Writers play an important part in any television show. I mean, they’re the ones in charge of writing what the actors are going to do and say on camera. Without them, a show wouldn’t exist. I mean, the actors could try to improvise an entire episode. But the challenge of doing a 21-minute episode fully improvised seems like a daunting task. So many writers have worked on numerous projects. Sometimes, they gotten enough experience in other writer’s rooms that they feel confident enough to make their own show.
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Creating a new show can be such a big deal for any writer. For one, you are going to execute your own idea and story. You have free rein to do whatever the fuck you want with it. But in order for people to be interested in the show that you’re making, you have to be clear what the general idea of the show is. Some writers have the entire show mapped. They know what the beats are for the entire show and how many seasons it would take for them to complete the story. Like any kind of writing, it goes through a lot of rewrites.
One person who has managed to get idea picked up for production is Ajay Sahgal. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really find anything about Ajay on the internet. It’s not much a surprise that a TV writer like Ajay wouldn’t be that well-known to have their own Wikipedia page. I shouldn’t have expected to find details about Ajay’s personal history that easily. Instead of talking about Ajay’s life, we’re going to talk about how television gets made. It’s probably a bit more interesting. But I will try to put some context that relates to Ajay in between them.
Early in 2022, it was announced that a pilot for Ajay’s show was picked up by a network, specifically by ABC. A pilot is basically the first episode of a series. If you look at the episode lists of a bunch of sitcoms or dramas, you would often see that the title of their first episode is almost always “Pilot.” The pilot episode sets up the world that the story lives in. In the case of Ajay’s show “The Son-in-Law,” he sets up the world wherein a guy tries to impress the parents of his fiancé. At the same time, the guys daughter also has a boyfriend that’s trying to impress him. The logline clues you in into what the story is going to be about.
Pilots can often make or break whether the network would pick it up into a series. Often, the creators of a pilot would often get notes about what they could change about the pilot. Because, bear in mind, they network is spending some money in order to produce that pilot. And productions cost a lot of money. If the pilot is good enough for the show to get picked up for a full season, that means the network is committing a budget for the show and a timeslot in their schedule for the upcoming television season.
Ajay has had a lot of experience writing for sitcoms. In 2018, he wrote a pilot called “Pandas In New York” for CBS. The show didn’t get picked up. But he has spent some time writing for other show including the Netflix series “Merry Happy Whatever” and the NBC series “The Carmichael Show.” He pretty much knows how to write within a sitcom format. It’s no wonder he has a net worth of $950,000.
Since you created the show, once it gets picked up, you will also make a lot of decisions to make the show work. A lot of aspects of the show would need your input. Everybody depends on what kinds of decisions you make. Making a TV show is really stressful. I have seen enough behind the scenes clips of the shows that I watched to know how stressful it can be. There are a lot factors involved with it.
But I highly enjoy watching television. I hope that his show gets picked up by the network. They’re having a hard time finding the type of shows that would get people to watch linear TV again. With streaming services, everybody seems to binge more than getting to wait a week for a new episode to drop.
