As Shortland Street’s 18th birthday episode rolled credits on TV2, four people who’d worked on it at various times braved a wet and windy Tuesday evening to talk about writing for TV. Christina Milligan MCed writer Rachel Lang, development executive Jo Johnson and director Mark Beesley through the Writers Room discussion.
Following a clip of the season 5 finale of Outrageous Fortune (and still not revealing who got shot) South Pacific Pictures’ Jo Johnson got the ball rolling with a description of the commissioning process at SPP, which includes accepting unsolicited ideas (of which the company receives up to 300 a year), books sent by publishers as possible adaptation material, invitations from SPP to writers for original ideas or responses to a brief when something, say a newspaper article, has sparked an idea.
