![]() And if you have a new writer, just catching him up to speed with all that takes a really long time. This steps on the canon we have for someone’s backstory that we haven’t unveiled yet. It slows everything down, because we’ll be in the middle of a story we love, and then say, “Wait a minute. In terms of the process of actually running the show, the amount of callbacks, the mythology, and all the clues, and all the codes we have, it does slow down the writing process. That’s how I get away with the scary stuff. You just have to be annoying and persistent and stay up late and keep trying and keep asking. That’s unfortunately the lesson I’ve learned. Hey, find another Alex Hirsh.” You have to play chicken with them and care more, and eventually they get so sick of your annoying, arrogant emails that they leave you alone and you get away with it. I just have to care more and be really annoying, and when they shoot that email back to me that says, “Oh the kids aren’t going to like the blood coming out of the monster’s mouth,” just be like, “Alright. I thought when I came into Disney I’ll play ball and be everyone’s best friend and they won’t have any reason to fight me. The way I got away with that was just pure stubbornness. We recently had an episode where a house was haunted and a bunch of taxidermied animal heads started chanting, “Ancient sins…” and then blood started coming out of their mouths, and then a skeleton came out of a fireplace with an ax in his head. Then, the other category is just like how complex and mythological and insane and packed it is. ![]() That’s one category of stuff we get away with. HIRSCH: We get away with crazy monsters and scary stuff that might give kids nightmares. Basically, the run time turns out to be about 28 without fail, unless I’ve been lazy and it’s 30, and then it feels too long. ![]() I thought the 22-minute total run time was responsible for the pace, but I found out that you can hold yourself to that pacing with no regard to run time. I looked at my older brothers and sisters and said, “Let’s be like that.” So Community was designed to be like that. I created Community to be like 30 Rock and The Office because that was the age that Community was allowed into the nursery room. But in the edit bay, it’s turning out to be one of the best I think by my standards. It was the hardest season we’ve ever worked on. It was incredibly strenuous this year for those exact reasons, all glibness aside. “Who’s in charge of this shit?” “It’s me.” “Why are we working so late?” “Because of me.” But it’s going incredibly well. All my anger has to go out three feet in front of my face and splats back on me like I’m spitting in the wind. The bad news is they’re giving me total control. To our benefit and their benefit, the answer has become you have to make so much stuff and you’ve got to stop caring quite as much about if somebody is a pain in the ass and let them make their thing. Now we get a lot of content and the question is how are you going to make money in a world where everyone has a million things to choose from. You would always go with somebody who knew what they were doing and gave you the least amount of grief. I would have been fired before I made it up to showrunner and never rehired because the industry was more tightly run and there was less content to make. We’re responsible for everything including the actor.ĭAN HARMON: I never would have been able to be a showrunner in the 80’s era of TV before blogging, before Twitter, before my brand of obnoxiousness, before the visibility of the showrunner. What we all have to do as showrunners encompasses the whole picture. They have the luxury of getting lost in that character. An actor really gets focused on a character. PETER HORTON: It’s a totally different mindset. The second one is not how you should run a show, but it’s how I do it, and it’s why I sleep in my office quite a bit. You are in charge of everything and you can choose how much you want to delegate or how much you want to be a control freak and try to do everything yourself. At the end of the day, everything that doesn’t get done, it’s your name on the show. You’re sort of like the president and also sort of like the janitor. They’re someone you can hire or fire to run a show.ĪLEX HIRSCH: Your whole floor is a bed. There’s millions and millions of dollars a month flowing through for a season. They’re in charge of 250 people on the network side that are making a show. It’s somebody that has either paid their dues or lucked out greatly depending on who you’re looking at. His schedule is severe and the stakes are high, so the people that care the most about it do get to be in charge of the content. ADAM GOLDBERG: In TV, unlike features, the writer is a producer.
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