Excerpt from Tim's other Creative Screenwriting interview. Spoilers for Aidan below:
Breaking the Story: Showrunner Tim Minear on Creating a TV Episode BY JASON DAVIS
When it comes to starting a teleplay, Minear suggests that story and character "are two things that meet in the middle. Sometimes I start with the plot as opposed to a character, but usually I'm fishing around for a plot that will say something metaphorically about the character. When I'm doing something like The Inside, which is procedural, the crime stories themselves are much more front and center than the adventure plot of an episode of Firefly", the science-fiction Western he worked on with Joss Whedon.
Alluding to "Aiden," an episode of The Inside that never aired, Minear explains, "it was the story of pregnant women who were being attacked, cut open, and having their unborn children stolen from their bodies. That was a story that we actually took from the headlines. We thought that was interesting and morbid enough for the show, but we were also dealing with a character [FBI agent Paul Ryan, played by Jay Harrington] whose wife had miscarried. There were character things that we wanted to explore, and we found that this was a really good way to hit that emotional arc for Paul. It came when it needed to come in terms of that arc [and] was interesting in and of itself."
To Minear, a good story must "be interesting and surprising" and, he adds, must not "rely too much on bullshit. I think it is the writer's responsibility to be interesting and to not lie. You find that stories that you can actually boil down to that one-sentence explanation [the logline] are generally good stories to write." But he quickly clarifies that, "The truth is that a logline does translate to clear storytelling; however, I would also say that it is completely unimportant." Minear explains the seeming contradiction: "Some of the best things I have written, when you boil them down to the logline, don't sound very interesting." "Out of Gas," an episode of the short-lived series Firefly provides an example. "The logline for that was 'An explosion onboard Serenity [the spaceship where the series was set] causes the air to be shut off.' That's so not what the episode was about."
ETA: And that answers the question I always meant to ask about Aidan. The idea did come from the incident I saw on the news.