Showrunner Chris Brancato on the Craft of Storytelling

Award-winning writer and showrunner Chris Brancato talks to World Screen about his experiences researching subjects, pitching shows, crafting stories and keeping audiences coming back for more.

Throughout his career, award-winning writer and showrunner Chris Brancato has witnessed the evolution of the television business. He started when the U.S. TV landscape consisted mainly of three broadcast networks and lived through the proliferation of cable channels and then streaming services. He had written or produced some 250 hours of television, from Beverly Hills, 90210 to The X-Files, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Hannibal, before co-creating Narcos. His latest show is Godfather of Harlem, which was recently picked up for a second season by EPIX. Brancato shares his experiences researching subjects, pitching shows, crafting stories and keeping audiences coming back for more.

WS: How have you seen the craft of storytelling evolve?
BRANCATO: TV has changed dramatically, and as often happens in our business, that change was driven by technology more than anything else. For decades there were three major U.S. networks. Then the proliferation of cable led to dozens of other channels, basic and premium, which slowly but surely influenced the change in direction in the creative community. Shows no longer needed to attract the widest possible audience. With the lesser viewership needed to sustain a cable show or subscription fees that sustain those channels, the programming could become a little more targeted to a niche audience. You started to see the development of anti-heroic lead characters you had never seen before, like Vic Mackey in The Shield and Tony Soprano. Viewers clearly appreciated the depictions of people in situations that weren’t so pristine and encouraged creators to develop more along those lines.

The next technological advancement was streaming services and their ability to put shows all over the world. [It fostered the] development of these ten-episode gems that are distinguished by, first, much more money than we used to spend on an episode; second, acquiring actors for these shows who previously never would have consented to do television; and third, the movement of many people in the feature world to this medium that previously they had written off. Technically, today, [I am] essentially able to do any story if I can find executives who are willing to believe it will be commercially successful for them. Nothing is off-limits. Of course, certain things make good television stories and others don’t; that will always be the case. But for right now, there is incredible creative freedom.

WS: Is it easier to get a show picked up today?
BRANCATO: It’s actually harder to get a show on the air in the U.S. than it ever has been, in my opinion, for a simple reason: the three-network system encouraged every studio to develop massively in the hopes of getting that one hit. And that one big hit used to cover all the 19 losses. Now, every show operates, at least according to the studios, on pretty slim margins. You are only making 10 or 20 or 30 shows. Every channel executive deciding to put something on the air is betting their career on whether it’s going to be successful because if they have two or three that aren’t successful, they are going to get fired. So you see a lot of fear and trepidation. A lot of looking over the shoulder, what’s the other guy doing? Also, there’s the continued need on behalf of all these channels to find that one show that makes everybody talk around the watercooler. AMC had it with Mad Men and then Breaking Bad. Netflix had it with House of Cards and Narcos.

When I used to write my one-hours of television in the network days, the story had a beginning, a middle and an end. We resolved the crisis of the episode but continued to leave interesting things hanging that made an audience want to watch the next episode. That hasn’t changed one iota. People ask what was different about writing Narcos for Netflix than writing for networks? Nothing really. I knew we needed something to get resolved because we want satisfaction in our hour of television. But I also knew it was a continuing serialized drama and we needed to leave certain tentacles unsatisfied so viewers would want to watch the next episode.

On my new show, Godfather of Harlem, it’s the same. I look at the ten episodes and ask, what are we accomplishing in this episode and what are we going to leave the audience to wonder about?

WS: How did Godfather of Harlem come about?
BRANCATO: I was approached by Forest Whitaker and a couple of producers who were interested in telling the story of a notorious gangster called Bumpy Johnson. I had written a movie about him in the ’90s called Hoodlum. At first, I wasn’t interested in doing that character again and passed it off to a friend who was interested. Then the friend came to me and said, “I’m having a bit of a struggle figuring out how to do this. Would you be interested?” I looked at his material and thought the thing that I had forgotten was that Bumpy Johnson and Malcolm X were friends. Right away, I said to my co-writer, Paul Eckstein, I know what this show is. This is a show about the collision of crime and civil rights in early-’60s Harlem. I proceeded to use that one-sentence definition for months.

As I started to research, [I discovered that] all of Malcolm’s Nation of Islam soldiers were former criminals. I noticed that Adam Clayton Powell, a Harlem congressman and preacher, had the same lawyer as Frank Costello, the mobster. I could see all the different ways that the efforts of second-class citizen groups in America to improve their economic circumstances—which generally came from crime because there was no barrier to entry—also paralleled their movement in the social fabric of America. For instance, the Irish, in the 1850s, were [way at the bottom of U.S. society], but by 1960, there was an Irish president. The theory that Forest, Paul and I started to operate under was crime becomes this first foundational step in an immigrant community’s rise to social, political and cultural prominence. That’s because crime gets you money, which buys political power, which gets you social power, which gets you cultural power. We were observing this in different groups: the Irish, the Italians and the Germans who had come to America. The African American experience is similar in that second-class citizen status, but also completely different because they came to the country involuntarily, for the most part. While there is a limit to how many comparisons you can make about the African American community as an immigrant group compared to others, there are some similarities about how crime becomes the stepladder economically.

We were fascinated by that. We knew the show had the chance to speak to issues that are now going on in the U.S., the political divisions, left and right, police brutality, the beginning of social movements like Black Lives Matter and opioid addiction in our country. All of this was going on in Harlem at the time. We felt we could study that period with an incredible actor, Forest Whitaker, and others, and do a show that examines issues that are still bubbling in our culture and country today. At the same time, I could do something I love, which is taking real history that I have researched and fictionalizing it: creating historical fiction that aims to capture the essence of the time and the way people spoke and what their attitudes were, without being constricted to an absolutely documentary portrayal of reality. You need to create drama. You need to make it entertaining.

WS: In the linear world, in success, a writer had the chance to share in the backend. Is there less of that today with streaming services?
BRANCATO: It’s a very difficult, competitive profession. Steven Bochco [creator of Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue], on his first day at Universal in 1963, went to a cigarette kiosk where the writers would meet after lunch. The discussion among older writers was the business is terrible. It’s never been worse for writers. Bochco heard all these complaints. Then one of the older writers turned to him and said, We were having the same conversation ten years ago. Writers will always complain.

Yes, in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, [TV] writers were looked upon as lesser beings than feature film writers. But if you got a hit and wrote hundreds of episodes that went into reruns [you made a lot of money for the network].
We’re entering a world now of only ten episodes per season, where a streamer acquires a show for its shelves, and then where does it go? Nowhere? One of the things my guild and writers, in general, are concerned about is, we want to make sure we are compensated adequately not only for the initial use of the show but for continual reuse over the years. I expect that to be in the ongoing negotiations at the studios.

While the multiplicity of streamers creates a wider field of jobs that a writer can take, it’s still harder to become a writer on a long show. You need to have a track record to be able to create your show. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. However, it’s still a very good time for storytellers.