Originally from the island of Puerto Rico, Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are amongst the most experienced writers working in genre television. Both have scribed, executive produced and served as showrunners for some of the most acclaimed genre TV series, such as: Lost, Firefly, Grimm, SeaQuest, Vampire Diaries, Terra Nova, Agent Carter, Helix, The Tick and many more. Between them, they possess over 40 years of TV writing experience and are currently working on numerous forthcoming projects. They are also co-hosts of the podcast, Children of Tendu.

Jose Molina (left) and Javier Grillo-Marxuach

JOSH: Walk me through your origin stories. I know you both grew up in Puerto Rico. What got you into sci-fi, what was fandom like on the island?

JAVI: I had that moment of damage. I literally saw Star Wars and that was it. I’m 7 years old, I live in Puerto Rico. I don’t know fuck all for fuck all. And I saw this movie and decided I’m going to do that. I just started creating my little comic books and writing my little stories and that just became who I was.

JOSE: I got into writing through Dungeons and Dragons. We didn’t have modules, so I wrote my own adventures.

JAVI: Some of my fondest memories was when my family would go on vacation to this little island that was just off the coast of Puerto Rico. And the great thing about the isle was that the TV signals coming from the Virgin Islands could be caught from the antennas where we were staying. That meant that I could get up early and watch Jason of Star Command.

JOSH: Sci-fi TV was hard to come by, what about books?

JOSE: In terms of books and publications, we got those on the island. That’s what started feeding my storytelling. Once I got into D&D, I would go into the bookstore and head straight into the sci-fi / fantasy section. I discovered Terry Brooks before I discovered Tolkien.

JAVI: You totally thought Tolkien ripped off Terry Brooks, right?

JOSE: Being able to find books, that was huge. I got into Piers Anthony and all sorts of authors, and I would find covers that just looked cool, that had wizards and dragons and shit. And I would devour all of that. My dad did this really smart thing—going to the movies is what we did all the time. My mom would drop me off and pick up me up three or four hours later. My dad would put a credit card down at the bookstore and say, “Any book he wants, put it on the card.” So, I would leave the movie and go into the bookshop and pick stuff out. And that’s really how I got into genre and reading. It was a combo: movie, book, double-feature.

JAVI: Later that year the family filed for bankruptcy.

JOSH: So, you guys found your passion for genre, talk about your breaking-in story.

JOSE: I got my first internship on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  I was in college, trying to figure out what to do, what to study. I thought it might be law, but I hated that idea. While on campus, I came across this flier that said, “Learn to Write for Television.”

JAVI: Who was that for?

JOSE: For the TV Academy Internship. The application had three stages, and the last stage was writing a spec script. I wrote a Star Trek: The Next Generation spec and that got me the internship and allowed me to convince my parents that I wanted to move to Hollywood. My dad, God bless him–

JOSH: Gave you his credit cards.

JOSE: Hah—they assumed this was going to be a phase that I needed to get out of my system. I came out here, interned, and was assigned a polish on a DS9 script that I didn’t get a credit on. I don’t think a word of mine got into the script, but it paid me twenty-eight hundred dollars and helped me land an agent. Those two things combined allowed me to convince my parents that other people thought I had skillset in this. I stayed out here longer, I didn’t have a job, or know where I was going to get money, I didn’t know anything from anything. I didn’t know what a production assistant was, what a writer’s assistant was—I didn’t know those were jobs that I should’ve been pursuing, so I went and worked at a Blockbuster video store.

Javi and I met through a family introduction. Javi hooked me up with a job at Warner Brother’s Animation while they were working on Quest for Camelot, Space Jam and Iron Giant. Ultimately, they brought me on in-house as a developmental department PA and 90% of my job was doing script coverage. I was in my early twenties, reading all these scripts and learning a shit-ton about what to do, and what not to do, and it was an education.

JAVI: My story was that I finally graduated high school and my father had decreed that I was too young to come to California, so I went to Carnegie Mellon to get a degree in Creative Writing, Playwriting and Cultural Studies. The high-paying disciplines.

Then I came out to get a master’s degree at USC and I went straight through. So, I was very young, and I had written a script that would have cost approximately 200 million dollars to produce in 1993. It was intended to star a middle-aged Puerto Rican man. So, needless to say, out of grad school I didn’t set the world on fire. I was working at Kinko’s.

While there, I got a letter from the USC Office of Minority Opportunities, seeking applicants with a master’s degree to come in as a junior executive with this training program they had at NBC. I was set on being a feature writer. This TV thing is bullshit, it’s a wasteland. I’m never going to work in television. And then they told me the starting salary was thirty-five thousand dollars a year. And I thought, I can afford a laser disc player with that kind of money! So, I got it, and bought the laser disc player, and my first movie was Akira. The Criterion Edition of Akira.

Suddenly I’m twenty-three years old and I’m an executive at a television network.

JOSH: At twenty-three?

JAVI:  Yeah. The dumbest decision anyone ever made was to hire me at that age in 1993. The year SeaQuest premiered, I turned twenty-four and I was at a meeting at Amblin about the series. That was NBC’s big sci-fi show.

It was a great job. Literally within a year I was a current executive on SeaQuest, Earth Two and Law and Order.

JOSH: You were the 90’s TV guy.

JAVI:  Yeah. It was an education, a second master’s degree in TV. After two years at the network I wound up going to be a staff writer on the third season of SeaQuest, because creative got tired of hearing my notes and said, “Enough already, come write here so we can torture you.”

JOSH: That’s where you met Naren Shankar, showrunner of The Expanse, right? 

JAVI: Yes, in fact, my last act as an exec was hiring Naren. So, on his first day of work, he goes to his office and I’m set-up right next to his, and I yell, “Hey Naren!” And he’s like, “What are you doing here?”  He was pretty surprised. Anyway, it literally went from, I’m meeting with him to get him a job on SeaQuest because I’m the executive covering the show, and then suddenly now he’s my boss, because he outranked me.

JOSH: What’s great about doing these interviews is that you realize that there is a larger narrative of sci-fi writers in TV and fiction intersecting.

JAVI: What you will find with people in our generation, Jose, me, guys of Naren’s vintage. Back then, the last thing our agents wanted us to do was to write sci-fi TV. That was the case up until the series Lost won an Emmy and I was on that stage. I had the conversation with every couple of agents, where they would ask me, “When are you going to write a ten o‘clock cop show?” I need you to get on a “good” show.

JOSE: That’s what sent me running to SVU. I had come off of Dark Angel, two years there, and Firefly, one year there. Long story short, what Javi is saying is the exact fear I lived with. To become a marginalized sci-fi guy, who had no prospects except writing on time traps.

JAVI: There were a shit-ton of incredibly talented writers in the 90’s on shows like Xena, Hercules, the Star Treks. Genre at that time was really flourishing, but afterwards, a lot of those people never got their due. Never got their fame or money, because they were perceived as genre guys.

JOSH: It was a negative stereotype.

JAVI: Absolutely. It was a ghetto.

JOSH: And the agents hated it.

JAVI: My agent literally never wanted to put me up for a job on Star Trek. I got a meeting on Star Trek on my own and he didn’t even want me to go in and pitch. That was the prejudice against genre, because it just wasn’t respectable.

JOSH: Genre, even from its beginnings in the pulps was marginalized. It wasn’t until it became hyper profitable in other media that people started respecting it.

JAVI: Look, in 2003, after Minority Report was released in the theatres, every network wanted a future law enforcement show. Fox bought one from Steven Bochco. Steven Bochco who was famously a hater of genre, got up at the TV Critics Association press tour and said “This show is not science fiction. It’s an extrapolation of a possible future based on current technology.” Which is, by the way, a dictionary definition of science fiction. The people who created Earth Two, one of them had just come off of ER, one had been on NYPD Blue. You could not be trusted to run a show, even a genre show, if you were a genre writer, and if you loved genre.

JOSE: And you would hear this type of stuff from actors as well. I think Schneider of SeaQuest, would say, “It’s not science fiction, it’s science faction.”

JAVI: SeaQuest was run by the creator of 21 Jump Street and the creator of Wise Guy. Getting Naren on that show was a big victory for me as an executive because I wanted to get Star Trek writers in the room.

JOSH: I still meet people in the industry who work in genre but won’t admit to being genre-types.

JAVI: Here’s the thing, nine out of the top ten grossing films are science fiction. The one that isn’t is Titanic, which was directed by James Cameron, who directed Aliens and Terminator. It’s an inane prejudice to have.

JOSE: But what has happened in the last fifteen years is that our generation came of age. The Star Wars generation came of age and we were asked to create shows. The financial gain became apparent to these people. The fact is, we know it, and we love it, and we know how to do it right. Finally, it became reflected in the shows we are getting made.

JAVI: But today, if you go anywhere and pitch a sci-fi show, the first thing they ask is “but is it grounded?” And is it grounded, is dog whistle code for, “We don’t trust you to not make it cheesy.”

JOSH: Right. Do you think that’s also code to make it low budget?

JAVI: No, because if you see the budgets on these shows, they are pretty high. Netflix is producing Altered Carbon, all those shows on Fox have high production quality. I mean, they see the money.

JOSH: Game of Thrones represented a shift as well.

JOSE: That changed everything.

JAVI: Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t get any recognition until its last year. It received a courtesy nomination for best dramatic series. The generation that we represent is probably the last one to have to deal with that prejudice. But it’s interesting being part of that hinge, and also mourning how many talented people got stuck and never got the money and resources they could’ve had because they wanted to work in this ghetto.

JOSH: There were a lot of lost people in that wave.

JOSE: I still watch DS9 and I wonder what Pete Fields would’ve been, had he been 20 years younger. He wrote some of the most memorable Star Treks.

JOSH: How is the state of things today?

JAVI: Look, things are pretty great right now for genre guys. As Jose said, the Star Wars generation came of age. You know a lot of us are in positions of power. We get to run shows.

JOSE: Hear, hear.

JAVI: By the way, the biggest genre guy in TV isn’t even considered a genre guy. Like nobody says “Oh, Greg Berlanti, the genre guy. The guy who oversees the DC TV Universe.” He’s just Greg Berlanti. Nobody even bats an eyelash, it’s great. I don’t think the stigma even exists anymore.

JOSH: You guys have written a ton of television. You’ve served on a lot of different series.

JAVI: I think the technical term is a metric-fuck-ton.

JOSH: So, how do you survive going from baby writer, a neophyte, all the way through the ranks? What was the survival strategy up to the point of becoming a showrunner?

JAVI: For me, it’s about living long enough, and keeping your head above water long enough, till you have enough credits, enough scripts, enough mastery, that you can say, “They can tell me that I can’t write their show, but they can’t tell me I can’t write.”

And I feel that it’s sort of a pivotal moment in every working writer’s life, where you stop being afraid that you might be an imposter. You realize two things—one: a TV show is not a place to find whatever familial bonds you were denied as a child. Two: The people who run the TV shows that you loved, and the people who run the TV shows that you work on—whatever the press may be, are not really the geniuses you thought they were. They would not have gotten where they did, if it wasn’t for people like you beneath them doing good, solid work. And once you demystify this, that this person isn’t a genius, but he or she is very good, and once you realize there are no geniuses—it’s just whoever has been anointed as the situational genius, who is going to be right because they’re the boss…

If you can stick around long enough to get to those epiphanies, you’ll probably survive the rest of your career.

JOSH: How did you guys consistently get work? I’ve met some solid writers, who would write on one show and then never work again.

JOSE: By the grace of God.

JOSH: Is it sheer skill?

JAVI: I think it’s our physical beauty. We are so pleasant to have around, that people just put up with the writing.

Honestly, self-effacing as though it may be, you look at for example my career. You go to IMDB and it looks successful and long and all that. Most of my career has been; I get one meeting, I get an offer, I take it, I do that job. I was one of the writers of the first and second season of Lost, and I won an Emmy on the show, even after that, it was still difficult.

This is a very difficult business, it’s very capricious. And what you are mostly doing is trying to string one job after the next. And somehow in there, if you are lucky you cobble together the appearance of success. You try to generate as much material as possible. You try to give your agents new stuff to sell. You always self-promote, self-generate, self-start.

JOSE: But there are five hundred guys out there like us for every job that’s open.

JAVI: The one thing you can control is your writing. You keep writing and keep creating new things that your representation can sell, that you can use to boost your image.

JOSH: How do neophytes even compete? They’re going up against writing teams, and people with years of experience, while they are just trying to get their first break.

JAVI: A good survival strategy is to not compete. The show that’s going to hire you, is the show that’s going to hire you and is also the show that’s going to hire you, y’know? All you can control is whether or not your script sample is good. Do you give a good meeting? Are you charming and lovely in the room? And put a good case that people want to hang out with you for ten hours a day. You can’t compete with anyone else, because you don’t know what they’re doing every day in a meeting with the EP’s. All you can do is bring your best game.

Look, staffing on shows is like being in relationships, the alchemy of who works out in a staff is so ethereal, because it’s about whether or not you can jive with those other creatives in the writer’s room.

JOSH: Talk about ramping up to that position of showrunning a sci-fi series. What could possibly prepare you? How do you even seize that opportunity?

JOSE: Well, I just seized my first showrunning opportunity for a series called Weird City. And a lot of what the job is, I’ve done for the last ten years as a co-EP. Which is making decisions from casting to production, design to editing. All those tools, I’ve been honing for the last ten years. I don’t think you can ever be fully prepared for what the job of the showrunner is until you’ve been in it

JOSH: You just have to be in it.

JAVI: But—it also helps to have ten years plus as a producer on other people’s shows. One of the things that has changed radically in our business now. Because there were so few shows, jobs were at a premium. The ideal would be that you get on a show, you stay there as long as you can, you go up the ladder. Every twenty-two episodes you get promoted. That meant that you were five to nine years away from staff writer to showrunner. You’re talking about a nine to ten-year ramp-up.

What few people truly realize is that showrunners are basically the CEOs of a startup with a 250-person workforce and a budget that could potentially be 100 million dollars.  And people are shocked that those who never worked management before don’t know how to do that job.

Well, duh! A lot of writers don’t even know how to talk to other writers about writing. Ninety-percent of showrunning isn’t about writing. It’s about managing creative resources. It’s about articulating opinions, decisions and directives in a way that everyone who works for you understands them. Showrunning is a job about communicating to the staff what the show is. What’s at stake isn’t just the success of the show, it’s also tens of millions of dollars of the studios’ money and the careers of 250 people. And it takes a while to learn to manage those things.

JOSH: What’s the difference between showrunning a sci-fi show, versus a non-genre show? Is it different?

JOSE: The job is the same. Drama or comedy, genre or non-genre, you have to have the skills that Javi just described and it requires most writers to step out of their comfort zone.

JAVI: Once you get to running a show, the logistical problems are all the same. Do you have enough time to shoot your show? Do you have enough money to put everything on the screen? And whether you are doing Star Trek: Discovery or Scandal, at this point in the history of TV, there are probably as many greenscreen shots on a Shonda Rhimes show, as there are on a Star Trek show.

The challenge is can you make your show on time, on budget, can you deliver great scripts on time? Can you make sure the show you have is the show you want?

For genre shows, it might be harder to convince executives to buy the show. The logistical problems are high overall because audiences expect so much spectacle that even your Doctor, Lawyer, Cop show have similar big-ticket items, that used to be primarily reserved for genre shows.

JOSE: I will say this, genre does tend to bend the boundaries of the medium. And because of that, it can be a little more demanding than your usual show. But the skills the showrunner has are the same across the board.

JAVI: They are all about marshaling resources with the most efficiency possible.

JOSH: Where do you see sci-fi TV going from here? Are we in a bubble?

JOSE: I think that as much expensive content as what’s being made right now is unsustainable. I don’t know if that means we are in a genre bubble. I think we are in a little bit of a TV bubble. That’s going to get scaled back, I don’t think it’s going to pop. And I think in terms of science fiction, there’s a lot of IP that people are trying to exploit. As long as there is IP there will be adaptations. Whether or not that makes for good or bad genre, it depends entirely on the material and the people that are adapting it.

JAVI: I think what’s happened in TV in the last twenty years is nothing short of remarkable. In that it was a form for forty to fifty years was so exactly what it was. And in a very small amount of time it has exploded into this great sort of huge amount of formalistic invention, narrative invention, genre invention, too.

The nice thing about the explosion in TV is that it made sci-fi and genre less of a thing, and more of a color to paint with. And I think that’s delightful. I think that TV has unlimited potential for storytelling that has only begun to be tapped into in the last few years. Because the business models have changed so much, and the mode of production has changed so much. I think what Jose was saying is accurate, there is a bit of a TV bubble, but I don’t think that you can put the genie of invention back in the bottle, and that’s what’s really cool.

JOSH: What do you want to say with your work? What do you want out of your careers?

JOSE: What I want out of my career is to work and be happy at work. I want to surround myself with people whose company I enjoy. Javi and I discussed adapting something last year, we are discussing adapting something this year. Making content that we are proud of while being in a work situation that is conducive to having a life.

JAVI: As far as what I want for the next twenty years of my career—well, I just want there to be twenty more years of my career.

I’ll tell you what, I created this show called The Middleman, it wasn’t a successful series. We ran twelve episodes on what used to be ABC Family. Five years after the show went off the air I found a thing on social media that this Cuban girl had written about how she was a Latina nerd growing up in Miami and the character that I created in that series, who was a Latina nerd, gave her the confidence to be herself. Frankly, you start collecting stories like that and you realize that’s who you’re doing it for. The next kid in Puerto Rico whose dreams seem to be a billion miles away—and you provide them with a concept, an image, an idea that things which seem impossible are actually possible, then you’ve done your job.