The room where it happens: why writers' rooms make for great TV

Watch a behind-the-scenes feature on any American TV show and you will see the clip where a gaggle of Biro-twiddling, Evian-sipping writers sit around an oval-shaped table, while the boss stands at the front scratching away on a scribble-strewn whiteboard. This is how most of our favourite telly shows are made, where seasons, episodes and storylines are invented, broken down, thrown out, lobbed in and generally brainstormed until they are perfect (or at least, as perfect as the showrunner allows them to be). Any one of that roomful of writers may get an episode credited solely to them, but usually there are many, many creative prints over that final draft.

Frank Spotnitz, the writer and executive producer of the X-Files, remembers the day when, in a meeting with the BBC in 2011, he first floated his idea for a US-style TV writers room in the UK. “They told me British writers can’t do this,” he says, laughing. “Like they need to be left alone in their shed to write – they can’t come in and actually talk to human beings in a room.”

That was then, however, and this is now. Today, the writers’ room model, for so long the go-to set-up in the US TV system, is becoming almost de rigueur in the UK. It is the result of not just a rocketing in overseas co-productions with their bounteous budgets (paying a pack of writers a full-time wage is clearly pricier than shedding out for just the one) and the inexorable rise of streaming, but also because a generation of “second golden age”-doting Brits looked at the biggest shows of the past 20 years and thought: “Why can’t we do it like that?”

“I can sit alone by myself in my room staring at my laptop screen, stuck on a problem for hours or trying many variations trying to solve a problem,” says Spotnitz, who learned his craft in the X-Files writers’ room before setting up his own for his BBC/Cinemax drama, Hunted, “but if you’re in a writers’ room, you’re going to shuttle through possibilities and ideas and arrive at a solution much more quickly than you would working by yourself.”

“It’s actually a beautiful way to foster new talent,” says the comic book writer Mark Millar, whose raft of Millarworld titles are currently deep in production at Netflix. “The crucial thing is that whoever is running the show needs to be both brilliant and experienced. They can structure the whole thing, keeping the big picture in mind at all times, plus do the heavy lifting and rewrites for the newbies.”

While British TV hasn’t totally given up on the single-authored series (the headlines would be screaming if Jed Mercurio, for example, let anybody else near Line of Duty), for shows with double-digit runs there’s usually a need for extra hands, even if the showrunner has the final edit. Although his name is wedded to the series he created, the great David Chase is only credited as screenwriter on 25 of the 86 episodes of The Sopranos. Of the 62 episodes of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan wrote just 13. Jesse Armstrong’s name is on just six of the 20 episodes of Succession screened so far.

“A lot of UK shows are being sold internationally and the UK model of four to six episodes a season doesn’t always work when trying to sell a show to streamers or networks,” says the US writer Tara Bennett, author of the book Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show. “Having a writers’ room dynamic in the UK makes them competitive with US churn, amping up the number of scripts that can be created for a season.”

Toby Whithouse, writer of Being Human, is currently prepping a fresh adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast for Showtime. Last year, he and three other writers (the numbers involved in these rooms can vary from a handful to 20-plus) cosied up in London for five weeks with what he describes as “a table, a whiteboard, lots of index cards and bad sandwiches”.

He says getting the chemistry right is crucial. For Gormenghast, which he is showrunning for executive producer Neil Gaiman, Whithouse waded through 80 or so scripts just to find those three writers. “You’re a bit of a hostage to fortune really,” he says. “You can meet them for a coffee, and you’ve read their work and thought: ‘I really like their voice as a writer.’ But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be any good in the room. It’s a bit of a lottery.”

“Casting a writers room is like casting a show,” says Pete McTighe, who is part of Chris Chibnall’s writers’ room on Doctor Who. “If you get it right it can really be to your benefit, but if you miscast that room it can be tricky. I’ve seen plenty of really talented people leave a show through no fault of their own – some writers don’t do their best work in a collaborative situation.”

However thrilling much of the creative conversation in a well-peopled writers’ room is, though, tempers can flare. Sometimes, says Spotnitz, who has run rooms on such series as The Man in the High Castle, Medici and the forthcoming Eisenhorn, writers can have their ego too invested in an idea or script and take it personally when it is rejected.

“Every once in a while, people get so passionate, they forget that it’s just ideas that we’re discussing,” he says. “And it hurts. They love an idea, and it upsets them when other people don’t love it.”

At the moment, of course, getting more than six people in an actual room is a no-no. Zoom, however, has proved to be a priceless resource to anxious showrunners. While the filming of TV had largely closed down over the summer, writers were still hooking up over Zoom and Google Hangouts. Moving the script chat from a physical room to a virtual one will, Spotnitz believes, prove beneficial in the long term to writers who are reluctant, or unable, to move to London or Los Angeles. It could foster a greater diversity of voices.

“That’s actually one of the silver linings of the pandemic,” he says. “We’ve been doing writers’ rooms via Zoom and, guess what, it turns out they work. Maybe in future you won’t have to live in London; you can be in a writers’ room in Cornwall or Manchester or wherever and still participate. That’s been one of the obstacles up to this point.”

This democratising of the writing pool can only help boost the UK TV industry, says Bennett. “When they work right,” she says, “writers’ rooms are training writers to go up the writing/producing ladder. That means there’s an organic eco-system breeding the next generation of writers and showrunners, so there’s a sustainable market for the future. If the UK is going to compete, broadening the pool of experienced writers and producers is necessary for the health of the industry.”

But should we be preparing to bid adieu to the one writer-one series model? Whithouse believes there’s still value in the single-authored drama and that not everything necessarily lends itself to the writers room format. “Single authorship is much more of tradition in the UK,” he says. “You look at something like Line of Duty or the shows of Russell T Davies or Sally Wainwright; they’re all written by one person, so there’s no need for a room.

“I’m so pleased that the writers’ room is now becoming more of a staple in the UK, but I think there’s a place for both.”