The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 739 of Script Notes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome the creator of 20 television series.
David E. Kelley: Oh, my God.
John: Who is also the first writer to win an Emmy for Best Comedy and Best Drama in the same season.
David: It’s too much.
John: His latest show is Margo’s Got Money Troubles on Apple. Welcome to Script Notes, David E. Kelley.
David: Thank you to you both. Good to be here.
John: It is remarkable to have you here. Craig, in front of you see a list of his TV shows. Just remind us of some of the shows that he’s done.
Craig: I’m going to do this. This is a process where I experience just a deep, brutal humbling. You all should. These are the television series created by David E. Kelley. Doogie Howser, MD, Picket Fences, Snoops, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal, The Practice, Boston Public, Boston Legal, Harry’s Law, The Crazy Ones, Big Little Lies, The Undoing, Goliath, Anatomy of a Scandal, Big Sky, Love and Death, Presumed Innocent, Nine Perfect Strangers, The Lincoln Lawyer, which I think is in its 900th season, and now Margo’s Got Money Troubles. What?
John: It’s a what and how.
Craig: I feel so stupid and lazy.
John: Craig, we all are stupid and lazy by comparison. We want to talk to you about all of those shows. We can’t go into depth on all of them, but really the idea of what a TV engine is because you have a knack for understanding how to not just create a show that will last a season but will keep going on.
In a bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk more about those long-running series because most of us are thinking about how we get that one season to happen. You’ve experienced shows that have just gone on and on. You’ll tell us, hopefully, what happens when you’re approaching your fifth or sixth season of a show. We’re excited to have you on just to talk television overall.
David: Amazing. I hope I don’t disappoint because I don’t have a knack or a science, but I’ll do my best.
Craig: Well, you’ve got something. It’s pretty remarkable, the longevity here. It’s not a thing about age, really. It’s just a thing about repetition, how many times you have to start something up. Pitch the idea, get the approval, get the room together, get the budget together, figure out where you’re going to shoot it, and cast it. To do that for a television show once is a lot. What I’m struck by is how many times you had to start over in a way. How did you, and how do you continue to keep it fresh somehow to get excited yet again for another reset?
David: Well, let’s start with the last part of the question first in terms of fresh. There was a point where that did become a challenge. How do I come up with something new and explore new creative muscles? I actually felt that it was around that time I was doing Harry’s Law, which I loved doing, but I felt this is a track I’d run around before. I think there’s a danger for any creative person, especially a writer, when things start to feel facile and the best thing you can do is to go outside of your lane and try to challenge yourself.
Now, the risk is you may fall off the high wire and bloody your nose because you may have picked the lane that you’re not particularly adapted to running in. I think I got a little lucky there because I started adapting projects, working off IP that was very well baked and hatched by excellent authors.
My first adaptations were Big Little Lies by Leon Moriarty. It was just a fantastic book, well-characterized and well-plotted. The second one was a book called Mr. Mercedes by Steven King. He’s the master of horror, but he’s also-
Craig: He’s a great writer.
David: -brilliant at character as well. Both of those particular projects, especially Mr. Mercedes, was well out of my lane. If I had set out and endeavored to write a horror piece just because I thought it would be good to wade into that genre, who knows what would have happened. It could have been a disaster. Having the training wheels of Steven King, having hatching that plot and developing those characters, that gave me the confidence to walk out on a plank that I hadn’t walked before.
Big Little Lies, similarly, I was a little more comfortable with that turf because it had a tonal blend of comedy and drama, which I’ve always gravitated to. It was a character piece. I felt pretty comfortable adapting that book. Again, great credit to Leon Moriarty. She wrote a wonderful book, and that made it easier.
Now, having gone down those paths with those two books, I realized there’s maybe a second chapter, or I don’t know, a third chapter in my own career, taking the IP and the ideas and the characters of others and adapting it.
Craig: Like Presumed Innocent.
David: It wasn’t something that I ever thought would appeal to me because, and you guys know better than anyone, that the true intoxicant of the job is the idea. Coming up with the story, breaking a story, discovering characters that you want to spend time with. That’s a certain form of adrenaline and dopamine that allows you to do the hard work, which is the writing itself.
I always felt, well, if you strip me of that, I’m going to not have the fuel, and it’s going to be all work and no play. To my great surprise, it was neither of that. You could take the ideas of others, infuse ideas of your own, and give occasion or allow yourself to hatch something that was original in and of itself.
John: David, I’m looking at your credits, and you have so many broadcast shows from the peak of, this was broadcast television and now many streaming shows, but there’s not a lot of cable in there. Were you developing shows for cable? Did you just skip over that generation? Tell us about that.
Craig: It was Big Little Lies.
David: No, HBO would be my cable experience. I did Big Little Lies and The Undoing with them and another show called Love and Death. Yes, you’re right. It was broadcast and then to streaming. It was broadcast really forever. It was the first 20-some odd years, maybe more, of my career. I actually quite loved broadcast television and miss it a little bit still. I never felt that I was constrained creatively or content-wise on broadcast television. Certainly, you couldn’t use all the words that you can use on cable, and some violence and nudity, obviously, are not allowed, but that was never my thing anyway. I had the most fun writing characters and ideas and even topical ideas, socially relevant ideas.
What was great about broadcast for that is it was so fast. I could be writing something today that would be on by the end of the month. Maybe by the end of the season when you’re doing 22 episodes, you’re writing episode 21 and 22, which could be airing in 10 to 12 days. You can be very timely. I loved that.
Now in the streaming world, you don’t have that. You’re expected to have all your episodes written before you even roll camera. What’s airing is going to be, on the fast track, probably a year to 16 months if you’re lucky. I do miss that from broadcast.
What I got tired of on broadcast is the commercials were rearing their ugly head. The show length, for example, when I was doing L.A. Law, I think we were 48, 49 minutes. By the time we got to Harry’s Law, we were down to 41 minutes.
Craig: Wow.
David: It was a ton of commercials. It became increasingly more difficult to tell stories with any kind of soft build of emotional momentum because it’d be interrupted by a loud Ford or Dodge Ram commercial. It’s just every six, seven minutes you were cutting to the commercial and then coming back and having to restart. That was frustrating.
I also was envious, probably of the talent pool that I saw cable drawing on. I moved to HBO, and Big Little Lies happened, and that worked. The streaming world was proliferating at that time, and there we went.
John: We think about you as this titan who’s made so many shows. In the year 2000, you had 67 episodes of television that you either wrote or produced, which is insane.
Craig: That’s illegal, I think, actually.
John: You also started someplace. Can you talk to us about L.A. Law and getting your start on L.A. Law and what you learned in those years in the room that are still the lessons you’re implementing today? What’s that first season on a show like for you?
David: That’s a great question because that was the job that imprinted upon me like no other. My first boss was Steven Bochco, who gave birth to L.A. Law. I was a lawyer back in Boston, and I didn’t really even watch much television. One thing I did watch was Hill Street Blues. I was really quite blown away by how good it was, the storytelling, the depth of the characters in it. You could have thrown out any name in the Hollywood industry and it probably would have gone right over my head, and I wouldn’t know who that person was.
Steven Bochco was a name that I did recognize because at the end of every episode, there was his title. His episodes usually ended with your jaw dropped near your abdomen. That name I knew.
I had written a project, a movie idea of my own, and mainly wrote it on my own because I didn’t know anybody in Hollywood to write it. It wasn’t that I said I wanted to become a writer, but I thought it made for a good story, and I liked to write as a hobby, so I started penning it. That happened, and it was a legal piece, and that happened as L.A. Law was being developed by Steven Bochco, and he was looking for lawyers who also wrote because he was seeking some authenticity to the show.
I came out and met him, and that went very well, and I became a member of that staff, and it was an incredible writing staff. In those days, again, forgive me if I sound like a dinosaur, but I am, but in those days, it was only broadcast, so it was a finite number of shows, and the talent pool for writers was just bigger. Those rooms, I think 30-something was on at that time, and Moonlighting was up. Those were all-star writing rooms, and ours was, too, so I was very blessed to be surrounded by a lot of talent.
First and foremost, Steven, he was a great teacher, and he really stressed finding stories that were not just good stories in and of themselves in terms of plot and engaging entertainment but stories that were conduits into the characters that allowed you to explore the characters as you were moving the plot. He was very ferocious in his storytelling approach that way, and he set a bar for all of us.
The first show that I did on my own after L.A. Law was Picket Fences. Steven wasn’t part of that show, but then again, he was because, again, his standard was in play. It’s funny, we never worked on the same show again after L.A. Law, and I’ve said it before, so I was never in his writer’s room again, but he was always in mine and is still in mine because his work ethic, his discipline. Everybody showed up at 9 o’clock, and it was 9:00 to 5:00 or 9:00 to 6:00 job, and his attention to detail and his respect for the audience. Those tenets made a big impression on me, and it still do today.
We’ve all gotten the note. Make it simpler so that the audience will follow this or understand that. Steven rejected that note out of hand. He was going to write up to the audience, not down. That was a great lesson that I learned, and I try to live up to this day.
Craig: I would say you have, and then some. What strikes me is that even though you picked up these great lessons from Steven Bochco about what to value and perhaps some notions about how the process should function and finding the reason that the show should exist beyond just “here’s some stuff that happens.” There are things about your work that are you, and there’s a lot of them.
I’m curious if you have any sense, looking back at all of it, maybe with the benefit of the perspective of time. What are the things in your work that feel like a united thread? Are there themes that you approach? Are there particular characters that you like to find? Is it a general intelligence, which I think marks all of these projects? What do you think? If I were learning from you in your writing room, what do I walk away with?
David: I don’t know. I’ve never tried to look at the wiring. I’m afraid if I try to. It’s like asking the golfer, do you breathe in or breathe out as you take your backswing, you can ruin them forever. My compass for any given show, I know, is it’s got to be characters that have some dimensional staying power because, in success, you’re going to spend a lot of time with them. It’s not something I would recommend to people, but I’ve spent my entire adult life hanging out mainly with characters who are not real, who are fictitious.
John: Me too.
David: Speaking to people I have never met in the audience. That’s a weird dynamic. On the other hand, all the characters– we’re all observing as writers. Whether we know it or not, we’re picking up eccentricities or behavioral nuances of people we encounter. It goes into the blender or whatever it is, the creative thing in your head that’s concocting.
It comes out. Picket Fences was the first show that I had. It was personal in that I grew up in small towns. I was always drawing on small towns and the people who populate those particular venues.
L.A. Law, obviously, I was a lawyer before that and in office life. I know I was drawing on that for both L.A. Law and The Practice and Ally McBeal and Boston Legal. I think if there’s one common denominator, I’m not sure there is, but it’s characters that speak to me that I love exploring. My radar is if I can find characters and a story that resonates with me, go to that, and then just cross your fingers and close your eyes and hope that there’s a constituency big enough to support it.
I think it’s folly to try to look at the marketplace, for example, and say, well, this kind of idea is popular at the moment. Therefore, you can try it. It’s probably, at least for me, going to be tougher to pull off. I’ve noticed that the shows that I’ve had the most success with, coincidentally, whether I knew it at the time we were doing it, I don’t know, but looking backwards, were the characters probably that were most dear to me. The characters that I would mourn, for example, once the series ended.
Picket Fences, when that ended. Douglas Wambaugh was played by Fyvush Finkel, and Judge Bone played by Ray Walston. I knew back then that I was never going to be able to write that guy again unless it was derivative. That character now was gone. Because they were so real to me at the time, I actually mourned their creative passing. That’s a good thing. If you finish a project and, well, that character, I can say goodbye to and write another one, then maybe you weren’t pouring yourself into that one as much as you should. Kathy Baker, who played Jill Brock-
John: So good.
David: -on Picket was the same. Of course, I think all the characters on The Practice were very dear to me. Ally McBeal and John Cage on Ally. I miss them still to this day. It sounds a little bit unhealthy, or-
John: Yes, but that’s okay.
David: a form of schizophrenia that you believe they’re real, but at the time they were very real.
John: David, Craig and I, up until Craig started his TV series, we were mostly working on features. With features, we’re writing characters we deeply invest in, but then they get handed off to an actor and then they’re no longer-
Craig: One-night stands.
John: They’re one-night stands. They’re with us for a time, and then they pass off. It’s such a different experience when you have these characters who you have to keep writing for every week. They are part of you, and then they’re being performed by a different person. That’s got to be a strange thing. They aren’t part of you. They are your friends. They are people you know so well. You know everything that they do, and yet they are performed by somebody else. What is the conversation like with you and an actor who is on their third or fourth season playing a character when you know them really well and an actor knows them really well? What is that conversation?
David: It’s a very collaborative process in that by that point, when you’re talking about year three, year four, I’m not writing, maybe I am, but more times than not, I’m not writing the character that I originally conceived of. You’re writing the melding of that character you conceived of with the interpretation of it by the particular actor. Sometimes right out of the block, the cadence and rhythms of an actor are spot on with what you append to your page with. Other times, it’s way off, and you either recast or reconfigure.
More times than not, it’s something in between. You write a character, you cast that character. That character in the hands of the actor is not exactly what you conceived of. You start to adjust and write to their strengths and see what they bring, see the potential that they offer in the character. By the end of season one, really, actually, probably after six or seven episodes, you’re both on the same page or wavelength. That collaboration isn’t always two people in a room saying, let’s do this, let’s do that. In fact, in broadcast television, you just don’t have time for it. The scripts are coming out every eight, nine days.
As soon as one’s done, you start the next. The collaboration is often unspoken. I’m seeing what they do on screen, and that’s in my head as I develop the character. The actors or actresses are interpreting or seeing what I’m putting on the page, and they’re bringing what they bring. If you’re lucky, you would arrive at a being that is fertile for storytelling and is great for your viewing constituency as well.
In broadcast, you don’t have really much time at all to be making big notes because an actor likes the scene or wants to say those words and doesn’t want to say this. In limited series, you do have more time, so there’s probably more input off-camera, but broadcast, when it’s 22 to 24 episodes, once that bus leaves the depot, you’re off. A great amount of trust has to be put in the showrunner by the actors for those kinds of vehicles because you’re running a marathon. You can’t pull over at the side of the road and rest.
Craig: It seems to me that no matter what the format, an enormous amount of trust has to be put into the showrunner because ultimately they are parenting this thing. You brought up actors. Just looking at the cast of Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Elle Fanning.
John: Elle Fanning, who was a child actor in my first movie.
Craig: Nick Offerman.
John: Your show?
Craig: My show. So far, you’ve just taken our people. Okay, now it gets better. Greg Kinnear, who I still maintain is one of the great unsung treasures of acting. Michael Angarano, who’s a great, I think of him as a young actor, but I’m old now, and so I realize he’s not young anymore.
John: Watching your show, I think of him as a young actor, and he’s playing a dad of two kids. He’s playing a professor.
Craig: We grew up. Michelle Pfeiffer, I feel like we know her better.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: So, working with your wife, that must be quite a trip. Then some lady named Nicole Kidman. Wow. In the circumstance like this, what I’m curious about is you’ve got, well, first of all, you’re in streaming, you’re on Apple TV, you have essentially all the freedom in the world. Your episodes could be whatever length you want, you could have any amount of episodes that you want.
John: There’s nudity in the show, which I was surprised by, but it works.
Craig: Nick Offerman loves to get his pants off.
David: We all know that.
Craig: Getting his pants back on is the trick.
John: That is the challenge.
Craig: When you have a cast like this, as the father, as the show dad, do you feel a responsibility to make sure everybody’s getting enough to do, or was the point to make sure that all these characters were worth these actors being there in the first place?
David: Excellent question. The story always comes first. If you’re in a position of having to build up a role to please an actor or to make sure that the page count is what they’re used to getting, it’s not that it can’t happen, but it’s a recipe for a pitfall, if not an outright disaster. Fortunately, on Margo, the story was so good. The book was so great, such a great read for all of us. That was well established before anybody showed up, even for a first read-through.
I mentioned earlier before that, you see what you got with actors on a read-through in the first few episodes, and you’re making adjustments here and there, and then you arrive at what ultimately you’re bringing to the audience. Margo was fairly unique in that the read-through was pretty impeccable. I credit Rufi Thorpe, the author of the book, because I think all the actors and the writers knew what we were buying into. Our goal was to execute the tonal blend and the character’s emotional lives on film, what she had done in the book.
It was shocking, the read-through, how spot on Elle was in every single beat, because she had to hit a lot of different notes, from absurdity to raw emotion to comedy to drama. That script bounced all over the place. The character did as well. I’ve said it before, I felt like Elle owned this character, perhaps maybe before I even picked up my pen to start adapting it, because she had read the book. She was part of the producing team that was chasing it before we all joined forces and got it.
That was one that spared me a lot of time having to convince actors. Well, you may not see it, but you got to trust us and zig where your instinct is to zag because this is what we’re going for. Part of the job is managing. With talent like that, you’re going to be managing up, but on this book, it was so well-crafted. Again, it’s a credit to Rufi that they all showed up and said, “Okay, where are my marks?” Nick Offerman, everyone wanted to work with him.
Craig: The greatest.
David: I remember our first Zoom. I thought, okay, I’m going to have to make a strong play to get him, but I didn’t. He had read the book and said, “Let’s go.”
Craig: I could just hear him say-
David: That was easy.
Craig: -David, I’ve read the novel. It’s strong. You have quite a resume. When are we shooting?
David: Yes, and his cadence, that is a character because my instinct is maybe to pace scenes up more than they need to be paced. Let’s get to the center of a scene quickly because the worst thing any show can be for me is boring. Not terrible, not outrageous, not offensive, but boring. Don’t want to be that. I’ve made mistakes in the past of maybe pushing scenes faster than they need to go.
Craig: I get accused of this.
David: With Nick, we knew what we had in him, that you could give him a pause, and he was going to give life to it. With Jinx, we were allowed to really take our time with him. He supplied such a belly to that character that was a luxury for us writers.
Craig: Well, and I would imagine too that it’s understandable because John and I came primarily out of features, as John said, and you came primarily out of broadcast television. In features and in broadcast television, you’re always running out of time. Before you even write one word, you’re running out of time. It’s squeezed and it’s finite.
Even in the older cable days, I still argue a little bit about this with HBO, where they have this 58-minute, 30-second maximum roll, which I’m always like, “Hmm, yes,” but 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 this second screen thing, you can take your time with it. You can breathe. You actually have. Like you, I’m paranoid that it will just be boring or self-indulgent to take a pause. It’s good to know that you struggle with this too.
David: Yes, my assumption is that the viewer has something better to do or at least something good to do. 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. That’s burden number one. Then if you can get lucky and, on top of entertaining them, cause them to think or even move them and stir their heart, then that’s the home run.
John: David, can you talk us through the process of Margo’s Got Money Troubles? Because there’s the book, Elle 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?
David: You’re told that you’re going to series but I think the dirty little secret for all these shows is, yes, 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.
Craig: For budget or for creative?
David: Creative. That they just didn’t think a story about these women in Monterey and the first episode was about a kid being bullied, is that enough? 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.” I said, “Do you have a child that’s gone to school?” He did not. I said, “Well, if it’s your child and he’s being picked on, that story takes on a certain severity.” Our job as writers is to convey that storytelling so the audience feels the emotional stakes and the severity of the offense.
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. On Margo, 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.
Yet, a lot of that, third-person and first-person internals, interiority of the characters were so rich. The goal is, okay, how do you get that out behaviorally? I remember my mantra for actually both Mr. Mercedes and Margo 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.
Craig: Don’t screw up.
David: 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. Margo, it was all there in the book.
John: Talk us through your writing versus the– You had a room on the show. There’s other writers. 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.
David: I wrote the first three episodes. Then Eva Anderson came on, and she ran the writer’s room with the other writers. Eva and I went back and forth. She was my point man. I have never been particularly adept at a writer’s room. For example, going back to Steven Bochco, he was genius at that. There were times where Steven couldn’t break a story in his head. He would call all the writers into the room to do it together. We would not say a word. Steven would suddenly break the story. I said, “What gives with that?” 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.”
It turns out I didn’t really need you to break the 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. They tell me more often than not what they want to say and where the story wants to go. 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.
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?” 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. Often, I don’t know for sure where I’m going to end up. I 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. 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.
John: Can we talk about the engine of an episode? I think back to a Boston Public episode, and there’s a template to it. There’s a sense of, like, well, 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 Margo’s Got Money Troubles are 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, or are you pitching the engine as you’re first pitching the show, and then how that changes with a limited series like Margo, what you’re thinking of in terms of the engine, the motor that’s getting you through the episode?
David: With Boston Public, and this is how much the industry has changed. With The Practice, with Ally McBeal, with Boston Public, there was no script, no outline, and no real formal pitch. With Boston Public, I sat down with Sandy Grushow, who was running Fox at the time, and 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. It’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’ll be both dramatic and comedic. We talked about the kids will be instruments to explore these faculty members as well as the parents. 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 different. When you’re going to pitch a show-
Craig: They want it all.
John: -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. 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. With broadcast, again, 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 also the nuclear family. The experience of watching it would be many different stories happening, but it was really one core thematic engine driving all four different stories. In the days of broadcast with Boston Public and L.A. 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, sometimes 11-minute acts.
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’m thinking I’m going to come back and watch the rest of it. Once you’re into the streaming and there are no commercials, you don’t have to worry about those act breaks. 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.
Craig: I wonder if this is why somebody like Sandy Grushow back in the day could say, yes, based on what you just said, high school, about the faculty, what you didn’t say, but what I will add to that is, “Also, I’m David E. Kelley, and I’ve done this before a number of times to great success.” 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, in the simplest form, I hate it. I would be willing to roll the dice on that.” Whereas now they ask for everything because it could be anything.
That is probably scary for them, but I do think it’s wonderful freedom for us. What’s fun and inspiring, honestly, about somebody like you and the length of your career is that we can see how you are not a great writer of broadcast television. You’re a great writer. 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. We know a lot of writers at this point. You’re probably approaching what, 50, 45 years of this? I don’t know how many.
David: I came out in ’86, so I’m just about 40.
Craig: 40?
David: Yes.
Craig: 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. 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. Kelley. I don’t know how else to put it.
John: Well, I do have a question because I want to talk. You were describing how you needed to write towards act breaks for broadcast TV and stuff. Within Margo, 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 which episodes do these things fall into, and you’re not going to match the book exactly. How early in the process did you figure out, 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? Was it before the writer’s room? When did you know the sequence of events?
David: 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. 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.
John: The tone of your show, it shifts a lot.
David: Exactly.
John: 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. There’s a baby at the center of it, so there’s things like Ally McBeal. Finding that right blend must be a challenge. It does feel like an editorial.
David: It is. It’s very unscientific, and it’s very subjective. In Episode 2, for example, I was worried about the first two episodes, especially with Margo, because I thought if this comes out of the gate as single mom with crying baby, will the audience really want to escape to that at the end of the day? 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 for the smile and a laugh is important.
The first two episodes, because the character was going through a lot of emotional gymnastics, I remember in Episode 2, there was a meltdown that Margo had over frustration with breastfeeding, the baby wasn’t getting a good latch. The scene was meant to be both absurd and real at the same time. You could maybe laugh at the monologue that the character was spewing, but at the same time, feel that was a very real issue for her.
We had a subsequent scene where Shyanne, 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 Shyanne. It was a form of judgment that this one-month-old baby was passing on Shyanne as a bad grandmother.
Similarly, that was also supposed to be absurd, comedic, but feeling a very real and raw insecurity of Shyanne 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. Even though we liked both scenes, but in the aggregate, the episode just might be too wrought and too emotionally draining that it would allow the audience to go, “You know what, I don’t need this kind of angst and anxiety at the end of my day.”
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. We were also pretty confident that both those scenes advanced story and a character.
Craig: There you go.
David: We said, “Okay, if it’s doing that, we’re going to stick with it.” Maybe the audience might find it wrought, but we bet on story and character at the end of the day. That’s not something 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? Margo, 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.
When I was at HBO, we had the luxury of, because A Big Little Lie was supposed to be eight episodes, and got to the seventh and eighth episode, and went back to HBO. I said, “This really needs to be one. Seven and eight are going to be broken up.” HBO said, “Fine, make it one.” Our finale was a little bit longer, but the series was seven episodes. The business models today, we don’t always have that luxury.
Margo Apple really wanted those eight episodes. We mapped them out with eight episodes. 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.
John: Great.
Craig: Awesome
John: Well, David, congratulations on Margo. Congratulations on a vast career that–
Craig: You know what? Just have to say, fellow Princeton tiger, there’s not a lot of us. There’s not a lot of us in this business. I would say, [crosstalk]
John: What about Harvard somehow?
Craig: Well, Harvard, it was like all you needed to do was to be a friend of somebody, and then you were on The Simpsons. That’s how easy it was as far as I could 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.”
David: You know what? Princeton really wasn’t putting it on the map. I never came out of Princeton thinking, “Oh, screenwriting was on the menu.”
Craig: No, there was no, it just didn’t– it wasn’t an option. We were 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.”
John: Absolutely. You’ll be the second David E. Kelley.
Craig: I was not, and I am not.
John: Let’s start with one cool thing, and mine actually ties into something that you may have firsthand knowledge of. This is the idea of the designated driver, which I think about as always having been there. It’s actually a relatively new concept. The basic idea came from Scandinavia and the Nordic countries, where the practice had developed earlier. 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 it for the US. The project launched in 1988. The quote was, “The designated driver is the life of the party.”
David: That’s very good.
John: 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 LA Law. Do you remember anything about this, David? Does this sound familiar?
David: No.
John: No.
David: They said, “Oh, yes, we’ll tell all of our writers and then–[chuckles]
John: It did air, and it aired in those shows, but other popular shows in 1988 to seed that idea out there in the world. I think it’s a good, noble thing that I’m happy exists in our culture.
Craig: I didn’t know that it came from Scandinavia. I remember when it happened. I remember designated driver suddenly being a phrase. I remember us making fun of it. First, you start laughing about it, but then someone’s like, “Yes, actually-
[crosstalk]
Craig: -who is the designated driver?”
John: Absolutely. We all recognize that drunk driving was a problem, but it’s a solution to it. It’s basically, “Oh, here’s how we’re going to avoid us doing that.”
Craig: It was a bad thing to talk about with people who were already drunk.
John: That’s the real thing.
Craig: You could get them before they started drinking.
John: It also became a useful excuse for why you’re not drinking that night.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: For folks who didn’t want to drink, it made it good, or why you bring along that one friend you don’t really like that much.
Craig: [laughs] That was always the dark side of the designated driver.
John: If you rotate among the people, that would make more sense. Anyway, I just thought it was an interesting 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?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is a fantastic article that is in WIRED. It’s on WIRED right now, written by Alan Levinovitz, called The Painful Truth About Long COVID. The subheader is “There might finally be a way forward for long COVID treatment if only you were allowed to talk about it.” What this article talks about, it doesn’t come down one way or the other, but what it starts to investigate is the notion that long COVID, first of all, existed before COVID.
When the flu epidemic happened, the Spanish flu back around 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. 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 hard biological underpinning, except maybe there isn’t, because they can’t seem to find one.
What people are starting to come around to is the notion that this is, in fact, a neurological symptom that is quasi-psychological. 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 in nature. There is no hard proof that it is all biological in 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. A very well-balanced, fascinating article. You can’t help but come out of it primarily with an enormous amount of empathy for people who are suffering from this. Whether it is “hard biology or neuropsychology,” it’s real. Really well done, very thorough, quite long, worth the whole read.
David: What’s the article? What’s the name of it?
Craig: It’s called The Painful Truth About Long COVID on Wired.com.
John: David, I’m now desperate for you to time-travel back.
Craig: I can’t top that.
John: 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.
Craig: He may have written an episode while I was talking. He’s that good.
John: He is that good, right? I saw him scribbling.
David: Well, they’re mentally disenfranchised for all our series because I’m always fascinated by neuroscience as well. There’s no such thing as a normal brain. Everyone has what we would call eccentricity and quirks. Others would call mental illness. You’re right. There is a stigma. There shouldn’t be. Everybody’s got their brain. None of them work the same way. They all have things to explore for both entertainment and fear value. I’ve always loved the psychology of people. 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.
John: David, what do you have to share with us?
David: Well, again, I have nothing as cool as that.
Craig: It could be a cupcake. It could be anything, though.
David: Well, I will tell you, one would be a fish.
Craig: A fish.
David: A fish, yes. It’s a salmon. 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. It’s born in a river. The odds of making it out of that river are low because of all the things that can eat it, and because of the water quality and flooding, and the natural hazards that are there.
As soon as that egg hatches, it goes to the ocean and spends three to four years in the ocean, and grows and fills itself with all these nutrients. At the end of that, it comes back. 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.
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. It’s feeding nature in the middle of the country. It all comes from this fish. That fish continues to fascinate me and to be a cool part of nature. I thought you wanted me to pick a movie or a book.
Craig: Honestly, salmon is– Also, is it not the only fish that is that color? I don’t think there’s another fish that’s that color, right?
David: 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. In the saltwater, it’s completely silver. It’s a silver bull.
Craig: All I know is that the delicious salmon that I have for sushi, which I know you’re like, “Please stop eating that. It’s from salmon.” I can see the look in your eyes. [laughs] When I was a kid growing up, New York and you have locks. Was that all wild salmon back then? When did it start?
David: Probably not. 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 now undamming rivers on the East Coast and West Coast to give them a chance to come back.
John: We have salmon elevators to get them up over certain obstacles.
Craig: I love the salmon. There are things–
David: Yes, it’s a battle, but they’re battlers. They’re warriors.
Craig: That’s actually a great, one cool thing.
John: I love it.
Craig: A fish.
John: A fish. [crosstalk] Not just a fish. A salmon.
Craig: A great fish. A salmon.
John: A great fish. [crosstalk] A big fish, in fact.
David: Nice. This is a great fish. The Chinook salmon, their nickname is King of Fish. 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 ecosystem that is vital to habitats far beyond where it actually lives itself.
John: That also feels like a metaphor for David E. Kelley in terms of a King of Fish, in terms of master of one domain, and also traveling to a new domain.
Craig: Soon, we will pick his body up, travel it across, have him take dumps on the ground below.
John: If you go back to broadcasting television, that would be a complete, or if you go back to practicing law, that would be a complete salmon journey.
Craig: That’s the river.
John: That’s the river.
Craig: It gets back to the river.
John: That’s where we started.
David: That’s the river.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptedness is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Congratulations.
John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: He’s also good.
John: 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 johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we often answer. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.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 @scriptnotespodcast. Lauren has been busy cutting videos for our Instagram, so you can see those.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. 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.
Craig: Salmon.
John: salmon
Craig: Just to tell them, like.
John: Thank you to all our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on long-running shows. David E. Kelley, an absolute delight having you on the program. I can’t believe it’s been 739 episodes before we got a chance to talk with you.
Craig: It was worth it. I think we had to work up to it.
John: Yes, we did. We had to practice.
David: Thank you both. How do you guys find time to write while doing all these shows? That’s a lot of hours.
John: That’s a lot of hours.
Craig: 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? [chuckles]
John: We won’t talk about that in the bonus segment.
Craig: Enjoying, enjoying, I guess, is the trick.
John: Enjoying, enjoying.
Craig: How do you enjoy enjoying?
John: All right. Thank you, David.
Craig: Thank you, David
David: Thank you, both. All right.
[music]
John: We’re in the bonus segment, which was supposed to be about long-running series. We should talk about that, but I also want to talk about these other things. In terms of long-running series, I just want to acknowledge The Practice, eight seasons. Chicago Hope, six seasons. Allen McBeal, five, Boston Legal, five, Picket Fences, four, Boston Public, four. Wow, Craig is struggling to–
Craig: I’m here. I am in season three, like, huh. Now, I do write all of it basically on my own, but it sounds like David’s done quite a bit of that himself, too. Even if you don’t, by the time you get to Season 6, you’ve written the equivalent of three seasons. It’s a–
David: You’re talking about Last of Us Season 3?
Craig: Yes, Last of Us Season 3.
David: I would say what you’re doing in The Last of Us, that’s in dog years or broadcast years. Three years is probably more like seven or eight because of the storytelling you’re doing.
Craig: The size of it, maybe.
John: Well, I want to talk about that because in the main segment, I was going to get into characters. You talk about knowing characters and loving your characters, but characters in a 22-episode season, you get to know them deeply, but they can’t change greatly episode by episode. There’s an expectation that they have to be largely the same people who’s like “Craig is killing people like crazy,” and they’re fundamentally different characters from one episode to another because there’s an expectation that people are going to see every episode of Craig’s show, versus they’re going to drop in and see–
Craig: [crosstalk] It’s not serialized.
David: You’re going to drop a jaw or two in every episode. That’s a burden that you’ve assumed. That’s tough. In broadcast, the limited series, I always thought would be less work because there’s less episodes, but you’re mounting a startup all over again, which is the heart. The first five, six episodes of any series is always the toughest. In the limited series world, you’re running a sprint all the time as opposed to a marathon.
Even though Big Little Lies is technically a series now because it’s repeated and now we’re going into the third year, the center you sat in that first year, the storytelling hoops that you’re jumping through, and the expectations of the audience that you’re cultivated, that’s a bear. That’s a real bear.
In broadcast, we didn’t assume that. The construct with the audience is they knew there’d be a legal story or they knew it would be over at the end, would spend time with the characters. They certainly wanted it to be smart and funny if need be, but they weren’t expecting the kinds of plot twists and jaw-dropping WTF moments that–
Craig: You have the benefit, I think, on shows like your long-running broadcast shows to say, we have a conference room, we have an ER, we have an office. We have a high school faculty room. This is where we live. We’re not moving around a lot. We know that there is, I think, a challenge to that, which is how do we have yet another staff meeting without it feeling like the staff meeting that we had 30 times before, but there is also a great benefit in–
John: There is. The same way you can write to characters, you can write to sets. You can write to familiar places. You can think about what’s new in this scene, versus I have to establish what this even is.
Craig: You don’t have to figure out like, “Okay, now, hold on. How do we get this person over to there before that gunshot goes off and this explodes and ta-ta-ta?”
John: In a long-running show like The Practice or Chicago Hope, were you the showrunner all eight seasons, or did you hand off the reins at a certain point? In doing so, how do you even do that creatively? I can’t even imagine what that’s like to have been doing everything on a show and then pull back.
David: The Practice and Boston Legal, I was the showrunner for all of those. Chicago Hope, I was the showrunner for the first one or two years, and then turned it over to John Tinker to run from there. The challenge in broadcast television, especially your audience, their expectations, unlike The Last of Us, is they’re showing up at your doorstep and saying, “Shock us and blow us away.”
In broadcast television, it’s not. Broadcast television is, “Make it the same but different. Don’t be so different by leaps and bounds that we’re not going to recognize it, but don’t be in the same place that you were last week.” The boundaries and also the budget, logistics, and constraints that we have make it challenging, but they also make it a little more comfortable for us because we don’t have to.
If you walk into a Walmart and you see all the opportunities in different aisles, you go, “Well, how do you pick anything?” That’s what’s happening in streaming now. Anything goes, everything goes, so what are you going to find and where am I going to go? Broadcast television, there’s a reason you saw lawyer shows, doctor shows, police shows.
There was a certain convention where the characters could be themselves but with different stories week to week because it was a fertile storytelling ground, the police venue, the hospital, or the law firm. It was not as challenging in terms of plot points for us as storytellers that I think you find in the streaming world today.
Craig: You certainly would never get the note. Why are they in a conference room again? That’s not an objection, whereas in streaming, it could be. Well, why are we always in the blank? I have to say that, as much as it sometimes is terrifying to walk into the creative Walmart and not know which aisle to go to or to consider the expectations of the audience for a large show in terms of its scale, I would be pretty terrified, I think, to be that guy coming in Season 5 of something going, “I have an idea for it.” Simpsons did it. I mean, David E. Kelley did it is probably a thing.
John: Yes. We had Zoanne Clack, who came on to Grey’s Anatomy late into the show, and we were asking her, and so if you have a new staff writer who comes on Grey’s Anatomy, they can’t be expected to have watched all 17 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy. They’re like, “Oh, no, they have to watch all 17 series of Grey’s Anatomy seasons so they know what the show is, which seems impossible.
David: Oh, God, I can’t imagine.
John: I want to talk to you about, from a creator’s point of view, if you’re stepping away from Chicago Hope, you know those characters, you know what that show is supposed to be. Are you still reading every script? Did you back fully away? What is that process of untangling yourself creatively?
Craig: I want to know this because I want that job. That’s the job I want. I want to create a show and then leave. How do I do this?[laughs]
David: I had that on Lincoln Lawyer, [crosstalk]
Craig: Which is doing so well.
David: Lincoln Lawyer was the best gig by those standards because I did the first episode, turned it over to Ted Humphrey, and the best thing I did after that was stay out of his way. I’d read scripts, and I’d watch cuts and not many notes. Honestly, sometimes I would watch as a student of what they were doing. We’re not the same kind of storyteller, but I would watch it and enjoy it and go, “Okay, what are the muscles that they’re flexing and what are the targets that they’re aiming for?” I’m not good at being half in. I can either be all in or I’m better from a macro, just giving macro notes from afar, but being with one foot in and one foot out is very difficult.
John: The challenge is you risk undercutting the person who actually is supposed to be doing the thing, or people are not committing to decisions because they don’t know what David’s going to say.
Craig: You will undercut them because you will put both feet in. You don’t stay one in, one out. You just are like, “Okay, I understand you exactly. Really, what I need is maybe I’ll just get Ted. Maybe I’ll just take Ted. [crosstalk]
John: Ted’s good.
Craig: I need Ted.”
John: The other challenge is going into the fourth or fifth season of a show, we have folks who are coming in who are doing streaming shows. We talk about the start of the season. They have a blue-sky period, like what are all the things that we can possibly do? In broadcast series, was that a thing? Was there like a blue-sky week or two at the start of a writer’s room where you were talking about the big macro things, or was it always just crunched down to like, this is the episode, this is the episode, this is the episode? What was that like?
David: Well, it was neither. There was no real formula for it. What was consistent with all the shows is that they never got easy. Every episode was a bit of a bear. There was also probably deep-seated concern with, will this material or this construct even have legs? I remember in LA Law, the second year, there was a writer’s strike. It had happened around show 15 or 16.
We and the writers in the room thought the blessing of that strike would be that the audience would never tumble to the fact that we were frauds because we had no more stories to tell. We were on fuse. That strike saved the audience from realizing we had no more stories to tell. Then we got to rest and went away, and the storytelling machine replenished, and you found more stories. Where the stories come from is always a search.
In The Practice, for example, we did hit a bit of a creative wall in Season 5. The episodes, I felt, were solid for what they were, but we’d done versions of them before. That’s why we brought in James Spader. By the way, ABC had moved us to Monday nights, or they’d taken away our time slot and given it to Joe Millionaire, which at the beginning of reality television became a huge hit.
John: Oh, I remember Joe Millionaire.
David: Joe Millionaire was opposite us. I can’t really remember, but I do remember is suddenly we were getting crushed. At the end of Season 5, our numbers were bad, and we were really limping in terms of ratings, and we were going to get canceled. That was it. We were going to say goodbye.
I remember the Sunday of the upruns, because those are the days they did upruns. I got a call from Lloyd Braun because their pilots were shaking out this way or that way. He said, “Look, here’s the deal. We’re going to pick up The Practice for one more year if you want it, but at half your license fee. We can’t afford it, half the license fee, which meant I would have to, because the actors were making a ton of money at that time, which means I would have to let go, probably half the cast.
My competitive ego about it, because we were limping with the ratings, and we also maybe weren’t hitting our best creative stride at that, and I loved that show, I thought, “I’m going to take the challenge and try to save it and try to make one more year out of it.”
We brought in James Spader and William Shatner for, I think, it was year six. I’m not sure about the math on it. You can check through them, but I think it was year six. The show did very well. ABC came back and now wanted to pick it up for another year. They said, “Well, it’s your choice. We can pick it up for another year of The Practice, or you can spin it off for these two characters and do another show.” That’s another case where I said, “Okay, let the story be in charge of you.” I thought the most fertile storytelling venue was another show. We came back and conceived of Boston Legal. That went five more years back-to-back.
Craig: Incredible.
John: That’s great. David E. Kelley, an absolute pleasure having you on Script Notes. It’s so good-
Craig: And honor.
John: -to hang out with you and chat about television.
Craig: The King.
John: The King.
Craig: A fish.
John: A fish.
John: Great.
Links:
- David E. Kelley on IMDb
- Margo’s Got Money Troubles on AppleTV
- Harvard Alcohol Project: Designated Driver
- The Painful Truth About Long Covid by Alan Levinovitz for WIRED
- Salmon
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- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
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