by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

When I was a kid, I had no idea that people made television. I barely knew that people made movies, honestly. I knew that actors we liked in our house showed up in other things, though. So, I understood that they weren’t their character in a given thing—I just don’t think I put much thought into how something went from somebody else’s mind and into my TV.

These days, however, I work in television. I figured it out, but it still seems like magic. Well, magic and the art of moving money and people around enough to make something. There’s a pretty standard pipeline involved in getting a television series made. Maybe the pre-production side has changed a bit with the advent of streaming, but the actual production and post-production side hasn’t. And sometimes that product is good, great even. Sometimes it’s god awful. Usually it’s perfectly fine.

But no matter how the show turns out, it always starts with an idea. The idea either comes from the studio (“we want to reboot this franchise” or “we have an actor we like and a vibe we’re going for”) or from a writer’s original pilot. Maybe it’s a paint-by-numbers replication of something that’s already done well on a different network, or maybe it’s a fun twist on a specific genre. There are, after all, only a handful of types of stories and settings—there’s just a million variations you can play with, within them. So, a script gets written. It’s either been paid for upfront, or it gets bought after. Either way the studio is moving forward and a room needs to be assembled to figure out what the rest of a hypothetical first season of the show might look like. 

American television is a fickle business, though. With a show on a broadcast network, the room often forms while the pilot is being shot (though this does appear to be a thing of the past, being less prevalent even on the main five networks). That way the next episodes are being brainstormed, written, and noted by the time the network and studio have decided the fate of the show for its first season. With the introduction of streaming, however, and based on what TV writers have said and what they’re fighting for in the current WGA strike, this pipeline is broken beyond repair. It’s been a mix of auteur writers (often coming in from features) who make up a room of one (or two, if they’re part of a writing team) with a few freelance writers hired in from time-to-time, and the dreaded mini-room (the bane of everyone’s existence and… it’s just not the way to run a show, I’m sorry). Coupled with shorter seasons, even on broadcast, or just outright limited series, the world of TV writing has become quite bleak. 

However, no matter how the scripts get written there hasn’t been a whole lot of change to production, or even post-production. The episode counts certainly change things, and the budgets have generally been slashed beyond all recognition, but they’re both pipelines that remain strong in their original conceptions. 

A million and one technical meetings happen before production even thinks of beginning. But even along the way, regardless of if you’re shooting a show with 22 episodes or 8 episodes, the production team decides if they’re shooting in a more traditional way, or if they’re going to do heavy crossboarding. More recently, shows have been doing the latter. If you’re shooting a shorter season or a limited series, then it just makes sense. Usually the writers’ room is over before production really starts, so crossboarding two or three episodes at a time, especially if the locations are the same (or close together), makes a lot of sense. So, what’s crossboarding? It’s just the act of shooting multiple episodes at the same time. Traditionally, it takes roughly 8-10 days to shoot an episode of television, with many productions trying to err on the side of 8 days for cost reasons. So, if you can combine a bunch of days together and get things for multiple episodes, then that’s great. It can help with locations, getting actors who aren’t in a lot of the show in and out quicker, and it helps the editors for later episodes have something to work on sooner. It does make it a little messy when it comes to cost for dailies on the post-production side of things, though. 

Which feels like a nice way to talk about post-production—my bread and butter. I’ve been working in post of some kind or another starting the year after I moved to Los Angeles. I worked in commercial post for about three years, but I finally started working in scripted post-production about a year and a half ago,  with three shows under my belt. Which, I recognize isn’t a lot, but those three years of commercial work really helped me understand what I was getting myself into when I moved to scripted. Besides, it was really nice to already know about almost all the post houses in Los Angeles, since most of them have scripted and commercial divisions. 

Okay, so post-production. In scripted television the post team starts basically at the same time as production—unlike a lot of feature film set ups. Obviously for big, blockbuster films and some TV shows, there’s a lot of pre-vis that would actually start before production. (Like, say, if the production is using the ILM Volume screen.) Mostly, though, you’ve got your editing teams (editors, their assistant editors, and the VFX editor) starting basically at the same time as the producer/co-producer/associate producer (depending on their deal), the post supervisor, the post coordinator, and the post production assistant. And that’s… it? Usually. That’s the team.

Obviously, there are also lots of vendors. You have your dailies house, who process the footage at the end of every shooting day, where it is then uploaded to editorial and also to a program (usually PIX) for viewing. You have your finishing house (sometimes it’s the same place, sometimes it’s not), who are the ones who… finish the show. Which means a lot of things, but ultimately means they’re usually the ones who put together and output the final set of files for delivery to the network and studio. They’re also the ones who do things like VFX pulls for your VFX vendor(s), where they send over the plates for artists to work on them. They’re also usually where you have your online editor, who does smaller scale VFX work at a much lower price than if you were to send it to a VFX vendor. (Online editing is wild, by the way, and I don’t think I really understood what was happening there until I started in scripted.) And then, of course, there’s the sound team and the color team. 

Usually viewing the files on the mix stage signals being near the end of an episode, ready to make the delivery. You’re picture locked and it’s usually been colored by then. Generally, the VFX and online editing has been completed, as well. And the music has been written by the composer and their team, ADR and loop have been completed and all the sound has been mixed into the show. Maybe there are notes on the mix itself, but very rarely will there be picture changes or much VFX left to complete by the time you reach the mix stage for a final viewing with studio and network suits involved. This isn’t always true, of course, but it often is.

There’s also a lot of QCing that happens from the time an episode locks to the final mix stage review. A lot of those notes will be taken care of in online editorial (again, a wild thing), but it’s a decidedly intense part of the process. Usually post-production will last months and months past shooting, and many networks require a few months lead-time on shows. But, of course, there are the exceptions. There are always shows that have episodes finishing on a Sunday and airing on Tuesday or Wednesday (usually on actual television and not just on a streamer). And, as long as nothing is too egregious, those shows will have their QC passes after the episode airs and will get patched before the next airing, or before it goes up on streaming. To be fair, this actually does still happen on streaming too. Notoriously, the second part of Stranger Things season 4 didn’t have completed VFX when it aired—the episodes were patched later to have their VFX at 100%.

But, whether you finish and deliver the episodes two months before they air or only a few hours before, it’s kind of amazing how many people it takes to make a television show from start to finish. The process feels like it takes forever, but also feels like it’s over in an instant. So, here’s to the creative forces making the shows—we wouldn’t have anything without you.