Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (4 page)

Of course, you know to tell students to write for current shows and create sample scripts that will leverage their careers. But you also know that this season’s shows are probably not the ones that will matter in five years, maybe not even next year when your students graduate. How can you reconcile that contradiction? The solution is to communicate the approaches that will last. You can start your students on a solid path, but they have to keep going beyond their time with you.

So, writers and teachers, hold on to this book. You may return to it again and again as you write new scripts and your careers evolve. In this Third Edition, I hope I’ve given you something that will last.

F
ROM
J
OHN
W
ELLS

John Wells is Executive Producer of
Southland
, and previously ran
ER
and
The West Wing
. He is also past president of the Writers Guild of America West.

Pamela Douglas:
If you could go back in time and talk to your own young self when you were a student in film school or college, what do you know now that you wish you’d known then about writing and producing television series?

John Wells:
I wish I’d known how long it was going to take. You come out and you sort of assume it’s going to be a couple-of-year process and you don’t really start making any headway until you’ve wrtitten about a foot and a half of material, measured up off the floor. That’s when you really start to think of yourself as a writer in the way you look at the world. It’s a craft that takes a tremendous amount of time.

I wish I had more of a sense that it was much more like learning to play a musical instrument. After four or five years you start to not embarrass yourself. It takes ten years before you can even begin to call yourself proficient. And that’s very difficult for students because they’ve been through twelve years of primary school, four years of college, and often a couple of years of graduate school and they think they’ve already done sixteen, eighteen years of education, so they want to go do it right now, though they’ve actually just started.

It looks deceptively easy from the outside. If you look at the lowest common denominator you think, “I can do that.” The craft that’s necessary — the time it takes to have enough trial and error and to keep going with it — that takes a very long time to develop. I’m very suspicious of writers who haven’t been writing for ten years. I will often ask people for three or four or five pieces of material if I’ve read one thing of theirs that I like. I know they’ve given me the thing they’re proudest of, and I’m looking to see the growth, and how much they’ve done and how much they’ve committed themselves to the long-term process of writing.

I’ve supervised well over 600 scripts, and personally written well over a hundred, and I still finish each one disappointed in my work. It’s a life-long endeavor, never something you succeed at. I’ve been working professionally for twenty years and I’m always learning something new every day about writing.

PD
: You could have chosen to write in any medium. Why TV?

JW
: The feature world, which I remain involved in, is not a medium, generally, where you’re able to write about character in the depth I like to write about character. There are characters now on
ER
whose growth I’ve been writing about for years. I don’t mean to compare myself to Dickens, but I heard Steven Bochco talk about that years ago, when he explained that what he was trying to do on
Hill Street Blues
was like the way Dickens published a chapter a week.

And subject matter is different in television. The kinds of things we can write about seriously are more appealing than most of what you’re offered to do in features.

Beyond that, it’s much easier to be involved creatively in your work in television than in feature films. It happens a lot faster, so there’s not time for as many cooks in the kitchen. But also you get to see your work and see it quickly. I’ve done work on features that haven’t been produced for years, and [when asked for another draft] it becomes hard to remember what you had in mind when you first wrote it three years ago. In television, you’ll finish a script and see dailies on it ten days later.

PD
: People talk about how television is changing now with cable, the Internet, and the influence of DVR. What does the future hold for the art of television drama?

JW
: The technology makes for short-term changes, but we’re still doing what Chaucer was doing a thousand years ago. We’re still writing stories. I think we are structured in such a way that we’re interested in people, and we’re interested in hearing their stories and metaphors for our own lives and going through cathartic experiences. That hasn’t changed.

I actually think it’s a more exciting time for a writer because there are many more ways for your material to get made. You can write something and make it on a digital videocam that you buy at a store. You have an opportunity to work on shows on cable which have content you can’t do on broadcast television. The opportunities are limitless. There isn’t as much money to be made doing it, but you have thoughts and impressions about the human experience you want to share with others. This is the way to share it, and now there are more opportunities than ever.

PD
: Any final words of wisdom for a beginning writer?

JW
: It’s going to take a lot longer than you think, and don’t give up. Just keep writing.

There was a guy I went to USC with who I used to see every year at a New Year’s party. And every year I’d ask him what he was doing. He told me what he was working on, and I realized it was the same thing he was working on last year. That went on for three or four years. You need to be writing, at the minimum three or four specs a year, different shows. And you need to do that while you’ve got whatever day job you have to keep you alive. That’s the sort of commitment you need to really succeed.

Even my friends who came out of school and immediately got jobs or sold screenplays — within three or four years they ended up having to do their period of four or five or six years slogging. I really don’t know any talented writers who ended up being successful who haven’t had a struggle. That’s just what being an artist is all about.

W
HAT’S
S
O
S
PECIAL
ABOUT
TV D
RAMA
S
ERIES
?

Imagine the power.

Picture the whole world dotted with hundreds of millions of screens glowing with the light from television images. Inside each TV set, computer monitor, and mobile screen — your own, for example — visitors tell stories about their dreams and problems, loves and rages, their thrills and their losses. You care about them, probably more than you admit, and even talk about them when they’re not around — after all, they come as often as you invite them.

Sometimes they’re broiling over issues in the news. Or sick and scared about that, or lying, or brave. At one time they were attacked and fought back and barely survived. But no matter what, they’ll be back next time, your same friends, there with you in your most vulnerable places, at home after work and on weekends, on your phone while you wait alone for a plane, on your computer when you can’t sleep at night. Intimate.

Maybe one of them is Tony Soprano, the mob boss, asking Uncle Junior, “I thought you loved me,” and watching Junior’s lip quiver, unable to answer. Or
Mad Men
’s Don Draper hurrying home for Thanksgiving with his family after all, imagining them happy, only to discover they’re already gone. In
The Good Wife
pilot, you were reeled into the fraction of a second when Alicia, standing by her philandering husband, fixes on a bit of string on his jacket, as if removing it would put her life back in order. On
House
, you were drawn into a doctor’s moral quandary when he must choose between allowing the tyrant in his care to perpetrate genocide or killing his patient. On
Treme
, just months after hurricane Katrina, amidst destroyed homes and near-empty streets, you rooted for Chief dressing in his Mardi Gras costume of immense yellow feathers, dancing and singing with enough heart to bring back the dead and New Orleans. Joy and tears, up close and personal.

Think about the impact. Once you understand the way viewers relate to their favorite shows, you’ll get a feel for the kinds of stories that work and how to wield this awesome power.

T
HREE
Q
UALITIES
OF
E
PISODIC
T
V
S
ERIES

Among the traits that distinguish primetime series (both dramas and comedies) from other kinds of screenwriting, three are especially significant for writers: endless character arcs, the “long narrative” for serials, and the collaborative process.

EPISODIC CHARACTERIZATION

In feature writing you were probably told to create an arc for your protagonist that takes him from one state to its opposite; the character struggles toward a goal, and once that is attained, your story ends. Someone who is unable to love is changed when a mate/child/friend appears and, through fighting the relationship, the character is finally able to love. Or someone who has been wronged seeks revenge and either achieves it or dies for the cause. All fine for movies that end. But series don’t.

So how do you progress a narrative without an arc? Well, you create a different kind of arc. Remember what I said about series characters being more like people you know than figures in a plot. If your friend has an extreme experience, you continue knowing him after the event. You’re invested in the process, not just the outcome.

But watch out — this does not mean the characters are flat. Your continuing cast should never be mere witnesses to the challenge of the week. On the contrary, characters who are not transformed by the plot need something instead: dimension. Think of it like this: instead of developing horizontally toward a goal, the character develops vertically, exploring internal conflicts that create tension. The character may be revealed incrementally within each episode and throughout the series, but viewers need to trust that Alicia Florrick and Walter White are the same people they knew last week. Does that mean those characters are without range or variation? Of course not, and neither are your friends.

THE “LONG NARRATIVE”

Episodic drama comes in three forms: anthologies, series with “closure,” and “serials.”

Anthologies
are free-standing stories, like short movies, unconnected to other installments except by a frame.
The Twilight Zone
had a continuing host, style, and franchise, but the casts were different each week. As the precursor of today’s episodic television, anthologies flourished in the 1950s when showcases like
Playhouse 90
presented literature more like stage plays. But anthologies are rare today, and we’re not focusing on writing them.

Series with closure
have continuing main casts but new situations that conclude at the end of each episode; they
close
. This is especially true of “procedurals” like
CSI, NCIS
, any version of
Law & Order
, and in fact the majority of fare on the traditional broadcast networks. Syndicators and cable channels that run repeats prefer this kind of show because they buy large packages (the first four seasons, or 88 episodes, is typical) and sell them to local and overseas stations who may rerun them in any order. If the episodes have no “memory,” that is, no significant development of ongoing relationships, the order of the episodes isn’t supposed to matter. Or so the thinking goes.

Most series have some closure, even if they continue other storylines. But when a series is well developed, the writers and fans follow the characters and find it hard to resist their history as it inevitably builds over time. In its early seasons,
The X-Files
had a new alien or paranormal event each week, and though the romantic tension between Mulder and Scully simmered, it didn’t escalate. Then interest from viewers pushed more and more of a relationship and turned the partners into lovers by the end of the series. Most
X-Files
episodes can still be enjoyed in any order, but serial storytelling is beguiling.