continued ......
With the structure of "24" bound by time restrictions on paper, Mr. Cochran wanted fewer such restrictions in the real world. After the network ordered the first full season of "24," the writers presented a huge map of the entire first season. The blueprint, however, didn't endure. "We used to obsess over that in Year 1," Mr. Cochran said. "You know, Oh, God, let's story out as many episodes as we can. We always got in a lot of trouble with that because if you try it, you end up locking yourselves into things that don't really work and it gets really contrived."
After his four seasons of "24," Mr. Cochran endorses the same approach: save big decisions till the end of the season. The writers and the audience, he insists, will then enjoy the benefits of a looser process. "At the beginning of the season, we certainly don't know," he said. "Halfway through, we certainly don't know. As we're writing episode 16 or 17, we start thinking in a very general sort of way, where we'd like to end the season."
Gail Berman, president of Fox Entertainment, said: "You have some idea of what's going to happen, but you just don't know exactly. And sometimes a character will pop and that will take things in a new direction, or a storyline will pop and that takes things in another direction."
Ms. Berman and her counterpart at ABC, Steve McPherson, each demand some sense of the show's arcs, which are often presented in packages of six or eight episodes that forecast a character's fate or a mystery's resolution. But both executives have learned to "respect the creative process," as the buzz-phrase goes, trusting that writerly intuition will flourish with looser deadlines and less intrusion. Pressed by reporters in January, Mr. McPherson admitted he didn't know how Mr. Abrams, a co-creator for "Lost," would end the season, nor did he care if the season's conclusion, at that point, was murky even to the writer himself. "I think it would be fun if he didn't know," Mr. McPherson said.
Mr. McPherson's embrace of the unknown is brave. ABC and Fox are neck-and-neck in a race for No. 2 in the ratings, behind CBS, and the outcome could turn on the handful of dramas, including "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," that are the seismic hits of the season.
The writers of "Desperate Housewives" are creating their highly anticipated finale only now because they have already used ideas they meant to save for later. The entire series began with a death, the suicide of the show's narrator, Mary Alice, and her motivation for killing herself became the series' driving mystery. Right away, the show's creator, Marc Cherry, proved unafraid to spill even more blood. Martha Huber, Wisteria Lane's nosey blackmailing neighbor, was murdered in the seventh episode in a twist that couldn't wait.
Now the writers of "Desperate Housewives" are proving slaves to their own demanding invention: their fast-paced script format includes about 60 scenes of 2 pages each per episode. Other hourlong dramas average 35 scenes or so of 5-page scenes, according to Tom Spezialy, one of the series' executive producers.
The show's concept blends so many genres - romantic comedy, family drama, murder mystery, soap opera - Mr. Cherry and his nine other writers "must feed the beast," in Mr. Spezialy's words.
Mr. McPherson publicly teased Mr. Cherry that his publicity demands were officially over in late January; the writer had pages to produce. Each morning before noon, he confines himself to a bungalow on a Universal Studios lot and produces six new pages in six hours, before turning to rewrites and reshoots. Mr. Spezialy removed the phone from Mr. Cherry's bungalow.
The end-of-season "lockdown" means living more in the life of the characters than in one's own life, according to many writers. And when Mr. Lindelof ran into Mr. Cherry in the ABC offices, they commiserated on having had one day off in seven weeks. To Mr. Spezialy, it had seemed even longer. "Really we've been here since last May," he said.
Describing his own freshman season's final months, Mr. Schwartz of "The O.C." replayed his internal monologue as he was struggling to write dialogue. "How did I get here? How am I ever going to sustain this? This is all going to go down in flames. The whole thing's riding on me," he recalled. "You know, that sort of wired exhaustion."
This year, for "The O.C.'s" second season, he did not worry as much; he figured out what will happen in his Southern California "soapedy," as he called it, after having written half the season's 24 episodes. But he recognized the anxious determination he saw in a newcomer like Mr. Lindelof. "It's just that constant feeling of like, well, we can't ever do any more stories than that? Oh, but we have to, O.K.!" Mr. Schwartz recalled.
