#2 - Peter Tolan (TV writer-showrunner & screenwriter) in Santa Monica

TheProcess.Ink

Peter Tolan (Rescue Me, Outsiders, The Jim Gaffigan Show, Analyze This) talks TV pilots and his creative journey.

We talk about:

• creating character conflicts
• balancing comedy and drama
• The central idea, the nugget, the central question of what a show is and writing to it
• Building character conflicts, plot in a TV pilot
• Mapping out the season/seasons of a series
• Episode balance of comedy and drama on Rescue me
• Writers room
• Using cards
• Cards wall
• Story checkpoints
• Sequences
• George Clooney
• Sony Television
• Pitching
• Rewriting
• Writing the rough draft
• Writing just comedy/jokes vs. story/plot – what happens next?
• The Larry Sanders Show
• UMass theatre days
• New York theatre exploits
• Murphy Brown
• Gaffigan
• Playwriting to TV writing
• Breaking into the business today – Youtube, shooting something

Quotes from the show:

"You slowly put everything in place so you can get to that last moment. We knew what the last image of the first season of Rescue Me was so we could always write to it. We slowly could make our way towards that."

"Rescue Me was dealing with death all the time. As dark as it went with drama, it had to go just as light with the comedy. You had to balance the two out."

“If you're young and starting out, you can shoot on your phone. Write something and make it. Put it on YouTube and people will see it.”

“You write somebody who's a dick - who has outrageous behavior, but then how do you have an audience empathize with that character, care about that character? So an essential character is not the dick, it's the other guy."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.