To understand the process behind creating and filming episodic television, director Harry Winer had to see the “rhythm” behind it.
“What happens is that directors are hired on a week-to-week basis. You come in and direct one episode. You leave. Another director comes in and directs an episode.” Winer says. “For a television series that goes on for years, the actors themselves are the ones that are running the show because they know their characters.”
When Winer came into doing his first TV series, Hart to Hart, he had no idea how television worked, so he treated it as if he was making a movie: “I go in and start setting up these elaborate shots.”
“So I get called into Leonard Goldberg’s office [at 20th Century Fox], and I’m sort of intimidated,” Winer recalls. “And he says to me, thank you. You directed a beautiful movie, and maybe one day we’ll get a chance to actually make a movie together. But right now I’d like you to direct Hart to Hart.”
That was one of Winer’s biggest moments of education. “I had no idea what he was talking about,” Winer says, “but subsequently came to learn that in that era, episodic television was a product.”
There is a standardization of the product — of television — and there are certain rhythms and ways in which a series is filmed that is the emblematic style of that particular episode. And subsequently when I recognized that, I started playing ball and would make several more Hart to Harts.
After directing his seventh episode of Hart to Hart, Winer realized that it was indistinguishable from every other episode of Hart to Hart. “That was the goal that they had set for me to achieve.”
That led him to discover an important lesson in the TV industry. “I realized that in serious television, there was a choice of being a really good series television director and implementing the style that others had created versus sharpening my skills of original creativity that originating a television series would allow.”
