Running the Show: Morwyn Brebner Showrunner of Coroner

In the first of our Running the Show series, featuring interviews with showrunners, we had the opportunity to speak with Morwyn Brebner at the Toronto Screenwriting Conference. Morwyn is a Toronto-based screenwriter and award-winning playwright.  She is the creator and showrunner of CBC’s hit series Coroner, and co-created Saving Hope (CTV/ION), on which she was an executive producer and showrunner for the first three seasons. She also co-created the ABC and Global Television drama series Rookie Blue. Series work includes Mary Kills People (Global/Lifetime) and Bellevue (CBC/WGN America).

You came from playwrighting. How did that experience serve you in the world of screenwriting?

I think playwrighting has served me in a number of distinct ways. One of the great things about playwrighting is you develop your voice before you ever get notes. So, when I came into working in television, I’d been a playwright not that long, but long enough I had a sense of who I was. I think when you have a strong sense of who you are, it also allows you to be flexible. You go onto a show, and you want to adopt the showrunner’s voice, but what I think is really valuable to a showrunner is to give something they don’t have, obviously funneling it through the tone of the show.

For me, that time that I spent figuring out who I was as a writer and my own particular way of being was really valuable, and has served me well. I don’t have a sense of being buffeted by what people want because I’m just myself. But I learned how to be myself, because when you go through theater it’s really focused on your own individuality as opposed to more of an idea of what people want to buy. So that was really useful.

The other thing you learn when you come from the theatre is that you have to write less as a screenwriter, which is hard to do as you’re used to writing so many things. But there’s the camera, and it’s so economical. In theatre, you really do learn how to tell stories through dialogue, the difference between dialogue as a storytelling medium and a conversation, and you learn what to leave out. For me, a that was my formation and it has really been helpful in both those ways.

Looking at your body of work, you’ve co-created a few shows like Saving Hope and Rookie Blue. What is the co-creating experience like for you? What are the benefits of it and the pitfalls?

Co-creation can happen in a bunch of different ways. You can co-create together, you can take over a show for someone, or someone can take over a show from you. With Rookie Blue, I began co-creating that show with Ellen Vanstone, and then Tassie Cameron, who was already a showrunner, came into the picture and then that sort of exchange began. I didn’t run that show but it was incredibly formative to learn from that experience.

With Saving Hope, Malcolm Macquarie had already began creating that show so I was on the opposite side of that and came into that show later. Coroner’s a different situation because I created it by myself, but it’s based on a book series. So I’ve had all very varied ways into a show coming into being.

Where do you look for ideas when you’re looking for inspiration?

I’ll take any idea from anywhere and from anyone. I won’t steal it, but I’ll take it if I see it. I also eavesdrop a lot and read widely. I’m interested in the world. When projects come to me, I feel like I either feel something about them, or I don’t. And if I don’t, I don’t try. I’ve learned not to try and force it because it’s always been a disaster. I’ve learned that if someone brings you a project, and they have a very strong idea about how they want to make it, they want you to kind of make their vision that for me, that’s not a good situation.

I write a lot. I write pilots for myself and some of them get developed, and some of them don’t. But I write to check in with myself, and see what I’m interested in, and where I am. I feel like, as a writer, you’re like a magpie, right? You’re always like, that can would be awesome in my nest. No one else likes that can, but I know how to weave it in.

For instance, I took a cab, and the guy was telling me gruesome stories about working in a hospital, and I was like, “Keep going. Just tell me your thing!” I try to have a line between stealing from people and just being interested in people. But there’s something everywhere, and I think you’re funneling it through your own feeling about the world and your own evolving relationship to the world.

I feel like now we’re in what feels like pretty frightening times. I’m trying to figure out how to respond to that in a way that feels engaged but not despairing. And that’s a new energy. I feel like you write to explore what you have, and then you look for things that you can put yourself into so that you can explore them fully.

In America I feel like it’s been really hard times at the moment. We’re seeing it ricochet into other places, places where we think we’re safe, but you’re never safe from that. So how do you approach that as a writer? What are you looking to bring to the world in a world that’s this fractured?

Whatever you are making should bring some news to the world. To make something that is not acknowledging in some way the historical moment that we’re in, there’s something retrograde about it. It feels disengaged, and it feels willfully cruel in a way.

One of the things that I believe in is community. We’re in times that are very individualistic, where everyone’s just responsible for themselves. And I don’t think that that’s how we’re going to get through the world. I believe in not just positing the dire thing and not just saying, this is terrible, we’re going to live in this terrible thing. We’re going to just re-traumatize ourselves constantly. I’m trying to figure out how we get through something in a way where we’re allowed to rise. Ignoring something doesn’t make it go away. Even to acknowledge it, truth doesn’t negate it. I don’t really have a plan, but if anyone does, oh, I wish, I wish I knew what the plan was.

What’s your day-to-day process like?

It really depends because I’m not a multi-tasker. I do the thing I’m doing, and I can only do one thing at a time. I’m not like one of those superhuman people who sleeps for four hours and then does everything.

In the room, it has its own particular energy. Right now we’re working on season two of Coroner. I’m with this amazing writing team, and we are breaking episodes, and we’re writing. It’s like the machine you get in, but it’s not a machine in the sense that you’re stamping widgets or whatever (not that there’s anything wrong with widgets).

It’s different when I’m writing by myself. When I was a playwright, I would feel the impulse to write, and then I would lie down until that feeling went away. Now I don’t do that. So when I’m writing, I just write. Sometimes if I’m on a deadline, I give myself a page count per day. I know that sounds like a weird thing, but I do it because you have to know how you’re going to get where you’re going. But I don’t really procrastinate anymore. That was a life’s work for me to figure that out. Now a great writing day is where you wake up and you write, I like to write in the morning, take the afternoon off and then write again at night so you get the day energy and the night energy.

You said you now don’t procrastinate. How did you break yourself of that habit?

I had kids. And it’s also practice. When we did Saving Hope, we did 18 episodes for that season so when are you going to procrastinate? The doing of the work teaches you how to do the work and this is going to sound very flaky, but that place where you go to write becomes more and more accessible the more you visit it.

When you’re running a room what are you looking for on your team? And what can writers do to better prepare to be in a writers room?

Every writer in our room is an amazing writer, and we have a diverse writing room, which I think is an immeasurable addition to any room. I like to read someone’s original script as opposed to a spec of another show where you feel somebody’s voice than where it feels formulaic. People focus on technical qualities, but I like a mix of energies and people who bring their own unique perspective. In my mind, it’s like the scene in a heist movie when they assemble the team. Mostly I’m looking for great writers, good thinkers, interesting people. I believe that a writing room should be a safe environment so you need people who are willing to embrace that. You have to spend a lot of time with people literally, in this case, in a small room. And so every, every writing room’s different.

What are the things you focus on as you develop your work in preparation to pitch it? Are there any words of advice on how to sell your idea better?

It’s important to think about your constellation of characters. For me, I always like to think about what the idea underneath is. What is it really about and how does that connect to some aspect of the zeitgeist or the world as it is. I try to imagine the future of it. You try and figure out if there is enough stuff to sustain itself.

Any hard lessons that you’ve learned and would like to pass on. Sometimes we think we look at someone’s success and think, how can I get there? But what are the things that I can learn that can maybe help me get to a place that I want to be at?

The thing about screenwriting is that you do get a lot of feedback from other people at a certain point. One of the hardest things to learn is how to not be defensive about taking that feedback, but also learn how to retain your core feelings about the project. Your core connections to what you’re writing. One of the things I wish I’d been able to tell myself was to be both less defensive and stronger about my own vision. I also feel as a woman you have to protect yourself from inadvertently being cast as a helpmate and subsuming your own power into someone else’s. I think it’s trying to figure out how to remain an individual and also become a collaborator.

A lot of people want to be a showrunner, but how do they get there? How do they navigate these waters?

We focus a lot on becoming a showrunner. A showrunner as a position where you manage the flame of the creative direction of your show. It involves a lot of components that you don’t necessarily learn as a writer or creative person. It’s actually a sort of long road. And I feel like focusing on becoming a showrunner is a strange thing to focus on, in a way. The one thing I would say is that if you have a show that you’re writing and you’re the creative force behind it, find a way to be the showrunner. That is really how you’ll be able to keep that feeling alive.

Originally posted on Script Magazine May 29, 2019

TVLand’s Younger: 4 Ways to Deepen Your Characters

Character is important no matter what the medium of storytelling, but for television it is paramount. Creators need to build a world where you can follow characters forever—or at least for as many seasons as the fans, and network, will allow. In a landscape where platforms like Netflix start to limit series to three stories, TVLand’s Younger is on to season six and creator Darren Star has no intention of stopping.

Younger stars Sutton Foster as Liza Miller, a single mother in her late thirties who decides to take the chance to reboot her career and her love life as a 26-year old. Set in the world of publishing, the series focuses on dynamic female friendships featuring characters played by industry veterans Hilary Duff, Miriam Shor, Debi Mazar and Peter Hermann, amongst others.

The first episode of season six of this New York-centric series premiered at Tribeca Festival to an enthusiastic New York audience. Younger is filled with characters people can fall in love with. You normally see fan conversation on Twitter and blogs, maybe amongst friends, but to watch a show with true fans was giddying. In a room of hundreds, the audience clapped and cheered as each character hit the screen. It was a level of excitement I’ve only seen at superhero movies.

Hilary Duff taking a selfie with fans at Tribeca Film Festival.

As season six doesn’t premiere until June 12, I’ll make this spoiler free, but here are four takeaways to consider when you’re thinking about character when writing for TV.

1) Create relatable characters with real adult emotions

Writers must write their characters as human beings and human beings are complicated. So are relationships. Though there is this element of #teamcharles (Peter Hermann) verses #teamjosh (Nico Tortorella) as most shows can’t resist the love triangle, it’s really about the women’s relationships that viewers tune in for.

It’s inevitable that as you move through the seasons, the relationships between the characters change. They grow over time. Characters will never go back to what they were. They will morph into something different. So as a writer, you need to know your characters, but also leave room to let them grow.

Liza and Charles end season five embarking on a new relationship—one that’s out in the open. This means the rest of the characters have to find out about it. In the writer’s room, you have to consider how this new relationship and the revealing of its secret will change the way everyone interacts with each other.

Creator Darren Star commented on the shift the show has taken since season one: “It’s less about Liza’s secret and more about the challenges the secret has created. And this tangled web of relationships all these characters have with each other. So it’s not about Liza keeping the secret, it’s very much about the relationships and also the passion everybody has for work. They are in the publishing industry, which is not the most thriving of businesses right now. But these are characters that really have a passion for it and want to keep it alive and the show details the lengths they go to pursue their careers.”

2) Do not fall into the trap of stereotypes

It’s easy to fall into stereotypical gender roles that showcase the tired relationships we’re used to seeing on TV. It’s something we need to be very conscious about as we develop our own series. Are we creating characters that are real? Characters grounded in the world we’ve built? Are they reacting in ways that are unexpected and forward-thinking? The writers on Younger are doing this as they push against the relationship norms you typically see, especially for the relationships they show between women.

For instance, Diana (Miriam Shor) and Liza have grown close over the seasons of the show. This relationship is important to Diana and she trusts Liza implicitly. So if there is a moment of betrayal, it’s not because of pettiness or “you stole the boy I like,” which is what we expect to see on screen between women. It’s because Liza wasn’t honest and open with Diana.

The writer’s room also talks about competition and support a lot when developing storylines for their characters. The writers are really sensitive about the relationship between these women. They want to ensure the characters, especially the women, are really supportive of each other. Whenever the characters come into conflict, the writers are aware of what that conflict is about, and how it’s managed. At the center, there’s always friendship and love. The characters come into conflict but it’s based on their friendship being true and real. It’s not just conflict because they are relegated to being catty as “women are catty.” It never goes there.

In that same vein, Lauren (Molly Bernard) is a champion of Kelsey (Hilary Duff) rather than seeing her as the competition. The only thing that Lauren wants to see is women becoming bosses. She’s constantly pushing people ahead, and wanting them to succeed. As a character, she’s confident in herself and not intimidated by all the bad-ass women in her life. You also see this in the relationship between Liza and her roommate, Maggie (Debi Mazar). Maggie gives Liza the confidence to get out there in the morning and be the person she’s meant to be. And then Liza passes on that feeling by lifting Kelsey up.

3) Connect big moments to character motivations

Sometimes there’s a fun thing you want to do in your series – a final cliff-hanging heart-stopping moment, or a big musical number. You can do it, but it has to be motivated, and you need to build to it. Sometimes that slow build will give you a deeper reaction from your viewers and grab their attention. Think about this as you develop your pilot and plan out your season. Yes, that moment you are planning sounds exciting, but you have to take your audience with you.

For instance, at the end of season two, when Charles kisses Liza, Hermann told us the story of “a woman who was on in years, wheeling her laundry cart by me when I was on the Upper West Side. It was right after the episode aired. She stopped in front of me with her cart. WHACK. She smacked me on the shoulder: “Took you long enough.” If you do it right, people have strong feelings about your characters and live every moment with them.

4) Give opportunities for your talent to shine

Once vou cast your show, look at the additional talents your actors bring to the table. Do they have a special skill that can add to the show? These hidden opportunities can build out your characters and the world they inhabit.

Even if you are far from filming, think about the unique talent that you may want for your show. Are there things a dream lead could bring that no one else could? Build that into your character. It will help you look beyond the stereotype and build interesting people we can fall in love with.

The most exciting thing about Younger isn’t just the way it develops characters and builds relationships, but also because it’s such an incredibly positive show. I’ll leave you with Peter Hermann’s last words as they sum it up best: “To write a show that is hopeful and optimistic, and depicts female friends and relationships in general that genuinely hope without being naive, without being maudlin, is such an incredibly difficult thing to do. We live in such a cynical age and that’s a lazy default setting as an approach to life, and I think it’s so beautiful to see hope and characters hoping for each other. “

Younger season six will premier on Wednesday June 12th at 10pm on TVLand.

Originally posted on Script Magazine on May 15, 2019

Taking Space: An Interview with Tamara Jenkins, Writer/Director of Private Life

As the world seems to grow considerably complex, there are still subjects that remain taboo, as we strive to solve them through technology rather than bringing them out into the open, so we can find support and understanding. Fertility is one of those subjects, and it was recently tackled by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Tamara Jenkins in her latest film, Private Life, which premiered on Netflix this month.

Private Life is the funny and moving story of Richard (Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), a couple in the throes of infertility who try to maintain their marriage as they descend deeper and deeper into the insular world of assisted reproduction and domestic adoption. From painful IVF injections to nerve-wracking adoption interviews to the humbling search for an egg donor, Rachel and Richard have to come to terms with their choices, crying, laughing and fumbling their way through some of life’s toughest questions about fertility, marriage and what it means to be in control.

Lately, no matter the topic, it’s hard to keep conversations from veering toward a dissection on a woman’s place in the world, especially when that conversation occurs between two women filmmakers. Does a woman’s voice matter any more? Will she be given the space she needs to be understood and heard? And will her truth be deemed valuable?

At the start of our conversation, my focus began with standard questions on her craft and how she approaches writing and directing:

• How much of her film is auto-biographical vs research? (She had her own personal experience with fertility but isn’t making a documentary. She’s interested in the emotional core of the subject or the experience.)

• Where do her characters come from? (She doesn’t go out formally in the world with her notebook and her pencil behind her ear, but once she’s in the zone, the world opens up to her and she starts seeing things everywhere that apply to her story.)

• How do the characters change as you move from writing to directing? (She feels like the actors are filling in a kind of humanity you try to get on the page. It’s like working in a laboratory, and in each scene, she’s setting up an experiment. She takes her dropper and drops in Paul and drops in Kathryn and sees the reaction. And it works if she does her preparation well enough and sets up the right parameters on the page.)

• What gets her excited about making a movie? (The laboratory experiment of human behavior and how humans are going to behave in a given situation)

Getting to the core of Private Life

Enviably the conversation shifted to the topic of fertility, which is the subject at the core of Private Life.

“I felt the issue of fertility is equally a male and female thing. So I’d write little things around my office to help order all my thoughts in the process of writing. At one point, I wrote “the biological battle of the sexes” and stuck that index card over my desk. I always wanted it to be not just her. It was both of them. They are both late bloomers. They both waited. I wanted both of them to be on equal terrain.”

Despite Jenkins’ film’s balanced view of the topic from both genders, fertility has been traditionally classified as a female issue (even though we both agreed that this isn’t really the case). Did her film have any pushback?

“I didn’t develop this in a normal way. I just wrote it myself on spec, in my office alone. It didn’t go through the normal development steps as I wanted to avoid that [pushback] as much as possible. Often you feel you’re going to be put in a little-league zone because [your film] is from a female perspective. I think that happens all the time. Is this as important as other movies?”

Kayli Carter, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti in ‘Private Life’ – Photo Credit: Jojo Whilden, Courtesy of Netflix, ©2018

Reclaiming the female perspective

At a time when women creators are standing up and screaming to be heard, I asked Jenkins what we can do. How do we change that point of view? How can the female perspective be deemed just as important as any other point of view?

“I don’t know. I think it’s really a deep thing. The movie is 2 hours and 3 minutes long. Somebody recently told me—oh so and so really liked it but they thought it was too long. I’m looking around, and I’m seeing the length of these movies by men that are just gigantic movies. Why is this movie too long?

Narratively, I don’t really feel like it’s too long. I don’t think that it’s fat. I really felt like it was some kind of unconscious prejudice, that it wasn’t considered important enough to be 2 hours and 3 minutes. If this movie was shorter you’d think it was too long because you don’t think it’s valuable enough to take up that much space. On some level, it’s like manspreading, like it’s OK to take up that much space on the subway but a woman has to have her knees tight together holding her purse on her lap.”

This feeling of double standard is sadly not a surprising one. Why shouldn’t Private Life take up space like anything else? Is it because people are uncomfortable to talk about the secret things in our own lives? The film is aptly called “Private Life.” It’s about a secret in a couple’s life that shouldn’t be secret but current societal norms deem it so. And Tamara Jenkins deems that subject something that should be talked about, a complicated gender-partative issue that deserves air time.

“Maybe it started 20 years ago when I was writing ‘The Slums of Beverly Hills.’ I went to a writers lab where all these grown-up screenplay writers were reading it and giving their insight. I’ll never forget this man who’d done these giant Hollywood movies (nothing like this kind of movie), read my screenplay.

In the first scene, there’s a girl being fitted for a bra and the first thing he said to me was: “Oh my god, you can’t spend 5 pages on that. We don’t want to sit there and see that for that long,” and I was like, wow. It was the same thing. Like it wasn’t worth the time. It’s too long. You can’t start your movie with a girl being fitted for a bra. Which, you know, is like normal. He was like you can’t spend all that time and I’m like it’s about an adolescent who’s body is taking over. But it wasn’t worth the time.

I think that set me off on a course of noticing that no one thinks that deserves space, but I do, and I think it does. We’ve watched so many movies by men, and read so many books by men, putting yourself in the shoes of white male protagonists. Then when the shoe is on the other foot, and they have to put themselves into the shoes of gender or race, they’re uncomfortable. They don’t like it.”

Taking time: is it process or the system?

Private Life is Jenkins’ third film as writer/director, and though her films have brought her varying degrees of success, there’s been at least 10 years between each one. Statistically she’s beating the odds, as 80% of women directors are one-and-done after their first film (according to the 2017 Inclusion in the Director’s chair study from USC Annenberg’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative).

“I don’t want to spend another 10 years for the next one. The older you get the more dangerous it is.”

And the study agrees. 65% of films directed by women in the past 10 years were made by women under 50. So even with success under her belt, why does the filmmaking process take this long for her?

“Some of it is my own problem and some of it is the system that isn’t that open to making my movies very easily. It takes me a couple years to write the screenplay. I don’t know how normal people do it, but it takes me two years to write anything of value. They’re always too long. They’re 200 pages and then I spend a lot of time reducing it to it’s proper screenplay length and structure. The first draft is everything (including the kitchen sink) and then I have to distill it. I think—oh I wrote a novel, and now I have to adapt my own thing and make it into a screenplay.

I was ready to make this before, but it took a long time to get it really made. There was time wasted. There was a couple of years where it could have been made, and it wasn’t. And I felt like I was watching the seasons go by, and I was trying to get this thing made. I don’t know, maybe if it were someone else they could hand in a script and it’d be like, ok let’s go, here’s your green light. I just feel like every time I’ve made a movie, it gets stretched. Once I start interfacing with the studios, it doesn’t happen quickly. Maybe it doesn’t for anybody.

But each time when you realize how hard it is to get them made, you have that “Oh my god I’m really going to go through all of that again?” moment, and I don’t even have the energy to think about starting a new one. That’s kind of embarrassing to admit, that resistance of going through it again.

It’s so hard: you spend years trying to convince people—this is valuable, this is valuable, this is valuable—and they’re saying—not really, not really, not really—and that really wears you down. But you have to be so crazy and obsessed, and you almost go into an obsessive-compulsive state.

You just stick with it, you keep going and arriving at the door saying:
“Please take this seriously.
Please take this seriously.
Please give me money for this.
Please.
This is valuable.”

And eventually something happens. But to get yourself up to that state is a lot of work. And also, I don’t know how healthy that is. Should I bang on the door to get this movie made or pick up my daughter from school? It’s complicated.”

Changing as a filmmaker

As a filmmaker who’s worked in the business for over 25 years and Private Life as the first film Jenkins’ shot digitally, the biggest change hasn’t only been the technology she’s worked with.

“I feel like I’m a better filmmaker. For each movie I become more demanding, and I don’t bend to things easily, I really fight for things. And you have to learn that to be a director. Everything is very difficult. To make a movie is very hard. You’re pushing against this gravity all the time, and you have to keep the belief and stick by your guns. It’s very easy to have your vision chipped away at. Not because people are mean, but there’s things that are getting in the way of your vision all the time, and you have to defend your vision. The way you really wanted it to be and not compromise.

That to me is the biggest learning curve. And maybe it’s extra as a female person, as some women have a problem with asserting themselves—the whole is the female director being a bitch or the male filmmaker being a visionary thing. I feel like I’ve really had to practice that, and I’ve become more fiercely protective of the vision of the movie.

I didn’t understand how much you had to do that at the beginning. I didn’t see all the ways your vision could be chipped away at. It’s very insidious. With each compromise, it just starts chipping away: Oh well, they don’t want that actress, so we’ll go with that actress; oh, we can’t get that location, so we’ll use this location; oh, we don’t have enough time to do that—you really have to defend the material, and you have to defend it to the bitter end.”

Tamara Jenkins with Kayli Carter on set of ‘Private Life’ – Photo Credit: Jojo Whilden, Courtesy of Netflix, ©2018

Moving forward

After such candor, I finished by asking Jenkins for some words of advice.

“If anybody tells you that you’re not allowed to start a movie with a girl getting fitted for her first bra, don’t listen to them. That should be on a T-shirt. It was so easy to be ashamed by that, by being told your experience wasn’t valuable enough, like it’s embarrassing. You have to hold that thing in your head and don’t listen to people. Don’t think that something you’ve never seen before in a movie isn’t valid. It’s probably more valid.

People always want to see something they’ve already seen. One of the good things about being a female filmmaker is that you get to put things on screen that haven’t been seen, because no one has had a chance to show them yet. So instead of thinking of it as a negative, you can flip it and think of it like there aren’t enough movies by women, so whatever I write, the things that I’m interested in, are different, therefore novel and therefore valuable. And maybe that’s a healthier way of looking at it. That it’s actually an asset.”

Just as Private Life ends with the two leads waiting for their future to begin, Jenkins leaves us with a ghost in the room at the end of this interview, whispering to us to tell our stories. Though the industry still hasn’t shifted substantially over the past few years to make more room for women and people of color, we have our mission to defend our vision and not compromise. That our stories can take up space, deserve space and those subjects that may be everyday to us are still novel on screen and will be more and more valuable as we move forward.

Originally posted on October 18, 2018