Hi, I'm Craig Mason, and this is the official Watchman Podcast. Throughout all of my conversations with Damon Lindeloff last year, Damon kept bringing things back to the

writer's room. Damon, why?

The writer's room is the core of the creative process and probably more so for the way that I like to do it than some of my peers.

I cannot write by myself and importantly, a lot of writing happens in that room.

And I think by time a script gets written, you may see one or two names on it, but every

one of the episodes of Watchman including the pilot

was basically generated by conversations that came out of that room and there's

never been a more democratic room I think that sometimes a writer's room has to be a benevolent dictatorship.

If decisions don't get made you cannot move forwards at all.

Watchman was not that room. It was a jury room where you had to have unanimous excitement in order to move on.

And although that process I think was, I'll just say brutal and unpleasant for everybody in it.

When you arrived at that consensus and you knew that everybody was on board with it

versus someone had been kind of bullied into it. Real magic

happened. If I may I just want to make sure I keep talking about this writer's

room like as it is sort of some collective hive mind but it's actually individuals that make it up.

And so for that first 12 week phase where we did a tremendous amount of the world building,

we figured out who Will Reeves was.

We figured out his connection to Bass Reeves. We figured out all the mechanics of

the pilot and where the rains of squids were coming from. And that room was Crystal Henry and Lea Bayoc and Claire

Cichell and Jeff Jensen and Tom Speeze Ali, Nick Hughes,

Stacey Oce Kefour, Cord Jefferson, and Janine Neighbors and Brandon Jacobs Jenkins and we had an incredible writer's assistant

Ryan Lipscomb who not only wrote down everything we said but somehow arranged it into coherent thought and often pitched stuff himself and then for phase

...