If you want a peek inside where Jennie Snyder Urman comes up with the most creative storylines for “Matlock,” you’ll have to put your sneakers on. While the CBS drama has a writers’ room, the note-taking, the character arcs and the big twists come to the showrunner on her daily walks.
“I walk to work, a mile and a half, then I walk during lunch, and then I walk home from work,” she says as I join her for a post-work walk. She’s just started the Season 2 writers’ room, so if you’re driving around the Valley in Los Angeles, there’s a chance you’ll see her walking, stacks of scripts in hand. “I don’t think in 20 years, I have ever proofread any script or outline and not been walking. I usually have a whole stack of papers. It’s extensive.”
I stop her to make sure I’ve heard correctly — Urman is writing and reading while walking. She laughs and knows it’s weird. “Every six to nine months, I run into something,” she admits.
“I’m an introvert masking as an extrovert. The job requires me to be an extrovert, but I recharge by myself, which I think is why the walking helps,” she explains. “In the writers’ room, it’s super intense. We’re thinking all the time, but then I need the lunch to take myself back to a quiet place. I think about the problems we have to solve in the afternoon and am alone with my brain. I can just really clearly see where I want to head us, and I try to solve a problem or two, so that when we get back to the room, we’re not exactly where we were.”
The walking isn’t just a helpful part of how she does her job; it’s a requirement, both for personal and professional reasons.
“This is a crazy job. Efficiency is my love language, so for me, I need decompression so I can reenter my family as not a showrunner, but as a mom [after work]. And I need to not commute for that. Part of my self-care is that my office always has to be walking distance from the house,” she says. “In LA that 30 minutes twice a day that you’re in the car commuting is direct time that you can’t be with family or you can’t be working, so my first thing is I find an office and it has to be within 1.5 miles [of my home]. They ask, ‘How about 1.7?’ No. It has to be within a 25-minute walk.”
“Matlock” Season 1
Courtesy of Sonja Flemming/CBS
Sometimes, she’s joined by writers as well. “I’d always prefer meeting on a walk. I also walk around the [Paramount] lot a lot,” she says. In fact, Kathy Bates has captured some stills of her doing laps. “It’s a good place because it’s relatively contained. You’re not that weird, other people have scripts!”
Sometimes, Urman has headphones on. “Sometimes they’re plugged into nothing, just so people don’t talk to me,” she laughs. “And sometimes I’ll talk while I’m writing or reading lines aloud to get the character. If I have headphones on, people might think I’m on the phone!”
In the end, everything lives on the page — a physical page, not a screen and not via a voice memo. “I need to have my copy and just write notes on it. Then I rush home, put in all of my revisions, print it out again, and then go for another walk — over and over and over until I feel like it’s right,” she says. “I walk to proofread, I walk to solve problems and I walk to think up big ideas. If I’m thinking of a big idea, sometimes I walk for miles.”
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