8.10.13 Avicii + Nile + Adam on Aug 19th for AFTEE concert!!

LOS ANGELES — For decades, the TV viewing experience was much the same. Tune into your favorite show, week by patient week, all on the network’s schedule. Feedback was restricted to faceless Nielsen ratings and perhaps a plaintive letter or phone call to executives complaining about a favorite show’s cast change or cancellation.

No more. In a connected world of DVDs, DVRs, video on demand and, more recently, Web streaming, the calculus of control has shifted. Gorge on an entire season of a new show like Netflix’s “House of Cards” in one delirious 13-hour sitting the day it debuts. Tweet your delight/disbelief/fury (pick one, or all) about plot twists to your multitude of followers. Marshal an army on social media to demand a show return from the dead, perhaps even as a movie. (See “Veronica Mars.”)

Grappling creatively with this industry upheaval — the technological advances, the rapidly shifting economic underpinnings, the cacophonous online commentary — are the show runners, the writers who animate the characters bursting through our big screen TVs, tablets and smartphones.

The New York Times recently gathered the men and women who steer six of the best dramas on television — from the broadcast and cable networks, and the upstart Netflix — to talk about the challenges of making TV in the Twitter age. At the fitting location here of the Writers Guild of America, West, Shonda Rhimes (“Scandal” and “Grey’s Anatomy”), Carlton Cuse (“Bates Motel” and previously “Lost”), Robert and Michelle King (“The Good Wife”), Terence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire”), Scott Buck (“Dexter”) and Beau Willimon (“House of Cards”) shared their views on writing themselves into and out of jams, the broadcast-cable divide and the possible end of episodes and seasons as we know them.

They spoke about how and when to listen to an evermore assertive audience. (Ms. Rhimes’s Twitter page comes with this amusingly combative note to her more than 420,000 followers: “I make stuff up for a living. Remember, it’s not real, O.K.? Don’t tweet me your craziness.”)

And with the final episodes of “Breaking Bad” beginning Sunday, they tackled the thorniest of storytelling conundrums: ending a beloved show. These are excerpts from the conversation.

More here: www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/arts/television/how-to-make-a-tv-drama-in-the-twitter-age.html