Interview (Part 4): Amy Berg

My Q&A with a top Hollywood TV showrunner.

Amy Berg is a writer and TV producer whose credits include Leverage, Person of Interest, Eureka, Caper, Da Vinci’s Demons, and the current hit STARZ series Counterpart. I crossed paths with Amy several years ago the way many writers do nowadays: via Twitter. In 2017, I reached out to Amy to do an interview and what followed was a months’ long back and forth via email.

Today in Part 4, Amy shares her thoughts about the changing landscape of television, movies, and streaming services:

Scott: That is a remarkable story. I remember Justin tweeting as he started working with you and the other ‘Counterpart’ writers something along the lines of: Why don’t all writers have this arrangement? In other words, feature writers slogging along, alone. But the TV writers room = heaven. What are your thoughts about the solo feature writer vs. the TV writers room dynamic?

Amy: Well, you’re starting to see writers rooms on the feature side these days but really only for the big franchises. And it’s usually a revolving door of the same small group of sought-after screenwriters.

I think the simple fact is that television is a totally different beast. It requires you to exercise different muscle groups that aren’t needed when you’re doing independent study. It’s all about collaboration, and let’s face it… collaboration isn’t for everyone. And not just in the room. In television, a writer’s responsibilities don’t start and stop at the page, particularly if you’re the showrunner. Showrunning is only 20% writing. The other 80% is managing people, places, and things. It’s casting, scheduling, budgeting, giving notes, getting notes, making calls, recruiting and hiring the right personnel… and that’s just preproduction.

I’ve been on my fair share of shows now and I’ve worked with people who are cut out for it and those who are not. Managing people is the toughest bit, because it’s instinctual. Your job is to simultaneously protect and inspire. Yes, you’re the teacher and you need to give instruction, but you’re not going to get good work if you view everyone else from a pedestal. You literally cannot make a television show alone. In fact, you can’t make it with any fewer than a hundred people. In the case of Counterpart, it was closer to three hundred in two countries and I worked my butt off to make sure they were looked after

Scott: You mention how there’s been a kind of evolution on the feature side with some of the franchise projects having writers room like Transformers at Paramount and Universal’s attempts to launch a ‘monsters’ universe. It seems to me that’s emblematic of more and more crossover between movies and TV. Here’s another one: Limited series like ‘Godless’ and anthology series like ‘Fargo’ where the creatives (Scott Frank and Noah Hawley) say publicly that they look at those stories as “long movies”. What’s your take on the emergence of limited series and anthology series, and do you envision more crossover and even convergence between movies and TV in the future?

Amy: Oh, absolutely. And I think it has a lot to do with the emergence of new platforms, particularly services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube Red, Crackle, and now even Apple joining the fray. In the world of streaming and digital downloads, how people view film and television is all the same to them so it’s not surprising to see the content itself starting to lend itself to that model as well.

Although I think there’s still an element of fear when it comes to folks tackling television for the first time, particularly if you’re bringing auteur-like talent to the table. Everyone has seen or heard enough horror stories to know it’s probably best they not try their hand at large episodic orders of a continuing series.

Right now there are more shows than there are skilled conductors capable of keeping the train on the tracks, but thanks to short orders and limited series you’re not noticing a drop in quality. If anything, since those shows usually offer longer writing periods, what you’re seeing is actually an uptick. I don’t think you can argue that television offers better storytelling than film these days.

Scott: The changing landscape of technology and new platforms appears to be altering the way writers get hired onto TV staffs. For example, I saw Jenji Kohan at the Austin Film Festival a few years back and she was asked what type of material they looked for when considering writers for Orange is the New Black, and she said basically anything other than the traditional spec script of an existing series. Original TV pilot scripts, movie scripts, plays, short stories, they considered everything. She said the main thing they were looking for was writers with a unique voice which she and her fellow producers felt could provide something distinctive yet also complimentary to the series.

So my questions to you are: What type of material did you and Justin Marks consider when hiring staff for Counterpart? What would you recommend a person wanting to break in as a TV writer focus on in their own writing?

Amy: Personally, I think specs of existing series still have a place. An original pilot might tell you about someone’s imaginative abilities in a room environment, but the goal on the page for a working TV writer is still to mimic the voice of your boss.

At the end of a long day, the last thing I want as a showrunner is to sit down with a draft from one of my writers and not have it be a workable product. There will always be something that needs to be adjusted, but if it’s not even in the wheelhouse I’m not going to be happy. Which is why when I’m staffing I still like to read one of each. But hardly anyone is writing specs of existing shows anymore because all the advice that’s out there tells them they don’t need one. So you make due with what you’re given and hope for the best.

What I look for in the samples I’m sent is scene structure. I look at the bones. I can rewrite a script in a day if it’s just a dialogue pass, but if I need to go back in and rebuild scenes from scratch that’s a much longer process. I also really want to be surprised. Whether it’s a story turn or a character choice or something even smaller, I want to know that you’re going to be a person I can count on in the room for a left turn when everyone else is looking right.

Specifically, for Counterpart, all the scripts we read were pilots. Unfortunately I had to leave town for a family emergency while we were staffing, so Justin was the one who made it through all the stacks of scripts. He’d send me the ones he liked and we went from there.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Amy talks about the hit Starz series Counterpart and the basics of how to break and write a script for an episodic TV series.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Follow Amy on Twitter: @bergopolis

For more exclusive Go Into The Story interviews with screenwriters, TV writers, filmmakers, and industry insiders, go here.