Season 1 of the completely excellent Orphan Black comes to a close tomorrow night with another roller coaster ride that you will NOT want to miss. Orphan Black has easily been one of the very best shows of 2013, so I was more than happy to accept the invitation to speak with Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier, co-presidents of Orphan Black’s production company Temple Street Productions, shortly after the show’s season 2 pickup was announced earlier this month.

They gave a lot of insight about the process of script and show development, about where they are in the process of planning out Season 2, and blissfully, a little something about knowing how the series will end.

First off, I asked them when they knew about the pickup:

Ivan Schneeberg: We have a really great relationship with BBC America, and with the folks at Space in Canada, people in our company speak with them pretty much daily, so we knew they were really enthusiastic about the show and how it was performing and the critical reaction, so we had a pretty good sense that they were optimistic. We got called a few days before the announcement was made and we were told that it looked very very likely that an order was gonna come.

David Fortier: Then we got asked to do a quote, so we realized … [laughing]

So what exactly does Temple Street Productions do in general, and specifically for Orphan Black?

Ivan Schneeberg: – Temple Street is our company, and we built it from the ground up. Dave and I started as creative producers and showrunners on television shows. We built the company up around us to the point where we now have 30 people here. Twenty-five percent of our company we sold to BBC Worldwide, so they’re our partner internationally. The company’s divided between factual – some nonscripted tv – and then our scripted division, which is where Dave and I started. We are sort of the chief creative officers of the company. We executive produce creatively all of our TV shows, we approve everything that we develop, in some instances we create or co-create the shows we work on. We always approve all of the creative and the cast, all of the cuts. We very much are hands-on on our shows.

Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier

In this particular instance Graeme Manson and John Fawcett were friends of ours and they were guys that we have always wanted to work with, and we’d been looking for projects to work with them on. And we’d worked with them on different shows of ours. Graeme was a writer on Being Erica, and John Fawcett directed Being Erica and Queer as Folk, so we knew these guys well. They sent us this sort of spec script they wrote for Orphan Black. It actually came in through our drama department, we read it on an airplane and immediately decided it was  something we wanted to buy and work with them on. We’ve been working for about four years developing Orphan Black with them. So we’re creatively responsible for the show with our showrunner partners.

And secondarily, but equally important, Temple Street as an entity is responsible for financing the show. So we have a whole business department within the company, and like an American studio [Temple Street Productions is based in Toronto], we put together the financing  for the series and arrange for the international sales of the series, and then we’re responsible for making the show, funding the show, and bringing the show in on budget. If it doesn’t come in on budget then we’re responsible for all of the overages. So in many ways our role is similar to an American independent, or a small American studio.

Temple Street makes the show, Temple Street owns the show, but Dave and I are creatively the executive producers of the show alongside John Fawcett and Graeme Manson.

I asked them to tell me more about the development of Orphan Black:

David Fortier: It used to be where Ivan or I would pound the pavement and take as many meetings with writers as we possibly could. In the early days one of the first  scripts we tried to go after was a Graeme Manson script – it was just an idea, a pitch about 10 years ago. And he was friends of friends of ours and we got to know him a little bit, and he’s been on our radar for a long time because he’s built his career up a lot in these past 10 years quite significantly. So as we built the company and built a drama team around us [that is] very very strong creatively and managerially, they take numerous, even daily meetings with everyone they possibly can who’s at the quality and caliber level we’re looking for to work with.  And Graeme and John were pitching this show around town, and they sent it to us, I think we were one of a select group of companies, and we jumped on it right away and optioned it. This was about four years ago. And then we developed it significantly with them for four years and ultimately got agreement about a year ago.

Is four years a long time for development?

Ivan Schneeberg: It’s a bit of a mercurial process. It takes a bit of time to get all the marbles on the glass table, so to speak. A show like Orphan Black which is a heavily serialized show, sci-fi, one actor playing multiple roles, it takes some time to convince broadcasters to commit. Then because, you know, it’s not a cheap show,  you have to assemble the financing, make sure you have enough money to deliver a great show, and that can just take some time sometimes. Four years is a bit long, it’s sort of the longer end of the spectrum. But also the way it works in Canada, people are doing other jobs while they’re developing shows. Graeme was a working writer, he was working in other people’s rooms, developing other projects. John was directing on other shows.

When they brought the script to us, actually there were several scripts, the only one we kept obviously was the pilot, it needed a lot of development. They had a loose roadmap for the series. Our job as producers is to take that and make sure it’s pitchable, because you can’t go out with an idea like Orphan Black and not know where it goes. The guys knew that and we were coaching them on it, so we spent a good year, and the drama team spent a good year, just developing the show, getting a few more scripts written, getting the ideas built out so that it was robust and could handle any question posed by any executive at any network. So that took up a year.

Then you enter into the very very convoluted Byzantine world of Canadian television financing, and then you layer on a US co-production partner, and it really is keeping those marbles on the glass table, because no one wants to jump in necessarily without knowing that the other financing is in place. The best comparative example is independent film financing where you may have a sale in one territory or you may have a distributor willing to take on for a certain  amount but it’s not your whole nut. So you’ve got to raise the rest of the financing and it could take a year, and by the time that’s done your original financier’s out. And so that’s the game that we often play, and it certainly happened in this case.

David Fortier: Frankly I think American cable television is the same issue now. Network television has a very very rigid sort of system in terms of when stuff gets made, and projects get passed on. Cable television can take a long time in the US. Four years is long but it’s not unusual.

I asked them if they have in mind an ideal number of seasons for the show. They laughed and said “probably 15, 20 – providing the price is right.” In discussing it, though, they went on to address what to me, and to any fan of serialized shows, is the crucial issue: do you know how this show ends:

Ivan Schneeberg: I don’t know that we necessarily want to curse it. I would say that our writers, Graeme and John and the team here, we have a sense of the roadmap of the show, we have a sense of the beginning, middle, and end of the series, we have a sense of the pace we want to keep in terms of delivering the show, and I think that that roadmap and that sense of pace is sufficient to allow us to deliver multiple really really strong series [seasons],  but inevitably, because it’s a serialized show and we want to be fair and honest to the story we want to tell, it has to come to an end at some point. It is not an episodic procedural, it’s not a Law & Order, it’s not gonna run for 22 seasons I don’t think. One of the great joys of this season is that people don’t feel duped or tricked by the storytelling. They’re getting lots of reveals and lots of answers, yet at the same time sort of being tossed further down the rabbit hole. And that’s intentional, because it’s a well-thought-out show. We’ve done it before where we’ve done the opposite, where we don’t think it out well enough before, and you end up zig-zagging around, you sometimes stretch and bend and even  break the contract you made with the audience in terms of what your show’s all about.

David Fortier: We definitely like the idea of “bringing to a conclusion” with a show like this. We like the idea of there being an end game. I think we’re a little early in the process to say how long that actually is. Inasmuch as we have a roadmap, we know what the ending should be, it’s hard to tell how many seasons we need to do that at this point, still in season 1. That point may come where the writers, John Fawcett and obviously Temple Street all agree as to where that end point needs to be, but it’s probably premature for us.

Ivan Schneeberg: We’ve got these moments during the writing process where you’re on a track, everyone knows where you’re going,  but Graeme or John or someone will turn and say, you know, “what about this?” or Graeme will turn and say “you know, I’ve got this thought in my head, maybe I’ll make this character do that” and it just opens up all these possibilities. Like a detour. The kind of show that it is, if you keep the action high enough and you keep the plotting tight and interesting, you’re actually able and viewers are quite happy to follow it down these little detours because the characters are strong and interesting and they’ve got lives that people want to know more about. That’s the strength of the storytelling and the writing, we think. So that gives us hope that we can build it out a little bit longer, but again, we have no intention of dragging it out, we just want to explore the characters as much as we want to tell the story.

By now they will have started the writers room for Season 2, “where we bring the writers all together to really start to mine in to what the season arc is going to be, what exactly is going to happen in the season…It’ll be over the next couple of weeks that that roadmap of Season 2 is very meticulously planned out.” And if the the writing’s all done before they start shooting, “we’ll buy the entire room a steak dinner; it never really happens that way.”

Ivan Schneeberg: It’s always our ambition to have it work out that way – to have as many scripts as we can, written before we go to camera . We will definitely know what every episode’s about, the writing team will have broken the storylines for each episode, we’ll have as many outlines and scripts in hand as we can, and we will always aim to have the scripts done as early as we can in the production process. It’s definitely more planned out than most American network television.

Just make it as good as Season 1 and I will be a completely satisfied viewer.

Mountains of thanks to David Fortier and Ivan Schneeberg for taking the time to talk with SciFiMafia.com about their work, and thanks especially for the exceptionally excellent Orphan Black.

Orphan Black, starring Tatiana Maslany, Jordan Gavaris, Dylan Bruce, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Michael Mando, Kevin Hanchard, Matt Frewer, and Skyler Wexler, airs its Season 1 finale this Saturday, June 1 at 9/8c on BBC America.