Her reading was smart, careful, and thoroughly researched. It also credited us with a level of deliberate intention that, honestly, was never actually there.
A fan sent our writers room a genuinely long, carefully researched essay this week analyzing what she has identified as our show’s deliberate, sustained thematic exploration of a specific social issue across the entire first season, a genuinely thoughtful, well-argued piece of analysis considerably more sophisticated than the actual, honest thinking that went into our own writers room across that same season, and I have spent several days now debating whether to write back and gently tell her the truth, or simply let her have this particular, more flattering reading of our work.
I want to be clear that her actual analysis is not wrong, exactly, in the sense that the specific pattern she identified does genuinely exist across our episodes, real, consistent choices our characters make and real, consistent consequences those choices produce that do, read carefully and considered together the way she has done, form a coherent thematic throughline about exactly the social issue her essay identifies. What her analysis gets wrong is not the pattern itself but the assumption that we, as writers, consciously, deliberately built that pattern with anything like the intentional, sustained thematic purpose she has credited us with.
The honest truth, which I have been sitting with somewhat uncomfortably since first reading her essay, is that most of the specific choices she has woven into her sophisticated thematic reading were made, individually, episode by episode, for considerably more mundane, practical reasons, what made for the funniest specific joke in a given scene, what worked logistically given our shooting schedule that week, what a specific actor happened to deliver especially well in a table read, rather than through any deliberate, season-long thematic architecture our room consciously constructed in advance the way her essay clearly assumes we did.
I think this touches on something genuinely interesting about how creative meaning actually gets made, a phenomenon I do not think gets discussed nearly often enough in how audiences and critics generally talk about television writing, the way a genuinely coherent thematic pattern can emerge across a season’s worth of episodes through the accumulated, individually practical choices of a writers room working under real production constraints, without that pattern ever having been consciously, deliberately planned as a unified whole the way careful, close analysis after the fact often assumes it must have been.
I do not think this makes her analysis worthless, exactly, or her essay a simple misreading undeserving of any real engagement. I think it raises a genuinely interesting question about where meaning in a piece of collaborative, constraint-driven creative work like television actually lives, whether it lives primarily in the writers’ original, conscious intentions, which in this specific case were considerably less unified and considerably more practical than she has assumed, or whether it lives, at least partly, in the actual pattern itself, regardless of how consciously or unconsciously it was originally assembled, a pattern that clearly resonates as coherent and meaningful to at least this one genuinely careful, engaged reader.
I have decided, after several days of genuine deliberation, to write back to her honestly, explaining that our own actual process was considerably less deliberate than her sophisticated reading assumes, while also genuinely thanking her for identifying a real pattern in our work that I do not think any of us in the room had ever consciously named or discussed this clearly ourselves, even if we never set out to build it with anything resembling her essay’s careful, intentional architecture.
I suspect that honest response will disappoint her somewhat, deflating a reading she clearly put real, careful work into constructing. But I think honesty here matters more than preserving a flattering but inaccurate account of our own actual process, and I am hoping she will find some genuine value in learning how a pattern this coherent can actually emerge from work considerably more improvised and practically constrained than her careful essay assumed it to be.
I shared her essay with the rest of the writers room today too, curious whether any of my colleagues actually remembered making some of the specific choices she highlighted with the kind of deliberate thematic intention her analysis assumes. Nobody did, which I found both reassuring, in the sense that it confirms my own honest account of our actual process, and genuinely humbling, in the sense that it means a pattern this clear and this coherent emerged entirely from a series of individually practical decisions none of us were tracking collectively at the time we actually made them.
One colleague suggested, half-jokingly, that perhaps this is simply how genuinely good collaborative writing tends to work, individual choices made in good faith toward the immediate scene in front of you eventually accumulating into something considerably more coherent than any single person consciously planned, a specific kind of emergent meaning that owes less to deliberate authorial intention than to the writers room genuinely, consistently caring about getting each individual moment right. I think there is something worth taking seriously in that framing, and I may actually include some version of it in my eventual reply to her.
More from this author at Aisha Muharrar, prat.uk.