Joseph Dougherty's Secrets and Ties

Excerpted and edited with permission from A Screenwriter's Companion: Instruction, Opinion, Encouragement by Joseph Dougherty. © 2022 Joseph Dougherty. Published by Fayetteville Mafia Press.

thirtysomething: “Michael Writes a Story”
Original airdate: April 4, 1989
Michael takes a writing class, but the quality of his writing improves only after he deals with some other areas of his life.

Pretty Little Liars: “Shadow Play”
Original airdate: February 11, 2014
Spencer’s sleepless nights take a toll as her hunt for Ali and much-needed answers continues, teleporting her into the world of 1940s film noir.

- IMDB

When people find out how long I've been writing for series television, some are impressed, but an increasing number appear shocked. Lately, I've been siding more and more with the shocked. My first staff writing job was for ABC's thirtysomething in 1988. When the show ended in 1991, I was a producer. My most recent staff job was as a consulting producer on Freeform's Pretty Little Liars. I was an executive producer when we wrapped in 2017.

These shows — thirtysomething and Pretty Little Liars — make an interesting set of potential bookends within a television career. Both were socially significant and influenced television drama. I got to write and direct on both, and they represent some of the best work I've done.

Twenty-five years separate "Michael Writes a Story" and "Shadow Play." Some members of the Pretty Little Liars cast were born in the year the thirtysomething episode premiered.

What we knew about our viewers on thirtysomething, aside from anonymous Nielsen numbers, came from letters. When people watched an episode that touched them or angered them, they would sometimes write a letter. Those letters were placed in envelopes, stamped, mailed, and eventually they made their way to our offices in Los Angeles. There, we would try to decode them, looking for clues that we'd gotten something right.

That seems almost prehistoric to me now.

When an episode of Pretty Little Liars was initially broadcast, the writers would gather in an executive producer's office to watch the East Coast feed, which occurred at the end of our California workday. We had our laptops or phones open, and as we watched, we followed the real-time reactions of viewers on social media. Often we'd enter into a serve-and-volley with our audience during the show.

Initially this scared the bejesus out of me. I couldn't imagine an audience capable of absorbing a show unless they were watching and listening to the exclusion of all other actions.

The audience for Pretty Little Liars had something the original thirtysomething audience couldn't dream of: instantaneous access — to the show itself and to its writers. The earlier show existed in the VCR era. You could tape it and keep copies of your favorite episodes; the series wasn't released on DVD until 2009.

Through a combination of design and good luck, Pretty Little Liars seemed to be everywhere at once, riding the wave of social media. And it was during our fourth season of fashion-forward mystery that the network called and asked if we'd be interested in making a simulated vintage episode in black and white. Sort of "Pretty Little Noir."

We were. My first directing slot on the show fell at the right point for me to not only write the black-and-white episode — which would be "Shadow Play" — but to direct it as well. It was Christmas and my birthday, all in one phone call.

"Michael Writes a Story" was driven by another semi-meta moment, decades before anybody knew what meta was. The stories on thirtysomething were often the result of what can be called the Big Rock School: Look at the characters... see how well they're doing? Good for them. It's almost as if they were sailing on a placid lake on a pleasant summer day. How about we throw a really big rock in the water and see what happens to them?

It wasn't about inventing stories — it was about throwing that rock and writing the ripples. So, Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) and Elliot Weston (Timothy Busfield) lost their business, a small ad agency. Elliot's wife Nancy (Patricia Wettig) was diagnosed with cancer. Marriages were tested. Families were stressed. People died.

But before he had to be a breadwinner, Michael wanted to be a writer. Now he looked for something to erase the word failure from his thoughts. He decided he would finally focus on writing. A show known for its writing, thirtysomething would explore the writing process.

At PLL, the big rock was tossed in the pilot, but the action was off-camera: what happened to Alison? As the series moved forward, we threw a substantially larger rock: who was the unseen, malevolent and apparently omniscient "A" torturing our central characters?

You can't maintain a mystery indefinitely — mysteries call for solutions. And Pretty Little Liars was so successful straight out of the gate, it soon became necessary for us to move the goalposts. People wanted more, but they also wanted answers.

This is a problem thirtysomething never had to face. On that series, we were distilling life as we encountered it, and as long as there were kids and lovers and plumbing and mortgages and loss, we'd have stories. Life doesn't have solutions, it has outcomes, and it just keeps on happening to us.

So where do this particular thirtysomething episode and this particular Pretty Little Liars episode meet? They each have a main character who has lost control of the narrative. Michael feels his writing isn't fraught enough. Unwilling to examine the real life around him, he runs for cover, to something almost self-parodistic. Meanwhile, Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario) had been burning herself out mentally and physically until, like Alice, she stumbles through the looking glass, or, in Spencer's case, into the film noir corners of Turner Classic Movies.

Both episodes can be said to be about storytelling and an author's control of the landscape. Both contain sections conjured by a main character's imagination. Each occurs at an identifiable crisis point in the character's life. Both Michael and Spencer think they're in some control of what's happening to them. They both fail to realize that the person in charge is actually... me.

I confess, both episodes are indulgent, but in different ways. The later script is in better control of the indulgences, using them rather than merely parading them around. While I remember being gleeful at the opportunity to show off with "Michael Writes a Story," I recall being a little testy in the writers' room during "Shadow Play." While I was openly swinging for the fences with the first, I was possessive and guarded with the second.

The "bad writing" in "Michael Writes a Story" is much worse than Michael would have ever produced. It was as if he were channeling Ed Wood. Which he sort of was. Why else would I let his wife Hope (Mel Harris) say, "Or do you think me wrong?" And if that wasn't bad enough, we have, "We move through life, trapped by time and events, our empty days piling up like discarded socks in God's hamper."

I'm guilty of using the term bad writing as if it meant something, and I really shouldn't be doing that. It's misleading. It's also unfair to Michael, a character already suffering from the burden of too much introspection and concern about the judgment of others.

Bad writing does exist, but it's mostly lazy writing — empty of imagination and empathy, disrespectful of the characters and the audience. Michael's first attempts aren't bad or lazy. They are, if anything, the opposite of lazy. He's trying way too hard, straining himself and the words.

Why would writers put their language under such pressure? Mostly because of fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of revealing something about themselves and leaving it out there for inspection and potential ridicule. I'm afraid I wrote Michael's bad writing from a place where I'd forgotten that fear and how hard it is to overcome. The result is funny, but at Michael's expense. I owe the character an apology.

Watching someone write is not particularly entertaining. Come over to my house sometime if you want to see some high-powered inertia. So I like the way Michael's false starts are dramatized, the dissatisfaction of his "fictional" characters giving him a hard time, the way Nancy's dress keeps changing color because Michael can't make a decision.

The episode marked my first time writing autocratic ad man Miles Drentell (David Clennon), discovering his cold convolutions and pop psychology vocabulary.

Miles was the closest thing to a villain the series ever had. He filled a gravitational void in the thirtysomething solar system by being a physical manifestation of all the main characters' otherwise amorphous fears and conflicts about success, purpose, relationships. When Miles — sharply dressed, sharply tongued — arrived on the scene, much of the series came into clearer focus for the audience and the writers. The shapeless concerns of the characters, particularly Michael and Elliot, were now a physical presence on stage with them.

Miles was an über-antagonist. Not a villain in the clichéd sense of the word, but a powerful force in opposition to the protagonists. He enjoyed conflict and left it in his wake. You felt you were writing something mythic when you wrote for Miles. He was our fallen angel, happy to reign in his ergonomically designed hell.

For the rest of the series, I guarded the character like a mother bear guards a precocious cub. God, I enjoyed writing Miles.

Other aspects of "Michael Writes a Story" that I enjoy include the fake commercial break we slipped into the episode. It amused me to imagine people getting up and heading for the kitchen for chips only to realize the act wasn't over yet.

And I like Elliot dying all over the imagined diner when fictional Nancy shoots him. Somewhere in the vaults of MGM, there is substantially more footage of Elliot falling down, getting up and staggering before finally succumbing. This was intended as my tribute to Basil Rathbone's death scene in the 1963 film The Comedy of Terrors, written by Richard Matheson. Unfortunately, I was the only one who knew the reference, so that indulgence was cut.

And I completely approve of the final scene between Michael and Miles. The action folds into Michael's story being read in the classroom of writing teacher Ivy Dunbar (Lorinne Vozoff) and should leave you wondering exactly how much of the scene you've just watched actually happened.

And, of course, there's Ivy herself. For a long time, I thought I knew who Ivy was. I certainly know who I claimed she was: an amalgam of all good writing teachers filtered through my sense of the pugnacious and righteous John Gardner. Should she have been kinder to Michael in the early parts of the story? Gentler? Perhaps, but I don't think that's what Michael needed. She didn't think so either. So she puts him to the test to see what he is made of.

I've started to think of Ivy in this episode as the counterpoint to Miles. They're surprisingly similar: confident, controlling, passionately in love with language and what they can make it do. Ivy is as much a fallen angel as Miles, and it pleases me to think of Michael navigating between the two of them.

Ivy gets to say a great deal about writing and writers that I was rapidly learning for myself, including, "If a writer disappears, it doesn't even leave a hole. But if a wife disappears, or a father, or a friend... When you learn the proper scale of things, that's when your writing will change. Writing is not a replacement for living. If you don't believe me, ask my ex-husband."

"Michael Writes a Story" marks my first use of the phrase "You'll disappear and won't even leave a hole." Variations of this have cropped up throughout my career. I must have used it at some point in Pretty Little Liars, but I'm not sure where. The concept that kept showing up in my PLL scripts was the use of the piñata as a serviceable metaphor for almost anything.

Ivy's warning is not that writing can turn you into a jerk, but that if you start out a jerk, writing can magnify your jerkitude to Olympic dimensions. Whatever is fucked up in your life when you sit down to write will be waiting for you, impatiently, when you switch off the computer. Your spouse may love your writing, but that's just a thing you do. It has no impact on your viability as a partner. Not really. Not even if you're making money at it.

Such is Ivy's hard-won wisdom, echoed in the episode by Elliot, Michael's business partner and best friend. Elliot functioned in the series as Michael's external id. His journey through the series is long, arduous and marked by impulsive carelessness. But at this point, he'd started to learn to be a husband and father. He suggests to Michael a compartmentalization of life that may seem practical — or the recipe for a nervous breakdown. As Elliot says a few seasons later about another existential dilemma, "It all depends on how you look at it."

Both Ivy and Elliot bring Michael to a place where he can synthesize his own way forward. That's the realization he brings home to Hope: "I could wear down enough pencils to make a forest, but I could never come up with a sentence that'd be worth as much to me as you are."

"Shadow Play" worked an altogether different side of the street. It gave me the opportunity and resources to jazz around with the form of PLL, and it hit a sweet spot with every department involved in producing the show; doing something as different as this was a tonic for the company.

The idea that stress, drugs and watching the 1952 noir classic Narrow Margin could push a character out of the show's reality and into a richly monochromatic, clearly cinematic world — as happens to Spencer Hastings — should not be examined too closely for logic.

The fantastic aspects of "Michael Writes a Story" are restricted to Michael's attempts at fiction, while the noir landscape Spencer moves through is out of her control. Michael is making up the rules; Spencer has to figure out what the rules are. Michael learns not so much from his story as he does from others' reactions to it. Spencer emerges from the alternative reality with a clue that will help her solve the real puzzles confronting the Liars. Take some fine-grain sandpaper to both stories and each one lines up with the Hero's Journey.

There's much I'm proud of in "Shadow Play," but I'll single out Emily (Shay Mitchell) kissing Paige (Lindsey Shaw), a scene that would never have existed in the real noir universe. As possessive as I was of Miles on thirtysomething, I was equally protective of Emily and Paige on Pretty Little Liars. There was something about their fragile love that guided me to some of the clearest writing I've done. They are like no other characters I've helped create.

Every writer on Pretty Little Liars contributed to every relationship on the show. This is how characters on a successful series develop and maintain a cumulative reality. I didn't create Emily and Paige. Their story was well under way by the time I first wrote them. But I did write their first kiss. Furtive and stolen, it was mine, and I remember it well.

Because of how important it was to these girls that they be honest with each other, they struggled to be as clear as possible when they spoke. As a result, the best things I wrote for them can look deceptively simple on the page. But that's how you can end up with a memorable line consisting only of the words "Don't look away."

Emily says she didn't come out of the closet — she fell out, on her face. That's only partially true. She fell out, but she fell into herself. When she came out, Emily finally got to become all of Emily. She stopped checking herself and holding her breath.

While Emily was afraid of her sexuality, Paige had been taught to hate herself because of what she wanted. The terror of loneliness that I saw in Paige attracted me to her character. I thought, If I can help remove the ten-ton weight that's crushing this girl's heart, I will have done a good thing, at least fictionally. So Paige came out, and as a reward she got Emily. And that made me feel like Santa Claus.

"Shadow Play" was my opportunity to give them a gift I thought they deserved: a vintage love scene filled with all the Hollywood glamour Warner Bros. could provide, complete with billowing curtains.

During its four seasons, thirtysomething was lauded and disliked, often for the same reasons: we spent time talking about the small things that add up to a life. We wrote about characters who were better off than their parents and were going to make sure their kids had it even better. It was only when they started to build things for their own families that they began to understand what their parents had given up. Were they supposed to do the same? What about their happiness?

The last time I looked, these remain salient talking points. The places where the generations push against each other, how that friction appears, may change. But I like to think you could watch an episode of thirtysomething and see what we were going for, once you get past the fax machines and the shoulder pads.

The thing that drew me to thirtysomething and made it important that I write for the show was that, at that moment in television history, no one had the nerve to say, "You can be angry with the person you love, but that doesn't mean you don't love them." I thought people were entitled to know that. And if we didn't tell them, who would?

Pretty Little Liars was initially shielded from criticism by its genre and by reduced expectations. No one took it seriously. But then we were successful. People still didn't take us seriously, but they were obliged to pay attention. Eventually we were criticized for being unrealistic and too pretty. This may be true, but it misses the point of what we were up to.

At Pretty Little Liars, I found what could pass for a writer's paradise. I wandered the backlot of Warner Bros. in the company of smart people making up the best stories we could imagine.

As we had at thirtysomething, we were playing with archetypes and expectations at Pretty Little Liars. We were experimenting with form and genre to see what else we could get them to do, trying to teach them a couple of new tricks. And at PLL we were doing this on the same soundstages where Casablanca and The Big Sleep were produced. Where Alfred Hitchcock made Dial M for Murder.

We were movie lovers given the chance to repay the storytellers who shaped us along the way. It was a gift, and we were very grateful. We did our best to say thank you.

The theme song of Pretty Little Liars taunted, "Got a secret, can you keep it?" My secret? I think everything I've ever written is connected to everything else I've ever written. It's all been one continuous shaggy-dog story.

Pretty Little Liars — murders notwithstanding — connects strongly with thirtysomething, especially in its friendships. Both shows received letters/emails saying the same thing, often in the same words: "I wish I had friends like that."

There was something about these small groups of humans who loved and trusted one another that went right to viewers' hearts. I don't know what this means, but I like that this is something the shows shared and nurtured.

Could you spot "Shadow Play" and "Michael Writes a Story" as written by the same writer? Possibly. Perhaps from the author's insistence on two spaces after a period. I'm not sure that comes across in the finished episodes. Maybe it does.

Joseph Dougherty was nominated for three Emmy Awards for thirtysomething; he won in 1989 for outstanding writing in a drama series. He is also a three-time nominee for the Humanitas Prize for thirtysomething, winning in 1990 in the sixty-minute category.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #6, 2022, under the title, "Secrets and Ties."