Getting the run of the place

Australian writer Shane Brennan is at the helm of two powerhouses of US television

Actor Chris O'Donnell and Australian executive producer/writer Shane Brennan

'THE producers get the money; the directors get the credit; the writers get the blame," the tough, bearded Australian writer is saying about the state of local TV, leaning forward slightly as if ready to move suddenly.

His name is Shane Brennan, and the 54-year-old just happens to be in charge of the two most successful scripted TV shows in the world, US military dramas NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles. He continues as he signals a waitress, "something wet" being the request. "In general, Australian TV networks are suspicious of writers, who operate in a culture of disdain, seen vulgarly as merely employees, but in the American studio system they run the show." After a pause, he settles for a sparkling water. "Ice, lemon, the whole gamut," he adds.

We're in the small bar of Phillip Island's Silverwater Resort, about 80km from Melbourne, where Australian screenwriters are having their annual conference. Brennan is one of the special guests, along with British legend Jimmy McGovern, the award-winning creator of The Street and Cracker.

The thirsty Brennan has just spoken entertainingly at a session about the role of the so-called "showrunner" in US studio TV. Nearly all are writers -- though they're usually credited as executive producers -- and they have absolute control of the world's most popular TV shows.

He explains the moniker was created to identify the producer who actually held ultimate management and creative authority for the program, given the way the honorific "executive producer" was applied to a wider range of roles. There's also the fact that anyone with any power wanted a producer's credit, including the leading actors, who often did no more than say the writers' lines. "It had got to the stage where it was incredibly confusing; there were so many production credits no one knew who was responsible," he says.

The new showrunner is the boss, the hard-nosed operational manager responsible for all creative aspects of a show and who runs interference with the studios and the networks.

In this new TV era, the shows are what count: viewers don't watch networks, or even care about them. They watch shows, and shows need to be creatively protected from networks. "It's another term for dictatorship, regardless of the level of committee involved in every creative decision," Brennan continues. "You can't do TV democratically -- you need one person's vision."

He's a stocky, convivial guy in jeans, khaki button-down working shirt with sleeves rolled up and a glinting silver earring. He's obliging to the young writers who are still crowding around, hanging on every word. McGovern passes us, threading though the crowd, a large glass of beer in his hand, somehow managing to pat Brennan on his shoulder.

Brennan turns, only to fend off a question from an onlooker who anxiously asks about how you know as a writer when a scene is finished. "Don't overkill it; let it be itself on the page," the showrunner replies. "Apply too much thought darlin', and writing falls apart."

It's hard to imagine that Brennan's two CBS dramas -- both forensic murder mysteries with military settings -- play to more than 40 million people in the US alone.

And both series are strong here for Ten, this year's eighth season of NCIS averaging 1.2 million a show, and Brennan's cool 2009 spin-off NCIS: LA about half that, though improving now Ten is running them back to back on Tuesdays.

If you've never watched, heartthrob fifty-something Mark Harmon stars as Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, with jurisdiction over crimes connected to members of the Navy and Marine Corps.

Gibbs's team includes former homicide detective Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly), officer Ziva David (Cote de Pablo) on loan from Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, computer specialist Tim McGee (Sean Murray) and oddly literary coroner Dr Donald "Ducky" Mallard (David McCallum). And there's Goth-punk-nerd pin-up Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette), the least likely forensic specialist in the history of crime shows. Addicted to death, BDSM and fetish clubs, she shines among the body parts and analytical equipment that clutter her hi-tech computerised domain.

Special agents G. Callen (Chris O'Donnell) and Sam Hanna (L.L. Cool J) are the action heroes of the sibling series, focusing on the high-stakes world of undercover surveillance. Petite Linda Hunt is Henrietta "Hett" Lange, boss of the NCIS: LA division, more like NCIS's bureau chief Vance (Rocky Carroll, who appears from time to time as well) than the deadly former sniper Gibbs.

Hunt, an accomplished actor, provides the gravitas as well as some nice ironic lines. But, while the show is also character-based, though with louder gunfire, it goes in harder than NCIS. There's a journalistic subtext, the stories based on intensive research which results in often confronting terrorist scenarios.

Brennan began his career as a newspaper journalist in Australia more than 30 years ago, but soon followed a girlfriend to Scotland where he tended bars, then worked in London on a trade magazine called Cargo Systems. "I can still tell you everything about bulk containers and how to get grain on to them," he says, grimacing.

He and his girlfriend hitched around Europe, ending up in Afghanistan just before the Russians arrived. ("It was beautiful then; a war-torn mess now," he says, as clipped and sardonic as one of his characters.) They were caught up in riots in Iran, saved by the Iranian secret police, and returned to Australia through India.

He worked as an on-air reporter for the ABC until 1981, then gave up journalism to write creatively, selling his first screenplay, an episode of the long-running Cop Shop, to the legendary Crawford Productions at the age of 24. "Life experience makes a good writer, and I still tap in to those fears and experiences of being on the road even now; you can't understand life just by looking at the box in the corner of the room."

He wrote more than 300 hours of local TV in all genres, just the right experience he feels for handling a show like NCIS with its astutely balanced mix of humour, action and, especially, character.

"Being able to write to the very tight production parameters of Australian TV was invaluable training for working in the Hollywood industry," he says. "I could control a budget and understood story." His time as a journalist also meant he had little trouble with deadlines, unlike many of his colleagues. "I write in 24-hour cycles, refusing to leave the zone until I break the story, until it declares itself," he says. "You are always fighting a story, whether sitting in a room on your own or working with a large group of people."

His vast local experience taught him that TV writers have to write to emotion, not to stunts; that you tell a story not through car crashes but through the weaknesses of your characters. "You learn here in Australia to develop the adrenaline rush of dynamic things happening, but without your audience actually seeing them," he says.

At times, the Bendigo-born producer still seems a bit dazed by how much writing he's done in his 54 years, how many different situations his almost countless characters have inhabited.

Even at this conference he's writing, as well as editing, taking calls from meetings and instructing his production teams, and is frequently seen making notes on his iPhone. He oversees more than 200 people on the two shows, often touching on up to 19 episodes on any workday.

His NCIS scripts are beige to LA's white, to keep them separate, and he famously zips back and forth in a golf cart across the Paramount studio lot between his office, where he works on both shows, and the LA set. The NCIS location is about an hour northwest in Valencia, across the Hollywood Hills. He draws a map in my notebook to convey a sense of his life's geography.

More than a decade ago, still contributing scripts to Australian series, he decided to try his luck in Hollywood, spending five years commuting, five times a year. He crammed in meetings with studio executives, as many as 23 in a week. "I had a GPS in a rental car and an outrageous mobile phone costing 2000 bucks a week," he mutters. (At times he sounds uncannily like the man for whom he writes so well, the taciturn, sardonic Special Agent Jethro Gibbs, the former sniper who heads up the NCIS team.) He was known as the unluckiest writer in Hollywood, constantly optioned but nothing made.

Then someone read one of his episodes of Stingers, the Nine Network's successful series chronicling the cases of a deep undercover unit of the Victoria Police. "They read a story with characters with whom they fell in love," he says.

In 2003 he got a job on CSI: Miami, lasting a year there before moving on to Summerland and One Tree Hill, non-crime shows targeted at younger audiences.

He was picked up for the military series at the end of its fourth season, after NCIS endured a behind-the-scenes drama, a much-publicised clash between star Harmon and series creator Don Bellisario. That was followed by a shake-up in which the daily production duties handled by Bellisario were passed to others, eventually ending up with Brennan.

It's a controversy belonging to the past Brennan is happy to put aside: "Something we all skirt these days," he says.

When he took over, NCIS was a gently ironic parody of most of the formularised patterns and riffs of murder mystery, crime-scene investigation and inside-government thrillers. It was also starting to fade in the ratings. The background stories were varied: clever takes on serial killers and arms dealers, with a dash of terrorism and espionage hysteria. But NCIS had started uneasily -- none of the actors seemed to know what kind of show they were in -- and the character interactions were stilted and affected. But under the Australian writer's direction the cast slowly embraced the corniness and deadpanned the military cop theme and military melodrama. NCIS became one of the most agreeable, intelligent and playful commercial shows around.

"When I joined I found a mixture of procedural and comedy: it was hard to produce," Brennan recalls. "We made many changes in season five and continue to make them in terms of exposing more of the characters. Starved of back-story by season four, the audience wanted to know more about these people; I unpeeled the characters just like we do on Australian shows."

Under Brennan, NCIS became an excuse for viewers to hang out with characters they love. The show presents basically a kind of comic universe in which the characters and action are constructed to continually reassure us that things will ultimately work out happily, even as they encompass a considerable degree of disorder and danger.

His newer undercover surveillance series has also grabbed a loyal audience with its cool attention-seeking and sinewy action-movie style. Stylistically, Brennan pushed this military procedural away from its parent show's toned-down approach and into the aesthetic of Hollywood director Michael Bay: high-contrast lighting, saturated colours and hyper-kinetic camera moves and edits.

He's proud of the way LA has partnerships with three technology companies, and is more digitally equipped than the original. Its relationships with Lockheed Martin, the aerial photography company Pictometry and Perceptive Pixel, the creator of the so-called magic wall made famous by CNN and other news networks, give the series more of a hi-tech sheen.

"A lot of the fans were sceptical about the new show because they are so dedicated to Gibbs and his crew," he says. "I looked at what made NCIS successful and I didn't do it. I created what I thought was a show that would work without any of those ties."

From a storytelling point of view there's a stronger narrative drive in LA, a ticking clock and a sense that things are moving. "I tell the directors every character has to be leaning forward in each scene as if they are ready to go somewhere."

Just like the showrunner.

NCIS screens Tuesdays at 8.30pm on Ten; NCIS: LA follows immediately afterwards at 9.30pm.