Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (29 page)

At HBO that was the dynamic they understood. So I come in the room with a cop show. But my purpose was to do it in a way that proves the network shows are a fraud. Well, that’s not the purpose of the show. The purpose is to tell a story. But that’s the added bonus. I had to sell them on the notion they were still counter-programming networks. The trouble is that unless you lay it out and they see that by episode six, the whole notion of good guys and bad guys has been reduced to farce and it’s really a show about economics and sociology and how power and money route themselves in a modern American city, unless you demonstrate beat by beat what you’re talking about it’s very hard for them to believe you.

In that very first meeting I didn’t tell them we were going to carve off a different piece of the city each season. They would have laughed me out of the room. I was trying to argue for one season there. But in a way you have to go as far as I did to say I know it will seem to have all the apparent tropes of what you’ve already seen on TV, but it’s not going to be stuff you’ve seen on TV and here’s why.

PD:
What impresses me about your shows is the character depth. But the comments I’ve read you’ve made in the past are that
The Wire
was just about Baltimore and the socio-economic issues. You don’t think of it being about the characters?

DS:
No. But people misunderstand that. It doesn’t suggest that as a writer you’re not obligated to write good characters and sustain good characters. Your characters are your tools to tell a story. They have to stay sharp. You can’t build a house with a bad toolbox. Everything — the characters, the actors, the directors — you want to have the best possible toolbox. But if all you’re doing is writing characters, what’s the difference between what you’re doing and a soap opera except that you’re executing on a better level. What do you have to say about the world? What do you have to say that hasn’t been said already?

Most of television writing — probably 80% of it — is to try to get a hit and then maintain the franchise at all costs. If they want to see shit blow up, blow some shit up. It’s about sustaining the audience. TV, for its lifetime until the advent of premium cable, had to exist on that level. American television at this point is only barely out of its adolescence. It’s been a grown-up for a very short time. And that’s because the advertising model of television destroys the integrity of storytelling. You have to maintain the maximum number of eyeballs to charge the maximum amount of money to sustain those ad rates. On that economic model, you must dumb it down. You cannot make it complicated. You cannot make it dark. You have to rely on melodrama.

The thing that happened in the last decade is somebody figured out an economic model where you could be a grown-up storyteller and do something that has meaning. And if people come, they come, but at least you’re still bringing people into the tent. Some people take HBO for
Treme
and
The Wire
. Not everybody. A lot of people want it for
True Blood
and whatever. But as long as I’m bringing people to the tent I can be an asset. It’s a different economic model where I literally don’t have to look at the Nielsens. What I do ask is, does the thing have a tail? Does it find its audience eventually?
The Wire
DVDs are selling at a faster rate now than ever before, though the show has been off the air for two and a half years. I need to know the show finds an audience or what I’m doing is irrelevant. But I don’t need it to find an audience on Sunday night.

PD:
Do you have another show in mind next?

DS:
Yes. We — Ed Burns, Dan Fesperman, and I — are working on another show about the post-World War II history of the CIA. I’m also working with my mentor Tom Fontana [producer of
Homicide
]. We’re planning a series on the assassination of Lincoln. And there are three or four other projects.

PD:
Any more wisdom you’d like to pass on to readers?

DS:
Experience life before they’re ready to write for any mass media. Experience the world, experience people, get outside yourself. In some ways journalism and nonfiction in any form is a great training ground for dramatists. I don’t work with people who woke up one day after they dreamed about becoming a TV writer. They want to become technicians. I don’t hire TV writers for
Treme
. The writers I hire love New Orleans, or are people who understand American roots music, and others who are journalists and novelists from New Orleans. That’s who I’m hiring.

I find television writers give me derivative television scripts. That’s why it’s all so generic. They get poverty and race so relentlessly wrong. They don’t even see the other America, and they don’t think they have to know anything other than the television industry. They read the “trades,” for God’s sake. I don’t need somebody who’s going to tell me how to make a television show. The last thing I want to do is make a television show. I want somebody who knows New Orleans, somebody who knows the drug wars, somebody who knows the CIA. Those are the valuable voices I’m always looking for. So when guys send me their resumes — I did three seasons here and I was story editor there — hey, what do you know about the world?

S
POTLIGHT ON
W
RITING
Y
OUR
P
ILOT

In the beginning is the world. When you write a pilot script, you’re the creator of a universe that includes places, people, churning and contradictory desires, threatening situations, even day jobs. And always, at the core, are secrets: mysteries so deep and intricate they will take 88 or 100 hours to discover. But most writers don’t start with those specific revelations, or even with the cast. And unlike movies, particular arcs in which characters grow and change are not usually the creator’s agenda on day one.

C
REATE THE
“W
ORLD
”

Many pilot writers begin with total mental immersion in a location where they will dwell virtually for years. David Simon, creator of HBO’s searing and insightful urban drama,
The Wire
, insists his show is about Baltimore. Each season focused on one aspect, such as the schools or the media, but he says the initial inspiration wasn’t the closely perceived drug dealers and police, or the teenagers portrayed with heartbreaking realism, just: Baltimore.

For Simon, the pilot emanated from both a geographic and socio-economic setting. But sometimes the “world” is tied to a quest or special character rather than a place. No one would mistake
House
for a show about Chicago. Instead, House’s world is his diagnostic unit in his hospital; and within that, the internal landscape of House’s need to overcome “a world of pain” (his own) propels the stories. And no one would mistake House’s hospital for the one in
ER
, although it was also in Chicago.
Grey’s Anatomy
’s Seattle Grace Hospital and
Nurse Jackie
’s St. Vincent (in New York) are in big American cities too, though they claim worlds of their own. Try this exercise yourself: how do the “worlds” of
Grey’s Anatomy, Nurse Jackie, House
, and
ER
differ from each other?

Damon Lindelof, co-creator of
Lost
, also began his world with a place: a mysterious island where a plane has crashed. But he advises that the starting point for most shows is usually not as challenging: “When you talk about television shows, there is a franchise element and the franchise is the world. A hospital, a law firm, or a precinct — those are the easiest worlds for a television series. You know what kinds of stories inhabit those worlds. The harder worlds are a spaceship that is being pursued across the galaxy or you’re on an island in the middle of nowhere that the audience knows you cannot leave.

“The question is who’s going to be interacting with that world? That’s what separates a good cop show from a bad cop show and a good medical show from a bad medical show. They both deal with the same patients, but the issue is: who are the doctors who are tending to those patients? A feel-good show like
Grey’s Anatomy
is a much different show from
ER
, but only because of the people. Otherwise it’s exactly the same show as
ER
.”

In the Second Edition of this book, Lindelof spoke generously about how the pilot of
Lost
was created. For the full interview, please visit
www.PamDouglasBooks.com
. Here’s part of what he said about the genesis of his show:

“Normally the pilot season starts in the summer when studios buy ideas from writers, and then the writers go off and write outlines, and then drafts, and usually before Christmas the networks and studios get those drafts and they come back after Christmas and in January the networks start announcing the pickups of their shows.

“But at the end of January, when all the pilots were already being picked up, Lloyd Braun, President of ABC, said he wanted to do a show about people stranded on an island. J.J. Abrams and I said independently (because we hadn’t met yet) well, there’s no place for the series to go. It’s not a dramatic show. How do you do
Survivor
, the drama? That’s a game show. Still, Lloyd was passionate about it. He had a vision; he wanted something different. At the time ABC was struggling with launching new series. They had crapped out of new dramas for several years; they were the number four network. And the police dramas, or medical dramas or legal dramas — you get those every year. But this was a different setting. The showman in him said there was nothing like this on television.

“This liberated us to create what we wanted. I called J.J., though I thought it was the worst idea ever — I didn’t think it was a TV show. But I said to him if you had to do it as a series it would require certain elements such as a massive cast, and it would have to be a huge ensemble piece and you’d have to know nothing about anybody. Maybe you could dramatize their past by having flashbacks of them prior to the crash. So you’d be doing two shows — one that took place after the crash and another show that took place before the crash. We didn’t know how we would make that work. And I said it has to be really weird. It has to be like an episode of
The Twilight Zone
every week. There have to be twists and turns and an external source of conflict that would send the characters into conflict with each other.”

F
IND THE
S
TORY
S
PRINGBOHRDS

Okay, let’s say you’ve fully moved into your new mental home — the world of your series. What’s next? Not writing — not quite yet, though you should be jotting notes all along. Now you need to fully imagine what makes stories happen in your world. That’s not limited to the pilot episode, but requires figuring out the “motor” of the show. Do people come in with cases to solve? If so, that doesn’t necessarily mean a legal or crime case, or a disease. In a sense, a case could be a relationship issue, or coping with extra-terrestrials or extra-dimensionals (as in
Fringe
and
The Event
), or your internal demons (as in
Dexter
and
Mad Men
). As long as characters have long-range quests that incur conflict, and their stories present both internal and external jeopardy, you can discover the “springboards” for stories within your world. This potential for future stories is the essential that differentiates writing a pilot from writing anything else on screen.

P
OPULATE THE
“W
ORLD
”

Once you know how your show “works” within a rich world, your next step is probably to draw out the main cast. I use that phrase “draw out” as opposed to “introduce” or even “create,” because if your world is fully enough imagined, these people already live there. In fact, if you have a problem knowing the three or four or five people who your show is about, you should go back to step one and delve deeper into your world. That’s not to say you’ll know everyone in a large ensemble cast, or that characters you didn’t see at first won’t step out and greet you as you write. Actually, as a writer it’s wonderful to be surprised like that. But beginners shouldn’t tackle a big ensemble anyway. It’s difficult enough to write a few people well!

Some writers do thorough bios of their characters at this point. Some sketch out moments, phrases or images that “pop” a character. I once wrote a pilot where I needed a way to tag a character (express her) in order to pitch the show. I saw her speeding into the outskirts of Los Angeles at dawn in a beat-up convertible, bare feet pressing the pedals to the metal while her butt danced on the car seat to the sound of “Mustang Sally.” In another glimpse, close and tight, she took her time licking the remnants of Kentucky Fried Chicken off a paper wrapper while a motel proprietor banged on her door. Only one of those moments actually appeared in the script, but both helped me visualize her at an early stage.

In the Second Edition, Ron Moore, creator of the great dramatic allegory
Battlestar Galactica
(the 21st century version on Syfy) described how he arrived at the characters. Initially, he wasn’t interested in the project because the original 1970s show by the same name lacked depth. “But,” he said, “when I watched it again I was struck by the dark premise at the heart: an apocalyptic attack destroyed humanity. The show was about the survivors and the Cylons chasing them forever. I thought that was a really interesting format because the core was this disturbing notion of death and being lost in the cosmos. So I thought, what if you took the premise and really did the show and asked yourself in those circumstances what would happen to real people? If you took normal, screwed-up people who just happened to be the ones that made it, what would that show be like?