NEWS: How to Make a TV Drama in the Twitter Age; MAD MEN Opening Credits Lawsuit Settled; THE O.C. Was Definitive Show About 2000s Economy

Last month at the Writers Guild of America, West, Lorne Manley of
The Times spoke with the overseers of several top dramas about the
challenges of producing television in the Twitter age.
Photo: Credit: Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Post-Water-Cooler TV: How to Make a TV Drama in the Twitter Age
The New York Times recently gathered the men and women who steer six of the best dramas on television — from the broadcast and cable networks, and the upstart Netflix — to talk about the challenges of making TV in the Twitter age. At the fitting location here of the Writers Guild of America, West, Shonda Rhimes (SCANDAL and GREY'S ANATOMY), Carlton Cuse (BATES MOTEL and previously LOST), Robert and Michelle King (THE GOOD WIFE), Terence Winter (BOARDWALK EMPIRE), Scott Buck (DEXTER) and Beau Willimon (HOUSE OF CARDS) shared their views on writing themselves into and out of jams, the broadcast-cable divide and the possible end of episodes and seasons as we know them.

Carlton Cuse: "Certainly the change in the way people watch TV has allowed for heavily serialized storytelling, which was an anathema to broadcast networks a few years ago, because they thought if somebody fell out of an episode, then they would never get them back. But now there’s so many ways for people to watch shows that they recognized that serialized storytelling actually hooks an audience, and they’re not as afraid about people missing stuff because they have so many ways of getting caught up."

Shonda Rhimes: "I’m going to do 46 hours of television this year, and that seems particularly painful all the time. I would love to live in a world in which we could do 13 episodes of each show. I have to be honest, I think the shows would be better for it. There’s a period of time in which somewhere in the storytelling, a few of the episodes are just filler. They can be interesting, and they can be lovely, but they don’t move our story forward."

MAD MEN Opening Credits Lawsuit Settled
A former model who claimed that her image was wrongfully used in the opening credits of MAD MEN has settled her lawsuit against Lionsgate. Gita Hall May filed suit against Lionsgate in March, claiming that the opening sequence, which features the silhouette of a man falling downward amid advertising images, used a 1950s Revlon ad that she appeared in without her permission, in violation of her right of publicity for commercial purposes. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

The Last Walts: An anxious, eight-episode farewell to BREAKING BAD
BREAKING BAD is demonstrably the best show of this decade and among the best shows in TV history, never quite had its SOPRANOS moment: It was set in a place no one really cares about.

This has a lot to do with East Coast default settings — an I-95 thing, a New York-New Jersey-Boston-centric culture bias for urban grit, guido-ness and mob narratives. What chance does a show set in Albuquerque have to hold us in its grip?

Why THE O.C. was the definitive show about the 2000s economy
THE O.C. was, at its heart, a show about the income inequality rupturing America in the run-up to the Great Recession. Newport is the One Percent, in its full glory. Ryan, the hard-luck car thieving teen from Chino, and to a lesser extent, Sandy, his public-defender-turned-adoptive-father, are the 99 Percent, baffled by excess and wealth and often raging against it.

MAGIC CITY star Jeffrey Dean Morgan on show's 'depressing' cancellation, 'fitting' series ender
"We literally found out five seconds before that press release went out. [Starz president] Chris Albrect, [executive producer] Mitch Glazer, and [Starz exec] Carmi Zlotnik all called me simultaneously, and the press release went out about five minutes later. That was the first we heard."