So I saw your episode, Hepler.
You don't say.

I loved it. It had lots of twists and turns, and it was really well researched and had that ripped- from-the-headlines feel.
Ah. The Hollywood answer.

It sucked.
Ah. The Internet answer.

Dude! It sucked! There was this thing and that thing and the inter-episode continuity was (twenty-minute play-by-play ensues) and I no longer want to fuse your DNA into mine in order to take advantage of the super-writerosity I thought you had and the whole show is LAAAAAAAAAME!
We've seen the Yahoo "AgencyCBS" group lists.

We've seen http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com.

Everyone working on a TV crew used to be like you.

When it's bad...which is a matter of opinion...they know it before you do.

But it would have been so easy to fix, you just (ten-minute rant ensues).
Yeah, well, here's the funny thing.

According to some chat groups, some folks who liked "The Agency" last year don't like it this year. Some of them wanted more fieldwork, and more action, like "Alias." Some of them wanted more political ramifications, i.e. more talk, more details of work, less action, like "West Wing." Some of them wanted to go home with the characters and have more personal plots, like "Buffy." And the producers want a show that never goes home with the characters, like CBS's biggest hit, "CSI" or that incredibly long-running gold mine of a show, "Law & Order."

(Those last two, by the way, are favorites of producers because they require no knowledge of the show beforehand to be entertained. Each episode is self-contained, almost like an anthology show, yet unlike an anthology show, there are main recurring characters to give the audience a few familiar faces to tune in to each week. They make sick advertising money in reruns.)

All good shows. All good choices.

But if you're looking for a template to emulate, you can't do them all. And if you argue for one, the other writers will bring up another.

When in doubt, the ones on your network win.

You're explaining. I thought the rule was, never apologize, never explain.
I spend enough of my time living in the shadows of other writers' aphorisms. That one can take its propagandistic message elsewhere.

It's a rule made up by those who want to preserve some mystery to themselves from a curious public, folks who want to appear more as an icon and less as a human being.

It's an okay approach, but not what I'm doing.

How exactly did the corporate suits not screw you over?
They let us sit in on casting, which I understand is rare.

They let us on the set.

They left in the plot, if not all of the dialogue, and at least two of the jokes thatworked.

I got to help choreograph a fight scene.

And now we can afford to get married.

What's being on the set for the first time like?
Kinda like losing your virginity. You can explain it to someone else, but it's quite different than the actual experience.

Example.
Well, I never realized just how many mistakes aren't there.

Put bluntly, you don't stay employed in Hollywood if you complain about how much work you do, so you don't hear a lot about how difficult the situation is to begin with. But it is. Let's take the teaser of "The Great Game" the way it ended up airing.

In the teaser (which is the opening few minutes of story before the Agency theme comes on) Terri gets out of a car outside the Afghanistan Ministry of Intelligence, goes inside, finds Stiles is also on assignment in Afghanistan, and excuses herself to the bathroom because she's uncomfortable with seeing him due to what happened in two previous episodes. She goes into the bathroom, he follows her, they have a quick chat about their motivation, and then one of the guards, Fadhl Amad, attempts to kill them both.

Fadhl fires an AK-47 into the bathroom stall while they're both in it, opens the door, and of course they swing out of the ceiling, kicking him. Terri hits him several times, strips the clip off the AK, slams him into a wall, he reverses it, and throws her to the ground. Stiles comes down, Fadhl tries to stick him with the bayonet on the AK, Stiles hits him in the head multiple times with his hands and Fadhl's own rifle, but the thing that finally brings him down is a high-speed collision with Stiles' extremely hard skull. The Ministry guards come in demanding to know what happened, and Terri leaves with an ending quip.

Are there things wrong with this opening?

Sure. If you want to look for them, sure.

Let's start with what action fans often do, and count the bullets.

Oh, yeah. Fadhl's gun, because it fired a burst, is still chambering one last round as he swings it at Stiles. Why doesn't he shoot? Did you not catch that during your all the hard work you claim to have done?
Here are some better questions to ask while watching the show:

* Did you notice the dirt lot outside is actually a parking lot in Los Angeles' Chinatown covered in two truckloads full of dirt scattered on the pavement?

* Did you notice the skyscrapers that aren't there?

* Or that Stiles' briefing to the Afghan minister takes place in a room that held 25 of the crew, their camera equipment, boom mikes, chairs and monitors during filming?

* How about those Afghan characters who are predominately Iranian, Israeli, or Italian in descent, and some of whom have dyed blond hair under those head wraps?

* Or half the "afternoon sunlight" streaming in the window comes from enormous spotlights reflected off of twenty-foot-tall towers with huge mylar reflectors because filming ran into the night?

* Did you figure out that the hallway Terri walks down to the bathroom is actually an old church about to be renovated?

* Or that the hallway is twenty miles away from the "bathroom" which they built on sound stage 3, which required a lot of calls to the friends of technical consultants to find out what bathrooms in Afghanistan actually look like and whether or not an old pre-Taliban government building would even have a ladies' room?

You probably didn't notice any of the above moves. Why? Because these folks know what they're doing.

And you sure didn't notice the stuff on the cutting room floor, which has Terri struggling over the gun for another second, and it firing the last round harmlessly into the ceiling.

Swear to God.

Why did it get cut?
First, because the director's cut and "planet run" of the episode ran about two minutes over the regular 45-minute length. You can't have that: it means lost advertising space, and that's how you pay your employees.

Second, because that extra second slowed down the pace of the fight, and not in a good way.

And third, we concluded that if we were kicked in the head with two-inch heels, we would have trouble remembering our names, let alone the number of bullets in a gun after the clip hits the floor.

What about the little details like the Afghani uniforms not being the green camo ones you see on the news?
You will never find me saying anything bad about the Agency production people. This is why.

It happened during the first production meeting, in which everybody from the various crews gather around with the writers and directors and they hash out whether or not the sets are all cleared and the schedules can be kept. We discussed a now-deleted portion of a scene when Terri nearly steps on what looks like a land mine. As it turns out, it's just a fragment of an old land mine, and Stiles mentions that construction crews in Afghanistan sometimes cannibalize them in order to clear rubble. Just another unsettling aspect of life before he gives her the gun to comfort her and show he's really not such a bad guy.

It was at this point when our bosses were running down the checklist for the props guys and said, "Okay, do we have a land mine?"

And the props guy said, "Yeah, did you have a specific kind?"

And I thought to myself, okay, yeah, it's probably one of the old Soviet land mines that litter Afghanistan from the war back in the '80s, because the Afghani guerrillas wired power stations with them during the war, and if anybody asked, which no one did, I could rattle off how the CIA got Soviet weapons out of Egypt, shipped them to the U.S., filed off the serial numbers, and sold them to the Pakistani ISI who gave them to the mujahedin, because I had become Central Asian Research Geek for my episode.

And the props guy reached into his duffel bag and put something on the table with a CLUNK.

"How's this one?" he said.

"That'll do," said our bosses, and they moved on to the next item. I never really heard the next minute of conversation.

I was busy thinking to myself over and over, "What the hell am I supposed to say if they get it wrong? 'No, no, I'll go get MY land mine?'"

What would I say about the green camo uniforms I wanted? Nothing, 'cause I was glad they had some guys on-set who knew how to tie a turban, and the right kind, too. What would I say about the fact that a firing AK pulls up and to the left and the holes in the bathroom door go up and to the right (which no one on the lists caught?) Nothing. I don't tell them what to do, because my merry co-workers have a door that has exploding holes in it and they made it look pretty darn cool, and if I remember right, they did it in one take.

Oh, and the special effects guys know how to blow up my car, so there's that.

What about the episode-to-episode continuity? I mean, shouldn't Stiles have had a different reaction considering he and Terri made up at the end of "Air Lex?"
Well, remember how in the other letter, I said our episode, number three, was the first to film?

That meant we had to write Terri and Stiles' relationship scenes before the premiere established Stiles actually existed, or the manner in which the two of them did the nasty. We also had to figure out what Doris Egan was going to write in the second episode; she in turn had to ensure that the consequences of hers were significant enough for a subplot but not so large they substantially altered our episode, especially considering the "CSI"-esque taste the producers preferred.

It was an interesting exercise.

Is this out-of-order thing normal?
Having worked on a grand total of one series, my answer is, "Yeah, sure, more than you'd think."

The part that particularly impressed me was finding out that action scenes are often filmed last. This is because they can injure the actors, screw film continuity, and send everybody's money down the drain while the actor recuperates. The teaser to "Great Game" was no exception.

That's right, the beginning of the episode was the last part to be filmed. Awful fun for the actors and the script coordinator, right?

So there we were, on the last day of filming, doing the interior Afghan ministry scenes. Now, we should tell you, the amazing production people built a bathroom with a ceiling, and the director decided not to go with it because he wanted to do some overhead shots. So once they removed the ceiling, the stunt coordinators moved on in with Stiles' and Terri's stunt doubles and Nick Hermz, who played Fadhl Amad and has a stunt background himself.

I, being a meddlesome writer and just past twelve years old, came in to, um., watch.

They were working on a nice routine with a few spinning backfists and a lot of kicking in it, and I waited around conspicuously until I could introduce myself. While the other scenes were filming, I grabbed a broom to use as a prop AK-47 and gave a brief and very quiet demonstration of what I had in mind.

I thought CIA operatives with Marine backgrounds would have training in infighting movements that looked like they came from jujitsu, wing chun, and arnis de mano, what the Marines at one point called the "LINE system." (They've since given it another name; they revise the programs every few years.) That meant no tournament-karate moves. The stunt folks were wonderful and polite, and we worked together on it for a while before I deferred to their judgment since they had worked together before.

It was at this point I discovered the real trick of just how difficult fight choreography for film is. We had to, in the space of the four hours before the director came in to start filming, play around within the following constraints:

* My first-draft idea of them slamming the stall door open and catching the AK before Fadhl fires was right out. I was imagining a scene in which Fadhl strapped on the bayonet because he was intent on impaling Terri silently, and what brings the guards running are his gunshots that go off in the struggle.

It was not to be. The production folks built bathroom doors that opened inward. Ditto for the brief idea that it would be more interesting to have them spring both down from the ceiling and up from beneath the toilet in a pincer move -- it can't happen if the toilet isn't built that way, and the characters would comment about the mess in those later scenes. We had also already purchased the special panels in the door to blow out. Thus, we went for the slightly more conventional gun-the-door, get-kicked-in-the-face- by-the-chick-swinging-from-the-ceiling approach. (If you call that conventional, of course. Still not something I see every day.)

* The few specific comments our boss gave was that he wanted Terri swinging down from the ceiling and finishing the fight by ultimately knocking Fadhl and Stiles's heads together. So I was going to keep that for sure.

* Terri and Stiles had to hide in the last toilet stall, because that's where the bar was installed for the swing down. (We did, however, pry open the ceiling panels in our office during the writing to determine how fast you could scramble up there and whether or not you could swing down.)

* Neither Stiles nor Terri nor Fadhl could be cut with the bayonet despite the high likelihood of it happening in a close-quarters fight in real life. Other scenes in which they were clearly without bandages had already been filmed.

* Terri had to get the AK out of the picture extremely quickly, or else Fadhl would simply gun the two of them down. But the two of them blitzing and beating him simultaneously wouldn't make it seem like our protagonists were in much danger; there had to be a little back-and-forth.

* But for Fadhl to start beating on Terri would provide an opportunity for him to impale her, and he would take it. So he couldn't. For Fadhl to drop the AK and do some more interesting hand and foot work would be pretty foolish, as would our heroes not using the AK to stab him in the back were they given an opportunity. So he faked with the blade and tried to sucker Stiles into the butt end.

* Fadhl could not be struck with what would be perceived as the hardest blow of the fight on the right side of his face; his black eye had already been filmed on his left.

* The motions had to be simple enough that Paige Turco and Jason O'Mara could learn them in a few minutes so they could be filmed in close-up. No, we were not able to teach them ahead of time; they were busy learning lines. The more lines I had written, the harder a job I had made for myself.

* The routine had to be film-able, that is, the camera crew and lights had to fit in the bathroom and they couldn't range entirely all over the place, because then the camera guys would have to dodge and duck while trying to fit the action within the camera frame...

* ...which I would be fine doing but it sure wasn't going to happen on a day in which we STARTED filming the bathroom scenes at midnight on Friday night because we could all get this done and go home and not have to come in Saturday or start throwing off the schedule for the next episode to be filmed, which was the premiere written by our boss.

This is when I discovered I love working in television.

So we put together a routine, and just before the director came in, I got out of the way. We sat where the camera feed appears on the monitors (nicknamed Video Village) and watched them work until about two in the morning. During the process, we realized that the broom we had been using for a prop had been left in the background right where Terri and Fadhl were going to shove one another.

They took it out and continued filming.

Embarrassed? Me? Never.

I still think you suck. I thought you'd be like writing heroes errant who ride onto a show lot and whip out super-fly bad-ass scripts that alternately put the audience through pain and pleasure like a naughty lover.
Well, here's the thing. According to our math, it didn't suck for everybody.

Did you get ratings?
The Nielsen ratings, according to the L.A. Times and Variety, were as follows: our particular Agency episode was the 55th most watched show out of 106 for the week, netting what Nielsen estimates as 9.57 million viewers nationally who watched it start to finish; that got about a 13% share of the audience for the 10-11:00 PM time slot.

And that means what?
It means we are so goddamned amazingly cool we beat up Superman ("Smallville," #63, 8.82), Batgirl ("Birds of Prey," 7.55), The Rock ("WWE Smackdown," 6.02), the Starship Enterprise (5.41), that other CIA show ("Alias," 9.44), and Buffy the freaking Vampire Slayer (4.90).

Really?
Yeah, but so did "Ed."

Did you mean to type "ER?"
No, no, I mean "Ed."

How is that possible?
Well, one option is that lawyer-with-a-bowling-alley mystique he's got going is part of the postmillenial zeitgeist and he is tapping into the nebbish within us all.

No, no, I mean how did you beat the fantasy and sci-fi shows I like better?
Both network and time slot matter. CBS is a big, well-established network. Merely by having more television stations in more locations across America, The Agency's viewership is larger than shows in better, weekday time slots on the UPN or WB networks, and the majority of cable shows.

But it wasn't as large as 54 other shows that week, including the reigning king show, "CSI" (which got about 30 million viewers), "CSI Miami," "The West Wing," "Friends," "Survivor," "Fear Factor," the baseball playoffs, and the show on right before ours, "The District."

That, of course, led to one of our more surreal experiences out here in La-La-Land, which is waking up one morning, reading the papers, and figuring out if 600,000 people changing the channel is actually something to worry about.

Also, getting your ass kicked by "Ed."

Will you be writing any more episodes?
Our second episode, "First Born," got rewritten even more heavily, but the story is recognizably ours, and for good or ill, our name remains on it. It will be airing sometime in November. We have a third outline called "An Isolated Incident" currently getting processed as a freelance episode.

What about anything after that?
Nobody freaking knows. Ever.

But given the way the world works, I suspect six months from now, we're gonna get a phone call, and our agent will be delighted to inform us that "Ed" has an opening for a freelance episode, and the interview is tomorrow.

Or we'll get on "The West Wing," and find out everyone in the writer's room are all "Ed" fans, and the fact that we've never watched it will be the first sign We Just Don't Belong.

Or we'll go to an interview at some other show and find out that it's the new project by the creators of "Ed." And they did this Google search on our names, and they found this little web site.

Town without pity.
You don't know the half of it.

What's the other half?
Read Matt Groening's comic "Life In Hell."

He's not kidding.