TV Writer Eric Haywood Discusses Writing On TV Shows Like “Law & Order: Organized Crime” & “Empire”

Film and television writer Eric Haywood first made a splash in Hollywood when he wrote a short film called Staring At The Sun, followed by ten episodes on a TV series called Soul Food about the Josephs, a black family living in Chicago. He has since written on broadcast and streaming shows including Power, Empire, Manifest, and more recently, Law & Order: Organized Crime. Eric spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about his writing career trajectory through the changing television landscape.

Despite his success in TV writing, television wasn’t always Eric’s goal. “I came to Hollywood with the plan of writing and directing feature films. Being a music video director and producer was great in terms of it teaches you how to work fast and how to work for relatively tight budgets. But in terms of screenwriting, there wasn’t really a practical application for it.”

He wrote spec screenplays during his spare time in the hopes of getting something made in the low-budget independent feature space that was going to be his calling card into Hollywood. “Television was the farthest thing from my mind at the time.”

Haywood’s spec script called Relative Stranger eventually got produced in 2009, but it also got him his first manager, agent, and TV writing job on Soul Food based on the strength of his writing. His career started in earnest, but his heart was still in features.

Eric rode the TV writing tide until his “feature film ship” came to dock. “What I realized almost immediately, was that in television I was even more comfortable than the feature world. I loved the challenge of taking a group of characters and having to find ways to keep their stories interesting and fresh, episode after episode, season after season.” Haywood realized the value of flexibility during this time in television.

The film and TV landscapes are closely related with many transferable writing skills. “Over the last couple of decades, I think we’ve seen how television has emerged and taken the place of the mid-range, mid-budget range feature films, which is what I was trying to do. I wasn’t trying to do Star Wars, I wasn’t trying to make The Matrix. I was trying to do, American Beauty. I was trying to do Sex, Lies And Videotape. I was trying to do ordinary, character-driven people.”

Empire – Musical Drama Not A Musical

“One of the things that I found really interesting about Empire was that it was a music-driven show, but it wasn’t a musical. It wasn’t like the characters would stop the story and then break out into song. We had to find organic ways to introduce music into the stories. They were integrated. It might be through a character recording a song in the studio, performing a song on stage, or dance rehearsals.” Every scene had to serve both the character and the story.

 - We would construct our stories in a way that we would call a ‘music text’

The music interludes would have to be organically woven into the storyline. “I think the end result was that the music sequences were just as important as the dialogue driven scenes.”

“One of the biggest examples very early on in the first season, the character Jamal (Jussie Smollett) came out. He was gay, but closeted and came out to the world as part of a music performance. His father was intensely homophobic and he performed one of his father’s songs at a public party in what had been a love song directed from a man to a woman, now being directed to another man.”

“His father is standing on the sidelines watching in horror. So, that scene gave us both a great music performance and some very dramatic interpersonal relationships woven into it.”

Structure Of Broadcast TV Shows

Traditional broadcast television typically comprises of twenty-two episodes per season. There was a teaser and four or five acts in an hour of television. “In many cases, it comes down to the decision of the showrunner, and sometimes it’s a corporate decision.”

Each network has a preferred template that is generally adheres to. “Every once in a while, you’ll have a show like The Good Wife on CBS, where Robert and Michelle King routinely have the very first acts in their shows run up to twenty minutes – which affects the pacing of the show.”

Eric Haywood has also worked on Law & Order: Organized Crime. “It has a very  clear cut template for closed-ended procedurals. The show was conceived as a more serialized drama. It wasn’t a case of the week. You might spend ten episodes with Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) undercover investigating a case. And then, we wrap up that story in a way that’s very different than they do on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit where it is a case of the week, crime, and victim in the teaser. And then you go through all the investigative steps and nine times out of ten, they get the bad guy at the very end.”

Although there are variants in a television universe such as Law & Order and CSI, Haywood considers the total running time of an episode more than the number of story beats. “One beat can be half a page. One beat can be three pages.” Hour-long network shows typically clock in at around forty beats – a beat is basically a scene rather than a plot point.

Eric also notes that the teaser in some TV shows is referred to as a “pre-credits sequence.”

“Every episode dictates the format, but you would have a scene or two or three, and then it would cut to the opening credits. You would end it on something dramatic and then you would cut to the title and then you on the other side of the title, the story would continue.”

 = There are no hard and fast rules in television other than telling the most compelling story you can

Writer’s Voice

Eric Haywood frequently writes about topics of race, justice, and inequality. He also notes that when you’re on the writing staff of somebody else’s TV show, your job is to help the vision of that showrunner which has hired you for your voice.

“A good showrunner will cultivate a writing staff that has a diversity of life experience, a diversity of thought, and find ways to marry each individual writer’s worldview with the showrunner’s worldview,” he says.

“When I was on Law & Order: Organized Crime, I pitched an idea about a unit of the New York Police Department that was a group of corrupt police officers who basically functioned as a gang.” Some writers believed that the stories were too dark and anti law enforcement that producer Dick Wolf would reject them. But the showrunner, Ilene Chaiken supported Haywood.

“We tried to take the idea, preserve the core elements of it, and pitch it to Dick to get his approval. You have to pitch it in a way that threads the needle between wanting to talk about some of the darker aspects of policing in America, but also doesn’t throw out the window, the Dick Wolf worldview.” Wolf finally approved the idea.

“Stabler still had to be the hero. He still had to win in the end. But I still got the chance to tell a story of something that was important to me,” recalls Eric.

Eric Haywood’s Advice To Writers

“The thing that I try to do is put any thought of marketability or commercial success out of my head. If you sit down to writing pilot and you knew with a hundred percent certainty that it would never ever sell, but you were free to do whatever you wanted without the pressure of having to make a sale, what would you do?”

Eric Haywood recommends writers do the latter. The industry is always hungry for new stories. “I think those are the ideas that yield the kinds of scripts you’re talking about. We have a million cop shows, we have a million legal shows, we have a million medical shows that all look similar.”

“What is the thing that keeps you up at night that you’re burning to write and put aside any thought of? Is this is going to be a million dollar script sale, this is going to make my career? What is the idea that you are so passionate about that you spend the time on? For me, that has resulted in scripts that haven’t always sold, but have actually led to someone who will read them and may lead to a writing job.”

 - Don’t be afraid to swing for the fences

Haywood also suggest writers watch TV shows they might not necessarily want to write for or even like. “In thinking about them, I ask what I would have done differently with that same concept,” he suggests.

Are Streamers And Broadcasters Converging?

“They’re definitely converging in a lot of ways. Are they learning from each other? That’s a different question.”

“You obviously have your differences in terms of standards and practices. There are things that you can do on Power, because it was on Starz as premium cable, that you could never get away with on an Empire or Law & Order.”

“But more and more, I think broadcast is feeling the squeeze from cable and streaming. There is a push for how can they compete if people can see sex, violence and nudity on premium cable, but how close to the edge can they come on CBS or NBC that they can still feed that appetite in the audience? You still can’t swear on broadcast TV, but maybe you come up with a more clever way such as inventing new words or rein it in,” adds Haywood.

Broadcast and cable/ streaming are functionally different beasts that can’t easily merge. “If you look at Empire’s ratings versus Power’s, or Empire’s ratings versus Succession, the latter is obviously a huge, massive pop culture juggernaut.” Cable and streaming audiences are more nuanced and specialized.

“But because it’s premium cable, there’s a limit to the number of eyeballs you’re going to get. What you’re relying on with these premium cable shows are, that they enter the zeitgeist. They become social media phenomena. They become written about by journalists and fans. They become considered high art in a way that broadcast sort of isn’t.”

On the flip side, Empire had a broader, larger audience far beyond the black community. “It was a huge, across the board mainstream hit in a way that very few premium cable shows can ever attain.”

Haywood concludes, “Broadcast people would kill to be able to have the freedom to do whatever they want, like the cable shows and cable shows would kill for the number of eyeballs that some broadcast shows have.”