It's a TV exec meeting!

I just realized I never wrote about the meeting I had over the summer. I guess they are becoming so normal I forget to share them! It's been my goal to share these experiences to help writers who have not been through them yet. So that when you are, you know what to expect. So if you've read any of my previous pitches, you'll notice that when I first started pitching "for real" I would get pretty nervous the first day and it would take me a few pitch meetings to really warm up and be myself. So over the summer, one of my friends who is a high-profile TV producer had asked me to come in and help him with ideas for a TV show of his, and that the network head would be there. Yikes! When I first posted this blog, I said I hadn't met with one of those before. But silly me, I had when I pitched to the ABC execs. But what I hadn't done is had a meeting with them. I've had a pitch meeting where you go in and say, hey, you don't know me, please buy my show. But this was a meeting where a person the exec respects and works with is saying, please meet this talented writer who you should respect too. NOW that was a new thing for me. I should probably back track and explain that my TV producer friend produces live event shows and award shows, things like the Emmys, but not the Emmys. So he tells me the Network exec is flying in from New York for the day and he wants help coming up with ideas. He tells me they want to revamp the show from previous years. He tells me a couple clips I can find online and that's pretty much it. He's so busy, he doesn't give me more direction than that. So, just as a heads up, if you're ever in that position, you do NOT wait for more direction! You dive in head first and figure out every single scenario they could probably want solved and how you'd solve it. You look at the show and figure out what you like, what you don't like, and what exactly you'd do if you were to make the show something YOU'D want to see. I repeat, you do NOT wait for them to tell you what to do! If you do, you've blown your opportunity to impress some really high up industry people. So, I spent a couple days getting my hands on as much info and clips of the show as I could. Then figured out what could possibly make the show even better. I knew that I only had one afternoon with this woman to impress her, so I didn't have my usual meeting or two to get comfortable. My TV producer friend trusted me enough to come up with great ideas, so I had to go with that and share exactly what I thought would help them. Luckily when I met the Network person, she was very nice and made me feel very comfortable. So once we started working and talking about the show, I told myself, "Here we go!" and started giving my opinion whenever asked or whenever I thought I could help. Both of them were very open to all my ideas and that only added to me feeling more and more comfortable. I will say, that when I have an idea for a show or script idea, I do have a knack for seeing the big picture and the ability to see what really can improve a story idea. Overall, the meeting went great. I'm glad I had that kind of experience. The more I work with high-profile execs, the more comfortable I get doing it. But it does show, as writers, we just need to trust ourselves and trust our opinions. I guess like anything, it takes practice. And the more we do it the better we get. Here's to seeing more and more of that in all our futures!