Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (21 page)

Katie’s story also provides an opportunity for Sipowicz to externalize his feelings about Simone (including his anger), without which he’d be stuck brooding. Throughout
NYPD Blue
, a prominent quality of Sipowicz as a character is his determination not to yield to helplessness even in the face of the dregs of society, or, in this case, death. Often, Sipowicz fails, but here, Katie’s needs provide a way for him to be the rescuer when he cannot rescue Simone.

See if you can discover other reasons for choosing this “B” story in this episode, and why it’s an effective opening for Act One.

Throughout this act, take note of the fluid blend of scenes within the Squad Room. In the first sample script, the scenes tended to be easily separated. Here, you’ll find multiple scenes in the same time and place, choreographed directorially. For example, at the end of #9, while Sipowicz takes Katie into the hallway, we see Medavoy and Martinez ascending the stairs. The point is that we don’t lose the persistence of the other characters and dilemmas. The action directs the camera to “Follow” them, moving our attention with this scene, but we’re also aware of material which is concurrent in the room we’ve left.

Similarly, the “C” story with Wolff commences as Sipowicz goes toward his desk in #12. In fact, notice that the “B” story is literally interspersed with the “C” story in # 13. Toward the end of # 13, you’ll see multiple visual layers: While Medavoy and Wolff move to Medavoy’s desk, they pass Sipowicz at his desk, and while Sipowicz speaks, we see Katie sneaking away in the background, followed by Sipowicz crossing the room, leaving us holding on Medavoy and Wolff. It’s a complex, but elegant way to create depth (multiple levels) on screen.

This layering style — scene on scene in the same time and place — is found in many other sophisticated series too, so watch for it. In writing your own script, though, I suggest that you separate the stories when you plan them initially, and weave them together only when you’re ready to go from outline to teleplay. (You can read more about this technique in
Chapter Four
.)

W
HAT
Y
OU
S
HOULD
D
O
N
EXT

Read and analyze all the good television scripts you can find from many different series. Sure, you’ve watched TV all your life, but observing how episodes are crafted on the page prepares you to work as a writer.

If you’d like to see how these two example shows turned out, they can be read and watched at the library of the Writers Guild and at the Museum of Television and Radio. Both institutions have award-winning shows available to the public. (You’ll find those and other resources in the Appendix.)

Once you have a solid sense how the best dramas are constructed, you’re ready for the steps to write your own, which I’ll show you in the next chapter.

S
UMMARY
P
OINTS

• Many (though not all) drama series use parallel non-sequential stories denoted by letters A, B, C, and so forth. Three stories per episode are typical, though some shows have more. Each story is usually “driven by” one character in the main cast.

• Scenes tend to run two minutes or less. Five to seven scenes comprise an act in a classic network drama. With four acts, that adds to around 28 scenes total in an hour episode. However, certain shows that have quick dialogue-intensive scenes have more beats per act; shows with action sequences might have fewer. Shows with five or six acts may have as few as 20 scenes total.

• A “teaser” is a prologue to an episode and may incite one or more of the stories.

• By analyzing a quality show using the “grid,” you can see its structure at a glance.

• The best television shows demonstrate the principles of dramatic art that apply to all quality screenwriting.

G
UEST
S
PEAKER
: S
TEVEN
B
OCHCO

Steven Bochco is the Emmy-winning co-creator and executive producer of
NYPD Blue
and many other series including
L.A. Law
and
Hill Street Blues
. I spoke with him for this book twice, in 2004 and 2010; highlights from both conversations follow.

Pamela Douglas:
You’re generally regarded as a pioneer, from
Hill Street Blues
all the way to now. Do you see any trajectory in what you want to do with television?

Steven Bochco:
Yes and no. I don’t think we started
Hill Street
with any grand notion of changing the medium. I mean, we just created the show and then, at some point in the process, the show began creating the show. And by that I mean that certain things that we committed to conceptually forced us to do other things that complemented the original things we’d done.

When you end up creating a show with seven, eight, nine characters — in response to that, ask yourself how can you appropriately dramatize that many characters within the framework of an hour television show? And the answer is that you can’t. So you say, okay, what we have to do is spill over the sides of our form and start telling multi-plot, more serial kinds of stories. Even though any given character may not have but three scenes in an hour, those three scenes are part of a 15-scene storyline that runs over numerous episodes. So that was simply a matter of trying to react to the initial things we did. The show began to dictate what it needed to be. Probably the smartest thing that Michael [Kozoll] and I did was to let it take us there instead of trying to hack away to get back into the box. We just let it spill over the sides.

PD:
So you didn’t go into it thinking you were going to have fourteen characters?

SB:
No, we just sort of started out knowing what we didn’t want to do. We didn’t want to do the typical cop shows that we’d been involved in writing and producing for years because we didn’t feel like we had a lot more to bring to that kind of programming. So the idea of focusing, to some degree, on these cops’ personal lives was appealing. But that’s all we had when we started, and it just kind of organically evolved.

PD:
It’s generally considered the progenitor of a whole wave of television that is not necessarily about cops at all.

SB:
The next show that adopted our style was
St. Elsewhere
. That came on the next year with my friend Bruce Paltrow. They were downstairs, we were upstairs. One of the reasons people, to this day, erroneously credited me with
St. Elsewhere
is that it had so much similarity in style and form.

But then it’s time to move on. When we started looking at
NYPD Blue
, I didn’t have a lot of interest in doing another cop show unless I could do something with the form that would really change television. That was the only time that I really, consciously thought, here’s an opportunity to do something in the medium that could change it.

PD:
What were some specific things you wanted to change?

SB:
It was nothing exotic. I just really wanted to expand the language and visual palette. And a cop show seemed a more legitimate canvas on which to do it rather than a family or legal drama. There’s just something so gritty and blue collar about a cop show that the language seems organic. So I thought if you’re going to fight that battle, you have to justify doing it on the grounds that not doing it is really less than realistic.

PD:
I think that’s what’s struck me about all of your shows. Above all, they’re honest and real. These people are the way people are.

SB:
Some of them are racist and some are cowards and some are frightened and some are mean-spirited, and you know, some people just don’t like each other. It’s politics in the workplace, so that’s the stuff you always go to. And, you know, David [Milch] and I had always wanted to work together again. He wanted to do a cop show. I was less interested in a cop show but wanted to do this thing to change television. I didn’t want to do it in a vacuum, but there really hadn’t been a one-hour hit since
L.A. Law
in 1986 and here we were in 1991. The hour drama was in the toilet and that’s my business, so my business was in the toilet.

I thought the only shot we had at reviving the form is if we were willing to compete with cable television. So that was my pitch to ABC when they wanted a cop show from me. I said: I’ll give you the cop show you want, but be careful what you wish for, because the price is this, the language and the nudity. It’s one thing to say yes to that theory, and it’s another thing to get that script, and you’ve got something that’s never been seen or heard before in television. Originally, the show was supposed to go on in the fall of 1992, and it didn’t because we couldn’t agree on language and sex. I refused to water it down. I said you take it as it is or we’ll move on. So it got postponed a year.

In the months before the show went on we were getting thousands and thousands of pieces of mail — they were coming in sacks every week, from the religious right who’d spent a million dollars taking out full-page ads in major newspapers in America, beating us over the head for being pornographic. But, of course, no one had seen the show, which was very offensive. It would have been one thing if they’d seen it and taken issue with it. But these ads were so cynical, manipulative, and untrue about the content of the show — I mean, everything I wanted to do, I wanted to accomplish.

Interestingly, we succeeded, not by the show itself but by the panic-stricken religious right because they created a stir that no publicity machine in the world could duplicate. And thank God they did because given all the anxiety about the show, if we had faltered a moment in the ratings then I think we would have been gone in three weeks. But we came out of the shoot huge.

PD:
Do you think that the same story could be told today if someone went in with something the religious right opposed in the same way?

SB:
No I don’t, I don’t. Not today. Maybe next year, maybe five years from now, because all that is cyclical. A lot of it is tied to election cycles. More than anything right now, it’s a function of corporate terror. As the television industry has become more and more vertically integrated, all the networks are now divisions of huge corporate entities, and in that environment they’re fearful of the government and of advertisers and of their own stockholders, that it’s just fear of not rocking the boat, it’s just get the ratings, make the ad time, get the dollars. Ultimately, it’s a self-defeating attitude. I’ve had a show on primetime continuously since 1981, and, you know, that’s a real responsibility and a real trust.

PD:
What do you think you owe the audience?

SB:
A good story.

PD:
And a good story to you means…?

SB:
A good story to me means all kinds of things. First, a good story has a beginning, a middle, a complication, and resolution. In some fundamental way, that gives the audience a certain pleasure and satisfaction in having spent their hour in a worthwhile pursuit; and if, in addition to that, it makes them think about something or gives them a different point of view about something, then great. If it engages their sensibilities in a way they haven’t anticipated — great. Those are all wonderful bonuses but that all stems from a good story.

PD:
I got more than that from the best episodes of
NYPD Blue
.

SB:
You know why? The good ones all have good stories, and the great ones have great stories. And when you’re telling a great story, the inherent elements in great storytelling are complex thematic moral and ethical ambiguities, considerations of big human elements and conditions. Those are the kinds of big-theme issues that are embraced when you are telling great stories.

But it always starts with the story. If you say, “I got to do an episode about free speech” then you’re [lost]. You’re starting from the wrong place. You tell a great story and themes emerge, so that’s just “Writing 101.” I’m just a nut about story, story, story, story.

PD:
At one point you were developing three shows at the same time. How could you stay close to all of them?

SB:
First of all, I’ve been doing it for over 30 years, so I’ve learned how to be really good at it. And also it’s just an issue of time management. I’m good at managing my time. Every one of those shows is at a different part of its evolution, so a show like
NYPD Blue
required a fraction of a time that a new show would require because all of us spoke a common language. The show has such a long and complex memory to think about that you don’t have to invent what’s there. My only chore in the last season of
NYPD Blue
was to make sure we finished the series in a way that’s really satisfying to an audience and make them feel like they didn’t get schmucked.

And, again, storytelling, except it’s a different consideration of story. You’re not considering story events, although you have to, as much as you’re looking at character arcs. How do you take all of these characters on a season-long journey that organically spins them into their next life? So the audience goes, ah, that felt good, and I’m sad but I get it and I’ll miss these people. But that’s a different type of thinking, and that’s been going on in my head for a long time. The time that I spend with the writers of a new show is almost exclusively devoted to character arcs because they’ll come up with the stories, whereas we had a well of stories from cops we collected, so that part of it almost took care of itself.