Shawn Ryan feels like he’s picked up in mid-sentence.
The seasoned showrunner is back in his element, leading a writers room and juggling two series, Netflix’s “The Night Agent” and the final season of CBS’ high-octane police drama “S.W.A.T.”
The end of the Writers Guild of America strike late last month unleashed a torrent of work for Ryan and his teams based at Sony Pictures Television. “Night Agent” was a little more than halfway done with writing for the 10 episodes for Season 2 when writers went pencils down on May 2.
“Night Agent” debuted with its 10-episode first season on March 23. That was three days after the WGA began its contract negotiations with the major studios under tense circumstances. It was a hard time for Ryan to focus on getting promotional traction for a new property led by two actors relatively unknown to U.S. audiences, Luciane Buchanan and Gabriel Basso.
But to Ryan’s pleasant surprise, “Night Agent” punched above its weight, consistently ranking among Netflix’s top 10 most-watched scripted titles for months after its debut. The significance of that feat came into focus for the showrunner as he returned to work late last month and plugged back in to the world of “Night Agent.”
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“It’s a remarkable underdog story,” Ryan told Variety. “Just from the publicly available metrics we can see that after 10 weeks, the show had over 750 million hours of viewing that was global. Considering that this was not a huge-budget show and it had no real names and not a lot of marketing, and it’s still going to be one of the most-watched new shows of 2023.”
Ryan’s producing partners on “Night Agent” continued to do prep work on Season 2 during the WGA strike because there were six completed scripts. Ryan knew that that some decisions were proceeding without him as he was not in touch with the production during the 148-day work stoppage.
“They knew I could come in when the strike was all over and blow it all up,” Ryan said. He spent his first week back in the office catching up with that progress and connecting with the production designer. When his writing team returned to work on Oct. 2, he was almost giddy to be back leading a room. It was an experience he missed from Season 1 of “Night Agent,” which was written through a Zoom room in the height of the pandemic. The difference between gathering virtually and sitting in-person in a room with fellow scribes is both mundane and profound – there’s more time for small talk and it’s also a better environment for discussing emotional truths.
“I’d like to think that it didn’t ultimately affect the quality of Season 1 but it certainly affected the process,” Ryan said of writing and breaking stories via Zoom calls. “It was hard to get to the quality level that we wanted to be at. You can get burned out on a computer screen pretty quickly. So we were limiting ourselves to maybe five and a half hours a day of actually working whereas when you’re in the room, it doesn’t feel as wearing on you. Just seeing how much we accomplished in the first few days, I can tell it’s a big difference than doing the Zoom thing.”
“Night Agent” has a 10-episode order and there are six writers in the room, or eight if you count Ryan and one freelancer. That is more than enough to meet the WGA’s new minimum staffing requirement for TV writers rooms – something that Ryan whole-heartedly endorses. For years, he has also insisted that writers on his shows be kept on throughout the production process to allow them to get first-hand experience in production and post-production, another aspect of series work that was codified in the WGA’s new three-year deal that was ratified by members on Oct. 9 with overwhelming (99%) support.
“The composition of our staff is very similar from Season One. We had some people move on to other projects and we were able to bring on a couple of new people,” Ryan said. As for keeping writers on the payroll while their episodes are produced, “it was something that I always have to find room for in our budget but I always felt that it is some of the best money you can spend because it avoids so many problems and it solves so many things. There is so much writing and rewriting going on during production. So now we have staff that got a lot of experience in Season 1 and some new faces in the writers room as well.”
When that new team first convened at “Night Agent’s” offices on the Sony lot, the mood was one of triumph and determination after the strike. “We’re proud of the fight we had to get the things we deserved,” he said.
During the many weeks that writers spent on picket lines, there was much discussion of the changes in TV over the past decade. Ryan is one of the many who hope that the disruption and debates of the past five months will have a silver lining of helping to bring new life to traditional broadcast TV formats of dramas and comedy series that can run for many seasons.
“Night Agent,” a thriller revolving around an FBI agent who is drawn into a conspiracy involving the White House, is not the kind of show that can run for 10 seasons. (However, he is quick to add that the basic concept of the show has legs for future extensions). But Ryan is confident there are new expressions of the broadcast network series model that can work in the streaming, binge-watch era.
“I would love to see some of the streamers take on the challenge in both the comedy and drama worlds,” he said. “As much as I love ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ I would hope that 30 years from now there’s going to be some newer comedies with 150-200 episodes that we all still want to watch.”
