Writing Sense8.

TV Aleksandar Hemon was one of a few writers hired to provide script elements and story suggestions for the second series of Sense 8. With little screenwriting experience he was surprised, but relished the challenge diving in so far that even when the show was cancelled, he agreed to continue the collaboration into a new series idea.

  He's written this fabulous piece for the New Yorker about the experience which somehow manages to say a lot about how Sense8 was made without revealing any spoilers:

"Before “Sense8,” my screenwriting experience consisted of co-authoring a script with the Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić for her comedy “Love Island,” in 2014. The rest of my writerly life had taken place in the self-imposed isolation of my head. I don’t take part in workshops or writing groups; I don’t share ideas or drafts with my fellow-writers for feedback; I make all the decisions and am responsible for every word in the book that I am writing, acknowledgments included. My solipsistic authorial habits would seem to feed into a common misconception about writing, which is that it is merely a conduit for the writer’s interiority, and that a good writer—or even just a capable one—possesses the skills to transfer the contents of that interiority onto the page with as little loss as possible."

It's arguable that with the new paradigm in television story telling a novelist should be just as prepared as another writer. Although in some cases (Class, cough) it can also be prudent to have someone with a television track record on hand, as here, to steer things otherwise the traps are wide enough to fall into.