What is the life-cycle of the typical show?
Jeff Greenstein: • Brainstorming. Just the writers sitting around, throwing out ideas, seeing what strikes a chord. This takes four or five days, during which time we’ll generate a dozen or so things that feel like stories. • Story-breaking. We take each story and break it down into individual scenes. This generally takes a day or two per story, depending on its scale. • Mix-‘n’-match. This is often the toughest phase of the process — picking from the bunch of stories we have, and seeing what goes with what. (The basic rule is three stories per episode.) We also have to make sure each of the six characters is serviced in each show, and that the stories jibe in terms of time sequence. This phase may also include some additional brainstorming and story-breaking as we try to fill in the gaps in each episode. For a typical episode, this would take another coupla days. • Outline. We divvy up the episodes and each writer goes off and does an outline. The producers give them notes on the out
