AUGUST 26, 2007
GHOST IN THE MACHINE

by Amy Berg


Don't sweat the small stuff.  Words of wisdom that usually apply in every facet of life.  But when it comes to producing a television show?  Forget about it.  In fact, sweating the small stuff is part of my job description. 

Case in point.  As I'm sure you noticed, "Ghost in the Machine" had quite a few theory room scenes.  It was up to Marco, Brady, and new girl geek Abigail to analyze the attacks on Drew Imroth's company and figure out who was behind it.  To do that, they had to study the manifesto that was being spit out by computers running Ubient software.  Then they had to sift through all the hate mail directed at Imroth and cross-reference the language with that in the manifesto.  Tough task for anyone except the venerable Marco Pacella and his cronies.  When they were explaining their results to Tom and Diana, they stood in front of a split screen with the documents projected behind them.  If you paused the episode with your Tivo, you could probably make out a few dozen words.  But in actuality, each document was three pages long.  How do I know?  Well, someone had to write them. 

And take my word for it, creating a hate-spewing email and a fanatical Unabomber-esque manifesto isn't as fun as it sounds.  It can affect your disposition.  I'm usually a rather cheery person, but having to launch into a wordy diatribe about the intolerable cruelty of another human being and rail incessantly against the current state of the world?  It actually put me in a bad mood.  I had to recruit two other writers to help me finish the documents.

But my job wasn't done yet.  There was other small stuff to sweat in the episode.  After Maia visits with her "parents" for the first time, there's a scene in her bedroom where she writes about the experience in her diary.  Not knowing how much of it we would see on screen, I wrote a few paragraphs just to be safe.  She talked about how amazing it was to see her mom and dad and how it was something she never thought could happen.  But with all the new abilities out there, there's no such thing as impossible anymore.  She knew it wasn't really them, that it was just a convincing mirage, but it was a great birthday present nonetheless.  Three paragraphs.  Of which you guys only saw one or two sentences. 

Although Maia's diary and the theory room documents were time-consuming, they were important in that they added flavor to the episode.  Like figuring out what extinct species we wanted Kevin to come across in Promise City.  Or what the travel itinerary would say when a suspicious Tom opened up the email on Diana's computer.  Small but crucial details, all of them.  But there is one bit of "small stuff" from this episode that was annoying as hell and didn't add anything substantive to the episode.  And it all came down to one little word.

After every draft of every script, we receive these things called clearance reports.  In them, someone has gone through the script and weeded out every name (person, place, or thing) that's remotely objectionable.  For example, if we name a character Warren Trask and there's actually a guy by that name who lives in Seattle, we can't use the name.  But if there are a dozen Warren Trasks who live in Seattle, that's okay because you can't prove we were targeting any one individual.  

It works the same for the names of businesses and products.  When Craig first came up with Ubient Software for his episode "The Marked," he simply made the word up from scratch to get around any potential clearance issues.  For "Ghost in the Machine" we needed a name for Ubient's computer operating system, and we didn't want to have two manufactured words in the same sentence.  In the final version of the episode, we used the name Enzyme.  But I can assure you, that was not our first choice.

Not only couldn't we use the name of any other operating system in existence, we couldn't use the name of any computer company that had the word in their title.  In the first draft of the script, we'd called it Horizons Operating System.  In the second draft, it was Synapse.  Neither name cleared.  So I gave Craig a list with twenty more names on it.  None of them cleared either.  We ended up going through another twenty names before landing on Enzyme, which none of us actually liked but were stuck with nonetheless. 

Don't sweat the small stuff?  Sage advice.  Sometimes I really wish I could take it.