An insider’s view on how a procedural writers’ room in Hollywood is run.
“In hour-long dramas if the story doesn’t quite add up you forgive it, because you are laughing. In a procedural like Criminal Minds there is no laughter or rich home life to sell the drama. It is all about the case and this is what the audience expects, a mystery that is well told. They are watching the clues very carefully. They love to be fooled and be corrected in a way that is consistent with the clues that they have been shown. This is the elegance of telling a mystery story,” says Breen Frazier, show runner for Criminal Minds.
The setting is Quixote Studios in Los Angeles, California. I sit opposite Breen Frazier, show runner of one of the most successful crime dramas on American television, as I try to unravel the mystery of the procedural. This is a rare moment, a result of a serendipitous meeting; I happened to be at Story Expo in LA on a trip sponsored by the Writer’s Guild of South Africa (WGSA) and the Department of Trade and Industry (dti), when a chance meeting with Breen Frazier led to an invitation to visit the Criminal Minds writers’ room. As luck had it, Coal Stove Pictures, for whom I work as a script development executive, saw the benefit of sending me to Los Angeles. The interview unravels slowly like a good mystery. The nuts and bolts of it aren’t so complicated I soon discover – they are really quite straight forward, I daresay. There is a genius and sophistication to achieving simplicity and it all begins in the writers’ room.
Running the room
“One of my responsibilities is to ensure that the room is always moving so that production doesn’t catch up with us and that the stories we are telling are good stories,” Frazier says. It’s the usual suspects; story and schedule that are at the heart of the matter.
The writers’ schedule begins promptly in June, one month before production starts.
“The job of each writer is to come in with three pitches and all those pitches need to be is ‘bad guy’ stuff,” says Breen. There is a method to this, I soon discover. Having writers pitch the antagonist and the world they live in is in sync with mystery writing simply because knowing who the killer is, is knowing what the case of the particular episode is about. Once all the writers have pitched their ideas and the episodes are assigned, the team begins to brainstorm – a process typically referred to as breaking story in the US. Within the period of a month the first eight episodes have been broken, meaning the room is well ahead of production.
The board and the formula
Once the story is broken the team begins to progress through each story line in the place of the show’s Behavioural Analysis Unit (BAU), mapping the way in which the BAU would decipher the clues and the way that the audience would experience the story. “Once we know what the bad guy is doing, we can fill in how the BAU team works deductively to catch the bad guy,” Breen says. In order to fill out the episode on the board, the writers need to be of one mind. This synergy of thought is created by a procedural formula which, in its structure, has assimilated the world of FBI profiling.
In the writers’ room a glossary of common FBI profiling terms is up on a board for ease of reference. Terms such as stressor, trigger, victimology and the different categories of killers are among a few that influence the room’s thinking as the writers fill the board. The organic assimilation of these terms has been the result of research, which includes consultations with Jim Clemente, an actual FBI profiler and a writer on the show.
“We have more than ten years of history on the show and you sort of know what it is you need to do in every act and that gives us a road map to follow,” says Breen. He points out that the teaser – act one and act two – are structurally almost always the same if not identical from episode to episode. “Once you get past the profile, then you’ve got to do some dancing as in you’ve got to come up with some really interesting stuff. The content changes but the format really doesn’t,” he adds. This is the formula at work. The writers write to it every time, therefore delivering on the promise of the procedural.
Research
One might ask if the formula is limiting? Having witnessed the room at work I’m confident to say it is liberating. There is a clear sense of what needs to be done when the room assembles. The art is in finding new ways to tell the same story. One avenue for this is through the scientific theories and research that Criminal Minds explores.
“Research is my bread and butter,” Breen says. He draws an example from a Season Ten episode where he explored delusional parasitosis, a hallucination in which affected people believe bugs are crawling under their skin. The challenge in the episode was to bring the scientific idea and theory into the structure of Criminal Minds, creating a connection between the delusion and the killer’s motivation to kill.
Finding the link between the killer’s motivation and his delusion created a theory where the killer throws his victims into a bathtub filled with bugs in an effort to convince them that they have bugs under their skin. If the experience with the bathtub fails to convince the victim, the killer kills them. “Once I’d figured this out I knew then what the structure of the criminal’s thinking was and then there was enough to back fill the episode,” explains Breen.
The writer as producer
The writers on Criminal Minds produce their own episodes. They are involved during pre-production, which involves processes such as tone meetings with the director and the various departments. They are present for every take on set and when the episode is cut in post. As a result, Breen points out that: “On a 22-episode show one cannot have a team of less than eight writers. If you have a smaller staff than that and you lose writers to production, you don’t have the benefit of their perspective.”
The room not only has to come together to break story, they need to give notes on each writer’s episode, outline and the various drafts. There are no script editors similar to those in the South African working processes. The writers read each other’s scripts and then receive and give feedback.
Wrapping up
Breen concludes: “Like a clock that is put together just right there is an elegance to a mystery that is uniquely enjoyable for audiences and for writers. Who knows what TV is going to be in ten years. I know eyeballs are leaving the television screen and going to computers. Realistically we are all probably going to be getting our media entertainment through an internet cable. What that will look like I don’t know; there is one thing of which I’m certain and that is that people love mysteries. The mystery in its form has been in place for centuries. I believe even if we are watching ten-minute mysteries on YouTube the structure is going to be the same and that is something that I’ve learnt on this show. There is a formula and the formula is valuable.”
By Nompi Vilakazi
