Television Academy — Earth Day Dinner

A room of working television writers, together for dinner and conversation on Earth Day, with panelists from The Pitt, Paradise, Matlock, and The Good Place.

Everyone in that room tells stories for a living, which raises the bar considerably on what an evening has to do to hold them.

The Television Academy and Good Energy had the program handled — the planning, the panels, who was in the room. I stepped in for everything in between. How you open. What a panel is supposed to leave people holding when they turn back to their tables. Whether the dinner conversations pick up where the panel left off or start over from scratch.

I worked backwards from what I wanted people to walk out with.

That meant thinking about the shape of the whole night rather than any one piece of it. How the room should feel when it opens. How a panel hands off to the conversations at the tables so the energy carries instead of dropping. What question to put in front of people right before the food comes out. How to close so the last thing anyone hears is the thing worth remembering.

I hosted it too, which let me adjust while it was happening.

The writers left inspired with something to take back into their shows. What that was is theirs to say.