Write On: TV Writing with Laura Eason

“About 12 years ago, I had my very first meeting to staff. It was
a show being run by a playwright named Beau Willimon, and he'd
done one season of a show that hadn't dropped yet, and they were
going to do this crazy new model where the whole season was going
to drop at once and they didn't know how it was going to go. And
that was a show called House of Cards. And I was staffed for
season two of that show before season one dropped. So, that was
my entrance into television. It was my first meeting to staff on
any show!” says Laura Eason, playwright and current showrunner
for Starz’s TV show Three Women. 


In this episode of the Write On podcast, we chat with Laura Eason
about her illustrious career as a playwright and how she made the
intimidating transition to TV writing. 


“I got a call a week before the [House of Cards] room started and
I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the book How to Write the
One Hour Drama. I'm not kidding. I was like, oh my God. And I
called everyone I knew that had been in TV and said, ‘Tell me
everything you can about being in a room and how it's supposed to
go.’ And then I was very lucky my first year in TV,” says Eason,
who was nominated for an Emmy for House of Cards in 2017. 


Eason also talks about her latest show Three Women, its unique
structure, and also shares her advice for writing a TV pilot as
the tides in Hollywood are changing. 


“Well, we're coming into a different moment with this contraction
that we're having in the [TV] industry. We had a very beautiful
time where I think there was a lot of room for idiosyncrasy, and
a lot of room for things to not quite check the list of
everything a pilot should probably be, but because the voice was
really unique or the world was interesting, those shows still
got made. And I think we're in a moment now where all of the
fundamentals need to be really, really strong. Like the engine of
your pilot really needs to work. Someone needs to read that pilot
and understand how you're going to be able to make 10 episodes or
20 or 50 episodes of that show, especially because there's less
interest in limited series. So, making sure that you're paying as
much attention to engine, to character, to your act structure,
that the action is really moving and the acts the way it should
as much as your voice, the unique things you bring, because of
course that's the special sauce. But you really need to have both
now, in a really strong way."


To hear more, listen to the podcast.