The Workings of a Writers’ Room: Borgen

Abstract

There is a limited tradition of working with writers’ rooms on high-profile drama series in the European television industry. European writers are sometimes described as going from ‘from shell to shell’ (Redvall 2012a, 17), whereas the US system is built around rooms of several writers developing material together under the supervision of a showrunner. Part of the explanation for the structural differences is the fundamental need to have several writers attached in the US system where vast amounts of material has to be produced in a short period of time, when pilots for new shows are normally ordered in January and delivered at the end of April or beginning of May after which shows for the summer or autumn are ordered. By June a writers’ room for a new show should be in place to start submitting storylines to the broadcaster and get notes. While there is no standardized season for pitching or production in most European contexts, US showrunner Frank Spotnitz has described the US system as moving ‘pretty fast and or derb’ (in Redvall 2012a, 30). At the European TV Drama Series Lab, Spotnitz addressed the challenges of establishing a writers’ room when moving to the UK to develop the series Hunted for the BBC (2012-). According to him, the process was marked by the meeting of two very different production cultures: At the level of management, executives wanted a US showrunner without really knowing what this might imply, and at the level of writers, there were challenges in the UK writers not being used to working in a writers’ room (in Redvall 2013, 12).