to. If your “buyers” can’t find a way to finance the show, then you can’t make it. People love these characters, so I can’t not serialize or “continue” their stories to some extent. How much that happens is part of the collegial push–pull process of making the series. My hope is to someday write a show that does not have five commercial breaks. It’s a bit intrusive for me as a storyteller and for you as the viewer. It creates challenges because my goal is to maintain the natural flow of the narrative. An interruption breaks that flow. But I’m used to writing to act breaks.

NL: So you’re a teaser and five acts or is it a teaser, four acts, and a tag?

JT: Cold open and five acts, yes. Our network execs like a very long first act. So that cold open can be anywhere from seven to ten minutes. The title sequence floats around, and I decide when I’m in post where it feels most appropriate. TNT is a wildly pleasant place to work, and I’m not just saying that because one of them may see this interview. They have given me a lot of autonomy in how I build the show within very general constraints—they have allowed me to make this show what it is.

NL: Are there rules on your show for when you’re breaking story? Like the A story has to end the act?

JT: Not as such. If I made myself actually chart and dissect it, I would probably find there are certain structural elements that feel “right” in our show and others that don’t—but there is no “set of rules” manual I hand out to prospective writers. But pretty strict “rules” have developed. I think my writers would tell you they’re hard to get a handle on because a lot of them are in my head. I need freedom to dance on the page, but my brain finds a way to organize all of it.

The fact is when I did sit and analyze it so that I could get better at communicating what I needed from my writers, I discovered that every story has, on average, thirty-two beats. So is that a formula? Maybe. I figured out that I almost always have a fifty-fifty split in my act breaks: half are character act breaks, half are story act breaks. That stuff wasn’t planned, but my guess is it’s my training (working on other people’s shows), my natural inclination, and my subconscious striking a balance between crime and character stories.

Now that the audience is engaged with these characters, I’m not afraid that they won’t come back. The lovely thing is that people do care about what happens to these characters in a very real way. Of course they want our characters to solve the mystery, and it’s our job to make the mysteries tight and complex, but as savvy viewers, they know the mystery of the crime will get solved at the end of the episode. It’s the more personal stories where the real surprises are. That’s true for me as a writer, too.

NL: Given your extensive background as a journalist, how is being a showrunner similar and how is it different than being a journalist and/or news editor?

JT: There are definitely similarities, but to answer the question you have to understand the disparate operational structures. I’ve worked in print for both newspapers and magazines. I’ve worked in broadcast news on weekly newsmagazine shows and daily live event coverage. I’ve worked on long-form narrative programming as a writer, a writer-producer, a producer-writer (essentially), and now as a showrunner. How much space do you have here?

Maybe the best way to explain it is that anyone who comes to be in a position of serious responsibility like this is only able to do it because of the specific set skills and experience they bring to it. I’ve done all the aspects one would imagine in journalism: thinking of the story, researching the story, setting up and conducting the interviews, the door kicks and ambush interviews, the backgrounders, shooting stills and/or video, acquiring other source material, understanding the equipment and all of the technical aspects, hiring and managing people, blah, blah, blah. But you are always thinking story. That’s first in your brain. And along the way, you have to continually shake the themes and facts and emotional elements in your working bag while asking, “Is this the best it can be?” There was so little space—and so much to tell when I was a news reporter. I feel the same way when I’m writing a screenplay. Everything has to matter.

I’ve always done a ton of research. I’d generate a small mountain of material as a reporter, so that by the time I’d shot, written and edited my piece, it was a tightly formatted, cohesive finished product that hopefully engaged, informed and, when appropriate, entertained. I always think it’s like an iceberg—you may just see the tip but you know there’s a hell of a lot under it. It also feels so similar to what I do now because as was true when I was a reporter/producer, there are so many hats to wear as a show-runner.

Being in charge of a series from prep through production to post-production is a bigger version of my life as a broadcast journalist. It turned out to be great training, though I never (never) intended to leave news to do this. I value that experience and draw on it all the time whether in planning, actual production or seeing the show through the many stages of Post. Clearly, it’s not the only path to becoming a showrunner, but it was mine. And none of those really valuable skills would matter if I couldn’t write—studios and networks will only throw you the keys if you’ve demonstrated the ability to turn blank pages into truly compelling and shoot-able scripts that turn into shows people want to watch.

I could always write. Journalism taught me how to write quickly. It also taught me the near magical value of research. In the narrative world where there is generally more value placed on just “making stuff up,” it’s important to remind ourselves that writers need to experience what we’re writing about. When I write Rizzoli & Isles, I don’t think of Angie and Sasha on TV. I think of Jane and Maura at a murder scene, I will go to the fish warehouse to listen to the sounds or smell the smells. When Jane and Maura are in a mud bath or hanging from an inverter, I do that stuff myself. What does it feel like? What are you thinking when you do it? Verisimilitude is not just a goal, it’s the foundation—and since we’re deep in the world of crime-solving, I’m pretty anal about getting it right. The actors and the crew really, really appreciate it. They do their homework, too.

When I was writing the pilot, I reached out to friends from graduate school (Columbia University) and tapped a Boston Globe reporter. I said, “Give me a homicide detective who’ll talk to me.” He made the introduction, and four years later, this cop went from full-time tech advisor to a writer on my staff.

No line or prop or action is too small because everything contributes to how the show feels. “Would our bad guy toss or burn bloody clothes? Why did he use a gun? What kind of gun?”

These things mattered as a journalist covering crime stories; they matter as a writer creating crime stories. The devil is in the details, but you also can’t let that run your life because as the showrunner, you’ve got a factory to run. I’m always thinking: “What’s been shot? Can we change this or hide it?” It’s about punting and being creative—as a writer and a producer—all day long. I love that. Reminds me of doing live news: you have to think on your feet or you’ll look like an idiot in front of a lot of people.

I have a couple hundred very talented people, but we all work under very stringent time/money resource parameters. Showrunners have to make sure the assembly line keeps moving, and if any one of the hundreds of components breaks down, the whole thing grinds to a loud, painful, expensive and sometimes very public halt.

Our overall goal is that no matter what aspect of the production you examine, you’ll see the money and time was spent wisely in service of the story, and that the end result is something that engages, entertains, and maybe even informs and inspires. So it’s not all that different in qualitative terms. It’s more a question of scale and the natural pressure that comes with having a lot more at stake.

NL: What gives a fictionalized crime story on Rizzoli & Isles the dramatic juice for you as showrunner/arbiter to have a eureka! moment in the writers’ room? And what might cause you to kill a story for not meeting those specific needs?

JT: I see it in my head as the writer pitches it. And what I’m thinking is: “Is this the show? And how badly do I want to write this?” The question I ask myself is simple: “Am I dying to write this?” If the answer is yes, then it’s something we’ll pursue. There are stories that are perfectly good stories for other shows—that just don’t excite me. Kind of like people at a cool gathering: some you’re drawn to; some, not so much.

And then when you decide to proceed, it’s a lot of time and thought and experimentation: go this way or this way? Trial and error. If you don’t have a story turn or a line or a resolving moment that gives you the kind of resonant tingle every viewer rightly seeks, you keep at it until it comes. I think I’m like other writers in that I never really stop writing this show—even when I’m sleeping. So sometimes that story-saving idea comes very late at night, or while I’m working out at the gym or yeah, while I’m vacuuming. That messy creative process drives us all nuts—writers included. But I learned all about deadlines from my news career: if you don’t meet the deadline, there’s dead air or a blank page … and you don’t work again.

I also really like to push it—myself, my writers and most especially the story. I don’t want your first idea—or my first idea. I want the idea we haven’t thought of yet. That’s hard.

NL: It seems like it’s a very thematically driven show. How important is theme to you?

JT: I think theme emerges. I think you find your way to things that when you’re done make a whole lot of sense. As I said, I didn’t realize until I was a year and a half into this project that my grief about my friend created a celebration of friendship between Jane and Maura. That to me is the writing process and why I want theme to emerge from the work—you don’t go out trying to hit the beats of a pre-conceived “theme” (or at least I don’t). Your writer’s mind finds and makes all of those connections as the story forms.

NL: How are you at coming up with the crimes? Are they coming from the books?

JT: No, the crimes aren’t coming from the books. We’ve used one story from one of the books in the pilot. But otherwise we’ve generated the stories ourselves largely because what works in a three hundred plus page book doesn’t necessarily work in a TV show. As for technique, I have a couple ways that I’m sure can make being on my staffsomewhat maddening. Sometimes an episode can start with just an idea for a scene. For example, I wanted to kill a guy in a car wash. That’s how the episode began. Another one began because one of my daughter’s is a dancer. We did a competitive dance episode. My other daughter is massively into art, so that’s figured into several episodes and into Maura’s mother’s background. My brother is currently doing a tour in Afghanistan. Jane’s lover, Lt. Col. Casey Jones, was in Afghanistan.

I read a lot, I eavesdrop, and I try to listen closely to my children’s worlds because the world of teenagers is nearly impenetrable. I know something is worth pursuing when I hear it—and story just naturally starts to spin in my brain. What I tend to do at the beginning of every season with my writers is we sit in the room for a week or two and brainstorm. I ask everyone to read as much as they can about local politics and life and crime in Boston. I have my former tech advisor turned writer who is constantly digging up murder stories.

I grew up on the East Coast and lived outside of Boston in elementary school, so I’ve done Revolutionary War–themed episodes, Salem witches, and a marathon. I sometimes find myself wishing Angie, Sasha, and Angela had Boston accents. I’ve been dying to do Strangers on a Train, but every time we try it out, we’re in the world of electronics and cell phones and computers. That is the single hardest piece of a procedural show to get around: there are a bazillion ways to track people now. How do you come up with a crime without an electronic footprint? It’s very hard, so I’m now in the place where I’m trying to challenge myself to make the mysteries stronger and tighter. I think when you think of the show, you think of Jane and Maura and the relationships and the family. But the things that really hold the show together are those flexible walls and the floor, which is the crime. The show is grounded and begins with a good mystery—that crime has to be good and solid.

NL: So you start with the crime?

JT: I always start with the crime. That is a rule that I think I’ve always had from my first procedural staff writing job. This has made for some very crazy circumstances for my children. When I was on CSI: New York, I wanted to kill a woman with a redwood stake. I’m very tactile and I’ve already said I was a journalist who liked to do research. So I went to the nursery with my then seven-year-old and the guy came over to say, “Can I help you?” And my daughter piped up and said, “My mommy’s looking for a redwood stake to kill somebody.” The guy rushed off saying something about having to bring the manager. I get myself to think like the murderer and plan it to the point that I think if I’m going to kill somebody, I’m going to get away with it. So I tell my writers that the mandate is this: but for super sleuths, Jane and Maura, the killer would get away with it. It also has to feel like if the stakes [no pun intended] are that high, if I’m willing to commit murder, I’d better have a damn good reason. When you’re trying to sustain this mystery, and you’re trying to get all of your actors on board, it’s got to make sense. Not “TV” sense, but real and true sense.

NL: What’s one of your favorite mystery stories that you’ve told? And why was that specific crime story particularly powerful/memorable for you?

JT: I really love the season enders that I’ve done. Given how truly hard this is, it’s easy to get into a not-so-fun place where you’re just brain dead and you have near-panic: the season opener and season ender always throw me for a loop. I go into my “I’ll never get it. I’ve done too many. How are we going to top that?” mode—and drive everyone in my life nuts.

NL: At what point do you have a sense of where you’re going to end the season?

JT: I knew early on with season 1 and season 2. I knew in season 1 that I wanted to end on a cliffhanger with something very unexpected with Jane. I figured I’d probably be out of money and have to do a bottle show [a whole episode set primarily all in one location]—which would play into how it was constructed. In season 2, I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to see them in conflict—not knowing if they were going to continue being friends. So the challenge was coming up with the mechanics of how that would happen— and how to do it in a very unexpected but real way. It comes down to the last few seconds of the show after Jane shoots Maura’s biological father, who’s a bad guy, and Maura looks up and gasps and says, “Don’t touch him. Don’t you dare touch him,” as Jane, who is conflicted and tormented, backs away from her best friend. I was really proud of that when it all finally came together. I figured out how I wanted to end last season, which was season 3, only as I started to beat out that final episode. I couldn’t decide how to end it really until I wrote that final scene.

We’ve just started shooting season 4—and I, thankfully, already know how I want to end it. Not saying I won’t panic—just saying I think I know where I’m headed…

NL: Talk about Paddy Doyle, the “Whitey Bulger”–like character you created who is Maura’s biological father. When Jane shot him, Maura had incredibly complicated feelings. He’s a bad guy—but she loves him.

JT: They both had incredibly complicated feelings—and they’re both right. That’s the best kind of conflict (in my opinion) that there is. Neither is wrong … my favorite kinds of arguments to write are ones in which both people feel that they are right.

When I don’t know how to write a scene, I know I’m headed in the right direction. That’s the piece of me that wants to eventually write novels. I think a lot of TV writers worry that viewers don’t think of us as writers because they’re not aware that everything they are seeing in a television show has been imagined, processed, thought-through repeatedly and then written and rewritten—from every action line to parenthetical to line of dialogue. To me, the two best compliments are when an executive says, “That was really fun to read,” and then way down the line we hear from viewers who don’t just think it was fun to watch, but they have the sense that they’re having these experiences along with the characters—as if they’re transported into this world we’ve created.

In moments of massive shock or trauma, we are both capable of being our truest selves and of completely surprising ourselves with what we do or say. These are unpredictable catalysts. In that finale with Paddy, what I wanted was Maura to react in a way that she couldn’t have anticipated. That’s a universally human experience. It’s that moment when you wonder, “Why did I just laugh at the most hideous thing that has happened to me?” I wanted to drop these best friends into a situation that threatened to sever years of friendship in an instant. Can you a lifelong relationship go away with one interaction? I think we know it can. How do you dramatize that in one scene?

But then of course, I had to pick up the pieces of that shattered relationship in the next season opener. Jane and Maura were no longer “best friends.” In fact, they weren’t speaking to each other. Paddy Doyle, Maura’s father, was dying. Jane was equally pissed: what else was she supposed to do? Doyle was one of the FBI’s Most Wanted—and he pointed a gun at her. I thought, “How do I revive this and how do I put this friendship back together? How do I do it in a way that doesn’t feel like television, but feels real?”

NL: That comes through in every episode because they’re both equally intelligent and equally impassioned. One comes from intellect and science, and the other much more from instinct, guts, and street smarts.

JT: I had an executive tell me that I couldn’t have women fighting, that no one would watch women fighting. It’s possible that there was a part of me that thought, “I’ll show you how women fight and how you can be invested and how you can learn something if you’re male.” One of my favorite scenes of them going at it in season 3 is in Maura’s office and Pike [Ed Begley Jr.] comes in and calls it a catfight. Yet, there are all kinds of real things being talked about in a funny way.

NL: When I’m talking to my students about their one-hour drama pilots, I tell them to think of every show as being about a family—whether they’re related by blood or not. In your show, you have both. You have the work family and mainly Jane’s family because of her brother being a cop and her mom who is now working at the café. Jane and Maura are like sisters. Her mentor character, Vince (Bruce McGill), is like a father. How important are family dynamics to you when you’re plotting?

JT: Originally, FBI agent Gabriel Dean [Billy Burke] was going to play a much larger role, but I didn’t want a love triangle with my two female leads fighting over a guy. Because these two women are so committed to what they do professionally, their familial relationships would happen at work. And yet, once I had the use of Lorraine Bracco, I had to find a way to integrate her into their world, so that we weren’t constantly stepping out of the Boston police department or the medical examiner’s office to go visit Ma. But did I sit down and think: “How do I make this family important?” No.

We all are dramatists, and even if you grow up as an orphan, you have some patchwork of a family. We’re all familiar with the archetypes, so maybe we just all naturally go there—to “family” both by blood and by choice. I think the contrast between these two people is that Maura had a little benign neglect with plenty of books and lots of intellectual stimulation, but not that huggy, kissy mom throwing her arms around her. Angela is a huggy, kissy, in-your-business Ma, but Jane is not a hugger. Why? Because it feels like Jane: nature won out over nurture. That’s why you love it so much when there is that contact because it breaks down that hard shell Jane has on, and hopefully, that it also feels real. One of my favorite scenes is when Maura is really in pain, yet won’t let Angela hug her, and it breaks her heart.

NL: One of the conventions of television is that characters don’t change because you want to tune in and see who they are, but in some shows like Breaking Bad, Walter has changed enormously—that’s the whole point of the show. Do you see your characters as evolving over time? Do you want them to? Or will they stay rooted?

JT: I think that since these women go through some grisly experiences, they can’t help but be changed. So I do feel that they have to evolve. Like all human beings, we become more of who we are or more of who we want to be. I wish in some ways that I could figure out a way to do five or ten seasons where they do stay the same. It’s also about your thoughts of who you want to be—but paying attention to what the world is telling you about who you are—or at least which face you’re showing.

I also think they are naturally affected by the friendship that’s deepened as they go through experiences that we see them having. Truthfully, I miss some of the wonkiness of Maura from season 1. In some ways, it was easier. But to keep the actors interested, I have to keep them alive as creative people and as artists so that they’re allowed to pick up a different colored pen—and flex different muscles.

Seeing Maura angry tonally is something we don’t get to see as much. There’s a scene at the end of season 3 where she’s rude to her biological mother. She says stuff she wouldn’t normally say. I struggled mightily with that scene because we’d never seen Maura do that. Was it consistent with who she was? Hell, yeah. She’d never been in that particular set of circumstances before. I do think that viewers don’t always love that, particularly viewers who drop in and out. They want the same meal every time. But here’s the thing: real people are full of contradictions. They don’t always say what they mean. They don’t always tell the truth. I love discovering something new about someone you’re certain can’t surprise you.

NL: You’ve gone to CSI camp. You’ve gone to Bones camp. What are the most important skills of being a showrunner to you?

JT: This is my second profession. My news skills have been absolutely invaluable. My ability to write very quickly when there are no second chances has also been invaluable. I also have a ton of production and postproduction experience. I was very lucky that way because writers don’t always get exposed to that. When I walked into the Rizzoli & Isles edit bungalow, I already had ten thousand hours under my belt and that was a huge bonus. I think that many screenwriters don’t understand the need to really go and learn post, and the only way to do that is to sit there and watch for a long time. There is so much story crafting that goes on (or should go on) in post, it’s a terminal mistake for a writer to think of it as “some guy pushing buttons” or that it’s someone else’s department—it’s often where you will rescue a show that’s about to tank.

I am also one of those people who is very pragmatic. I know what my budget is and what I can and can’t do. I prefer to only write stuff that I know we can do. It’s a team sport. Production is not my adversary. They are my allies and the more they know, the earlier they know it, the better the “wedding” we’re planning is going to be. You have to be able to handle criticism and problems and bounce back with great ideas and solutions quickly. I think I’m well suited for the sort of ADHD environment of showrunning because you don’t have the luxury of days and days or even sometimes an hour to think through a problem and solve it through writing. You also have to be able to switch gears very quickly. So I think that my first profession and my news training was invaluable. I would say that writers who have come up through the TV drama system or have only been somebody’s assistant are missing out. I’m very interested in writers who have had another career. I was interviewing a writer today who was a professor of philosophy. Those people are immensely, enormously valuable to me because they come at it from very different places. Their work tends to be less derivative. I find that some television writers’ whole frame of reference is television. I don’t want a writer copying me. I want them to go out and do what I did by seeing it for themselves: experiencing and smelling and touching in order to bring me something I don’t see anywhere else. I’m not saying I’m able to do that in every story beat, but that’s always the goal. Every time I write something, my goal is to give viewers some new experience. Even if it’s just an interaction with someone they would never, ever run across in life. That’s the part I miss the most about being a journalist: I went everywhere and talked to anyone. It was like an all-access pass to life.

NL: Production-wise are you a seven-day?

JT: Seven and a half.

NL: And do you have rules about how many days in or how many days out?

JT: I try to be flexible. Some episodes beg for three days out. It just depends on how well you’ve planned your season or how ahead you are. We generally go out one to two days an episode. The purse strings are very tight. There’s no room for error. Everybody matters. When you’re not doing your job, somebody else really feels it. The point is to get people who embrace the challenge. I can’t imagine what we’d do with a shitload of money and time. How fabulous that would be, but there’s also something exciting about knowing that even though you couldn’t afford this, you made it work by collaborating and coming up with a solve. My brain loves puzzles—and I’m picky. Which means I have to figure out a way to get what I want. If we can’t afford an idea, we’ll find a way to make something else—or even something different but just as good—work. And when you’re surrounded by people who rev up at a challenge, that’s creativity at its finest.