BEAT SIX
FALL 2016
I publish a short novel, Everything Belongs to the Future,
which is barely disguised fan fiction about me and my
friends, set in a far-future Oxford, with a group of
queer anarchists in a filthy flatshare trying to make art
in a world that has no space for them. The structure
is threadbare, and I’ve scarcely managed to scrub the
serial numbers off some of our more salubrious adven-
tures, but in this science fiction version of us, we get to
steal back the future. I wrote it to impress Liz, who texts
congratulations from Los Angeles, where she’s mar-
ried to a photographer, and Jen, who will never read it,
because she died six months earlier.
There’s no neat, simple way to slam in that piece of
information. It is what my TV writing colleagues would
call tonally inconsistent, one of the splinters sticking
out of this story about the structure of stories. If I was
running this show, I would take us into a bottle episode
right now all about Jen, and who she was and why she
mattered, except I would get Liz to write it because
she knew her best, and I’d come up with a meaningful
ending where brilliant, good-hearted friends don’t die
pointlessly and too soon.
I thought we’d have time to connect with one another
again, to talk madly about books and sex and expecta-
tions and how we were all going to make it off-planet
like we used to. There wasn’t time. She was 28. When
some members of the old fanfic group went to visit
Jen’s room one last time before it was cleared out, they
found that she’d been writing on her walls, including
that old line from Voyager and Station Eleven: “Sur-
vival is insufficient.”
BEAT SEVEN
SPRING 2019
Los Angeles. It has been a long time since I dared reread
any of the wish-fulfillment stories I scribbled in my
lonely teenage notebooks, but I suspect if I did, they’d
contain something a little like this: You’re a freewheel-
ing political reporter on assignment on a ship in the
middle of the Mediterranean, covering a tech con-
ference full of Ukrainian models, when Joss Whedon
calls and asks if you’ve ever thought of writing for tele-
vision. Of course you have, but only in the way that
you’ve thought of being an astronaut. Six weeks later
you’re in California, sitting in your first writers’ room,
on Whedon’s new sci-fi show for HBO, The Nevers,
and it turns out that the evenings you spent at college
arguing about Buffy with your best friends were a bet-
ter use of your time than you realized.
I always suspected that Los Angeles was largely
fictional, but I knew it for sure once I arrived. It’s a
spread-out, traffic-stinking daydream baking in the
endless sun, as if a normal metropolis melted into a
puddle in the heat of its own hype. There are palm
trees everywhere. At least twice a week I wonder if
I have walked through a magic screen into the tele-
vision and my body is somewhere back in England,
slowly stiffening.
Writers’ rooms are intense. You take six to 10 clever,
sensitive, ambitious people who spent their adoles-
cence largely in their own heads, lure them with cash
and sugary snacks, trap them in a room with white-
boards all around, and tell them to come out when
they’ve scripted 10 or 20 episodes or killed each other,
whichever comes first. Ideas bob to the surface and are
batted away, friendships form, entire character arcs
shift and change in a day; egos are stretched to snap-
ping point and darlings are dashed against the rocks
of studio notes and production budgets. And then you
let the actors loose. Dropped in at the deep end of a
whole new industry, I find it all fascinating. But then,
watching the sausage get made actually enhances my
breakfast experience.
On the second day on The Nevers, surrounded by
still-blank whiteboards where the narrative DNA of
the show had yet to be sequenced, two of us admitted
shyly that we used to write Buffy fan fiction. Whedon
looked at Jane Espenson, who wrote for Buffy and so
many other shows we watched and who all of us were
still too intimidated to talk to. “So did we,” she said.
“We called it season 6.”BEAT EIGHT
RIGHT NOW 2019
I’m working full-time in my second writers’ room,
for The Haunting of Bly Manor, a gothic horror show
loosely based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
I landed the job after a panicked interview, where I
babbled about the importance of innovation in narra-
tive architecture and launched into a nervous explana-
tion of the structural elegance of Babylon 5—and why
episodic narrative television is as culturally important
to the 21st century as novelswere to the 18th. I didn’t
explain it as well as Jen. I don’t think I ever will. But it
goes something like this:
Television and online streaming are driving the
evolution of a new, powerful hybrid species of mass
culture, one that can be collective without being
homogeneous. As arc-based television explodes,
becomes more diverse and more daring, the film
industry is lagging awkwardly behind. Films are still
hamstrung by their own format: They have to tell sto-
ries of a certain length that will persuade enough peo-