Eternal Annapurna

Every new episode of the show feels like a new Annapurna to climb. Not helping matters is the mocking illusion that makes all previous episodes look easy in comparison. "Oh that one had the lost kid at the center, it wrote itself..." "That one I always knew the ending to, all I had to do was get there..." "That one had killer stakes, there was no way to screw it up..." Of course I know that at the time every one of those episodes seemed difficult to the point of unwriteable in comparison with the ones that had come before. So why does knowing that not make the episode I'm working on now any easier? Yes, it's just an hour of television among many many hours of television. But hammering out the story requires no less effort and precision than hammering out a chapter of a book. And right now on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, with the stakes in the story feeling low, the resolution foregone and the story twists not half twisty enough, I feel that I am barely at base camp... And on November the 20th a director, actors, and a very big crew are going to have to start prepping something.