Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (15 page)

And in keeping with our strategy, to launch
Breaking Bad
, we did a month of films we called “March Badness.” AMC featured some of the greatest anti-hero stories ever told, with Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and others. Again, this yielded successful movie ratings all month long, all serving to promote our original anti-hero story,
Breaking Bad
.

We’re a company — Rainbow Media — which has a tradition in film. We own the Independent Film Channel and the Sundance Channel, and several on our team who saw the
Breaking Bad
pilot remarked that if we were to add just 20 minutes to it, we could have called that pilot the best independent film made that year. I agree. It’s a remarkable pilot and it has become an extraordinary series.

These serialized dramas have each been passion projects led by auteurs with clear and strong visions. It’s a joy to nurture them. Everyone looks forward to reading scripts, and I love the chances, when I get them, to sit down with the writers. I appreciate their talents, their vision, and their true craft in building the character and context.

Breaking Bad

PD:
You said something unusual. Here you are the network president, and you said you sometimes sit down with writers. I can’t imagine another president doing that.

CC:
Don’t get me wrong. That’s not my role. The original programming team does that work and I’m, appropriately, far, far away from the professionals in “the room” day to day. However, I think anyone who gets into the business, and who doesn’t have a healthy appreciation for the content and the brilliant people who create the best of it, is in the wrong business. It’s certainly a point of distinction for AMC, and Rainbow, how deeply into the organization the creative is valued, with so many of us being true fans of the content, from the top of the organization on down. One early goal we set — and it remains our goal today at AMC — is to create an environment where the best in the business will bring us their passion projects because they believe AMC will nurture them differently, and better, than anywhere else. Our introduction to most of Hollywood is a very bright and talented development team. From that introduction on, I hope all of our partners would say AMC has a different feel than most networks, from top to bottom.

PD:
Among the newer projects, you have
The Walking Dead
with Frank Darabont out of the movie field.

CC:
Here we have the man who wrote and directed
The Shawshank Redemption
, which is on the top of just about every “best movie” list you can think of. Again, we have an auteur, Frank Darabont, who is bringing the voice, vision and story, and it’s executive produced by Gale Ann Hurd, who has done a few huge films herself —
The Terminator, Aliens
, among many others we all love. In keeping with our strategy, we premiered the show on Halloween. That’s at the end of our 14th annual movie event called
FearFest
, where for two straight weeks we turn AMC over to horror films and we curate them to make it feel like a film festival on our air. Of course we use that effort to support some of the great films in the genre, but also to point horror film fans to an original series of the same genre.
The Walking Dead
is shot on film and, with Frank and Gale at the helm, is very cinematic. It’s another example of pairing the best talent and the best films in a genre with a like-minded AMC original series.

PD:
What else is coming down the pike?

CC:
In March we’re launching a series with Fox Television Studios which is our first move into the crime genre. It’s a show called
The Killing
, which is based on a series of the same name that was a phenomenon in Denmark. It’s about a murder and the overlapping storylines and interwoven mysteries that arise on the way to solving the case. We are enraptured by the stories; from the family of the victim to the investigator and what she gives up in her life in pursuit of information about the crime. You’ve also got a politician up for re-election and how he and his life story intersects with the tragic event. When we saw the Danish series we thought it was the most engaging storytelling we’d seen in the crime genre. We’re thrilled to bring this unique, addictive storytelling to America. It’s piloted and there’s tremendous talent attached. The writing is as good as it gets in the genre, led by showrunner Veena Sud (
Cold Case)
… we’re just thrilled.

PD:
In terms of development, the Danish series was brought to you by Fox Television Studios, who already had the project. In L.A., everybody is trying to come up with their own material, and people wonder how they would approach AMC. Do you actually look at new material, assuming it comes through representation? Do you have a pitch process like the networks where there’s a season and people come in?

CC:
Our process has a rhythm to it, as they all do, but in general we are developing all year along. The evolution of AMC has been quite rapid, so it’s not as if we only take material during only one season as you say others do. We do have the typical development process and our very talented (and very overworked) development team has hundreds and hundreds of formal submissions as you might imagine. Regardless of genre, we’re looking to tell the best stories on television; again, stories with distinction and with a cinematic feel.

PD:
Do you think the high-quality, slower-paced, introspective dramas you’re doing are something that’s part of a response to the frenetic nature of current life?

CC:
There’s a character-development emphasis in the stories that we have an appreciation for, possibly because we have such an appreciation for movie-like storytelling. If you speak with Matt Weiner and others who have inspired us, they’re telling stories where character and character-based drama comes first. And as with the “characters” you love in real life, it takes some time to understand who people really are.
Mad Men
and
Breaking Bad
each do wonderfully well with character, sharing the little things that make the character’s stories so much more than what you could ever learn about them in, for example, a typical crime procedural that wraps up in an hour. Matt Weiner has said there’s drama in a phone ringing and no one picking it up. You learn from these brilliant writers that life and storytelling and character development is in the details. And we’re willing to invest in these auteurs because we love the way they tell patient stories and nurture those details. We also appreciate our share of action stories, by the way. But yes, in
Mad Men
and
Breaking Bad
the pacing can be much more deliberate than a typical TV hour. Matt says, and
Mad Men
is a great reminder, that while most of us have never worked in an ER, been in a car chase or solved a crime in an hour, we’ve all felt the drama in hesitating when picking up the phone, not wanting to take a call for one reason or another.

PD:
That’s not usual on television. You said you were just fortunate, but it seems it took a level of vision.

CC:
We set out to create a level of distinction for the AMC brand. The vision is and was to create “premium television on basic cable” and to do that, my amazing team sought and delivered storytelling that at times has a cadence to it that is very different from what you might find elsewhere. We’re very proud of the stories we’re building and supporting.

H
OW
A
C
LASSIC
S
CRIPT
I
S
C
RAFTED

Constructing your episode
may seem daunting at first, but hour dramas — especially primetime network shows — follow a general template. Your insights into character, talent with dialogue, inventiveness in storytelling, and the depth of meaning are all creative qualities beyond any system. But I’ve found that using a basic pattern can actually release your artistry because you don’t have to worry whether the underlying skeleton will hold up.

Initially, I even advise students to try to separate their right-brain and left-brain functions — the creative and the analytical. We know how we are as artists, ready to run off with the circus, or an emotional explosion. Those moments when passion takes over are gifts, and if you’re touched by a cinematically hot encounter between characters, go ahead and write it down. The best writing is like trying to catch the wind anyway. But then put that piece of writing aside and return to engineering your script in the cold light of the left brain.

Even if you could somehow begin at Page 1 and steam your way through to Page 50 in a single creative breath (and I don’t think anyone can), television series don’t work like that. As you’ll discover in
Chapter Five
, you’ll be collaborating with a staff and will have to submit an outline or beat sheet (more about those in
Chapter Four
) prior to writing your teleplay.

T
HE
D
RAMATIC
B
EAT

Before we go further, keep in mind the nature of a screenplay scene, as I’m sure you’ve learned in screenwriting courses or books. A dramatic scene is the essential building block of storytelling on screen and should have a complete dramatic structure. That means each scene has a motivated protagonist who wants something and drives the action to get it through conflict with an opposition, usually an equally motivated antagonist. That’s just a basic statement of story plotting. If you’re stuck on this point, then take a break and refresh yourself on screenwriting before you move on to TV. Seriously. Writing television drama isn’t easier than theatrical movies, even though it’s shorter; actually it’s more difficult, because it requires all the same elements compressed in a tighter form.

When you look at the sample script pages that follow you’ll notice numbers at the sides. Those are automatically generated by screenwriting software in preparing a “shooting script” (that means the final draft which goes into production), but you should not have numbers on your presentation draft. I left these numbers in to help refer to sections as I discuss them (and because these really are from shooting scripts). The numbers indicate “Slug Lines,” also called “Scene Headings,” but they are not scenes in the dramatic sense I’m using. For example, an establishing shot outside a building is not a full dramatic scene, though it is a location that physical production needs to plan. For our purposes, a dramatic beat may encompass one or more slug lines; the key is identifying a step of the story, not a shot. You’ll see more examples when I talk about the script segments.

A–B–C S
TORIES

We’re going to look at a show that uses parallel storytelling. In this sample, the three storylines are not subplots, but independent tales each involving distinct guest cast. Since they occur within the same arena — a New York detective precinct — and they feature the same main cast, the stories are sometimes interwoven, sometimes blended, sometimes juxtaposed. Clearly, in style and tone they are part of the same show, and you might find a theme linking all the stories within an episode.

The largest (or most resonant) story is called “A.” The second most important story is “B.” And the third “C” story is sometimes comic relief in an otherwise serious show, or may be a “runner,” such as a recurring incident or character issue. Like any description of writing methods, those distinctions are flexible. Among variations, you may find “A” and “B” stories that are equal in weight, shows where a “C” story in one episode is a seed beginning a major arc in subsequent episodes, and shows that normally have three stories but might turn up with two or four. Again, I’m giving you a sense of the overall design, not laying down the law.

Some series usually have more than three stories —
The Wire
, for example. And some primarily “A” story only, for example
Dexter
. Before you speculate a show, carefully study how it’s crafted.

Each series has its own ways, but I’ve come up with a generic grid that fits many shows on both broadcast networks and basic cable. I use it to analyze sample episodes in my classes, and here’s a blank one you can apply to the excerpts printed in this chapter. For practice, try it while you’re watching TV. But here’s a hint: for five acts look for which two acts are the shortest. Usually five acts are simply Act Four divided in half. But I know of one action show that divides Act One instead. If you count pages (or time the acts) it’s easy to figure out how shows are accommodating themselves to this basic structure. Once you get the hang of it, you can also use this simple chart in the early planning stages of an original script. (see
Chart 3.1
)