“You can fight with [the execs], but you have to fight fair. You have to be completely honest with them, because you might be having a screaming fight with them at 10 in the morning, and inevitably at two in the afternoon you will have to call back on a different subject, and you have to work together,” said The Good Wife creator Michelle King during The Hollywood Reporter‘s Drama Showrunner Roundtable.
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When prodded on the craziest disagreement she ever had with her CBS network executives, King answered, “Who can remember?” She does recount an argument about an abstract painting seen in the background of a scene that they wished to cut because they felt it showed breasts.
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“But it was abstract and they were circles,” she told the group.
“Did you fight?” asked Lee Daniels.
“Oh yeah,” laughed King, “cause that’s fun.”
“Who won?”
“I know I’m supposed to have that answer, but it was several seasons ago and so many arguments ago, I actually don’t recall. All I know is that, and the painting is somewhere in the production office.”
When it comes to Good Wife criticism, she only has a problem “when they move off of the show and onto the personal. ‘What were Robert and Michelle thinking?'” (King and her writing partner husband Robert King co-created The Good Wife.)
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The show creator joined Sarah Treem (The Affair), Beau Willimon (House of Cards), Alex Gansa (Homeland), Lee Daniels (Empire), and Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers) for the Roundtable, where the biggest drama TV influencers discussed writing, creative collaborations, and taking risks.
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The full Drama Showrunner Roundtable aired on Close Up With The Hollywood Reporter on Aug. 30, at 11 a.m. ET/PT on Sundance TV and HollywoodReporter.com. Tune in this Sunday for the next episode.
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