Drama Panelists Take Pride in Their Work

Variety’s A Night in the Writers Room: Awards Season Edition kicked off with a strong lineup of drama series panelists, who delved into the joys and challenges of what makes a good dramatic series in today’s entertainment landscape.

The panel was moderated by Variety‘s Senior Awards Editor Clayton Davis and included panelists of hit shows: Jennie Snyder Urman, writer & executive producer “Matlock” at CBS; Alison Schapker, showrunner & executive producer of “Dune: Prophecy” at HBO & Max; Todd Harthan, showrunner & executive producer of “High Potential” at ABC; and Patrick Mckay and J.D. Payne, showrunners & executive producers of “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” at Amazon Prime Video.

While discussing what they are most proud of in the making of their respective shows, Payne said that one moment that has stuck with him from Season 2 of “Rings of Power” is when the character Celebrimbor says, “At this time we need to remember, it’s not strength that overcomes darkness, but light.”

“I feel like in times that we live in right now, there is so much darkness, and I feel like we often respond to darkness with just throwing more punches. We just want to fight it,” Payne said. “I think we see a lot of just reciprocity of people fighting, instead of saying, ‘What is the light that I can bring into the world? What can I do to bring something good into the world instead of just bringing more anger and more hatred?’”

McKay added that he felt a great deal of pride in his and Payne’s choice of directors for Season 2. “We interviewed a lot of people for Season 2 and we ended up hiring three directors who did the eight episodes of the season, and they did wonderful work,” he said. “They were amazing collaborators. They happened to all be ladies, and I think that’s cool. There was no pretense involved in that and not trying to wave a flag or a badge, but I just think that’s cool, actually.”

Also during the panel, Schapker addressed the challenges of creating a new series set within the world of well known IP like “Dune,” specifically drawing in new fans while appeasing existing ones.

“That was something we were quite conscious of,” she said. “I mean, it’s a prequel 10,000 years before the films that are so popular right now…and we wanted new viewers to be able to come, but we didn’t want in any way dilute the material. We wanted ‘Dune’ fans to have enough to dig into because I think it’s one of those shows that people can theorize about or guess how we’re doing it or bring a lot of ‘Dune’ knowledge to it. That was just something we constantly were trying to navigate.”

Snyder Urman likewise spoke to how her version of “Matlock” trades on the name of the original and much beloved series while also doing something wholly different.

“That’s why I decided to knit the character’s motivation into my motivation, that we would both be using Matlock as sort of this Trojan Horse to put in a totally different show that was original, but would trade on the familiarity that both the audience felt and the people within the show felt about it, so it sort of gives you this couch of comfort and then all of a sudden you wake up and you’re in a totally different place.”

Harthan then spoke on the biggest challenge he feels he and his writing staff face on “High Potential”: how to write easily digestible cases of the week that actually pose a challenge to the intellect of series lead Kaitlin Olson’s character.

“These cases cannot be pedestrian,” he said. “They have to be really, really complicated. So we’ll sit there and talk about just people throwing stuff at the wall and going, ‘Oh yeah. In a lot of procedurals it would work if they were normal detectives. Right?’ Once you throw a genius into the mix, and with respect to all of my writers, none of us are geniuses, at least not on paper, but collectively, I think maybe if you put all of our IQs together, we’ve got a shot.”