Hey TSL fan, producer Jeff here and I am so excited to present an amazing

Best Of episode for you this week as we prepare to return from our summer hiatus.

Thank you to our intern Boris who caught this episode together.

He chose seven of his favorite moments from our show in the last, you know, half a year

and kind of unified them by specific considerations, themes, and even exercises that we can be using to really dig into

and find the heart of our stories.

So today we hear from Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet, Michael Waldron.

We hear from Maggie Cohn, who show ran the staircase.

We talk about character polls, Pat Verduchi shows up,

and even Alice and Mann, who kind of helps us connect our professional careers to our personal brand as a writer.

So it's a really wonderful episode.

I encourage all of you to really take it in and as always keep writing. You know there's an old adage about musicals, right?

Where the musicals that,

if you look at the structure of the musical,

if you were to pull the songs out, the story wouldn't work anymore.

And I think the same rule applies to action writing, action screen writing, which is that if the set piece isn't moving the story forward or the character forward in some significant way, then it needs to not be there.

And I've worked with directors before where they have pre-planned a set piece and suddenly you'd find yourself as a screenwriter trying to write to a set piece rather than letting the set piece grow out of, you know, a legitimate emotional turning point for a character.

And what happens is you can have great eye candy, but it's ultimately extremely empty for the audience. It just doesn't, it doesn't land, it doesn't stay with you, right? It's like, it's like, it's candy, right? It can taste very sweet, but you don't really remember it a second later, you know?

And in my experience with set pieces now, I think they all have to tell, they either have to

turn over a new card in terms of story, or they have to turn over a new card in terms of a reveal about a character in the court, you know, or, you know, it brings two characters closer together for some reason because like they might have hated each other but suddenly they have to do something to survive together and so a new bond of trust is formed in that moment I mean you wrote inside out, right?

Like you could break inside out down with all the same rules

where you have all these set pieces,

...