1. Most “Tribal Knowledge” About Rights is 100% Wrong
A few words on copyright and clearance rights: If you are a writer, don’t just register your script with the WGA West or East. The best way to legally protect your script and yourself is to buy a copyright. If production designer or set decorator, don’t think that because you bought a picture on the wall or a painting, or got permission from a home owner to shoot in their house, that you now have any right to show that picture or painting in your series. It’s a separate permission, and without it, you might end up spending thousands of dollars after the fact to get the rights or digitally erase it. If you are a prop master, make sure that a character doesn’t get killed with a Heinz 57 bottle. Bad things should never happen with commercial products. You’ll never get the rights. If you are a casting agent, make sure that the least ethical person in your docudrama is played by your most famous—and most attractive—actor.

2. Being a Showrunner is a Benevolent Dictatorship.
The appeal of being a showrunner is that you have an enormous amount of control over your project; you are the CEO of the show. The downside, is that that all of these other commitments take you away from what you love: the writing. That can be a blessing and a curse, since many writers agree that TV writing is the ideal job for people who hate being alone even more than they hate writing.

Showrunners Panel: Deb Curtis (Programming Exec/Moderator), James Duff (The Closer), Jenji Kohan (Weeds), Bill Lawrence (Cougar Town), Matt Weiner (Mad Men)

3. The Primetime Game Show Will Return
Two-and-a-half years ago there were seven game shows on primetime television. Now there are zero. We hear they will return! Fox’s Million Dollar Money Drop might just kick off the resurgence in December.

4. Barney McNulty Was the Creator of Cue Cards
Of course someone created them, but now we know who.

5. If You Know What You Are Doing, You Can Make $8 Million in Fifteen Minutes
When a championship game goes into overtime, the operations producer at the network gets on the phone and starts creating his own match-ups. As the clock wore down in a close football game last year, Fox Sports VP Jack Simmons got on the phone and built another series of commercial breaks, found new inventory, and made his network a ton of money. Just don’t ask him the score at the end of the game. He’ll watch it on the DVR when he gets home.

Jack Simmons, Senior VP Production, Fox Sports

6. The DVR Has Changed Everything and Nothing
The “Network called DVR” is contemporary TV’s frenemy. Writers now have to work in a four-act structure for a 30-minute show, thanks to TiVo. While Live Plus ratings have given networks some breathing room to still benefit from time-shifted viewing, when Hulu puts a show up within three days of it airing, the Live+3 numbers go down substantially. At the same time, overall ratings are 15% higher in DVR homes than in non-DVR homes. People with DVRs watch more TV. But DVRs are still the minority in most American homes, so today, successful shows still get 40%-50% of their audience from the lead-in. The bottom line, according to broadcast programming executives: flow and scheduling still matter.

Last week’s Supernatural, called “Swan Song,” was an amazing season finale. In fact, it could have easilystood in as the series finale it had been intended to be until the show got renewed. It closed off the fifth season’s arc of battling the apocalypse, and it brought to the fore all the things fans loved about the show: the brothers, their love, the importance of family, and the central role of humanity and free will. In the climactic scene we see archangels Lucifer and Michael inhabiting the vessels of the two brothers Sam and Adam. The third brother, Dean, stands in for the human element he has always represented. And as it should be, human free will and love win out over angelic destiny. It’s an epic story and the dramatic bang of Sam overtaking Lucifer by remembering the last five seasons (and their entire lives) and pulling Michael into hell with him would have made a grandiose ending indeed.

That is to say it could have made a grandiose ending, except that the show has become notorious in what some would consider fan service and others might deem postmodern authorial intrusions. The acknowledgment of fans as they exist outside the series and the introduction of in-show interaction with fans has been cause for much debate this past year: some fans love these developments while others feel ridiculed and/or misrepresented, seeing Supernatural’s representation of fans as yet another indication of its quite problematic gender issues. The recent Transformative Works and Cultures’ special Supernatural issue addresses some of these conflicts. Given this context, the authorial in-show complaint that “the fans are always gonna bitch” is not too surprising.

Last season introduced author Chuck, who is both the writer of a Supernatural book series within the show and, it turns out, a prophet of the lord. The entire episode “Swan Song” is framed in his authorial voice over. Unlike film noir voice over, however, his is clearly external: we see him writing the story as he interprets it for us. Moreover, whereas in the beginning of the episode Chuck simply narrates the story (author, prophet, and possibly God of this world that he is), in the scenes after the apocalyptic battle he clearly moves in to explain the story to us. We move from Dean’s question “Are You God” to an image of Chuck in front of the computer screen, dressed in white and bearded. We’ve been told all season that God is on earth and doesn’t want to be found, and when Chuck finishes the story and types “The End,” he magically (God-like?) disappears.

Since the episode aired, fans have been debating whether Chuck (as Kripke’s stand-in) is meant to be God or not. I’m firmly in the camp that feels Kripke wrote Chuck as a stand-in and made himself author-as-God. Given that, it is the voice over explanation and interpretation that ultimately bother me most. We’ve questioned and undermined and complicated the concept of subversive readings and resistant audiences and yet, as a fan and as an academic, I do feel that much of my pleasure comes from interpreting and analyzing the text. I like active viewers/readers, and while I actually don’t think that authors are dead, I don’t think they should run after their texts telling us what they mean. A good text should show me its myriad meanings, and great texts tend to contain multitudes. I really wish Kripke—and many other creators who want to protect their texts from those fans that dare to read against the grain or, worse, go and take their “children” and create new stories (for an overview of the latest incarnation of this debate, see metafandom prowriting tag)—would give us, the viewers, the free will he so passionately proclaims and advocates in his swan song. But then fans may take that freedom anyway: Somewhere on the internet….