Q&A: Screenwriter Javier Grillo-Marxuach Knows What Makes Great Showrunners
The veteran scribe offers up no-holds-barred thoughts on what's hobbled writers' rooms over the decades, Hollywood's many daddy issues, and how to change the TV industry's future
Javier Grillo-Marxuach is one of those screenwriters I’ve been aware of for what feels like forever. His name has appeared on more television than I can list here for some three decades now - from “SeaQuestDSV”, to “Lost”, to, more recently, “Cowboy Bepop”, “From”, and “The Witcher”. He created the series “The Middleman” and has won multiple Emmys. I’d interacted with him on Twitter a bit in the past few years, too; he was always quick to help signal boost another writer. But it wasn’t until journalist (and new friend) Maureen “Mo” Ryan announced her book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood last year with an excerpt in Vanity Fair1 — about the alleged toxic behavior in the writers’ room and on the set of “Lost” — that I discovered Javi was more than just a wonderful writer. He also has an extraordinary history of decency and integrity in a business known for its deficit of both. For example, he was a core part of “Lost’s” initial success, but left at the end of Season 2, appalled by what he’d witnessed. He went on the record with Mo, then took to Twitter to vociferously stand by what he told her.2
“If Lost is so great a work of art as to continue to be a topic of discussion after all these years, then it is cruel to expect those of us who were there to remain silent as to how the show was made,” he wrote. “Lost succeeded because of the sustained contribution of many, many artists, many of them geniuses in their own right, and many of whom were treated quite badly and then disappeared in favor of ‘auteur showrunner’ hagiography.”
“I do hope future abusers will be deterred,” he added.
The more you dig into Javi’s Hollywood story, the more you realize that he has a long history of not being able to keep his mouth shut about the terrible he’s seen and experienced in the industry (something we have in common). Back in 2016, he even penned a now-notorious — both grueling and inspiring — treatise on showrunning called “The 11 Laws of Showrunning”, which I’ll share below and he and I will discuss in some detail. Because of all this, I thought I was prepared for how outspoken he might be when he joined me for one of my artist-on-artist conversations, but he exceeded most of my expectations in what turned into a sprawling chat about everything from craft and genre, to writers’ rooms abuses, and what he learned from a deli we both used to frequent in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I usually try to tee up what readers might glean from the conversations I have here at 5AM StoryTalk, but so much of what Javi and I are about to discuss here resonates across the arts — and even other professions — that I’ll instead just close out this introduction with this note:
You’re going to learn a lot from this one, as an artist and maybe even as a human being.
COLE HADDON: Thanks for having this conversation with me, Javi. Can you tell me the last episode of television that you watched that was so exceptionally written it left you wanting to throw in the towel because you worried you’d never be able to write something as good?
JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH: When the three-episode arc that opened the third season of “Battlestar Galactica” aired, I watched all three hours of it in a room with several other battle-hardened television writer/producers. When the final episode finished, we all looked at one another in a weird mix of complete elation and utter depression - and I articulated that exact feeling "What are any of us doing here anyway?" It was so amazing to see a show echo and comment on the history of the time – the second Gulf War, the occupation of Iraq, and the ethics of resistance – so pointedly, but without ever betraying its own integrity and dramatic agenda. I revisit it frequently.
CH: I remember these episodes well for a similar reason. I’d been in L.A. for just about a year at that point, I was just becoming settled I suppose you’d say, and then Season 3 comes along and leaves me reeling. My whole life I’d been determined to work in film, but I think Battlestar Galactica was the first show that made me truly question my fidelity to the big screen. Let’s keep doing this. What else have you got?
JGM: There are also two individual episodes of “Mad Men” – which is to this day one of my top five TV series of all time – that I go to whenever I need a challenge to my complacency. "Shut The Door and Have a Seat", the third season finale, is the platonic ideal of a season finale in that it completely upends the dynamic of the show and opens a myriad of story areas while defending just the right amount of tentpoles in the show's architecture. Similarly, the episode "The Suitcase" pulls off the miracle of being a perfect bottle show, a perfect one-act play, and a perfect study and evolution of two already well-established characters - a hard feat to pull in a fourth season.
CH: That episode haunts me. Again, an episode of television so goddamn good, it makes pursuing the craft feel pointless because who wants to aspire to only ever be “not as good as”? So, what I love about your answers so far is they sound very reverential. You clearly love this medium. Are there any TV writers who feel clearly bigger than it in some way for you?
JGM: I consider Rod Serling and Jim Henson my twin deities in television. Whenever I think I have it all figured out, one of them pops up from out of nowhere to show me exactly how far I have to go. I was in a hotel room in England recently, having just finished a script for The Witcher while visiting the show's production base. I was feeling pretty spiffy about myself and having all sorts of "I'm a Big Shot" emotions. Just as my self-esteem was hitting peak insufferable, I turned on the hotel TV to a random channel that just happened to be showing reruns of The Twilight Zone in primetime.
By the time I finished watching the episode entitled "The Big Tall Wish", I was not only in tears, but also cut well back to size. Rod Serling's gift for rendering character and plot in beautiful clean strokes that cut straight to the bone, his simple and declarative – but never simplistic – dialogue, his endless talent for pulling the rug out from under the audience in the most unexpected but completely inevitable way, even the mid-century poetry of his episodic intros, are still the platinum standard for television as far as I am concerned. Duly chastened, I opened my laptop and went back to work.
CH: Which is, of course, the only real answer to being confronted by art so intimidatingly good. Have you seen Serling’s A Carol for Another Christmas? I only just discovered it a few years back, and despite its modernization and horrific nuclear-related imagery, it might just be the most effective adaptation of A Christmas Carol I’ve ever seen. I bring it up because Serling understood better than almost all of us how to use his art as a form of political protest. You cited similar about what made those Season 3 episodes of Battlestar Galactica so brilliant. This is all a long-winded preamble to the question: did you come to Hollywood with the hopes of doing similar?
JGM: The great thing about Rod Serling's work is that while his concerns were very much of his time – the Cold War, civil rights, etcetera – his themes and his execution are so clean that they transcend the times themselves. To name another artist working in a much different style, a lot of Derek Jarman's work does the same to me. He's making movies about the very specific experience of being a queer man in Thatcher's England, but he also saw very clearly how capitalism, mass media, and authoritarianism destroy the humanity in all of us - and that transcends time and space.
As for me, I wish I could tell you that I came to Hollywood wanting to change the world and speak truth to power. The sad reality is that most of my early life as a writer was dominated by a need that went back to my earliest days - I wanted to say something and be seen saying it. There are two kinds of writers - those who freely admit that they write to get the love and attention they didn't get as children and damned, dirty liars. The knowledge and wisdom to find something worthy of saying, to develop a self that works out of conviction and not just need is every artist's journey.
CH: I really appreciate this description of the artist’s journey, Javi. I think some of us come more naturally to writing from a place of conviction, while others must, as you say, develop that sense of self as a storyteller. I know for me, writing was a compulsion, but there wasn’t a single person around me until my mid-twenties who asked where I even was in my work. I only understood how to hone my craft and pursue paying my bills with it - I came from a deeply working-class family. I didn’t enter the conversation, so to say, until much later. Do you look back with regret at any of your earlier work as I do?
JGM: When I look back at the work I have done, there's a fair bit that I am actively ashamed of, especially in the 1990s. This was work I did while I was coming up in the business, figuring myself out, and maybe lacking the conviction or awareness to know better. There's episodes out there with my name on them that reflect a lot of the prejudices of their time - ignorance of LGBTQ+ issues, the usual misogyny, etc. - that make me cringe and wonder who I was.
As I have gotten older, I think I now know myself well enough to have something to say I can be proud of. Rod Serling died at fifty years of age having produced the greatest legacy of writing by any individual in our medium. Jim Henson died at fifty-three having created some of the most iconic characters and films ever made. At fifty-four, I am groping for meaning and hoping that watching that process of maturation is interesting to anyone who happens upon something I have written.
I wish I had Rod Serling's moral clarity and the ability to translate it into words, or Jim Henson's gift for turning weird ideas into concrete reality. Mostly, I was lucky to enter this business at a time when a white-ish man could learn on the job while producing a considerable amount of material on shows with twenty-two episode orders.
CH: Before we move on, a lot of what we’ve discussed so far would fall into the category of “genre”. It’s a subject I’ve been discussing quite a bit lately, and, since you work in this space a lot, I thought I’d bring it up. Genre is everywhere these days. You could say it’s taken over film and TV. Book publishing thrives on it, too. But in all cases, I still find people trying to find ways to somehow polish what they feel is a turd. They call things “elevated genre” – “elevated horror” being the dumbest example of this, in my opinion. “Speculative fiction”, “drama with a single genre twist”, and so on. Tell me, what does genre mean to you as an idea and a storytelling approach?
JGM: The word "elevated" is little more than a replacement for the older and equally offensive "grounded". What it really means – and it absolutely is executive dog whistle code – is "we don't trust you to not make it cheesy". I find it hilarious that the top ten movies of all time are about magical space knights, people in tights who can fly, blue humanoids on a planet that might as well have been dreamed up by Greenpeace on DMT, wizards living in verdant fantasy worlds, talking animated lions re-enacting Shakespeare, and reanimated dinosaurs. The only non-genre movie in the top ten of all time is a period bodice-ripper set on the Titanic - and that was directed by the same dude that gave us murderous cyborgs from the future and the eco-planet. Yet TV executives keep looking for some sort of "special sauce" that will make "genre" palatable to a mass audience.
JGM (cont’d): So let's get down to brass tacks - everything is genre. Law & Order is genre, it just so happens that it's the cop genre. That's a genre that is easily digestible because it takes place in our world and does not require a lot of additional information up top in order to enter and understand the setting and the stakes, why these characters are in it, and what they are doing. It also just so happens that it has been, historically, an impeccably well-written and well-executed series. I should know, I was the covering executive on the flagship Law & Order way back in its third season - that was Sam Waterston's first season on the show. Law & Order does exactly what all great TV should do - it brings you in, keeps you there, and lets you go satisfied. There's a reason why so many cop shows – including a number of spinoffs of Law & Order – fail to achieve the same level of success: they aren't as great at doing what they do.
In the aggregate, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror – even in their best execution – do require far more introduction of the audience into the world-building and mythology, and often require visual flights of fancy that strike some as juvenile. Which, I mean, whatever: let's say you don't watch many cop shows and have some weariness for that genre because of a few you were made to watch but didn't immediately get, well, I imagine, then Magnum P.I. might seem a little juvenile to you. Anyway, this has all has often relegated Sci-Fi to the little kids’ table.
The good news is that the ranks of writers and executives are slowly filling up with the children and the children of the children of Star Wars - those who spent their childhoods at the little kids’ table. That's why there's so much sci-fi around, and that's why there's going to be a lot more in the future, grounded, elevated or otherwise. The executives audience for whom sci-fi was not a widely accepted genre - because it is a newer genre and because it requires that the audience exercise different muscles than cowboys, doctors, cops, and lawyers - is slowly moving on. So, it's a generational change, and the incoming generation has had Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel as the oxygen they breathed since birth.
I look forward to the day when it is as stupid to ask for "elevated" genre as it would be to ask for an "elevated" doctor, lawyer, or cop show.
CH: As do I. And if you think it’s bad in the States, it’s so much worse in the U.K. and Australia where I do a lot of work. I know producers who make exceptional genre series who still appear uncomfortable using the word “genre” and spend far too much time trying to convince what’s won them so much acclaim “isn’t like that other shit”.
JGM: Around 2001, when Minority Report came out, all the networks immediately wanted a future-set procedural. They also wanted them to be "grounded", so they hired people who hate genre to do it. In the FOX press tour, Steven Bochco patiently explained to a journalist that his own future cop show – it never got out of development – was not sci-fi but rather a plausible extrapolation of the future based on current scientific trends. The man literally gave the textbook definition of science fiction as an explanation for why his show was not "science fiction". When you put people who think this way in charge, the result is going to either never get out of the gate, like Bochco's series, or it is going to be terrible.
CH: So, I really appreciate the historical context you provided, especially this description of “generational change” taking place. I’m generally good at those kinds of observations, but I’ve never thought that “out loud” before. I’m just going to muse right now, but I wonder if you’ll have any interesting thoughts about what I’m about to say. I just watched Avengers: Endgame for the first time with my kid. That’s a film that absolutely should not work. Too many characters, too big of a plot, too many rules. Except the rules part isn’t actually something the film seems especially concerned by. The mystery of time travel? Solved in a quick sequence, maybe a page in a script. Talking about time travel? What a waste of time, we’ll just throw out some gobbledygook words nobody can argue with to sound legit. Pym Particles? Who gives a shit what they are? Because at the end of the day, the audience didn’t need all that world-building to understand the emotional story at the heart of the film.
I often go back to the ’80s here, too, because I think it was a purer time in some ways for this sort of story. The Thing, Terminator, The Fly – you just hit the ground running, barely anything is explained, and yet nobody left the movie theater saying they would’ve dug the film if they weren’t so confused by how many rules there were. This is all my incredibly longwinded way of asking…do you think Hollywood has a condescension problem in how development encourages us to talk down to viewers who, as it turns out, have an easier time understanding this stuff than executives historically have? Or is the problem instead that Hollywood – God, I hate referring to it as some monolithic entity – but is the problem instead that Hollywood is now regularly producing films and TV that are unnecessarily complicated in terms of plot and rules compared to, say, the ’80s?