David E. Kelley on the secret of his prolific career: ‘Don't ever assume you're smarter than the audience'

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L.A. Law. Picket Fences. Chicago Hope. Ally McBeal. The Practice. Boston Legal. Big Little Lies. Nine Perfect Strangers. Presumed Innocent.
And that's far from the complete list. So it's fitting that David E. Kelley was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the ATX TV Festival's Showrunner Award. Over the course of his career, he's earned 31 Emmy nominations and 12 wins (including a Hall of Fame trophy) and was the first producer ever to take home Emmys for both comedy series and drama series in the same year. Not to mention all of the actors he's written for who have won trophies in their own right.
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In a Q&A at the festival moderated by Gold Derby's editor-in-chief, Kelley talked about his creative process, what he learned from his mentor Steven Bochco, and why he still writes longhand.
Gold Derby: You've written comedy, drama, legal dramas, medical dramas, adaptations. What's the secret formula? What's the DNA of a David E. Kelley show?
David E. Kelley: Well, there's no secret formula. And if you think that you've got one or it's that easy, then that's when you've lost it and you should get out. It's always hard and always daunting. I would say for my shows, they're character-based. I look to mine the cauldron with a collection of characters that allow me to go in different directions. And so more times than not, you'll see disenfranchised people who have flaws and personality deficits, but who are redeeming and have something to love in them as well. I've always wanted but not always succeeded the piece to ultimately be affirming at the end of the day. That doesn't mean you don't have bad things going on within episodes, but at the end of the day, I would love to nurture the audience with the idea that people are more good than bad. If there's one common denominator that fits the bill across the board, that would probably be it.
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So what do you look for in an actor to embody that?
First, I look for a good casting director. There's something called casting fatigue. It's a long, long process, and the longer it goes, the more likely that you will settle. That the first 20 actors will be so far off, that number 21 will be remotely in the ballpark and you go, that's the one. And that's very dangerous. I've always counted on a strong casting director to bring a point of view and a perspective to (a) find the person that we're looking for, but (b) be strong and secure enough to tell me that this person is not it if I fall for the wrong person. A woman named Judith Weiner cast The Practice and Ally McBeal, which we were doing at the same time. We did The Practice first, and then we went to cast Ally McBeal, and she changed the furniture around in the same room. And I said, "Judith, I can see you've chosen to sit over by the window this time." And she said, "Yes, so I can jump out of it if you fall prey to some of the inclinations that you did during The Practice." When you get a casting director who does not settle, it just makes your job as a producer much, much easier.
Do you find that once you've worked with an actor before, you're able to then write with them? You've worked with Nicole Kidman, for example, a few times now.
It's a really good question because I don't think people understand how collaborative television series can be. I can't really compare it to movies because I've not done many of them. But in a series you're really looking at what the actor is bringing to the piece and listening to it and feeding off of it. Sometimes you're going for the strengths and shying away from the deficits when you're writing a subsequent episode. But oftentimes, they're doing things that you don't even anticipate. And if you're working with great actors, you just allow yourself to be flexible, to play to their strengths. O-T Fagbenle who played Nico Della Guardia on Presumed Innocent, I had no idea what he was doing when the dailies first came in. He was playing it with an affect and an aloofness and a humor and it wasn't at all the way I'd heard it when I'd written on the page. But it was great and the show needed a little bit of levity where we could find it. So I remember saying I don't know what he is doing but tell him to keep doing it.
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Did you write end up writing to that?
It's folly to say, well, that's not the construct that I set out to build and I'm going to stick to the original idea. Sometimes you do, but other times if you see what the actor is giving you is elevating the piece, don't be afraid of it.
Is that something you've learned over the course of your career?
I learned it pretty early from Stephen Bochco. He taught me so many good habits, and he also had huge amount of respect for the actors. If you surround yourself with good people and smart people, it's only going to make your work better. Lord knows we have more than a few in our industry who get threatened by others, who want to populate their piece with opinions who won't threaten their own, but he never did that. He did that, from the very first day I walked in his office, and he did that with the audience as well. So don't ever for a second assume you're smarter than the audience. These people more likely are going to be every bit as intelligent as you, if not more so.
How were you lucky enough to find your way to Stephen Bochco so early in your career?
I was a practicing lawyer in Boston, and I knew I liked to write. I had done a little bit in college, but it wasn't something I really thought I was going to make a living at. I was a young litigator and it was motion practice for the most part, which means you sit in a courtroom with a zillion other lawyers and you wait for your case to get called, and it's a long day in court with not much to do. So I started writing a script while in court, and over the course of a year, at the end of that year, I had a script of a young lawyer who was bored with his practice because all he did was go and sit in motion session and never got to argue.
Gee, how did you ever come up with that idea?
(Laughs.) There was someone in my law firm who was getting into the movie production business from the producing side that I knew, and they were getting bottom of the barrel scripts. They heard I was writing one, and he said, let me read it. And he said, by comparison, it looks good, and he optioned it. The script found its way to Stephen Bochco, who at that time was hatching L.A. Law and he was looking for lawyers/writers, hybrids of people because he really wanted the series to be as authentic as possible. He invited me out, and I had no idea what a fluke it was. I met him, we got along quite well, and he gave me a script assignment.
How did he respond to the script?
I remember the first couple of weeks were a bit strange because there's a writing staff of about eight to 10 people, and we would get script assignments. I had script number eight, so there were seven that came before me. And I was noticing people walking by with their belongings leaving the office, and I heard, "Oh, these are the writers who have turned in their scripts." Steven would weed them out pretty quickly. When it came time for my script, I walked into the office and sat down, and he looked across the table and he just said, 'You can do this.' And I remember, oh my god. It was like when I had taken the bar exam and opened the envelope and it said that I'd passed the bar. I'm not the complete fraud that I'd convinced myself that I was. When someone like Stephen Bochco says that, that can really fuel the tank.
How did his writers' room work?
Steven Bochco did his best work in a room with other writers. The more people, the more the heightened his acuity would be. In fact, when he would write himself, and he could not break a story or solve an ending, he would call all the writers into the room to talk about it. We quickly realized he really wasn't calling us in to get our ideas, he was calling us in because he did his best thinking with an audience. I could not do that at all. Where Steven's process was if he's stuck, bring everybody into the room, my process is I can't really do my best work unless I get everybody out of the room because I want to be in the room with the characters. It's probably a more schizophrenic way to work, but I immerse myself into the world. I've always been more of a solitary writer. I've gotten better about working with staffs, and it's easier to share the load. But at the early part of my career, it was actually harder because I didn't really know what I wanted in some of the storytelling until I immersed in the world myself and got in the trenches with the characters.
How then do you get your head though into a character that is not you, like Ally McBeal, a single working woman?
I'm not really sure. That's probably the schizophrenia part. I just focus on who he or she is, and I listen to that voice. My process in every episode of every series is that you listen to the story and you listen to the characters. And at the beginning, you are crafting the story and you're creating the characters, but at some point the characters are telling me where they want to go and the story is now becoming the boss and dictating which direction it should go in.
Do you prefer creating your own shows or adapting preexisting material as you've been doing lately?
I've loved both. I would say creating was the biggest high. In fact, I never really wanted to adapt because I thought the process of writing is twofold. There's a huge intoxication when you come up with an idea and when you break an idea and there's an adrenaline that comes with that and that adrenaline applies the fuel when you set sail and you go and and write it. And my fear of an adaptation process was, well, someone else has been the architect. The story breaking is done, the idea has been hatched, now you're just kind of the contractor to execute it. I thought that's the work without the high of breaking the story. The first one I tried was Big Little Lies and I actually quite loved it because, first of all, the book was great, the characters were so fun to write. The book was very internal, the characters were thinking things but not voicing them. So there was a great deal of challenge of how do we take what's going inside the characters' minds and convey them? So there was real hard work to be done there. The adaptation process occasioned me to go in directions that I might not otherwise have ventured into. I did Mr. Mercedes, the Stephen King thing, and that was horror. I had never gone into the horror genre before. I said, "OK, I'll try this," and went down that path and there was a lot of discovery in it, and I ended up quite enjoying it. So, at this point in my career I've been lucky. I've worked with Stephen King, Liane Moriarty with Big Little Lies, Scott Turow has always been one of my favorites with Presumed Innocent, Tom Wolfe with Man in Full. So that's pretty cool when you get these kinds of authors trusting you with their babies.
How much collaboration do you do with them?
Well, Tom Wolfe was unavailable. (Laughs.) I was probably the most daunted with Stephen King because, you know, it's Stephen King, and, there are things that he writes that logistically and from a production standpoint are going to be hard to do, so I knew I was going to have to make changes. And oh man, he may make me a victim in his next book! But he blessed everything. He says he loved it. I think he even said that Mr. Mercedes was one of his favorite adaptations, because I knew he hated The Shining.
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What about Scott Turow with ?
Scott Turow's the same with Presumed Innocent. Again, I loved that book. I also loved the movie. I was daunted. This has been done well twice — in book form and in movie form — and I didn't want to be the one to screw it up. The series offered an opportunity to dig deeper into characters, especially the ancillary characters, so I was really excited about that opportunity and it was the love for the characters that that made me dive in. And Scott Turow said OK. He understood the difference in the process. A book is a book, a television series is a series. It was my baby, it's now it's your baby.
You've been on a run of limited series; would you ever go back to continuing drama again?
I do enjoy the limited series, but right now I'm beginning to miss series again. I tend to mourn characters when series are over. You live with them for a year or two years, and they become a little too real, and then when they're gone, it's sad. Big Little Lies, I still miss them. With series television, you live with the characters for longer. Also, you're really building a community. I am looking to do less amount of projects and get back to a series where it can go on for a long time and maybe we can get that community that I missed back. There was real currency in it. The studios now are looking for shows that aren't going to be over and done with in one, two, or three years, and I think that's going to be good for the consumer. And I look forward to it as a writer too because when, again, when you spend so much time working with these characters, they tend to become real, they tend to become like your family, and you want to hold on to them. But not the Mr. Mercedes family. I was happy to say goodbye to that family.
Is there any other family in your library you would revisit for a reunion or a revival?
I'm not a reboot kind of guy. I feel I've done that once, and I'm not opposed to someone else taking something I've done if they've got a new idea on it. But I feel it I just want to go forwards not backwards if I can.
And do you still write longhand?
I do, although my hand sort of runs out of gas now. (Laughs.) I actually do believe that there is a hand-brain connection. Because when I try to dictate or type, the brain doesn't fire as well as when I write with my hand. You heard it here.
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