Courtney Baron speaking with playwriting students taking her television writing class at the New School in Greenwich Village. More drama programs are offering instruction geared to TV.Credit...Joe Carrotta for The New York Times
More top playwriting programs are preparing students to write for the small screen. And TV writers’ rooms are scouting those classrooms for new talent.
At Columbia, students can now take upper level classes like TV Revision, because when David Henry Hwang took over the program five years ago, he said one of his goals was to expand the TV offerings available to playwrights.
After all, even some of the most successful playwrights out there were writing for television. Hwang is one of them: a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award winner for “M. Butterfly,” he spent four years as a writer for Showtime’s “The Affair.”