For Celeb Scoop Hub’s first celebrity interview, I sat down with Tim Minear about his approach to storytelling. We touched on how he got started, how he blends the real with the dramatized, and more. Read below to see what he has to say.

CSH: You used to film Super8 films as a kid. Are there parts of that process that still show up now when you’re running a set or breaking down a story?

TM: I think so. I mean I think it’s all kind of a continuation in a way. You’re getting together with friends and you’re making movies. In fact, the guy I grew up with, Jonathan Lawrence, he’s now directed two episodes of the show. That’s definitely like just being a kid again. Cause, literally, we were doing it together from the time we were about 9 or 10. He directed episode 13 this year, “Mother’s Boy” and that was special.

CSH: That’s awesome! Is there a Super8 film that feels like a proto-episode of something that you did later?

TM: In a weird way, yes, because when we were kids in the 70’s and 80’s, when we’d go out and make our Super8 films, we’d make Star Trek and the 6 Million Dollar Man. We were actually making episodes of the TV shows that we watched. So in a way, yeah I guess I was actually making TV even back then if you think about it.

CSH: That’s pretty cool. It’s kind of like it translates over to when you were working on Firefly and stuff like that.

TM: Oh definitely. No question about it.

CSH: That’s so cool. If you could tap Platoon-era Tim on the shoulder and show him all the things you’ve done, what do you think would surprise him most about where you’ve ended up?

TM: Oh! He’d be like, well why aren’t you directing feature films? What’s this TV nonsense? Cause that never occurred to me as a kid. I always thought that I’d make movies and I didn’t even consider television. But it turns out television is obviously what I’ve been doing for decades now and television obviously gets made. Movies often don’t. I don’t know how many hours of produced content I’ve actually been behind but it’s a lot.

CSH: Was there a moment where it stopped feeling random, and you just went, “Oh this is what I do now?”

TM: No. I think I always was pretty confident that this was what I would do. I remember my agent telling me back after my first job at a network show, which was Lois and Clark, “You know you gotta start saving that because a TV writer only has a limited life span,” and I just was like, “What? No. If I wanna work, I’ll work.” And it’s never been the case. I have the longest-running overall production deal at 20^th Century Fox. The longest.

CSH: Wow that’s awesome! You’ve joked a lot in the past about your shows being  cancelled and you had your twitter account poking fun at it. How do you actually process finding out a show’s been cancelled and find the energy to build the next thing?

TM: I just go on to the next thing. It’s always just kind of rolled off my back. I mean most things get cancelled. Although that hasn’t been my experience in the last more than a  decade obviously. Cause we’re coming in on season 10 of 9-1-1 and American Horror Story is still going. But back then, when the shows would get cancelled, I just saw it as an opportunity to do something new. I was just grateful that I got to do the thing that I got to do. You know, it’s funny, if I hadn’t have been cancelled back then,  there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t have ended up doing. Like if one thing had stuck, I wouldn’t have done Wonderfalls or The Inside or Terriers. And all of those things, I’m really happy that I did, so in a way, my thundering failure was good for me.

CSH: That makes sense. Like it builds up to something that’s different. Like you get to work on something else and it ends being something better. Or not necessarily better.

TM: Or just different. Like Wonderfalls was a comedy, and Terriers was kind of a throwback Rockford-style detective show. The Inside was a serial killer show and Drive was something else entirely. So yeah, you just keep collecting these little charms on your failure charm bracelet.  

CSH: Right. That actually leads into my next question. You’ve hopped around a few different genres. When blending tones, are there rules that you refuse to break so it still feels like one show and not patchwork?

TM: No I just do what I do. All the stuff that I’ve done, that have had whimsy, or comedy, or drama. Lois and Clark was a comic book. Angel was a vampire detective and Firefly was a space western. I mean, I think one thing that I’m pretty good at and why I got work early on, was that I can come in to a particular show, whether it’s X-Files or Lois and Clark, and I can just kind of channel what that was. Like my Lois and Clarks read like Lois and Clarks. I got on the X-Files from an X-Files spec that I wrote. People thought it was a produced episode but it wasn’t. It was just my spec. And Chris Carter read it and hired me onto the X-Files. I have a pretty good ability to click into whatever the thing is that I’m doing. I don’t overthink it. I just kind of feel my way through it. And on 9-1-1, the tone is wild. You go from people barfing on each other to dead people in the road.

CSH: You play a lot with stories about real events and institutions. How do you draw the line between this is grounded enough vs this is still television?

TM:  Again, I think it’s just something that you kind of have to feel your way through. And it just depends on what the show is too. But, I think the trick is when you’re writing something, you have to believe it yourself. So if you feel like you’re in the story or if you feel like the character’s communicating with you and behaving the way that feels real to you, then that’s kind of just the way I do it. You know what I mean? You can’t stand outside of it too much and have a checklist.

CSH: That makes sense. Sometimes you just have to let the story flow. When you’re writing characters people attach their whole identities to, how much do you feel you owe them versus just telling the story?

TM: Well, you do feel a certain pressure. Like, there’s a lot of pressure to that. So, I have stopped engaging with social media. Like, I don’t read anything about the show. I don’t read any reactions. There is one podcast that I sometimes listen to, called The Buddie System. Those people are real fans of the show. Which is not to say you have to like what I do or you’re not a real fan. That’s not what I’m saying. But there’s also a toxic element in the fandom that is just not good to swim around with. It’ll make you sick. I think the danger is that if you’re looking for that instant response or that instant love from the fandom, then you’re going to end up pandering to them, which I have done in the past- I will admit it- just to get the praise, that’s dangerous. Just tell the story and try to be honest about the story. And that’s also pie in the sky cause there’s also a million other elements that you have to react to like network notes or what the studio wants you to do, or something an actor won’t do, or the availability of an actor. That will change your plans real quick. Like, when I did Firefly, and the Firefly fans know this, the episode I wrote called ‘Outta Gas’ which is everyone’s favorite episode, it starts off with Gina Torres’ character being injured and she’s in this coma and she might die. Well, part of the reason that story was constructed that way was because Gina had just married Laurence Fishburne and they were going off on their honeymoon. So she couldn’t be in scenes. So we put her on a table in the infirmary and just did not have scenes with her. I mean, there are some scenes with her, but for the most part, I had to carve out a big part of the production schedule so that she could go on her honeymoon. Stuff like that happens behind the scenes all the time.

CSH: That makes sense. Plus, it’s hard to deal with fandom. Fandom can be very toxic. So it’s hard to deal with their expectations because you still have a story to tell.

TM: You still have a story to tell. Sometimes the stories that they demand that you tell, they may not realize it, but what they’re really asking for is the end of the story. They want something to happen, and they don’t have second stage thinking in terms of, if this show is to continue, you’ve basically just ended the story. Now there’s not going to be anything for these characters to do. That’s one thing. But also, there’s a lot of masters to serve. But yeah, I definitely do feel the pressure of certain elements of the fandom, but that’s why I avoid it now, because even when you think you’re giving them the thing that they absolutely will love, they won’t. I just think that the only thing you can really do, your only true north star, is if you feel like it’s working for you. Like I was just watching some interviews with the B-52s, and they were a band from the 70s and 80s, and they were very iconoclastic, and great. But they were also very strange, and people didn’t know what to make of them when they first broke. They just decided, “we can’t sit down and just try to recapture some success that we’ve had. We have to write music that is for us. That’s coming from us and that we’re making for us.” That’s really what you have to do, right? Like if something amuses or moves or excites you as a writer, you have to assume that it’s going to amuse and excite other people too. But trying to pander, it just never really works.

CSH: No that’s fair. My mom always says you can’t satisfy everybody. You have to do what you need to do, and it’ll just work itself out. When you’re breaking down a season, is there a moment where it just clicks for you and you know the direction that you want to head in?

TM: I would say no. Not for the season. At least that hasn’t been my experience on this show or kind of any other. But I will say that that is true when it comes to a story. You’re beating your head against a wall in the writer’s room. You know that there’s something there. You kind of know what you want to do and then at some point, it will click, and you’ll sort of understand what the thing is. What’s funny is that for the finale, like that was a bit of a puzzle. There were certain things that were required of me, and it did seem to click on the page. The first cut of it that I got was not good. Sometimes, you’re actually rewriting it in the editing room. You’re looking at what’s there and you go, “oh you know, this point here.” And then I pulled this up to here, and so you can just find it there as well. There’s different places where things click, I guess is what I’m trying to say. As far as the season goes, it’s always like a moving freight train and you’re trying to crack down in front of the train before it runs you over. Maybe this year will be different. Maybe I’ll go in there at the beginning of the writer’s room and I’ll be like, “I see the entire season. I see the shape of it.” But probably not.

CSH: It kind of shapes back into the whole, you might have an idea, but then certain actors might not be available or might not want to do it. So, it kind of ties into that as well cause then you have to readjust.

TM: Right, and, a lot of your inspiration comes as you’re creating the thing. Like, I remember on Lone Star, I kept doing this thing where I had Rob Lowe’s character punch people. Like it’s, “and then Owen punches the guy.” I did that three or four times and I realized, “Oh God. I just keep repeating myself. I can’t think of a new way to end this scene.” But what that ended up yielding, was a whole character arc for him where he had anger management problems and there was this whole underlying thing from his childhood, and we got to explore all of that. Well, none of that was planned. It grew out of me realizing I had played the same joke three times. And so now, I needed to kind of restructure it so it felt like there was a reason for doing that. Although now I’ve unmasked myself.

CSH: It kind of just gives you a way to add more to the story.

TM: Yeah, the story is kind of like a kinetic living thing in a way. So, as the thing unfolds for you, it’ll surprise you by suggesting for itself where it wants to go, and you may not have even expected it. Sometimes, that’s good and sometimes, that makes people angry.

CSH: So, you’ve had leaks in the past. Is there a way that you deal with that or is it more like, “Hey it happened” and you just move on?

TM: I mean, look, at this point, we try to get ahead of that stuff. I guess there’s a certain cohort of fandom that is always out there trying to figure out what is going to happen. They’re trying to figure it out because so and so liked someone else’s post on Instagram. You know what I mean? Like that’s how they do it and they’re actually quite good at it. I will say that. And at first, it pissed me off because I felt like they were ruining the show for themselves. Like, why would you not want to experience it? Why would you want to go into it knowing exactly what’s going to happen? But there are some people who like that and so you’re not going to change them. And those leaks are going to happen. But what I found was even the biggest leak, which is Bobby’s death, the people that talked about it or knew about it, are just a tiny portion of the audience online. Most of America who actually watches 9-1-1, are not going to like Reddit threads to find out if Buck is going to A, B, or C. Like, they’re just not doing that. So I feel like you can’t plug all the leaks. What are you going to do? Although if somebody on my cast or crew is leaking stuff, they will be fired.

CSH: That makes sense. Also, a lot of times, if an actor follows another actor on Instagram or something, people think that that means something.

TM: And often it does. That’s the problem. They’re like, “Ah! So and so from season six is coming back. And so and so did this thing. That has to mean this!” And you know, it usually does.

CSH: And then sometimes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. Is there a scene or episode that you’re proudest of structurally? Where you feel like everything you care about as a writer is visible on the page?

TM: There’s a few, I think that stand out for me on both 9-1-1 and Lone Star. I would say that on Lone Star it was, “In the Unlikely Event of an Emergency,” which I kind of wrote that as a tribute to my mother who got me through rehab. And I thought that came out exactly as I saw it in my head. On 9-1-1, the ones that stand out for me, funny enough, I think “Stuck” is a perfect episode of the show, which was Season 2, and what’s hilarious about that was, we had spent all this time just breaking our backs on the earthquake. When we got to “Stuck,” I realized I didn’t have a story, I didn’t have a script, the director was coming in to prep, and Kristen Reidel and I went in and just bashed our heads together until we kind of had an idea. We’re like, “Ok the theme is stuck.” She had this thing where she goes, “Ok this thing happens where people get stuck between buildings. Where they fall off a roof.” So that was one thing. And I put up either 3×5 cards or a whiteboard. But I brought the director in and all I had were like, “a guy gets stuck between a building! Girl gets her head stuck in a pipe. Eddie feels stuck in the system.” We really get to meet Christopher for the first time. We met him in the earthquake, but this was the first time we had a look into their home life. And then Buck wants to help Eddie, and we have to do something with the pipe on the head because I don’t want to just forget that Chimney had a pipe through his head. So we should bring that back. And he feels like it’s stuck. It was stuck in his head. There were just a bunch of stuck puns. So, I had everything on the board and pitched it out to the director, and we were writing that thing while she was shooting it. We were so far behind already. It was like, episode 4. But when I go back and look at that episode, I feel like it’s perfect. Like it really is. Like, the themes worked, everybody’s story moved down the field. I thought that was great. The other ones that stand out for me, well I love the event episodes. The earthquake was sort of the beginning of that. We did the plane crash in season 1 but it was the first time where I was leaning into kind of like an Irwin Allen mindset of like the big disaster films from the 70s and we were shooting that. It was going to be one episode. We were shooting it and as we were shooting it, we’d built this giant hotel suite on this gimbal. I mean you can search it up. Go to YouTube and type in “9-1-1 making of earthquake” and you’ll see the behind-the-scenes stuff, and you’ll see how we did it. But we were shooting that and I was like, “God, this is so good and it’s so expensive.” But the editor put together the montage with Heroes by David Bowie.

CSH: Right.

TM: He’d put together the montage, and we were still shooting the episode. I see this montage and it’s like four minutes or so. Which is a lot of screentime on this show. I mean one entire act can be as short as 4 and a half minutes. So, the montage is almost a whole act and I’m looking at this thing and I’m like this whole episode is going to be really long and I’m going to end up having to cut a bunch of stuff. And that meant we decided, “let’s just keep shooting. Let’s do two episodes.” And so there was stuff that played in the first episode that got moved into the second episode because it was long and then I came up with more scenes. Like the looting scene with Athena and Michael taking the kids to the church. So there were just some threads that I added in there to round it out and make it into two episodes, which saved us a ton of money because you amortize costs for those big sets and now there’s two episodes that they’re servicing instead of one. Which is why you’ll see that the big, expensive episodes end up going into two to three parts. Part of that is to let it breathe. Because I really found on Lone Star when I did the snowstorm, it ended up going for like four episodes. But we had to do that in order to just let the stories breathe. All the characters are separated and they all needed screentime. And then all of a sudden, it came together in the last one, which was great. But yeah, I like the big multi-part ones. But as far as just individual episodes where I feel like things went perfectly, I feel like part 2 of the tsunami is one of my favorites. It doesn’t even have as much spectacle as the first part. The whole idea of Buck losing Christopher and ending up in the same place as Eddie. That always gets me. So I think that was kind of perfect. And then, Ocean’s 9-1-1, which was a big swing and was different than anything we’d done before. “Let’s do this caper.” I felt like that worked out really well. I feel like the season 2 finale is still my favorite finale. Although this season’s finale is giving it a run for its money. I think it turned out really well. “This Life We Choose” which was the season 2 finale and I think “Merry Xmas” is also a perfect episode of the show. That Christmas episode, the cases were great, the emotion was strong, the reveal that Doug had found Maddie.

CSH: That Doug had found Maddie, yeah.

TM: The “Begins” episodes were great. I particularly loved Chimney Begins. In fact, the whole run of those three or four episodes, “Merry Xmas” I think is great. I loved “New Beginnings” which is the one where Chimney got stabbed. And then I knew we were going to do “Fight or Flight” but I wanted to do “Chimney Begins.” “Maybe we should do it in between him getting stabbed and finding out if he lived.” So I know that drove the audience crazy, but I’m like, “this is great because they’ll just have to wait a whole other week to see what happened. Then “Chimney Begins” and then when we came back, “Fight or Flight.” I also think that’s perfect. That was also very different, right? Even when we first wrote that episode, we still had the 118 going around doing calls, and I’m like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Like, Chimney’s in the hospital. He’s been stabbed; Maddie’s been abducted. Everyone should just be at the hospital. Right? Like they’re all just waiting to hear. Then Buck can team up with Athena, and we’ll just make it this one story. So, I think that was really the first episode that was like its own thriller. It didn’t have conventional 9-1-1 calls going out to help people who had things impaled in their head or something like that. Because literally Maddie’s been abducted and what I discovered was those were kind of my favorite episodes to write. I would say this year, “Mother’s Boy” falls into that category. It was like, it’ll be about Buck and Eddie. They’ll be on a road trip, it’ll be hilarious, and then we’ll do “Misery.” Like, one of them will be abducted by some crazy woman and it ended up being Buck, and that ended up being probably my favorite episode this year. Last year, I loved the serial killer episode where Maddie gets kidnapped. Again, there’s no calls on that, right? There’s no 9-1-1 calls. It’s just Maddie’s been abducted and a woman talks to herself. Jennifer Lynch directed the shit out of it and I thought it was great. I loved writing that stuff, and I’ll tell you something else. Those episodes? Wicked cheap to produce. They’re much less expensive to make, more focused, fewer locations, smaller guest casts, and it’s just very focused, right? When we did Beenado last year, I will say that scene where she landed the plane on the freeway, to me that was a favorite scene. I just think you can’t beat it. But those episodes are really expensive right? Like if I’m going to send Athena into space, I’m going to be spending millions of dollars more than a regular episode costs which means then down the road, I need to come up with episodes that are much less expensive than the normal production costs and that way when we get to the end of the season, I’m not over budget.

CSH: That makes sense. Plus, it makes sense why going into space would be a four-parter because it’s so much more expensive than some of the other emergencies.

TM: Yes, and I will argue with you for a second. I don’t think it is a four-parter. I think it’s a three-parter. In the first episode, a man gets swallowed by a whale, a woman is found who appears to be dead, but is not, and there’s a school bus that goes crazy and it turns out everyone was inhaling anti-freeze. So, they were talking about space and all we do is flash forward in the last shot of the episode to the rocket taking off. So, I would not count “Eat the Rich” as part of the going into space. I mean, it is setting it up, but it’s a regular episode, right? And then space takes over for three episodes. And for me, because I knew that people were going to be like, “Holy shit, they’re going to space.” But it was all based on that Blue Origin Katy Perry space flight thing. Like it was all based on space flight, private billionaires. Like stuff that’s happening right now. So, it’s not like suddenly aliens attacked Los Angeles or something. This was all based on real stuff. I think if you watch it and are fair to it, you’ll see that we tried to handle it that way. In a 9-1-1 way where there’s space debris and it’s obviously a big disaster movie. But everything we tried to do, we tried to have it make sense. But for me, I always knew that sequence would be that way. In episode 4, the flashback to her as young Athena and her kind of drifting in space, like that backstory. And then suddenly she’s talking to herself because she’s losing oxygen and hallucinating. I knew that that was going to be in this space arc. How we’d get there, I wasn’t sure. I always knew that that was going to be the point of it, and believe it or not, I wrote the kind of flashback story, the bank robbery and all that stuff as kind of one long sequence. And I had no idea how I was going to put it together. I had that and then a certain amount of material of her at the International Space Station and I knew that she was going to go and try to fix the thing and her tether would come loose, and her oxygen would get messed up. And that somehow I would be crosscutting the past with the present day and I mostly did all of that in the editing room. It was not laid out on the page the way that it ended up in the episode. I was really flying by the seat of my pants on that and I think that it came out great.

CSH: No yeah, it was awesome. I think sometimes the best things come out when you’re not really sure how you want to structure it and then it just happens.

TM: I mean, I knew kind of intuitively how I was going to structure it. I just couldn’t tell you. I had to see it. I had to see the different parts and then I just had to figure out when to go back. I think that’s the other reason for me that three parts of that work, is because when you get to part three, you probably fully expect it to be all taking place on the space station or something, but no. A good third of the whole episode takes place in the 90s. Like no one saw that coming.

CSH: That’s true. It’s a very unexpected way to do it which is really cool. When you cut certain scenes of an episode, how do you decide what stays and what goes?

TM: Well, again it’s just intuitive right? I know how a story is supposed to feel. I know what it’s supposed to feel like. You’re always disappointed. The director fucks it up. The actors never do what you think they should be doing. And eventually you start to see, they could be doing something else. And eventually you start to lean into that. You try to get it as close to the thing that you wrote as possible without becoming so slavish to it that you can’t see how to turn it into something that is something else. Like in the first episode this year, that whole scene where Athena finds the woman she thinks is dead and they’re trying to bring her back to life and we’re crosscutting the woman’s backstory. The way it was on the page is it just started as the backstory. So you meet this woman and this guy and you go through their life and then you kind of hard cut to now she’s dead in the chair and Athena shows up. And instead, I took those pieces and then intercut them. I started in the present with the 9-1-1 call. So that wasn’t planned but there’s so much stuff you can do in an editing room. I think the finale is a great example of it. If you read that script and then watched the episode, you’d be like, “It feels like it’s the same thing, but is it?” Because it’s not. Because I changed all the ad breaks. I just paced it out differently because it wasn’t really working in its first iteration and then I just kind of found it.

CSH: Are there storylines that you’ve left in the past that you’d want to bring back later on?

TM: Yeah. I mean, obviously we did it with Kameron, Connor and Theo. Like that was a story from season 6. To be frank, it was a story that I wasn’t crazy about. But then, I thought, you know, I wonder what that kid’s doing now. And I felt like it would just be an interesting way to introduce a new “Love Interest” for Buck. Meaning this child. Instead of bringing in another guy or another woman. Sometimes, it’s like the story I was telling you about having Rob Lowe’s character punching everybody. It’s not something I planned but it ended up bringing about something. So while I thought the paternity thing was meh back in season 6, now it felt like it could end up being about something. So, once you have any kind of history that you created on a show, then you can really start planning to build new threads and go down different roads. And I actually love doing that.

CSH: That makes sense. When storylines like that come up, it’s kind of cool to see how that affects other things because there was online backlash about how people have said that Buck just went through the addiction thing and now he’s suddenly going to have this kid. In my head, I’m thinking that would actually help him with healing.

TM: Yeah I also heard that. I mean look, I also heard some criticism about the addiction thing too. I wanted to tell a story where somebody nips it in the bud. Because I hadn’t seen that before. Because it is true. You can become addicted to opioids five days after you don’t need them. You can kind of start to develop a dependency. It’s not impossible to nip that in the bud. I went into rehab when I was twenty years old. And I was doing all kinds of things. And I went to my mom between bawling my head off and I told her I’d been doing drugs. And I was doing coke. It was the 80s. And she said, “well ok. Let’s go get you into rehab.” I literally went at that moment. She took me to a rehab facility, I went in and I signed up for 30 days rehab, and I have not had a drink or drug since. I got sober before I was old enough to drink and I have had no relapses. So, tell me that can’t happen because it can.

CSH: I agree. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.

TM: Right.

Talking with Tim Minear gave me insight not just into his process, but also into his mindset when it comes to storytelling. The way he blends the personal with the dramatic and pulls from both personal experiences and movies.