10 Step Foolproof Guide To Making An Awful TV Show

4. Write Your Scripts As A Committee

Heroes is back in the news recently since NBC has chosen to revive it, but even now it remains difficult to pinpoint a reason why the quality dropped so sharply in between season one and season two. Plenty of other shows survived the writers' strike relatively unscathed, but Heroes never reached the heights of its superb first season again. In 2010, creator Tim Kring discussed the series in an interview with The A.V. Club, and his illustration of the scriptwriting process in the later seasons is faintly unsettling. Due to the demand for scripts to keep pace with production, each writer took an individual storyline and wrote as much of it as possible over multiple episodes. These disparate strands would then be combined with the efforts of other writers slaving over different storylines into around three episodes. No wonder there was thematic inconsistency. Kring responded to the interviewer's obvious disbelief with reassurance: "When episodes are written by individual writers, they have wild inconsistency. When everybody is writing an episode, they feel like they're written by one voice." Heroes' descent into inanity is a mystery no more.