Presenting: Arts Educators Save the World with Guest Craig Thomas

Summary

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Podcast Summary: How We Made Your Mother x Arts Educators Save the World

Episode Title: Presenting: Arts Educators Save the World with Guest Craig Thomas
Air Date: August 29, 2025
Host: Josh Radnor, Craig Thomas (guesting on Arts Educators Save the World with Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson and Alec Le)
Special Guest: Rob Greenberg (writer, director, mentor)
Topic: Mentorship, Showrunning, and the Art of Collaborative Creation in TV

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Overview

In this heartwarming and insightful crossover episode, “How We Made Your Mother” shares an installment of Arts Educators Save the World. Series co-creator Craig Thomas appears alongside his mentor, veteran TV writer/director Rob Greenberg (Frasier, HIMYM). The conversation, moderated by Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson and co-producer Alec Le, delves into the rarely-taught, often-murky world of showrunning—what it is, how one learns it, and how mentorship can shape an artist’s voice. They explore the balance between creativity and collaboration, the navigation of executive “notes”, and the personal risks and rewards of pouring one’s own life into a work of art.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Does It Mean to Be a Showrunner?

[09:34] Craig Thomas:

• Describes the leap from writer to showrunner as “impossible” and “the hardest thing to learn as you go.”
• Emphasizes the sudden transition: from “introverted, neurotic, crazy, unpresentable people” to being both “the schoolteacher of a schoolroom full of writers” and the “public face and business people of the show.”
• “You have no idea what you're doing. And no one teaches you how to make the jump from writing...to running this huge business operation that has this public facing side.”

2. Mentorship in Action: Rob Greenberg’s Role

[12:09] Rob Greenberg:

• Initially hesitant to take on the mentor role, but saw Craig and co-creator Carter Bays’ script as “super talented.”
• Rob’s role: “Make sure that it doesn't get lost. That was it.” ([16:30])

[13:40] Craig Thomas:

• Details the early “meet cute” with Rob at a Brentwood coffee shop, where Rob was “the adult” to their “embryos.”
• Praises Rob’s ability to “see the heart and structural aspects of the script.”

Craig Thomas: “You were one of the earliest believers in How I Met Your Mother... you loved the emotional and storytelling structural aspects of the script as much or more than the jokes.” [14:12]

3. Notes, Networks, and Going Down Swinging

[17:36] Craig Thomas:

• Shares the struggle to maintain the unique voice and format of HIMYM amidst overwhelming feedback—some well-intentioned, some “infused with panic.”
• Memorable Mantra from Rob: “No one is ever going to apologize to you if you make your pilot more mediocre and more expected... and then it sucks and it doesn't get on TV... You have to go down swinging, that this is your vision, this is your voice, this is your thing. And hold onto that like...gold.” ([17:36])

[20:10] Rob Greenberg:
“I basically taught them the correct way to fail. That was my job.”

[21:19] Rob Greenberg:
Recalls urging Craig and Carter not to overwrite the emotional rooftop scene in episode two with forced jokes—“Go down swinging.” This set the tone for the creative integrity of the show.

4. Learning to Filter & Deliver Notes

[28:38] Craig Thomas:

• A core skill is “curate what's a good note from a bad note,” whether they come from executives or writers.
• Rob taught the importance of “civility and lack of ego”—to thank and credit good notes, but also to know when to politely deflect those that would water down the show’s vision.

[30:40] Rob Greenberg:

• Notes come in all forms: “some great notes... some bad notes... and some...it doesn't matter.”
• “Often they'll give a note, and what they're saying isn’t what they mean. You often try to find what's the note underneath the note.”

Rob Greenberg: “If you don't feel like you have to take the bad ones, notes aren't so scary.” [30:40]

5. Showrunning vs. Writing: Leadership, Tone, and Teaching

[34:32] Craig Thomas / Rob Greenberg:

• The showrunner as teacher: not only collecting and curating ideas, but explaining the “why” behind creative choices.
• “It's not a writer skill. It's a showrunner skill.” ([34:32])

[36:12] Craig Thomas:

• Grappling with imposter syndrome and subjective “rightness” in choices—what makes something “work” or not.
• The importance of clarity about the show’s target: “That's your job, to respectfully explain... It's not that you're right; it's just the tone you're going for. It's more abstract than that.”

6. The Value of Storytelling: Reportability, Credibility, and Emotional Truth

[39:53] Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson:
Introduces the concept of “reportability” (uniqueness) and “credibility” (believability within a genre), noting it’s the showrunner’s job to balance both.

[39:53] Craig Thomas:

• Embraces these dual aims as HIMYM’s defining features: a playful, unique narrative style yet grounded in characters you believe and care about.
• On set culture: “The reality line and the fiction line blurred for years in this wonderful way... When HIMYM ended, I felt like friends were leaving me.” ([39:53])

Rob Greenberg: “Your job is to hold onto the heart and give away the leaves freely.” [43:06]

7. Mentoring into the Future & Mining Personal Life for Art

[44:24] Craig Thomas:

• Shifted into prose writing, applying the same mentorship and creative rigor to new forms.
• The lesson: always return to “what is the heart of what I'm trying to do here?”

[46:27] Craig Thomas:

• Urges young writers to be “unafraid to dig into the messiest parts of your own life... Let's talk about the feeling of losing a parent... and we will write a script that hopefully feels like that.”
• A humorous but earnestly-felt addendum: “But again, tell the people in your life before you steal all those details and put it on national TV.” ([47:55])

[49:18] Craig Thomas:

• When real-life hardships intersected with showrunning, Rob’s support to “find a way to put it on the show” was invaluable.

Craig Thomas: “Even the incredibly hard things you're going through, you can use that... You're writing a comedy and living a drama right now, and that's okay.” [49:18]

[50:53] Rob Greenberg:

• “I also feel, the best comedy—if you don't cry in a comedy, it's not a great comedy. So I like a tearful comedy.”
• Deep mutual respect and friendship between mentor and mentee shines throughout.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Craig Thomas:

  • “You have to go down swinging, that this is your vision, this is your voice, this is your thing. And hold onto that like...gold.” ([17:36])
  • “I just know what I want this show to feel like... I can't even fully explain to you exactly why I'm not putting that joke in, but I'm going to try.” ([36:12])

• Rob Greenberg:

  • “Notes aren't so scary. If you don't feel like you have to take the bad ones.” ([30:40])
  • “Hold on to the heart and give away the leaves freely.” (artichoke system, [43:06])
  • “The best comedy—if you don’t cry in a comedy, it’s not a great comedy.” ([50:53])

• Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson:

  • “Classroom as writers room”—a call for dynamic collaboration in educational spaces ([54:15])

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Important Timestamps

• [09:34]: Craig defines showrunning and details the “plunge” into the unknown.
• [14:06]: The “meet cute” coffee shop moment of mentorship.
• [17:36]: Rob’s mantra: “Go down swinging.”
• [21:19]: The emotional rooftop scene and first major test of creative integrity.
• [28:38]: Filtering and responding to notes.
• [34:32]: Showrunner as teacher and tone-setter.
• [39:53]: On “reportability” and “credibility” in storytelling.
• [43:06]: “Artichoke system” for defending what matters in your work.
• [46:27]: Mining autobiography for meaningful, relatable writing.
• [49:18]: Living real-life struggles and infusing them into the show.

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Takeaways for Listeners & Educators

• The best mentorship is not prescriptive, but supportive and protective of a creator’s unique vision.
• True leadership in art involves transparency, empathy, and collaborative spirit—not dictating, but guiding, teaching, defending, and reflecting.
• Navigating “notes” is a fine art—distinguish what serves the work, let go of the rest, and always root decisions in the core purpose (“the heart of the artichoke”).
• Sharing one’s own vulnerabilities and stories brings authenticity to the work—and invites others in the creative space to do the same.
• The writers’ room, like a great classroom, thrives on respectful, collaborative critique, where everyone seeks to serve the larger vision rather than ego or external expectations.

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Final Reflections

The episode beautifully weaves the world of sitcom creation with broader truths about teaching, learning, and collaboration. Craig Thomas and Rob Greenberg’s mentorship journey becomes a lens for anyone fostering creative voices: don’t be afraid to fail being yourself, be generous in collaboration, and always honor the stories that only you can tell.

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For Further Listening/Information

• Arts Educators Save the World (available wherever podcasts are found)
• Show notes and resources: artseducatorspodcast.com
• More HIMYM reflections on “How We Made Your Mother”

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Transcript

[Craig Thomas]

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[Alec Le]

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[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

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[Alec Le]

See mintmobile.com welcome back to your how we MADE your mother podcast feed. Today we're presenting an appearance by our own Craig Thomas on a podcast called Arts Educators Save the World, where successful artists sit in conversation with their mentors to talk about the importance of art, arts education and mentorship. I produced this podcast with my lifelong friend Erica, and last week we brought you an episode with Josh Radner and his teacher from nyu. This week we got Craig with Rob Greenberg, an experienced writer and showrunner who helped Craig and Carr during the early years of him and beyond. If you enjoy these episodes, please check out Arts Educators Save the World, where guests have included Lin Manuel Miranda, Annalee Ashford, Cecily Strong, Bradley Whitford, Jonathan Groff, Billy Eichner, and many, many more. Enjoy.

[Craig Thomas]

Writers often get asked, how do you learn how to do that job? Or how do you learn how to be a showrunner? What's interesting about this podcast in general is exploring the different ways that people learn and are mentored. Such a huge part of what Rob did for us and what I try to do to younger writers now is just telling them they're not crazy. Just being reassured you're not crazy for the weird, unique, specific thing you want to do, that the thing you think is special about the thing you've created is worth holding onto.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

This is Arts Educators Save the World, where successful artists and their mentors talk about how arts education transformed their lives. Hey. Hey Alec. Hey everyone. Welcome back to Arts Educators Save the World, a podcast where successful artists and their mentors talk about the impact that arts education has had on both of their lives. I'm really excited to be sharing this with you today. We are going to hear from two folks who do something artistically that I know nothing about, which is the art of the showrunner. If you don't know what a showrunner is, be excited to hear from two of television's most successful showrunners, Craig Thomas and Rob Greenberg. I got a chance to hear about how people learn to do an art form that you don't pick up in formal education. So these two folks were mentor mentee within not only an adult context, but in a professional context. Rob has been Craig's professional mentor around the art of showrunning when he launched his hit television series How I Met yout Mother in the early mid 2000s.

[Craig Thomas]

Yes, indeed.

[Alec Le]

Yes. Showrunning is one where until you're just right there, seeing is a mystery. I mean, the short answer, as you'll see, is it's running the whole show. You are the last word of what does go on the screen. And so that involves interacting with more than a hundred people, much more than a hundred people with no experience prior to doing it. It's like you could run for president and you could say all the things in the world that you've done that make you a good candidate for president, but there's nothing like being president. And it's the same thing here. So Craig and I, this would be, this is, I would say, my most personal episode here. Craig and I are. He's one of my best friends. We went to school together at Wesleyan. We were housemates and roommates for three or four years, English majors. Then he went off and created How I Met yout Mother without me. I didn't. That part I wasn't involved in. I did, I did get to work for the show for a while. And yeah, this is a great example of how mentorship never ends. I'd say that's the real takeaway for this one, is that, okay, you run a major network television show and 10 million people watch it, but you, the human that has to do that, or in this case, Craig and his co creator partner, Carter Bayes. Sure, they're doing it, but they still need to learn stuff as they're doing it. And so we're gonna get to hear about him learning it from the great Rob Greenberg.

[Rob Greenberg]

This week.

[Alec Le]

I'm gonna start us off here because I am bringing in a friend of mine for many, many years. Craig Thomas is a writer and producer and the co creator of the beloved TV show How I Met yout Mother. As a graduate of Wesleyan University, he follows in the grand tradition of some of our past guests, including Lin Manuel Miranda and Ted Mosby. And we have another great special Wesleyan Guest, coming up soon. More on that later. After graduation, Craig and his writing partner Carter Bayes went on to write for the Late show with David Letterman and then wrote for the half hour shows Oliver Bean and American dad and others, before eventually creating How I Met yout Mother, which ran for, Correct Me if I'm wrong, 208 episodes on CBS from 2005 to 2014.

[Craig Thomas]

Correct.

[Alec Le]

Correct. I am correct. He's recently been publishing prose which we will link to in the show notes. And Craig, as a musician and songwriter, has also written for Sesame street. And I think we can just end it there. But it was back in 2005 at the start of How I Met yout Mother, known to many as Himyim. If you hear that come out of our mouths where Rob will enter our story. We'll talk about him in just a moment. But Craig, I wonder, first of all, hi, welcome to the show.

[Craig Thomas]

Craig, hi, thanks for having me. And soon us, because Rob will speak at some point too.

[Alec Le]

Yeah. So Craig, if you could introduce Rob to us, who have you brought with you today?

[Craig Thomas]

I have brought my dear and beloved friend and mentor to me in 2005 and continually mentoring and making my life smarter and better every time I talk to him. Rob Greenberg, who is a phenomenal writer and director and was at the time of How I Met yout mother's launch in 2005, considered the adult as compared to me and Carter Bayes, the co creator of How I Met yout Mother, who were, I think, eight years old when we launched that show. Yeah. And so Rob would help us cross the street. He bought us beer. We drank our first beers with Rob. He was our older, wiser, not that much older. Not that much older, but definitely wiser mentor who'd been around the block a few times. He had written for Frasier for many years. He had made a bunch of pilots at CBS with a network that How I Met yout Mother was at. And he just looked and seemed like a real, actual adult as opposed to the mischievous kids visiting Willy Wonka's factory that Carter and I were. I saw a picture of us recently from that time and I can't blame the studio and the network for not trusting a multimillion dollar enterprise to the embryos in that photo I saw. And so Rob was just a wonderful mentor he is a fantastic writer, fantastic director. He has created his own shows. He has directed big movies. He is just someone that I've always looked up to and was pivotal as a mentor and support system in launching the biggest hit I'll ever have, which is how I met your mother. It's a pleasure to welcome him here. Hi, Rob. I'll welcome you to the show. Hi.

[Rob Greenberg]

It's a pleasure to be here.

[Craig Thomas]

Now you say something.

[Rob Greenberg]

I think you were 8 and I.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Was 107 when we met, because ages converge over time.

[Craig Thomas]

That's what happens.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

So now you're both going in the other direction.

[Craig Thomas]

That's just science.

[Rob Greenberg]

Craig is now five years older than I.

[Alec Le]

All right, so I'm going to frame this for us here. Erica's book, how the Arts Can Save Education is about many things, but one is that classroom teaching techniques don't need to be siloed away from the rest of the world, that teachers can use methods of sharing knowledge and skills in ways that other people do as well. And specifically, she points to the arts and the way artists collaborate through improvisation, through trial and error, and through play. This is a great way to teach not just art, but math and science and everything else. So the way we're looking at this, I'm looking at this is that obviously making a television show is a highly collaborative, a constantly collaborative art form. And, Craig, when you and Carter sold the show, you hadn't run a show before, and so Rob was brought in to mentor you kids in the arts.

[Craig Thomas]

Yeah.

[Alec Le]

So I'm kind of thinking about this as showrunner school. Craig attended showrunner school under Rob's mentorship. So let's start with this just so we can kind of set the stage as we connect what went on between the two of you as mentor and Craig. So in my attempt to relate what goes on at a big Hollywood studio to what teachers can do in their classroom, let's start off with this. Craig, what is a showrunner?

[Craig Thomas]

Here's what a showrunner is. And no one teaches you this. And it's impossible. It's the hardest thing to learn as you go. And Rob was this wonderful voice of kind of taking me through it and reducing the panic involved, desperately climbing up that learning curve. We were 29, Carter and I, when we wrote How I Met yout Mother. And by the way, everything I'm going to say about Rob and mentorship and learning to be a showrunner, I know that Carter would second all of it, especially the loving Rob Greenberg parts a showrunner is you write a Script maybe you're lucky enough to have been a writer on a couple of shows. I had mostly written for late night shows, or one in particular, Late show with David Letterman. When we wrote the pilot for How I Met yout Mother, I had never even been on staff really for a multi camera sitcom show. Briefly for one second on this incredibly forgettable show. But I'd written on this animated show, American Dad. Basically we were writing our first real live action multi camera comedy show and then became showrunners. So you go from being writers that are introverted, neurotic, crazy, unpresentable people. We should not be presented to the world. We hide away in our caves. And then there's this thing, you become that as a showrunner, all of a sudden you're not just a writer, you are the schoolteacher of a schoolroom full of writers. So all of a sudden you're teaching a staff full of writers how to write your show while also being kind of the public face and the business people of the show. You're pitching to the network, you're pitching to the studio. You're trying to present yourself as this competent force of keeping this multimillion dollar operation together, when in fact you have no idea what you're doing. And no one teaches you how to make the jump from writing, sitting at a computer, writing in your little golem cave, to then stepping out into the world where you're running this huge business operation that has this public facing side and that has this very pitchy presentational and budgetary side and line producers that tell you you're over budget and you go, what's a budget? I just write ideas on the page and then they sort of get shot by someone somewhere. We really had a genuinely huge learning curve there to go from writers on a staff to being showrunners and Rob, his job. And it was not suggested by us. It was suggested by the very nervous studio and the very nervous network who knew how green we were. They said, what about we pair you with somebody that can help you stay calm and stay focused, take some of the workload off and tell you what to worry about and what not to worry about. And that's where Rob stepped in.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Rob, was this your first time mentoring a showrunner team when you worked with Craig?

[Rob Greenberg]

That is a great question. I'm not sure. It probably was, or maybe I had done it once before. I was offered this many times and I often didn't like the script. It was clearly when I read this that these guys were super talented. So it made my Job? Very.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

And how does that come to be? Maybe in this case I'll just say, how did this come to be? How did it come to be that you were put into this role or you agreed to take on this role?

[Rob Greenberg]

Craig, do you remember how that happened? I don't remember. Someone said, hey, are you interested in me and these guys? They have a great script.

[Craig Thomas]

And first of all, I'm glad it meant so much to you that it stuck in your head so indelibly. You're like, did I work on that one?

[Alec Le]

Yeah.

[Craig Thomas]

Did I help out for a sec on how I met your mother?

[Rob Greenberg]

I know, I've seen the show.

[Craig Thomas]

I should say Rob remained a consulting producer on the show for its entire run and is the only other director essentially who directed episodes of foundimet yout Mother, save for a couple of other little bits and bops of other people popping in. But he directed a bunch of them too. Rob was very involved, despite forgetting our How I met story, which just seems like sacrilege in this particular conversation.

[Rob Greenberg]

I remember the coffee shop. I remember meeting you gentlemen very clearly.

[Craig Thomas]

It was a coffee shop. I know you do. It was our meet Cute. It was the inciting incident of our rom com. But Rob, I feel like the Studio liked you 20th and you had done a couple pilots with the folks at CBS and they loved you. I don't know. I don't remember who suggested it, 20th or CBS, but somehow your name came along. I will say this. We did meet a couple of other people. We went on a couple other first dates. Rob, did you know that?

[Rob Greenberg]

Now I hear. Now it comes out. Now it comes out.

[Craig Thomas]

This is how you find out. I want to say we probably met with like four or five other people and did not click with any one of them as much as we did you. I guess we never told you this. I feel very awkward about it coming out like this while it's being recorded. Exactly.

[Rob Greenberg]

You're forgiven.

[Craig Thomas]

Carter and I went to a coffee shop in Brentwood. I think. I think you made us come somewhere near where you lived because you were the grown up when we were the kids and we just.

[Rob Greenberg]

That sounds right.

[Craig Thomas]

We listened to our elders and we met you. And I remember just loving you immediately. Everything you said about the script was what we hoped the script would make someone feel. And you, you loved the emotional and storytelling structural aspects of the script as much or more than the jokes. You said the jokes can come. You can add jokes, you can always add jokes, but the bones of. Of what the heart of the story is and the bones of the structure. Like you saw that in our script and that meant the world to me. You were one of the earliest believers in How I Met your Mother.

[Rob Greenberg]

Full disclosure, I had read three other How I Met yout Mothers, but I picked yours.

[Craig Thomas]

We got there first. Look, we moved the fastest. There's a lot of lawsuits. There's a lot still a lot of litigation happening around that.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

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[Rob Greenberg]

One of the things about being comedy writers, you help your friends even when you're competing for the same slots. And often you work on other people's pilots and you help punch up and you're doing whatever you can to help and they take it or leave it. But what I've seen over the years, our pilots get lost. There are so many notes coming at you from other writers, from the executives, from the studio. You get a barrage of notes. And I've seen over and over again people try to please everyone, try to Frankenstein all these notes together. And a pilot that started great does not only not get better, but it becomes something other than that, but what's great about it gets lost. And so I felt like my job was this pilot was great. These guys are talented. Make sure that it doesn't get lost. That was it.

[Craig Thomas]

But saying that was it, that's everything. That's everything.

[Alec Le]

Erica, so many bells are ringing about things that we have talked about. And if we're looking at this as a teacher student type of relationship that it goes along with so much, I mean, Rob, what Erica has written about, what we've been talking about, the difference between my image of the strawman teacher, who we're, who we're knocking down here all the time, is you, the teacher, know Things you want the students to repeat them back. And by the way, they're probably never going to use them in their lives. All the way to the other end of the spectrum of we are all here kind of collaborating and learning together. And it's my job as a teacher not to give you, but to find in you something and help you to bring that out. And that's what I'm hearing here that Craig was looking for and what Rob was able to do.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Can you give an example of a time that the three of you had a challenge, had an issue, had an aha in working together, where the work was changed as a result of an interaction that the three of you had?

[Craig Thomas]

100% what I always think about Rob, and I always have. I hope Rob's not embarrassed being here with me. Calling him a mentor. It seems like the kind of thing that would make him want to leave the interview. Maybe if you get too embarrassed and find it cringy, you are correct. He's staying, though. He's not storming off. I see him. Rob's mantra and I carried it through all nine seasons, but it meant the most when we were just a pilot. Because keep in mind, when you're writing a pilot, you're one of like, 40 pilots the network bought that year. And then out of those 40 pilots, they maybe shoot 10 of them, and then maybe they pick up two or three of them. So the odds are very much against you. And so at each point, when we kept getting to the next level of the video game, we were in disbelief. And finally, when it got picked up to go be a TV show, it was absolutely shocking. We had to be the darkest horse of that race because we were nobody and we were so young. Was our first pilot. And Rob, from day one, said, because you'd get these notes, and some of the notes are infused with some panic, I think, from the network in the studio. The notes are infused with this thing of, like, let's make it a little less different, let's make it a little less strange. This is for cbs. You're trying to get on CBS sandwiched between King of Queens and Two and a Half Men, and you're writing all this ooey, gooey romance stuff. You're shooting 83 scenes in, like, 22 minutes. You're jumping around with structure and time. It's narrated from the future about now. Everything about our show was weird for that network. And when we would get notes, wanting to sand down what was unique about it, Rob would say to me and Carter, and he Would come into our office and close the door and he'd go, no one is ever going to apologize to you. If you make your pilot more mediocre and more expected and traditional and then it sucks and it doesn't get on tv, you're not going to get a nice handwritten apology from the network or the studio saying, hey, sorry, that's on us. We over noted you. We toned down what was special and now it's kind of nothing. It's like everything else. And we're going to go with this other thing with a bigger star attached. And Rob said, you'll never get that. You have to go down swinging, that this is your vision, this is your voice, this is your thing. And hold onto that like it is gold, like it is the most precious thing in the world. And fail with that. Don't fail with the watered down version. Fail with the version you know, that you could do 200 episodes of if you're lucky enough to sneak this thing past the goalies. And I thought of that daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, for nine seasons. And Rob was there for all of those nine seasons to keep reminding us.

[Rob Greenberg]

I basically taught them the correct way to fail. That was my job.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Rob, can you say what the better way to fail is?

[Rob Greenberg]

Look, these guys were super talented. It was clear the script was great. So I just encouraged them to trust that and go down swinging. Go do the show you want to do. Go as big as you can go and not worry about the result. But Craig said that was my mantra. And look, if they were less talented, the show was less good. I may have had a different mantra, but you could tell that they knew what they were doing and the show was. That doesn't mean it would succeed. It doesn't mean it would get on the air. But the show was special. So it was really make your show. Make the show you have in your head. And my job was to try to keep the other noise away.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Were there times I might use the wrong language? So forgive me, but when the studio or when the producers said to you, rob, listen, go fix this.

[Craig Thomas]

I don't wanna know the answer to this. Erica.

[Rob Greenberg]

No, I never got pulled aside. I heard the same notes they heard.

[Craig Thomas]

You swear that's true.

[Rob Greenberg]

I do swear that's true.

[Craig Thomas]

Are you just being nice to me?

[Rob Greenberg]

I have zero memory of anything. But that is my memory. I remember in episode. I believe it was episode two, you guys had some scene on the roof with Robin and Ted, and it was kind of a sweet scene and it was kind of an emotional scene. And at the end of it, everyone converged. You got to put jokes in it. Da, da, da, da, da. And I remember very clearly pulling you guys aside and saying, this scene's great. Don't listen to it. Anybody else go down swinging. And I think that was a turning point in our relationship as well. Cause I think you guys did it, and I think it changed things.

[Craig Thomas]

We did do it, and we kept doing it.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Were there other aspects of showrunning other than writing, where Craig, you felt like Rob mentored you, showed you the way toward being successful at that gig?

[Craig Thomas]

Yeah, a whole bunch of different ways. It's funny. Writers often get asked, how do you learn how to do that job? Or how do you learn how to be a showrunner? And I think what's interesting about this podcast in general is exploring the different ways that people learn and are mentored. And I would say such a huge part of what Rob did for us and what I try to do to younger writers now is just telling them they're not crazy. Just being reassured you're not crazy for the weird, unique, specific thing you want to do, that the thing you think is special about the thing you've created is worth holding onto to. Your question, Erica, off of what Rob just said about episode two, jump ahead, flash forward in How I Met yout Mother Speak. Right. We always played with structure. So I'll flash forward and jump ahead in the timeline to the end of season one. We had this really emotional season one ending where Ted gets the girl. He finally wins over Robin and comes home to find Marshall, his best friend, sitting on their front stoop in the rain. And Marshall holds up his returned engagement ring. Lily has returned and called out the engagement ring. Returned the ring. And it is the lowest point of Marshall's life. He's crying in the rain on his front steps, right? His Ted is sort of bringing this victory of getting the girl. He's coming home the morning after he had this magical night with Robin. And it's really sad. It's really sad. There's like this amazing song playing. It feels like a little indie movie. It did not feel like a CBS show. It did not feel like Camp of Queens. It did not feel like Two and a Half Men after that. We locked the picture on that episode. We got called into a meeting at CBS with the studio and the network. We should have known we were in trouble because all the parents were showing up. And we were told with some alarm that the perception was. And maybe the testing showed that we had made the show too Serialized. The audience feels some focus group testing showed that you have to watch too many episodes in a row. There's these arcs, right? It's like a soap opera. You need to make it less emotional, more standalone, more jokey. It needs to be like these other shows on cbs, and they're just more like a box of candies you can eat anyone at any time. And that was not. In fairness, they were right. That was not the show we were making at all. And we got a stern talking to about, like, hey, we want to see more of that box of chocolates in season two and less of the soap opera. It was a bummer because it was like, we just had finished season one. It's like running to the end of the marathon and you get a cup of water and it's like hydrochloric acid instead of water, and you're sort of like, oh, that was not the victory celebration at the end of the marathon. And we had this kind of turning point where we had to decide if we were going to dramatically change the show and make it more like what the big boss, people giving us tons of money, we're saying it should be. And that is a moment where Rob's advice from the pilot, from throughout season one came in. We decided we're gonna go down swinging with the show we wanna make. And we did not change it up at all in season two. If anything, it was more serialized, it was more emotional. There were more arcs. And what happened was people had caught up to the show over the summer, and we started getting more of an audience. And then years passed. And over those years, the same people that were giving us those notes were like, you know what? It's good that your show has these emotional arcs. It's what's special about your show. And that's great. We've always loved that. Just like we said at the end of season one, more of that. But in those moments when you're being told by a room full of very serious, smart people who hold the key to the money that they're doubting something about your game plan, those are the moments where the words of somebody like Rob and his support and belief in it, that's where mentorship means the world.

[Rob Greenberg]

I would also say I had my own stuff, my own project. So I was not trying to make this mine. I was trying desperately to make it theirs. And I think that was what was helpful. And that's also A lot of very good writers are not good showrunners. Carter and Craig happen to be turned into great showrunners but that often is not the case. You have leadership and you have public speaking, and you have to deal with budgets and in different departments and writers and schedules. And some writers are great writers, but not good at that.

[Alec Le]

Rob, did you have people in your past who functioned as Hollywood mentors, showrunner mentors, writer mentors?

[Rob Greenberg]

That's a good question. I don't think I really did. I mean, I had some people who helped me, like, gave a script to somebody or those kind of things. Oh, I had. I was on Frasier for years, and Chris Lloyd ran it, and he was basically my mentor. He was a spectacular writer. And I basically could not get. I tried to get everything I could out of him. He's a writer's writer, and that's kind of my mentor. But that was already in a. I was on staff. I was his employee, but I would credit him. Hey.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Hey. You know what strikes me as a non a person outside of this art form, and this is not the first time we've heard this, when we've spoken to writers in the more Hollywood style, is this concept of notes and how that. I'll call it an artifact. That artifact serves as kind of the thing around which learning and doing and knowing sort of rotates. And the thing that's really interesting, listening to you all talk is how informal education, A, we try to teach people to critique in ways that are productive for learning, and B, how oftentimes the assessments of what people learn can be at odds with how innovative teachers want learners to be engaged with their process and their product. This concept of how you respond to notes, not as the be all, end all of what the judgment of the quality of your work is, but rather, how do you learn to respond to notes in a way that allows you to keep the artistic integrity of what you do.

[Craig Thomas]

Yeah.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Seems to me a really important part of Craig, what you got out of working with Rob. And Rob, what you do when you engage with other teams of writers.

[Craig Thomas]

Yeah. There are so many notes, because you're getting notes on the verbal pitch of the story and then the outline of what you think the story's gonna be, and then a draft of the script and another draft of the script and a table read and a rehearsal. You have to get good at hearing notes and taking notes. And I think another thing Rob taught me is if it's a good note, tell them it's a good note. Tell them why you think it's a smart note, and do it. And don't get defensive. There's kind of this cliche like writers just get their hackles up and you're just sort of reflexively defending against notes and then you put up this wall that keeps out the good ones too. These are smart people. I know I just said that whole story about at the end of season one. There were some doubts and whatever, but there's a lot of money involved and there's people trying to sort of put science onto art, and that's hard. These same people also were really smart. There were really smart executives @ CBS and 20th who gave us really good ideas. And you have to sort of, sometimes you have to take the hit and go, they're right about this thing. They're right about something that's wrong with what I wrote. If you can kind of, yes, end and play the improv game to the note, you can make the script a lot better. And then you can, the next day after you do that rewrite, till two in the morning when you are at the run through and the script's better, you say to that executive, thanks, that was a really good note. That was smart. I think the civility and sort of like lack of ego of that is something that Rob taught me too defend against notes that are going to rip apart what's important to you about this script. Don't do those. Say no in a nice way or just don't say no. Say we're going to take a look at that, then rewrite it for two days and hope that they forgot about that one. But if it's a good one, don't be an egomaniac that you can't take a good note. Everybody there is trying to make something better. The intent is for it to be a success and to be a good show. Your job is to curate what's a good note from a bad note. It takes a lot of putting your ego off to the side. Rob was very, very good at that, and Rob was very good at talking to the network in the studio, very good at pitching, and very good at telling us what we should worry about and what we should forget about.

[Rob Greenberg]

With notes, you get a lot of notes. There's some great notes and you take them, there's some bad notes and you ignore them. And then there's some notes like, you know, he's drinking coffee, can he drink tea? And it's like, it doesn't matter. So, yeah, give them that note because they are your collaborative partners. So if it's a lateral move and it makes them happy, maybe you give it to them to keep the, keep the relationship alive and Just don't do the bad ones. And often they'll give a note, and what they're saying isn't what they mean. You often try to find what's the note underneath the note, what are they missing in a deeper sense? And that's the note you address rather than whatever their fix might be. So if you don't take the bad ones, notes aren't so scary. If you don't feel like you have to take the bad ones.

[Craig Thomas]

A weird sort of offshoot of this and another lesson that Rob taught me, that I feel like no one tells you this as a showrunner. And hopefully this will not only compliment Rob, but be not the thing you hear a billion times from writers. Sometimes you also need to defend against stuff coming at you from the writer's room. If you're in a writer's room doing a TV show, people will want to pitch jokes that are not right for the show. They're funny and they get laughs in the room. But there's something that you as a showrunner know. You're sort of like the conductor of this orchestra, and you're just like, that was a wrong note. I can't tell you why that was a wrong note. But something about that was just either it's a little bit inappropriate or it throws the character under the bus in some way. It's funny in theory, but it hurts the character, it hurts the story, or takes you emotionally out of, like, what you're trying to get out of that particular episode. And so Rob would often say to me, like, send the writers home early, man. Get all the jokes from the writers, get them written down, keep a log of them all, then send them home and finish the rewrite, just you, the showrunner, and the writer, maybe one other person, and calmly and quietly do that in a room that is not full of people. Like, throwing shit at the ceiling to see if it sticks, or like having, like, chair races around the office or seeing who can eat the most wasabi without vomiting or whatever's happening in writer's room. And just quietly and calmly go through the script and say at each moment, what's the best thing to do for this script and this moment? And sometimes some of the hilarious jokes even the writers are throwing out actually aren't right. This is me defending why how much yout Mother was not that funny. I just cut all the jokes. But it actually was not dissimilar from what Rob was telling us about. Notes from above, notes from executives, notes from the money people. Sometimes you have to take a moment to take a deep breath, get in a quiet room and decide what's best for the story you want to tell.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

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[Craig Thomas]

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[Rob Greenberg]

I would also say like an executive, the writer pitches something that, you know it's basically a lateral move to what you already have, and it's good, but you already have. Sometimes you give it to them anyway because it's a dance. You want to invest the writers and make them feel like they're contributing, but you also want to protect the script and the story. But you want them to be invested. You want them to keep pitching. If you never take their pitches, then you lose the writer. So again, that's a showrunner skill and.

[Craig Thomas]

Not a writer skill. Yeah, and a showrunner is kind of like a teacher. It is almost like a little classroom. And sometimes it is good to tell sometimes the room why you didn't take that joke or why that idea for the story didn't feel right to you. So you can say like, I know it's funny, but there's something else I want to set up or accomplish here for the character that it kind of undercuts or undermines. You're sort of teaching this room full of people the tone you want to go for. So you're trying to be a teacher yourself while also figuring it out and feeling very much like a student. Weird job.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

But I also love, Craig, that you identify the concept of being a teacher as about that meta reflection process, which I don't think all education spaces see it that way. The way that we communicate effectively with folks about what matters in our discipline is by explaining not only what they should do, but by saying, here's why we're making this choice. Or here's why we're not making this choice, despite the fact that that choice has some features that you might recognize as belonging in this space. Right. I mean, an equivalent in mathematics. When you get to higher, more sophisticated levels of mathematics, there's lots of different ways to set up and solve a particular problem.

[Craig Thomas]

Yeah.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

And a good math teacher will communicate to students not just like, that's the right answer or that's the wrong answer, but they'll say, ah, I see why you made this choice. It is true that that choice will allow you to get to this place, but here's why we're gonna make this different choice.

[Craig Thomas]

I so relate to that. Because the weirdest thing about the job of showrunner is who gets to be right. And are me and Carter right? Cause we created the show. Is the network in the studio? Are they right? Because they're putting millions and millions of dollars into it so they get to be right. Are the writers right? Cause the writers want to be right instead of the network. Don't listen to the network. Let's do this hilarious joke that's like super dirty or whatever it is. Who's right? So write loses all meaning. The way I tried to talk to the writers room because I felt you have this imposter syndrome. Right. Because you're like, I don't know anything that much. More than anyone else. I just know what I want this show to feel like. So I'd always try to say, like, here's why I like this one idea and here's why I don't like this other one as much. And I acknowledge that that is subjective. That is my subjective opinion. It might be great on another show. And I can't even fully explain to you exactly why I'm not putting that joke in, but I'm going to try to put it into words and try to steer it this other way. I feel like over time, I got better at that. And I did feel like the writers attuned to that. They feel respected. And if you kind of acknowledge. And this is what's good about the sort of story you told about teaching, it's very respectful to the student or the recipient of that sentiment to say, you're not wrong, you're not wrong. There isn't really a right or wrong. There's just this weird, specific target I'm trying to hit with this show. And someday you should go do your own show. And that's the target everyone will aim at. And you'll try your damnedest to explain to them the Target's over there. It may be small, it may be like high up on a tree in the woods, but that's the target we're aiming at. And that's your job, is to respectfully explain that you're not right. It's just the tone you're going for. It's more abstract than that.

[Rob Greenberg]

And Craig was very good at communicating. And I would also say it's self serving in the best possible way because it's a very hard job to run a show. And you want people learn the show and learn what you're looking for. They make your life easier and you'll get more help. And ultimately that's what you want. You can't do it all on your own. And if you can teach them why this works and why this doesn't work, and we're, we're all moving in the same direction, you'll get better pitches and your show will have more. You'll get more help.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Can I throw a super nerd bomb into the conversation? That's maybe my, my greatest gift as a. As a podcast host is throwing throwing a nerd bomb. One of the things that I'm really interested in is how we communicate complex ideas of what it means to make art, particularly with young people, but with, you know, newcomers of all ages. And I'm a theater maker, so I think a lot about how you get people making theater who've never made theater before. And one of the big driving ideas in narrative theory that inspires me is the concept of a good story as having both what they call reportability and credibility. Right. Where reportability is the thing that makes the story unique, worth telling, and credibility being its quote, unquote, believability, but not believability in terms of. I believe that that happened, but believability in terms of. Right. Capacity to locate it within a genre. I know what this is. I hear a lot in all of your conversations, Rob and Craig, that the balance of reportability and credibility is what the showrunner's job is in many ways. And I just wonder if that resonates with you or if that makes you think of anything.

[Craig Thomas]

Yeah, I really like that way of thinking about storytelling and theater and tv. That's a great way of looking at stories. Reportability and credibility. Reportability feels like what we were trying to have on How I Met yout Mother Was. Maybe someone would watch our TV show on cbs and yes, it would feel a little different and that would be a good thing. It would feel a little bit young for that network it would feel like it was being playful with storytelling and emotionally, tonally, it would feel different. And that was not a bad thing. That was a good thing. That reportability part feels very true. Like, that's the absolute most precious thing to hold onto, because that's you reminding yourself why you wanted to tell the story to begin with. It's how you would pitch the elevator pitch of the story, boil it down to one sentence. You're going to say the reportable part of it, hopefully. And then credibility, I think, is that piece of. That Rob and Pam were so good with the actors about, which was investing them in feeling like these were real human beings and not sacrificing character to joke, not making the process of making a TV show feeling unsafe. And we're constantly singing for our supper and we're going to get canceled. The stage of How I Met yout Mother felt incredibly safe. Other actors, guest actors would come on and they would go, what's happening on this stage? I can't believe how not toxic it feels here. What's in the water over here? Are you guys high? We get that kind of question a lot. The credibility piece, in terms of selling a piece of art that feels like it's its own universe. The pocket we got into with How I Met yout Mother is one in which I think we all felt like these were real people that we really cared about. When How I Met yout Mother ended, I felt like friends were leaving me that I could. I felt, like, heartbroken that these characters. I was going to miss the actors. They're all very nice people. I was really going to miss these characters. That's the moment I realized, like, I've just come to believe in them completely. I completely believe in these. These are real people to me. I cry for them, I laugh with them. And I think that credibility piece, you have to, as a creator of art, sort of delude yourself into thinking these are almost actual real beings. We spent nine years living in that set. The writer's room was right next to the set of I Met yout Mother. I would know it was Christmas in Los Angeles because our set would be decorated for our Christmas episode or our Thanksgiving episode. And you'd go down and you'd, like, have a Christmas party on the set at the bar of How I Met yout Mother. And the reality line and the fiction line blurred for years in this wonderful way that it was like an escape. It was like walking out of time and out of reality into stage 22 on the Fox lot. I really entered into that credibility piece. What you're teaching people to do, the writers, the actors, you're trying to, if it's a teacher aspect, you're trying to teach them what that universe is that we're all going to agree is real. We're going to do this nine year improv game of pretending this is all really happening to us. And if we would be shooting an emotional scene where one of the characters would be crying and like the buff camera guy with like biceps bigger than my entire body would be like wiping away. We really all invested in that credibility piece. And I think that came from the pilot and I think that goes all the way back to Rob saying, just create the universe you want to create. No one's ever going to say sorry for changing it for you. And then it doesn't work. You have to go down swinging with what you want to make.

[Rob Greenberg]

And also, Carter and Craig had a very clear vision of what they wanted to make. It was based on their own lives and they had a vision of the tone and the humor. And again, my job was just say it's a great vision and stick to it and don't get pushed off it. My brother is a dispute negotiator and he talks about something called the artichoke system of negotiation. And it really struck me, he says, your job is to hold on to heart, hold onto the heart and give away the leaves freely. And I feel like that's how you can do all of this stuff. If the actor has an idea that doesn't affect the heart, give it to him freely. If it affects the heart, then you have to to protect the heart. And I think that's the job of the showrunner and director, really.

[Craig Thomas]

That would have been a great thing to say to me years ago when I was really looking at you for advice, but great, I guess I'll take it.

[Alec Le]

Now.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

I did want to ask one final question, which is two parts. One, what are you both working on now? And if you have extended this mentorship capacity in any other ways in more recent projects. So Rob, have you been on other shows where you've been asked to serve in this role? Craig, now that you're older than Rob, are you serving in that capacity?

[Craig Thomas]

I'm actually not doing as much TV these days. We did do a couple of other short lived series and pilots that didn't go forth. It's very hard after the joy that was nine years of getting to do your own show to sort of move out and into back into the wild, back into the wilderness of not Doing that. So I've been writing more prose lately. I'm actually working on my first book, so I've been doing a little more solo stuff. But all of those lessons and in fact, writing this book, which is the biggest thing I've ever written alone, has required all of the same things we've talked about here today, including the reportability and credibility piece and holding onto just what am I really trying to do here? I'm gonna spend months and months trying to create this story. Why? What's most important? What's the thing you can't let go of? What is the thing that makes it worth still doing this? And having that ability to kind of boil down that question as a writer is huge. And I really owe a lot of that to Rob. That way of looking at the heart of the artichoke, I guess for me.

[Rob Greenberg]

I have a bunch of shows that I am doing currently, and some of them I'm also trying to do shows where I help create a show and write the first few and launch it, but hand it off. And that's not so easy to do. I'm trying to do that as well. So in some level, that is some of the same kind of mentorship stuff, but more in the creator part at first.

[Craig Thomas]

It's also not so easy to do.

[Rob Greenberg]

Because you end up sticking with it because you fall in love with it and all that.

[Alec Le]

Well, thank you both so much for joining us today. Craig, I guess if you could. Not that it's your job to pull lessons from this. That's what Erica and I do. But you went through a lot of school. You have now been mentored, and you have acted as this mentor. Can you say what, for you, is the best way that you learned in coming to this new job where you clearly learned. It worked. You did it. Congratulations. It went very well.

[Craig Thomas]

Thank you.

[Alec Le]

But what's the heart of it? What do you need from someone like Rob?

[Craig Thomas]

How I Met yout Mother was very autobiographical, as my wife would tell you when she would watch it on Monday night and go, like, I can't believe you put our argument on national television. That was a piece I never got better at, Rob. You never took me aside and told me that one. You should ask before you take the personal details and put them in front of millions of people. I was just terrible about that the whole time. But that idea of mining your own life to create your art, really being unafraid to dig into the messiest parts of your own life and try to set that tone. If you're teaching A room of writers. You have to be able to dig into your own messiest stuff and put it on the table and go like, this story doesn't make me look good, but I'm going to tell it in the writer's room. I'm going to talk about my breakup, and we're going to put our characters through some hell. And I want everybody in this room to just put it on the table. Just like this will be our therapy session. Let's all just put it out there. Let's talk about the feeling of losing a parent. Let's have a very real, very therapeutic conversation. And we will see what felt true in our conversation and we will write a script that hopefully feels like that. And Rob was a really great voice from minute one. He said, I know the script is you guys, I can see you in it. The Marshall Millie character were me and my wife Rebecca. And Ted was based on Carter. And Rob was always a great voice of like, just hold onto that. That is what it is. And always follow that. That's what I try to do in my writing now, and that's what I try to teach that writing staff to do. I think you can always feel that in writing and TV and art and theater and film, whatever. Like you can always feel when there's stakes because it's exciting. It's like watching a high wire act. You can feel like something's on the line here, someone's putting it out there. But again, tell the people in your life before you steal all those details and put it on national tv. If there's one takeaway from this conversation, please do that.

[Rob Greenberg]

And I would say as a mentor, find two guys who are immensely talented, terrific, lovely people who don't need much help. And that's a great way to go about being a mentor.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

For all the folks listening who are educators in any way. For me, the lesson is start everything with what your kids are bringing into the learning space. It is so difficult in our modern educational ecology to focus on kids assets and gifts. And in part, I think what makes what you do so difficult, Craig, is, is because we unlearn through most of our young life that our stories, our experiences, our lives are relevant and valuable in those public spaces. For all of you who listen, who work with young people who are educators, this is a reminder to always begin with what kids are bringing into your learning space.

[Craig Thomas]

Yeah. If I'm going to add one last thing to that, one other thing that Rob was amazing with was there was a time in the middle of how much yout Mother where Rob was going through something really hard, a health thing that he went through that was really hard. And I was going through something really hard. I became the parent of a child with health differences, learning differences, and it was like, really hard while I was writing this comedy. Right. Your job is to go in and write jokes. And Rob was really the best person for me to talk to in the middle of all that. He had been through some hard things, and I was going through some hard things. They weren't the exact same hard things, but Rob was a wonderful voice of support and saying, take that and find a way to put it on the show. Like, find some of that emotion. And yes, you're feeling a little bit outside of it all right now. Maybe we both are. Maybe we both feel a little outside of the normal flow of life looking in, but there's a way to use that. And also I'm here to talk to you about that stuff. In some way, I feel like that stuff did make it. I Know How I Met yout Mother. Some of those emotions and some of the sort of, like, darker, more nuanced tones of that show, like some of the stuff we were really going through, sort of led to some different emotional terrain on the show. Not literal one to one, apples to apples, but like, it influenced the show. So that idea of just. Even the incredibly hard things you're going through, like, you can use that. And you can also just acknowledge that, yes, you're writing a comedy and living a drama right now, and that's okay. And you're gonna feel that way for a little while. You're gonna feel outside of it, but you'll get through it. And Rob was. I don't know. I just wanted to add that Rob was an amazing voice of that for me in the middle of that show.

[Rob Greenberg]

Well, and you were for me. And you know, Craig is one of my best, dearest friends in the world. So the relationship has grown and that's. Can't ask for more than that. And I also feel the best comedy, if you don't cry in a comedy, it's not a great comedy. So I like a tearful comedy.

[Craig Thomas]

Amen. That's the dream. Who's the better showrunner, me or John Wells? Real quick, just to wrap up.

[Rob Greenberg]

We'Ll go offline.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Craig. It's so nice to get to spend a little time with both of you.

[Rob Greenberg]

Thank you.

[Craig Thomas]

A pleasure. Thank you guys for having us.

[Rob Greenberg]

This has been fantastic. Thank you. What a great thing.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Alec. Two ideas that jumped out at me wearing my arts educator's hat that I wanted to just quickly reflect with you on. The first is the concept of collaboration. And not only how much they talked about collaboration, but how collaboration as an outcome, which is something I talk a lot about in my book, comes through really clearly in the way these folks not only worked with one another, but talked about what it meant to be a good showrunner. So many examples. I loved some of the talk about how when you're getting ideas from writers, from execs, sometimes you take those ideas so that they are contributing positively toward the product, even if you maybe have a better idea or you maybe have a simpler idea, because the collaboration, in some sense, is the point. And that is something I think that schools and formal educational settings could take up really meaningfully in their own practice.

[Craig Thomas]

Absolutely.

[Alec Le]

And in this case, it's sort of both creative and political.

[Craig Thomas]

Right.

[Alec Le]

Because when an executive at a studio or a network is giving you a suggestion, they are your boss, they are paying for your show. They also know that it's your show, and you know the lines are drawn there. But of course, it's a great idea to basically, I think most people in this world, the basic rule is say yes as much as you can, because you're going to say no sometimes, and you're going to have reasons for saying no. And the hope is that the perfect relationship is that an executive is giving you notes with the understanding that you are the best person to decide if that works for your show or not. That's not. I'm saying this very. This is a very positive version of all of this. There's the, you have to do this. No, I don't want to do this. And then you've got a problem on your hands. But in terms of collaboration, I mean, you really have to picture what a writer's room is really like. I mean, these shows that when you watch them, there's a credit at the beginning for writer. But all those other credits, the story editors and various producing credits, everyone's a writer. And they would literally sit in the room of 12 to 15 people writing together, line by line. Someone, you get together, you kind of come up with the idea for the show. Someone goes off and writes a first draft, and then you sit line by line and you have all these great mind just trying to do better, trying to have something funnier or something more interesting or something different. And it is true, true collaboration.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

I love the idea of classroom as writers room. I feel like someday we could try to ask the question of what if you Modeled a classroom after a writer's room. And how would that change the way everyone in the space contributed to not only the collective, but also what would that mean for their own learning?

[Alec Le]

It's also interesting how you say that, because you have to have someone making the final decision. And in this case, Craig was making the final decision. You're sitting around a table. A lot of ideas are being thrown around. And when Craig says, this is the one we're doing, that's the one we're doing. But it has a very different feel from a dictatorial teacher who says, I'm right because I'm the teacher. Listen to me, because these are the rules in this case. I mean, granted, they're all adults, but still, what can be learned from the reason one person is making a decision? Because that's how things get done. Because 15 people can't make a decision. 15 people can contribute, and someone needs to do it, and you want them there. You don't want to just be going in circles. You want someone to say, okay, this is it. Let's move forward.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Ugh. We could talk about this forever, but I want to do one more idea that popped out at me, which we did talk about in the episode with them, but I wanted to circle back to this idea of notes and notes as an artifact around which learning and feedback happens. Again, how much I think that practice. Now, we heard some about how that can be a struggle and a challenge. And as you say, there's politics involved. But the idea that there exists a set of artifacts around which people can discuss the improvement of their own work also seems to me like a practice that classrooms and other learning environments could use to think about how creative work of all kinds doesn't just have to be creative writing, but creative production of all kinds could change over time for learners as they share their work with others.

[Alec Le]

Yeah, notes are a disease. They're an epidemic in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. It's almost hard to hand someone a script or an idea and have them not reply with notes, which is very strange because you can imagine plenty of artists who want other people to see their stuff. And I don't need your. I need you to tell me to make it better. I'm showing it to you because it's a work of art. So that's it. That's all I want from you. But here, it's. It's odd. It's almost odd, but in the context that they're talking about, where they are handing scripts into a studio and a network and getting notes back I would say the learning here to be done is from the classroom, not from the studio side, the business side, that is. Notes are often given without the best understanding of how one might implement this and what the creator's intent was. Right. That's what a good note sees. I see your intent, and let's see how we could all make it better.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Well, and I would say something else I talk about a lot in my book is the importance of an authentic audience for the work that young people produce. One of the reasons for the importance of an authentic audience is because it gives learners, kids, a grounding for why they make the decisions they make. The notes, in some sense, could be, ought to be, maybe sometimes are about the reflection back of how is the audience gonna take this?

[Alec Le]

Right.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

How can we make the intention as clear for the potential audience as possible? And feedback in a learning setting is given for completeness, for correctness, but not for this purpose of saying, here's what I think you're trying to say here. And let me tell you how an audience is going to take that completely.

[Alec Le]

And I should also differentiate, I did a little bit between sort of the official notes like that and. And when any of us who are writing, making movies, anything like that, especially movies, they're such a huge beast. You're not just painting one thing on a piece of paper. There's so many moves to it. And in the movie that I made, I mean, Craig himself, Craig watched the film and then said, you know, I think you should cut the last five minutes. Now, that's a huge comment. The amount of time and money it took to shoot the pieces that went into the end of it. But he was completely right, and I absolutely could not see it myself. He knew what we wanted. He knew what we were going for. He knew what the feeling was without that ending and with it. And he said, it's funny, but I don't think it's doing what you want to do. And what a note. What a sort of shocking note. And I knew it was right the second he said it. There was absolutely no, like, I should look at this. I was like, light switch. And so, yeah, feedback that really sees what you want and helps just from another point of view, another creator's point of view is invaluable.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

That response. No notes. Well done. Perfect.

[Alec Le]

Yeah.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Hey, Alec, as we were talking, I was pondering.

[Alec Le]

Oh, boy.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

A question that I have for you as we wrap up our amazing conversation today with Rob and Craig. Give me three of the best notes that you could possibly imagine getting about your life. Oh, or your work.

[Alec Le]

My work is fine. My life needs notes. Not everything that you wear needs to be blue.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

1.

[Alec Le]

Ice cream is not a meal. 2. I see you disagree with that, but I feel it would be helpful. You know you only live 15 minutes from the beach. Go to the beach.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Three things good notes.

[Alec Le]

No notes to those notes. Also, Erica, what are three things that people can do to interact, to enjoy, to love, to help to support this podcast?

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Oh first of all friends, we are so excited about all the work we're doing and we know you love it and we want more people to love it too. So please go to the platform that you are listening to this podcast on and rate and review our podcast.

[Alec Le]

1.

[Erica Rosenfeld Halvorson]

Send us an email if you have ideas for guests. If you just want to tell us how much you enjoyed learning about showrunning, we would love to hear from you@contactrtseducators podcast.com want to learn more about what we're doing? Want to learn more about some of the guests you've seen? Want to just be part of our community? We have some interesting information available on our website that's www.artseducatorspodcast.com Three Things Onward Together.

[Alec Le]

Arts Educators Save the World is hosted by Erika Rosenfeld Halvorson and produced and co hosted by me, Alec Le. Our executive producer is Doug Matica and our audio producer is Justin Asher. We are also executive produced by the Fantastic group at Story Pirate Studios. Lee Overtree, Benjamin Salka and Amy Fiore. Original music is by Dan Lipton and our artwork is by Lyra Evans. Check out our website designed by Cole Locasio at www.artseducatorspodcast.com. you can follow us on Twitter. Yes, somehow that wasn't taken yet and on Instagram Tseducators Podcast. Write to us with your questions and [e-mail] and wherever you're listening. Please remember to subscribe, rate and review. It really helps the show. We are proud to be sponsored in part by the Wallace foundation, the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Gibb Faculty Fellowship. Arts Educators Save the World was created by Erika Rosenfeld, Halvorson and Alec Led.

[Rob Greenberg]

New season, new chaos in college football.

[Craig Thomas]

Big stage, big opportunity.

[Rob Greenberg]

This Labor Day weekend, wildness lives on ABC, ESPN and the all new ESPN app.

[Craig Thomas]

What a way to start. Featuring top 10 teams like Clemson. No Notre Dame, Alabama and LSU. And Bill Belichick's debut at North Carolina.

[Alec Le]

It's so special.

[Craig Thomas]

These teams collide.

[Rob Greenberg]

Don't miss a lineup filled with electric matchups.

[Craig Thomas]

Welcome back to College Football Kickoff Week presented by Modelo Labor Day weekend on ESPN and abc. Also available to stream on the all new ESPN app.