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Shane Brennan to mentor more Aussie showrunners

Shane Brennan, best known for NCIS and NCIS: LA, will mentor writers through Playmakers’ Scribe Showrunner Initiative for 2012.

Australian screenwriter and producer Shane Brennan, best known for NCIS and NCIS: LA,  is back in Australia to continue mentoring writers through Playmakers’ Scribe Showrunner Initiative for 2012.

Brennan will mentor three of the 2012 participants: Blake Ayshford (Love My Way, The Straits), Sarah Lambert (Love My Way, Dance Academy) and Giula Sandler (McLeod’s Daughters, Rescue: Special Ops).

Scribe was launched in 2011 with participants included Matt Ford (Panic at Rock Island, SLiDE) and Shelly Birse (Lockie Leonard, Wildside), Drew Proffitt and Ellie Beaumont (Lockie Leonard, Wildside).

“I’m very excited to see the first project developed under Scribe go into production and I applaud the Nine Network for supporting the
initiative. I look forward to working with other writers in the months ahead to develop their showrunning skills. Australian television drama can only benefit from having the writers who create the vision follow it through to production and beyond,” he said.

David Taylor, Playmaker Media added, “We want to produce higher quality Australian drama at Playmaker and a single creator driven vision carried throughout all aspects of the process just feels like the best approach. Projects in development emerging in this second year of Scribe are quite inspired and already attracting interest, so watch this space.”

One Response

  1. Shane Brennan’s initiative is to be applauded but the system for writers here is very different to the US where you have a hugely competitive and parochial market driven by strong local ideas and almost no foreign buy-ins by major free to air and premium pay networks. The local networks have a complete stranglehold on script development and the programmers now have no qualms in dictating what gets made and the drama commissioners in order to survive suffer under them. The producer/writing teams are not left alone, not trusted and rarely given enought time to develop scripts. The results with the exception of Seven, the only network to succeed with commercially strong long running series, have been generally poor. I wish Shane luck but the core of the problem lies elsewhere.

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