739 - The One with David E. Kelley

26:57but you know, there's a little more flow. I remind myself, and it seems like you're taking advantage of this, that this new format, which people accuse of being kind of this like, oh, second screen thing, you can take your time with it. You can, you can breathe. You actually have, but like you, I'm paranoid that it will just be boring or self-indulgent to take a pause. It's, It's good to know that you struggle with this too. Yeah, my assumption is that the viewer has something better to do or at least something good to do. So if you're going to ask them to pay attention to your product, then you better entertain them and you better not waste their time.

27:39So that's burden number one. And then if you can get lucky on top of entertaining them, cause them to think or even move them and stir their heart, then that's the home run.

27:52John August:David, can you talk us through the process of Mario's Got Money Troubles? Because there's the book, L is attached to the book. It enters into your orbit. Were you writing a pilot first? Were you getting a room together? What was the process for figuring out how to make this adaptation happen? Yeah, you're told that you're going to series. But I think the dirty little secret for all these shows is, yeah, you are writing a pilot first. Because if they don't like that first or second episode, they can pull it. I don't know for a fact, but I'm told that HBO came very close to pulling the plug on Big Little Lives a week before we started shooting.

28:28For budget or for creative? Creative. That they just didn't think, you know, a story about these women in Monterey and the first episode was about a kid being bullied. Is that enough? I mean, that's not much of a story. I remember having the conversation with an HBO executive. And he said, it's just about a kid being bullied at school. And I said, do you have a child that's gone to school? And he did not. But I said, well, if it's your child and he's being picked on, that story takes on a certain severity. So our job as writers is to convey that storytelling so the audience feels the emotional stakes and the severity of the events.

29:14But so many shows now start out greenlit because that's how they may attract the talent pool. But there's an off-ramp if they're not happy with those first scripts. And Margot, I don't think there was any pause. Everyone was pretty excited and raring to go from the get-go. The actual process for me was part triage because there's so much great stuff on that book that you can't use at all. The biggest challenge was there was a lot of third-person storytelling that you could easily convey in the book, but on film it wouldn't be as quite so coherent. And yet a lot of that third-person and first-person internals, interiority of the character is so rich, so the goal is, okay, how do you get that out behaviorally?

30:04But I remember my mantra for actually both Mr. Mercedes and Margot when I first started, I think the very first thing I said to myself on both was, okay, don't screw it up. The writer knows what they're doing. The author had a plan and it was a good one. Don't screw it up. And live up to the bar that they set. Not always that. Sometimes you get an adaptation, which is a great idea and a great springboard, but you've got to take it in a different direction to make it commercially viable. But Margot, it was all there in the book.

30:45John August:So talk us through your writing versus the writing. You had a room on the show. There's other writers. So did you write a pilot first and then get a room together? Were you writing a pilot at the same time the room was happening? Talk us through how that all worked. Yeah, I wrote the first three episodes. And then Eva Anderson came on. And she ran the writer's room with the other writers. And Eva and I sort of went back and forth. She was my point man. I have never been particularly adept at writing, at a writer's room. I go back, for example, going back to Stephen Bochco, he was genius at that.

31:24There were times where Stephen couldn't break a story in his head. So he would call all the writers into the room to do it together. We would not say a word. Stephen would suddenly break the story. And I said, what gives with that? And he says, well, sometimes I need an audience to tap into my acuity. And I get my dopamine rush just from all of you being in a room. So it turns out I didn't really need you to break this story, but I needed you to be there. My process was completely the opposite. I can be in a room full of writers and I can't solve something. And I have to throw everybody out. because my process is to go inside the characters themselves and let the characters speak to me.

32:11And they tell me more often than not what they want to say or where the story wants to go. And it's a process that's worked for me as a writer, but as a showrunner, it's been very frustrating for writers who have worked for me. I've had many times a script will come in and I'll do a rewrite and a writer will look at me and go, if you were going to go left like that, do you think maybe you shouldn't have directed me to go right? And my answer invariably was I didn't know that left was the correct way to go until I got into the pond myself. It's not a satisfying answer for a staff member trying to guess where I'm going to go because often I don't know for sure where I'm going to end up.

32:58I have a general sense when I dive in, but it's a little bit like a river. You go where it flows and you listen to it. And I try to listen to the characters and listen to the story. I start off every series telling them what to say and where the story is going to go. But many series then take me over and then the characters start directing me and the story does as well.

33:22John August:Can we talk about the engine of an episode? Because I think back to a Boston Public episode and there's a template to it. There's a sense of like, this is the kind of thing that happens in an episode of the show. versus the kind of thing that happens in an episode of Margaret's Got Money Troubles are very, very different. The audience expectation about what's going to be happening at the end, the sense of closure, the sense of this, and yet both of these need to have, within the episode, an engine that's going to drive us through story. Can you talk us through, first, in a classic broadcast situation, what is enough of a story engine?

33:54John August:Are you pitching the engine as you're first pitching the show? And then how that changes with a limited series like a Margo, what you're thinking of in terms of the engine, the motor that's getting you through the episode. Yeah, with Boston Public, and this is how much the industry has changed, okay? With The Practice, with Ally McBeal, with Boston Public, there was no script, no outline, and no real formal pitch. This is going to be up with Boston Public. I sat down with Sandy Grucho, I was running Fox at the time, said, this is going to be a high school show. It's going to be a public high school, but it's going to be about the faculty.

34:38It's going to explore the lives of the faculty and the adversities they face in trying to do their jobs every day. We talked about the tone. It will go both dramatic and comedic. We talked about the kids will be instruments to explore these faculty members as well as the parents. but there was an understanding that would be the DNA of the show but we would then find the show in the writing. Today it's very, very different. When you're going to pitch a show, the buyers are looking for such a specificity and there's a danger to that because you're not letting the writers find and feel their way and if they're living up to the notes or the outline that was a product of that goal of specificity, it can have a very creatively constraining effect.

35:34With broadcast, again, once you're actually, the process, once you're doing it, the science of the shows, and all my shows have been fairly multi-story format. With Boston Public, I think there were three storylines going on with Ally McBeal and The Practice, usually two. With Picket Fences, there was one main storyline, but it was played through three different prisms. You would take an issue or a story, you would play it through the police franchise, sometimes the medical, the legal, and then also the nuclear family. So the experience of watching it would be many different stories happening, but it was really one core engine, thematic engine driving all four different stories.

36:18Boston, in the days of broadcast with Boston Public and LA Law and The Practice, your main storylines would probably have about 8 to 10 beats. You would also be operating with 9 to 10 minute acts. That's right. Sometimes 11 minute acts. So you were writing acts that would build and have a crescendo at 9, 10, 11 minutes with some version of at least a mini cliffhanger that would leave the audience with the idea that I'm more interested in this story than that Dodge Ram commercial that's following it and I think I'm going to come back and watch the rest of it. once you're into streaming and there are no commercials, you don't have to worry about those act breaks.

36:57So you don't have to crescendo as much over your 50 minutes. You can build and trust the audience to stay with you and not worry about them being distracted by another stimuli and having to earn their trust to come back again. I wonder if this is why somebody like Sandy Grushow back in the day could say, yeah, based on what you just said, high school, about the faculty, what you didn't say, what you didn't say, but what I will add to that is, also, I'm David E. Kelly, and I've done this before a number of times to great success. And because the broadcast format was so rigid and repeatable, meaning, okay, it's this many acts, the crescendo, that somebody could say, I'm pretty sure unless David pitches me an idea that I just hate, you know, in its simplest, the simplest form, I hate it.

37:54I would be willing to roll the dice on that. Whereas now they ask for everything because it could be anything. And that is probably scary for them, but I do think it's wonderful freedom for us. And what's fun about and inspiring, honestly, about somebody like you and the length of your career is that we can see how you are not You're not a great writer of broadcast television. You're a great writer. And then as you go to write movies or as you go to write streaming series or originals or adaptations, you are the thing that keeps adapting to the world around you. I think a lot of writers, we know a lot of writers at this point in, you're probably approaching what, 50, 45 years of this?

38:39I don't know how many. I came out in 86. So I'm just about 40. 40. A lot of writers around year 10 are discovered to be perhaps, I'm not going to say one note, but maybe five notes. Changing the notes and adapting to the world around you and adapting to the new formats. And as you said, getting out of your lane, but not so far out of your lane that you fall down on your face is in itself a rarity. This isn't a question. This is just really a hagiography of David E. Kelly. I don't know how I'll still put it.

39:14John August:Well, I do have a question because I want to talk, you were describing sort of how you needed to write towards act breaks for broadcast TV and stuff. But within Margo, you have to be able to, you have to figure out, okay, we have this book and these are the things from the book we want to do. But we have to figure out like, which episodes do these things fall into? And you're not going to match the book exactly. So how early in the process did you figure out like, okay, this is the beat that's happening in episode three versus episode four, episode five. When did you have the shape of it? Was that early in the writer's room?

39:43John August:Was it before the writer's room? When did you know the sequence of events? It wasn't terribly challenging breaking down the episodes in terms of what was going to happen in each... It felt pretty organic when I was drawing that roadmap. What was less organic, Margo was a little bit like the porridge that Goldilocks was... And the process was in the editing room. That's where we were jumping through more hoops. a little too hot, a little too cold, a little too slow, a little too fast, a little too funny, a little too serious. The tone of your show, it shifts a lot. And so, honestly, it reminded me of Ally McBeal in the sense like, this is a comedy, but there's also some real serious dramatic things happening here.

40:26John August:There's a baby at the center of it, so there's things like Ally McBeal. But finding that right blend must be a challenge, and that feels like an editorial. It is. And it's very unscientific, and it's very subjective. in episode two, for example, I was worried about the first two episodes, especially with Margot, because I thought if this comes out of the gate, a single mom with crying baby, will the audience really want to escape to that at the end of the day? And I do think you have to offer some form of escapism, the world being what it is today, that when people turn on the television, I think the invitation or the opportunity of a smile and a laugh is important.

41:10And the first two episodes, because the character was going through a lot of emotional gymnastics, I remember in episode two, there was a meltdown that Margot had over frustration with breastfeeding. The baby wasn't getting a good latch and the scene was meant to be both absurd and real at the same time. So you could maybe laugh at the monologue that the character was spewing, but at the same time feel that that was a very real issue for her. We had a subsequent scene where Cheyenne, the mother, was upset and having a crisis because she was sure that the newborn didn't like her and deliberately cried when she was being held by Cheyenne.

41:55It was a form of judgment that this one-month-old baby was passing on Cheyenne as a bad grandmother. Similarly, that was also supposed to be absurd, comedic, but feeling a very real and raw insecurity of Cheyenne as a person and a grandmother. In the editing room, I was worried. We all were a little bit. Both of those scenes together in the same episode was just too much. And that the episode in the aggregate, even though both scenes, we like both scenes, but the aggregate, the episode just might be too wrought and too emotionally draining that it would allow the audience to go, you know, I don't need this kind of angst and anxiety at the end of my day.

42:44And we scratched our heads and asked questions and worried about it. But it was undeniable that the actors in both scenes were phenomenal. Elle in her scene and Michelle in hers. And we were also pretty confident that both those scenes advanced story and a character. So we said, okay, if it's doing that, we're going to stick with it. Maybe the audience might find it rot, but we bet on story and character at the end of the day. That's not something you use. It's always in a playbook. You feel it as you go along. That was that experience. To answer your question more specifically, how do you figure it out?

43:26Margot, a lot of the figuring was more in the editing room than I think in the outline. The episodes outlined and mapped out pretty coherently and clearly as we went along. I thought for a while it would be seven hours and not eight. You know, when I was at HBO, we had the luxury of, because Big Little Lives was supposed to be eight episodes, and got to the seventh and eighth episode, and I went back to HBO, and I said, this really needs to be one. Seven and eight are going to be broken up, and HBO said, fine, make it one, and our finale was a little bit longer, but the series was seven episodes.

44:05Now, the business models today, we don't always have that luxury. And Margot Apple really wanted those eight episodes. So we mapped them out with eight episodes. And again, on the page, there was a coherency to it. But the real struggle was in the editing room and figuring out the tonal, the blend and the spikes and valleys of emotion and comedy. Great.

44:29John August:Well, David, congratulations on Margot. Congratulations on a vast career. You know what? And just have to say, fellow Princeton Tiger, there's not a lot of us. There's not a lot of us in this business. No, I know. Harvard somehow. Harvard, it was like all you needed to do was be like a friend of somebody and then you were on The Simpsons. That's how easy it was as far as I can tell. Princeton was like, do you want to be a lawyer? Do you want to go to a hedge fund? No. All right. See you later. But you know what? Princeton really wasn't putting it on the menu. I never came out of Princeton thinking, oh, screenwriting was on the menu.

45:02No. No, there was no, it just didn't, it wasn't an option. We're few and far between, but you were certainly when I came out to Hollywood, you were one of the people where I went, well, okay, a guy can do it from here. Absolutely.

45:15John August:You'll be the second David D. Kelly. I was not, and I am not. Let's do our one cool thing is that mine actually ties into something that you may have firsthand knowledge of. So this is the idea of the designated driver, which I think about as I've always having been there, but it's actually a relatively new concept. So the basic idea came from Scandinavia and the Nordic countries where the practice had developed earlier. But it was this guy, Jay Winston at Harvard Public School of Health, learned about it in the 1980s, looked and saw how it worked in Sweden and Norway and adapted for the US. And the project, the idea, the project launched in 1988.

45:53John August:And the quote was, the designated driver is the life of the party. That's very good. Yeah. And so they had posters for it. But most crucially, they went to writers in the Writers Guild and TV writers to try to insert this idea and this message into episodes of top rated programs such as Cheers, Dallas and L.A. Law. Do you remember anything about this, David? Does this sound familiar? No. No. No. They said, oh, yeah, we'll tell all of our writers. So it did air in those shows, but other popular shows in 1988 to sort of seed that idea out there in the world. And I think it's a good, noble thing that I'm happy exists in our culture.

46:37I didn't know that it came from Scandinavia.

46:39John August:I remember when it happened. I remember designated driver suddenly being a phrase. I remember us making fun of it. So first you start laughing about it, but then someone's like, but yeah, actually, who is the designated driver? Absolutely. Because we all recognize that drunk driving was a problem, but it's a solution to it. It's basically like, oh, here's how we're going to avoid us doing that. It was a bad thing to talk about with people who were already drunk. That's the real thing. So you could get them before they started drinking. Well, it also became a useful excuse for why you're not drinking that night.

47:13John August:Absolutely. Yeah, so for folks who didn't want to drink, it made it good. Or like why you bring along that one friend you don't really like that much, but they're not. That was always the dark side of the driving-handed driver. Or if you could rotate among the people, that would make more sense. Anyway, I just thought it was an interesting sort of cultural shift that happened in part because of broadcast television of its era that it was able to get that into the world. Craig, what do you have for One Cool Thing? My One Cool Thing is a fantastic article that is in Wired. It's on Wired right now, written by Alan Levinowitz called The Painful Truth About Long COVID.

47:49And the subheader is there might finally be a way forward for long COVID treatment if only you were allowed to talk about it. And what this article talks about, it doesn't come down one way or the other, but what it sort of starts to investigate is the notion that long COVID, first of all, existed before COVID. When the flu epidemic happened, you know, the Spanish flu back around, you know, World War I period, there were people who for years were basically assigned some sort of post-flu malaise is what it was called, with very similar symptoms to long COVID. But what's happened is because so many people with long COVID symptoms were essentially dismissed as lying or just being weak, the people who have long COVID have become incredibly invested in the notion that there is a biologically hard biological underpinning.

48:47Except maybe there isn't because they can't seem to find one. And what people are starting to come around to is the notion that this is, in fact, a neurological symptom that is quasi-psychological. But what really comes out of this article is we're so judgmental about mental illness and not assigning it as illness that even people who may have something that is essentially a mental illness can't accept it because it delegitimizes them. Everybody seems to decide that if something is psychosomatic, it is not legitimate. It is. We know that. Now, there is no hard proof that it is only neurological and psychological nature.

49:33There is no hard proof that it is all biological nature. Everyone is at war. But people who are proposing that perhaps there are mental health treatments for this are oftentimes facing the proverbial villagers with pitchforks and torches. So a very well-balanced, fascinating article. And you can't help but come out of it primarily with an enormous amount of empathy for people who are suffering from this. Because whether it is, quote-unquote, hard biology or neuropsychology, it's real. So really well done. Very thorough. Quite long. Worth the whole read. What's the article? What's the name of it?

50:19It's called The Painful Truth About Long COVID. Okay. On Wired.

50:25John August:Yeah. Wired.com. So, David, I'm now desperate for you to time travel back. I can't top that. No, but to go back and I can imagine the Picket Fences episode about this. I can imagine a couple, like a Boston Legal, a Boston Public. He may have written an episode while I was talking. He's that good. He is that good. I saw him scribbling, so. Yeah. Well, the mentally disenfranchised for all our series, because I'm always fascinated by neuroscience as well. and there's no such thing as a normal brain. Oh, no. Everyone had what we would call eccentric quirks. Others would call, you know, mental illness.

51:01And you're right, there is a stigma. And there shouldn't be. Everybody's got their brain. None of them work the same way. And they all have things to explore for both entertainment and fear value. And I've always loved the psychology of people. and it's no secret or coincidence, I guess, that the psychology of characters have been part and parcel of the shows that I've endeavored to write about.

51:29John August:David, what do you have to share with us? Well, again, I have nothing as cool as that. It could be a cupcake. It could be anything, though. Well, I will tell you, one would be a fish. A fish. A fish, yes. And it's a salmon. And full disclosure, I'm on a conservation group that's about saving wild salmon. But the salmon itself has forever fascinated me and stirred me with a bit of awe. It's this fish that's born in a river. The odds of making out of that river are low because of all the things they can eat it and because of the water quality and flooding and the natural hazards that are there. as soon as that egg hatches.

52:13It goes to the ocean and spends three to four years in the ocean and grows and fills itself with all these nutrients. And at the end of that, it comes back. And we're talking, it could have traveled maybe 50 ,000 miles at this point. It comes back to the very river where it hatched and comes back to spawn and gives life again. And then in death, in its carcass, feeds the riparian riverbanks and the eagles and the bears and the birds who eat it and then fly over the heartlands in the middle of the country and take a big dump and drop those nutrients so it's feeding nature in the middle of the country.

52:52It all comes from this fish. So that fish continues to fascinate me and to be a cool part of nature. But that's how I thought you wanted me to pick a movie or a book. Honestly, salmon is... And also, is it not the only fish that is that color? I don't think there's another fish that's a color, right? Well, it's silver when it comes out of the ocean and it begins to change colors and decompose. The sockeye will turn bright red once it enters the river, the freshwater. But in the saltwater, it's completely silver. It's a silver bullet. Okay, so all I know is that the delicious salmon that I have for sushi, which I know you're like, please stop eating that.

53:32It's farm salmon. I can see the look in your eyes. But when I was a kid growing up, you know, in New York, and you have lox, was that all wild salmon back then? When did it start? Probably not. Well, I was born in Maine and we had no salmon because the rivers were dammed up. Atlantic salmon were very indigenous to Maine at that time, but I never saw one because we had dammed the rivers. We're still in the process of undamming rivers on the East Coast and West Coast to give them a chance to come back.

54:03John August:And we have salmon elevators to get them up over certain obstacles. I love a salmon elevator. Yeah, it's a battle, but they're battlers. They're warriors. That's actually a great one, cool thing. I love it. A fish. A fish. A fish. This is why he used to it. Not just a fish, but a salmon. A great fish. A salmon. A great fish. A big fish, in fact, yes. Nice. This is a great fish. The Chinook salmon, their nickname is king of fish. King. There are nature writers who will write a line, okay, that's king of the jungle, but that king takes second place to the king of fish, which is the salmon. because the salmon is such an eco-species that is vital to habitats far beyond where it actually lives itself.

54:46John August:I mean, that also feels like a metaphor for David E. Kelly in terms of a king of fish, in terms of, you know, master of one domain and also traveling to a new domain. Soon we will pick his body up, travel it across, have him take dumps on the ground below. If you go back to broadcast television, that would be a complete, or if you go back to practicing law, That would be a complete journey. Oh, that's the river. That's the river. Gets back to the river. That's where we started. That's the river, yeah. That is our show for this week. Script News is produced by Drew Marquardt. Congratulations. It is edited by Matthew Cilelli.

55:18John August:He's also good. Our intern this summer is Lauren Loesberg. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnoggins.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we often answer. You'll find transcripts at johnoggins.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. You'll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast.

55:46John August:Lauren has been busy cutting videos for our Instagram, so you can see those. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You'll find us at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Salmon. Salmon. Just its own link. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we're about to record on long-running shows. David and Kelly, an absolute delight having you on the program.

56:17John August:I can't believe it's been 739 episodes before we got a chance to talk with you, but... It was worth it. I think we had to work up to it. Yeah, we did. We had to practice. Thank you both. How do you guys find time to write with doing all these shows? That's a lot of hours. That's a lot of hours. We're like, maybe we'll save this for the bonus segment. The question is, how do you feel when you have so much that you know you're supposed to be writing and you just don't and you do something else instead? We will talk about that in the bonus segment. Enjoying, enjoying, I guess is the point. Enjoying, enjoying.

56:46John August:How do you enjoy enjoying? All right. Thank you, David. Thank you, David. Thank you. Thank you both.

57:02Thank you.