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DGA QUARTERLY 47 PHOTO: ANNE MARIE FOX; (OPPOSITE, TOP) NICOLE WILDER/ABC; (BOTTOM) BARRY WETCHER/HBO a profound transformation while incar- cerated at Rikers Island jail. Even after commissioning the pilot, HBO passed on making the series in early 2013, then resurrected the project after its co-star and executive producer, James Gandolfini, died suddenly. When John Turturro replaced Gandolfini as Naz's defense lawyer John Stone, Zail- lian only had to reshoot the pilot's end- ing, since that was when Stone, a major character, came onstage. "Often, pilots begin setting up all the characters that will be in the series to come," says Zaillian, who directed seven of the eight installments. "The pilot was just the beginning of a long story, the first night of it, shown in what would feel like real time. Characters would come into the story when they naturally would, not be forced into it. There aren't a lot of pilots where the co-lead—in this case Stone—is introduced in the final minutes. I wanted to define the pace and feel and style of the show." ABC's Speechless enters fairly uncharted territory as a half-hour comedy with a disabled character center stage. Teenager J.J. DiMeo (Micah Fowler) has cerebral palsy, which might rob him of mobility and speech but not membership in an eccentric family where it's hard to tell which comes first—everyone's inherent eccentricity or the way society regards the DiMeos as "different." With an established career directing shows on the BBC, Chris- tine Gernon came to Speechless through executive producer Jake Kasdan, for whom she'd directed episodes of Weird Lon- ers, New Girl and The Grinder. With Speechless, she says, the key was "making sure the funny is something that doesn't feel exclusive to people in the disabled commu- nity, or excluded, if you go the other way." In the pilot, we meet the functionally ragtag DiMeo clan as they're uprooting themselves, moving to a dilap- idated house in a nice neighborhood so J.J. can attend the local high school. Gernon says she and series creator Scott Silveri wanted a less polished look than other ABC shows, and for the camera work to give the series come- dic pace, literally and figuratively. "I guess you imagine people can come into this idea of, here's a show about a kid in a wheelchair as being quite a static show," she says. "Our whole thinking was to kind of turn that on its end. We never wanted it just to be a show set in a house." Now a hit for Lifetime, UnReal, created by Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Marti Noxon and based on a short film Shapiro made called Sequin Raze, is set be- hind the scenes of a show called "Everlasting," where mercenary segment producers go up against scheming but more vulnerable contestants to engineer a romance- themed trainwreck of a reality show. "It didn't have the edge they wanted it to," recalls O'Fallon about the original pilot that Lifetime wanted him to reshoot. O'Fallon calls himself a "director-writer," and admits that he'll monkey with scripts. "Not a lot, but a bit." It's one of the reasons he screens pilots in a group setting, never for the writer alone, lest his changes on the page become a writer's fixation. O'Fallon thought he could bring humor to what Shapiro, in Sequin Raze, presents as dark and nearly tragic. To O'Fallon, UnReal could be a story, infused with humor, about "the battle for a person's soul"—namely, the show 's protagonist, a show whisperer named Rachel who can be as cold-blooded in get- ting contestants into on-camera breakdowns as she feels guilty about this talent for manipulation. For all that, "The pilot itself was probably the hardest thing I've done technically," O'Fallon says. That first hour had to convey the different tones of its two worlds—"the mole people" of UnReal, as the executive produc- ers called the pallid crew lurking in the shadows, and the overlit, gauzy atmosphere of "Everlasting," the show happening in front of the camera. Rather than swap out lights continually to shoot both sides of the mirror, "We shot four Steadicams at the same time," O'Fallon says, one with Red cameras for the mole people, and the other with Arriflex Alexas for the prettified, "Everlasting " scenes. The best way to shoot Time After Time, Siega decided, was to hearken back to films that inspired him when he was young, like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "I started look- ing at these old films that were more locked down, and disciplined, and, for lack of a better word, more elegant," he says. Clockwise from above: Ava DuVernay, right, says despite Queen Sugar's nuanced, atmospheric pace, she needed to introduce a heightened plot point in the pilot to help draw in the audience; Steven Zaillian, says his Night Of lead Riz Ahmed clearly "had the range" to undergo a startling transformation; Christine Gernon works with disabled actor Micah Fowler on Speechless.