The Work Travels

On making good television a long way from the studio lot.

There’s a stretch of I-94 between Chicago and the Calumet Region where the skyline trades glass for smokestack in about twenty minutes. Mills, rail yards, the orange flare off a blast furnace if you catch it after dark. I drive it most weeks. It isn’t pretty in the postcard sense, but it’s where things got made — and you can still feel that. A place built by people who worked with their hands and didn’t say much about it after.

I came up from the shops. Before I wrote a word of television, I built sets, drove the truck, ran a camera, fabricated props on a midnight shift. The craft came first, and it came from places like this — Pittsburgh, where I’m from, and the Region, where I landed. Two steel towns, give or take. Both taught the same lesson: make the thing, make it right, let the work speak.

Make it right. Let the work speak.

The business still assumes that work happens in Los Angeles. That you develop there, staff there, and live and die inside a thirty-mile radius of the studios. For a long time that was mostly true.

It’s less true now.

The tools moved. A room can run across three time zones at once. A streamer doesn’t care about your area code, only whether the pages land. Cloud-based, bicoastal, remote — whatever you call it, making television stopped requiring a particular zip code somewhere around the time the rest of our lives did too.

But logistics were never the real argument. The real argument is about where stories come from.

Los Angeles is a company town. It’s very good at making things about itself and increasingly unsure about making things about anywhere else. The catch is that the specific, lived-in material good television runs on doesn’t grow on a lot. You can’t manufacture the Region. You can’t fake the particular way a man who gave thirty years to a mill talks about it — or doesn’t. You have to have stood next to him. You have to be from somewhere.

That’s the case for working outside L.A. Not that it’s cheaper or easier; it’s neither. It’s that distance keeps your eye honest and roots give you something true to point the camera at. The best material I’ve got didn’t come out of a pitch meeting. It came off a job site, a loading dock, a two-lane road in western Pennsylvania.

So we built Twointhebush to travel. Boutique by design, cloud-based by necessity, rooted on purpose. We break stories where we are and keep breaking them when nobody’s buying — a living repository, the practice kept warm whether or not there’s a deal on the table. The shops taught that too: you don’t stop sharpening tools because there’s no job that week.

None of this is a complaint about Hollywood. It’s a field note. The center held a long time, and now it doesn’t have to. Good television can come out of a steel town as easily as a studio lot — easier, maybe, because the steel town isn’t trying to be anything but itself.

Simple to say. Harder in practice.

But that’s the work.

Good TV. ‘Nuff ced.

An original essay from Twointhebush Television Co.