Thread by @BittrScrptReadr

At the risk of ending up with a very long thread, here's an overview of what goes into writing an episode. When you see a writer credited with "Written By," that generally denotes the person who wrote the Story Area, the Outline and the First draft of the episode script.

https://twitter.com/judy_carrasco/status/1403093010137681926

That script is then rewritten, usually by the showrunner, but often one or more of the Co-EPs will be involved in this process. The higher up you are on the ladder, the less likely your script is going to be rewritten.

Before all that, we "break" the episode as a group.

In theory, every writer has some level of involvement with every episode. Often it will happen that when a room for 109 is going, the writers for 107 and 108 are out writing their eps. Some breaks will have less of the staff involved than others.

Let's take this week's episode as an example. The room for that might start with, "Last ep, Superman had to expose himself to experimental Kryptonite to save the day. It's gonna mess with his powers. What's an interesting story to get out of that?" And you start spitballing...

In 80 years of Superman, there have been literally hundreds of stories about him losing his powers. In terms of "incident," you're probably not going to think of something that HASN'T been done before. So the process might focus on, "What makes this interesting FOR OUR SHOW?"

the tone and voice of #SupermanAndLois is very different from any other Superman adaptation. So you start pitching ideas that make it an S&L story.

And soon you land on "what if it makes one of the boys sick and it's a story about parents dealing with a dying kid?"

In our room, you know you've got gold when it comes back to the family. In this case, there's additional levels to the conflict because already Lois feels betrayed her own father was running that secret project. Now it's made her son deathly ill.

Superman powerless we've seen. We haven't seen him have to watch his son suffer AND have no idea what to do. As soon as you crack open that idea, scenes start spilling out: How does Jordan's illness manifest? How does his brother react? how does Lois find out? And so on.

Sometimes you might peg those scenes to an act right away, but more often you're just generating an idea bank. Eventually you start organizing them.

"Jordan collapses at school. That's an Act Break. Maybe Act Two."

"Lois reads her father the riot act feels like a midpoint"

And everyone's a part of this process. It's a very organic conversation about how the story will play out, who it will affect. Our room is an extremely supportive bunch and we read each other pretty well, so when we get going, it's like watching a great band jam

On some other shows I've been on, you might end up in very serious arguments about the fundamental story you're telling. Most of the time you work that out. In our room, if there was a debate, rarely was it on that level. Mostly would be like an A or B choice...

Like this: "I think Jon should go to his grandfather and tell him he's a horrible person."

"No, I think he should be empathetic and just put any issues aside." Everyone might weigh in, and if you fail to resolve this as a group, the SR then steps in and says, "We're doing A."

I look at the SR as sort of the Supreme Court. You make your case, passionately if you need to. And then when the ruling comes in, that's it. It's done.

That's usually the best way to handle it if a story point isn't going your way.

Also, I've seen many times that something I maybe felt was a mistake that we shouldn't do eventually gets taken care of by the process. That's why it's not worth any prolonged conflict once the SR weighs in.

If something is really broken in an idea, one of the later steps...

...might fix it. Or a later story turn might adjust it.

Eventually you start organizing these beats, sanding off the rough edges, weave the A-story and B-story, etc. At the end of the process you have a complete story that you pitch to the SR, and they send you off to Story Area

What I've just written is kind of a composite of how the process works, so don't take it as EXACTLY how this week's story came together, but hopefully it demystifies how a writers' room works.