Soo Hugh (“Pachinko”) and Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” “Mrs. Davis”) discuss learning from their staffs, wanting to hear “no” and navigating the writers’ strike.
“What I love about the writer’s room, and I think why it’s probably my favorite part of the process, is all of a sudden my sense of the world expands,” Soo Hugh said.Credit…Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times
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By Reggie Ugwu
For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.
Years ago, the television writer Soo Hugh had a meeting with Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the groundbreaking ABC drama “Lost.” Lindelof was looking for writers to work on his next series, “The Leftovers,” for HBO, and Hugh was an admirer. She didn’t get the job.
The next time the two met, in March 2022, it was at the premiere party for “Pachinko,” Hugh’s own critically acclaimed series, on Apple TV+, based on the National Book Award finalist of the same name. Lindelof took his place among a long line of well-wishers.
“Clearly I made a mistake,” he said, in a recent conversation with Hugh via video.
It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe in which Lindelof, 50, and Hugh, 45, were collaborators. Both writers are known for sweeping, large-cast, character-driven narratives that center on questions of fate and the search for meaning. On “Lost,” the castaways of the island are haunted by the unfinished business of their previous lives. On “Pachinko,” multiple generations of a Korean family are buffeted by the forces of war and globalization.
As a showrunner in the mid 2000s, Lindelof ran a writers’ room that looked and functioned much differently than is common today. On “Lost,” he said, he mostly hired other “white Jewish guys who wore glasses and loved ‘Star Wars’” to generate the 24-episodes in a season of network television. His latest show, “Mrs. Davis,” an eight-episode limited series for the streaming service Peacock, was made in partnership with its co-creator Tara Hernandez, a former writer and producer on “The Big Bang Theory,” and a team of writers from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds.
Hugh who previously wrote for network and cable television, now sits at the helm of a show that would have been nearly impossible to imagine 15 years ago: a fully international production — with an all-Asian lead cast and dialogue in subtitled Korean and Japanese — financed and distributed by an American tech company that now also functions as a studio.
But some things in Hollywood never change. At the time of this conversation, members of the Writers’ Guild of America — Hugh and Lindelof among them — were one week into a labor strike, in which they are demanding changes to pay and employment practices that they say are exploitative, including issues involving compensation for streaming shows. Lindelof was preparing to join other members in a picket line — just as he had when the last writers strike, in 2007, disrupted production of the fourth season of “Lost.”
Lindelof, in Los Angeles, and Hugh, in New York, discussed the challenges of working as a television writer today, learning from their staffs and remaining true to their creative vision in a collaborative medium. This conversation has been condensed and edited.
DAMON LINDELOF Soo, I’m just curious — you guys are in production right now, right? You’re shooting?
SOO HUGH We are. We have a month left. We just finished in Toronto as the strike was being called. The Korea portion starts next week and will go for five weeks.
LINDELOF Are you going?
HUGH I am going, but I felt conflicted. [Many studios have warned writers who are also producers to continue producing or risk losing their contracts.] I have done all of my writing services. I would say “Pachinko” is a producer’s show in some ways just because of the gargantuan production. It’s a headache. I don’t know how long I will stay. It makes me very uncomfortable figuring out those boundaries — they’re so gray. It’s very strange times.
LINDELOF Yeah, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable, I guess. I think that everybody is looking for the right thing to do. I don’t have a show that’s in production right now. With “Mrs. Davis,” we finished everything — post, final sound mix, final visual effects — before the strike. So it’s a much cleaner line. I wake up, I picket and then I go to bed. So I’ll just say, I’m with you in spirit.
What do you think your career would be like if you were starting today?
HUGH I don’t know if you feel this way, Damon, but I feel like there’s so little room for failure now. My first show was a failure [Hugh’s “The Whispers” ran for a single season on ABC in 2015] and it was by learning what I never wanted to do again that I was able to go on to something I’m more proud of. Nowadays, the system feels so do or die.
LINDELOF I agree a thousand percent. In the mid-90s, when I first came out to Los Angeles and was trying to figure out how to become a professional writer, broadcast television was still where most of the work was. There was this institution where it was like, this is what you do, this is how you get a job, this is how you work your way up. Now, all of those things have changed. The goal used to be, Can I be on this show for three, four, five seasons? Now you have to put it all on the field on your very first opportunity because that show will probably only exist for a season, if at all. The pressures are just immense. I don’t think that I could have been successful in this environment.
HUGH It’s interesting that you came from broadcast. I think we all pooh-pooh broadcast these days, but I am the showrunner I am because of broadcast, without a doubt. And I think the fact that broadcast has died is really killing showrunners. You don’t learn how to produce anymore. When we were coming up, you only had $4 million an episode and seven-day shoots [The most expensive episodes of television today can cost more than $20 million and shoot for more than 20 days]; it taught you a level of discipline that I think really carries you later on.
How did you learn to communicate your vision effectively?
LINDELOF Clumsily. I think that you watch how it’s done. I had the institutional experience of working primarily in broadcast procedurals. When you’re making as many episodes as we were, it’s a bit of speed chess. To Soo’s point, you have X number of dollars and X number of days to produce these episodes and everything kind of backfills into that. So it requires a lot of delegation and trust inside of the writers’ room. Ultimately the room becomes a machine that is trying to channel the vision of the showrunner. That’s how I learned how to do the job.
On my last few shows, the goal has been different. It’s giving strong guidance and a decisive sense of, Yes, that feels good or That feels bad, but ultimately wanting every writer in the room to feel some fundamental sense of authorship. It became, Let’s build some kind of collective vision that we call “The Leftovers” or “Watchmen” [Lindelof’s limited series adaptation of the graphic novel, which aired on HBO in 2019, was nominated for 26 Emmys and won 11] that you all see yourselves in, and I’ll do my best to steer that thing. By the time I got to “Mrs. Davis,” I wasn’t showrunning at all anymore; Tara was. And that feels even better. She could either call upon my experience or completely and totally ignore it. It created both a tremendous amount of relief for me and also, I feel, a much better product.
HUGH I really do believe in frequencies aligning. I feel like my job in putting a room together is creating a creative short circuit by finding the right personalities. I’m more interested in the way people think than how they write, because at the end of the day, I usually rewrite everything anyway. I just need that right brain power because that’s what we’re fueling the room with.
LINDELOF I love that idea of frequencies aligning. I’m curious — do you start out like, The frequency is 89.9, and I am teaching it to all of you so you can get on it? Or are you like, I have some sense of what the range of frequency is, but I’m looking for these people in the room to help me find it?
HUGH Both. We always start the day with an hour of non sequiturs. You’re not allowed to talk about the show. You’re not allowed to talk about your characters. You can only talk about what you saw on your walk over, or what did you watch on TV last night? Then, after an hour, we all turn together to a different tune.
What makes you excited when you’re reading a spec script?
HUGH When it doesn’t start with a flash-forward.
LINDELOF [Laughs] Anything that’s not like, Three days ago … It’s intangible, but it’s the same thing that you feel when you meet someone and you recognize, Oh, OK, I want to spend more time with this person. Within five or six pages you’re like, Who wrote this? Why did they write this? It feels so fresh and interesting. Then you meet them and, as in life, sometimes they’re even more interesting than you thought, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like a connection. You also want to have a well-balanced team. I’m not interested in having seven shortstops. You want some talkers, some listeners, some who are stronger on the page, some who are stronger in the room, some utility players.
HUGH I’m so desperate for someone to say no to me. When you hire writers, you’re surrounded by people pleasers, and I get it. But what we’re looking for are people to help us build the best show. And sometimes that means telling us, You know what? I personally don’t think that’s going to work, and this is why.
LINDELOF The worst thing that you can say to me in an interview is, I’m a huge fan of your work. Because either it triggers some degree of discomfort or self-loathing, or it’s very flattering and it’s really nice, but it kind of runs afoul of what you’re talking about. Is this person going to be unable to tell me that I’m an idiot? The fact of the matter is that most of the time, I am an idiot.
Are there times when your writers have opened your eyes to a way of thinking that you hadn’t thought of before?
HUGH All the time.
LINDELOF All the time.
HUGH I think the higher up you go, you lose all sense of proportion. You don’t worry about money anymore. You’re less hungry. You get exposed to fewer different people. Age just bubbles you in a way that for better or worse is limiting in terms of the human experience. So what I love about the writers’ room, and I think why it’s probably my favorite part of the process, is all of a sudden my sense of the world expands. Now I’m seeing it through seven or eight people’s eyes.
LINDELOF Look, in the rooms that I started in, the reality was it was basically white guys. And so I was like, Oh, what you do is you just copy yourself. That way, there’s all these different versions of you, and you don’t have to waste time explaining things. That led to a culture of tokenism, which I take full responsibility for. On “Lost,” we had characters who spoke Korean, and Harold Perrineau as a Black father, so it was like, We should probably have a Black writer and a Korean writer for their episodes. But, of course, those writers are whole people who have perspectives on all the other characters, as well.
The idea that came later — of curating a room that looks nothing like you and has wildly different life experience than you and that you may occasionally come into more conflict with — I think that resulted in better and more interesting work.
As writers who became producers, how did you learn to get a big crew rowing in the same direction?
HUGH I’ve found that my job as a showrunner is mostly to say, It’s not good enough but to say it with a smile. What can we do? How do we push it forward?
LINDELOF I think when you are producing something, as opposed to writing, it is the act of making. If you’re a novelist, for example, sure you’re making a novel. But then you say, Now, Jonathan Franzen, manifest “The Corrections” into a television series, and it becomes an entirely different skill set. It requires daily and constant sacrifice and compromise from people who are not necessarily used to that. Every single day, every email that we get is some version of, I know you wanted to do this, but how about this instead? If you always say yes, then what are you even there for? Where’s the place where you dig in your heels? It will seem arbitrary to someone outside of our bodies, but we have to take the arbitrary thing and make it seem essential.
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