Ask Adam Savage: How MythBusters Seasons Were Planned

I'm going to keep trying it in one syllable. Oh, it's two syllables. Zeebo says, How did you go about planning a myth buster seasons season? Would you have big myths and special episodes lined up well in advance to anchor the season, or did it all just develop organically over the year? The answer to that is yes. All of the above. I'm enjoying some diet snapple peach iced tea, which Seth Meyers has said is objectively the worst flavor. I'll tell you how we plotted myth buster seasons. Well, first of all, we didn't think of them as seasons. We thought of them as blocks. And I'll explain. Normal television shows shoot for eight months, a year, six, eight months, depending. And then they often have a break where those the stars of those shows get to go off and do fun movies and things. Mythbusters shot almost year round. But in essence, our shooting, our shooting blocks went for about three months, about 12 to 14 weeks at a time. So we would shoot for 12 to 14 weeks. Then we take a couple of weeks off. Shoot for 12 to 14 weeks. Take a couple of weeks off. Now, at the beginning of every contractual year, and that could sometimes fall in the middle of the year, depending upon Jamie's and my contract and other factors. But at the beginning of a year, I think that we would be looking at like well, we'd be looking at like 15 episodes, which would be 30 plus stories, which would be we'd want at least like 40 stories in the hopper ready to go for a 30 story season. And I was never not every news story that showed up in my feed that was interesting. Someone's dog got diarrhea and their Roomba spread it all over the house. Like that goes on the list apocalypse. And so to Dan, so does Jamie. I mean, everybody had stories. So we would at the beginning of the year, we'd sort of gather and this master list, this endless number of stories that we were constantly building and still have it somewhere. And then when so then we'd take those stories and we'd sort of give discovery, this big block of stories. And some of them, they would say, no, most of them they would accept because they knew that we had interesting ways to do stuff, even if they couldn't picture it. And so that would be our that would be kind of roughly the year's worth of stories. But then that list gets torn to shreds by the end of that calendar year. Really, the planning that would happen would happen at the beginning of each shooting block. So we would show up for a 12 to 14 week shooting block. And the first week was just story meetings. Always we'd spend a whole week in the office working through whatever the next 30 stories would be. And we'd have a master list. And, you know, we would sort of work through the outlines, what we thought. And this was an argumentative process, you know, as it should have been. It was it was you know, we were trying to compare all of our different psychological ideas about why something was true or not. I would say, well, we do it this way because it's patently obvious to everyone that this is the thing that they think. And Jamie would be like, actually, I think totally differently. And then Steve-O would say, well, actually, I think totally differently, too. All of that would be interesting fodder for a story. I mean, the more we disagreed about the parameters, often the more interesting the story got by the by the end of it. And even still, even with all that planning, there were plenty of stories we got to and realized there's not enough here for a story that that I don't have specific examples of that. But look, it was Mythbusters was a very organic process. Its original conception was very different than the original show ended up being. And that was also an organic process. And as the show matured and the sources of myths changed and shifted over time, that also changed how we made the show. I remember the story meetings really fondly. I love sitting there in a room arguing over why we think this is or isn't true and what we think the most obvious way to test it is. Those those were those are really fun days because you end up you'd always end up miles from where you began and frequently you'd end up being like, well, what we could build something really weird to test this one. And, you know, you'd have these fantastical left turns. Conversationally, all of a sudden, Jamie would be drawing some huge thing or a light upon some machine or costume I wanted to make. I hope that is somewhat of an answer. So Justin Ashcraft says that he used to work in post-production, including some Shark Week episodes for Discovery. He wanted to know how much involvement I had in the shaping of an episode story and feel while it was in post. Usually very little. But again, like I said earlier today, the production of Mythbusters was a very organic process, which which is one way of saying that we were we were learning how to make the show while we were making it. So it wasn't like I went into Mythbusters in 03 having an idea about how this episode should feel. It was more like Jamie and I got hired to host a TV show. We didn't know what that entailed. So we hosted a TV show until we learned what that entailed. And then we continued to host the TV show. All of us. That was Cary Grant, Tori, all of our education was that way. That being said, we would watch rough cuts and when things didn't match, which was rare, but sometimes a story beat was missing or an explanation was cut in half or we did the explanation wrong and then we would reshoot or reedit to to fix those things. But it wasn't really like the show was a hit by the time we were figuring out how to host it. And at that point, you don't want to mess with success like this is working. Let's keep on doing it. Why? Why should I have an overarching opinion about how this should go? That's different than it has gone. Later on, I would see things and want to try them. I watched this beautiful video of Hans Rosling, one of the great science communicators, doing this beautiful piece about the health and wellness of the Earth over the last 200 years, moving graphs with his hands in midair. And it got me so excited that I ended up drawing a graph. And I said to Katie, the digital person through the camera, I was like, Katie, I'm about to do something to draw an X and a Y. And I want you to graph this here. And here's a picture of the graph. And we're emailing it to you. And then I did my own little version of Hans Rosling. And like they sent me a rough cut of that. Is this what you were thinking about? Yeah, there was our our our contribution. But no, no, no, no. We were we were for the most part, we were always filming, not really worrying about the post about the post production. Thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to support us even further, you can by becoming a tested member. Details are, of course, below, but it includes all sorts of perks. And we're building them all the time. You get advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects. Questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams. And we have some members only videos, including the Adam real time series of unbroken, unedited shots of me working here in the shop. They are weirdly meditative. Thank you guys so much. I'll see you on the next one.