THE ANATOMY OF A TV SHOW
Tia Napolitano ’02
Tia Napolitano graduated from New York University and headed west with a dream. She worked her way up from a job in the mailroom of a Los Angeles talent agency to a job as a writer’s assistant on the long-running hit ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” She finally got her big break in the chance to write an episode script; the script was a hit, the episode aired and she got a coveted seat in the “Grey’s Anatomy” writers’ room. How does the “Grey’s Anatomy” writers’ room work? How do episodes get written? There are about a dozen writers, and
we hold a roundtable meeting every day where we pitch ideas and work as a group. Each episode is assigned to a particular writer who takes the lead. I compare this to the small classroom style at Brooks: When it’s your episode, you act like a teacher leading a group discussion; everyone’s talking, but you’re steering the content. Then, the writer will take all those ideas away and write an outline, and then a script. Do the writers know what’s going to happen in the long term, or do you only learn the plot episode by episode?
A little bit of both. We do our seasons in two parts, so there’s something called a midseason finale. We know how the midseason is going to end, and we sometimes know how the season’s going to end. I think Shonda [Rhimes, the show’s creator, head writer, executive producer and showrunner] has the long-term plot in her mind. The writers have an idea of the larger story, but it’s not very specific. The writers focus episode by episode, but there is a sense of the larger story that we’re trying to tell for the characters. What was your experience with the arts at Brooks? I sched-
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uled my classes with an eye toward taking as many writing courses as I could as a sixth-former. I think the English program at the time was fantastic. I took a fiction and film class that really inspired me to see that screenwriting was an actual thing. As far as arts, I did an independent study where I directed and staged my own play in the black box theater. I took advantage of everything I could, but there’s always room for more. Arts education is invaluable. In the same way that the school asks kids who normally wouldn’t play sports to play sports — and that’s great; I learned a lot about team building and life lessons through sports at Brooks — I think there are similar lessons to be learned from the arts.
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BRO OKS BULLETIN