Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (42 page)

T
HE
F
UTURE
OF
T
V
D
RAMA
S
ERIES

Any prediction about the future of television will be wrong. This is not because shows come and go each season, or genres fall in and out of favor, or new gadgets arrive on the market, new technologies are invented, new business models and entire industries take over TV distribution, or even that viewers are transformed by their personal lives and world events — though all those do happen and they may influence what you write for TV.

Any prediction will be wrong because predictions are based on the notion that the future is linear. Now, bear with me a moment — I’m not veering off into some sci-fi/fantasy realm. I’m leading up to advice that might be helpful long after the shows I mention in this book have all become history.

Some theoretical physicists have deduced that the Space/Time Continuum does not favor going in any particular direction, such as forward rather than backward; and for centuries mystics have invited us to experience Time as a single infinite moment. Of course, the mathematicians and philosophers could have saved their trouble by watching episodes of
Lost, Flash Forward, Fringe, The Event
, and anything on the Syfy channel. You are already familiar with flashbacks, flashes forward, simultaneous events told from various perspectives, and time travel in modes from silly to provocative. Personally, I think of Time as a spiral in which experiences and choices repeat, though never in exactly the same way, sort of like the DNA helix. To us in Flatland, that three-dimensional spiral would look like a pendulum swinging.

Here’s my point: Television has swung widely in the past few years. Sitcoms were “dead” at the start of the 21st century, but by 2010 half-hour television comedy was on the forefront of storytelling. Quality drama series were supposedly “killed” by cheap “Unscripted” shows, but as the mistake of moving the Jay Leno show to 10 PM revealed, the audience hungered for scripted series, and hour dramas actually grew instead. Broadcast networks themselves were “dead,” with the rise of cable and Internet viewing; but, guess what, broadcast audiences increased while cable also grew after 2009.

Now that camera and editing equipment is inexpensive and easy to use, and anyone can post an opus on the Internet, some observers have claimed that professionally produced full-length shows of any kind will become rare (if not “dead”), replaced by thousands of homemade productions. Right. Everyone really wants to see Junior’s horror series in which he bursts out of a closet in a sheet rather than tuning into Frank Darabont’s series
The Walking Dead
. Uh huh. I even hear that television itself is the walking dead, a zombie killed by Internet fever. Gimme a break.

Of course, some industries really do die out with the advent of technology. After paper became available, very few scribes preferred to carve into rocks. If you are a computer or technology specialist, venture capitalist, or an entrepreneurial independent producer with your own filmmaking equipment and aggressive energy, then yes, you probably should pay attention to the momentary swings of fortune and invention. But if you are primarily a writer, and you are interested in writing real television drama, I advise you to take a breath and stop spinning.

No matter what happens with Google TV or Apple apps or Hulu or DVRs or the number of act breaks or different financing models —
you are
what everyone needs. You bring the content. If you can continue to create credible characters with enough depth to develop long narratives, if you can be insightful in telling the stories of our times and our relationships, if you can acquire the craft to make the world of your script compelling on screen, then it doesn’t much matter what platform people use to view it.

So my advice to you is to find the center of the pendulum, the spot that doesn’t move (or the vortex of the DNA spiral if you prefer). Just let everything swing around you. And write your story.

With that caveat, I’m going to introduce our final Guest Speaker, David Goetsch. His enthusiasm for what he calls “New TV” led him to speak without interruption in the following interview. After David, I will return with other viewpoints.

G
UEST
S
PEAKER
: D
AVID
G
OETSCH

Executive Producer of
The Big Bang Theory
, David Goetsch has also been a writer-producer on
3rd Rock from the Sun
and
Grounded for Life
. His interest in “New Television” brings him to our discussion of the future.

David Goetsch:
The first question to ask is what is television today? It had been really clear up until ten years ago what television was, from
I Love Lucy
to
Emergency
. You knew what an hour was and you knew what a half-hour was. Half-hours were always comedy and hours were dramas that had a procedural component or an action component or a relationship component, or all of those, but they were very distinct genres.

Now TV has changed in two ways. One is distribution. How do you pay for and also show these dramas and comedies? We saw some changes with the cable revolution. But now there’s a third thing farther along the spectrum — a lot of different things that generally could be called The Internet.

The second part is that it used to take a lot of money to make all of the programming, but now it’s not necessarily the case. Now there can be lots of innovations and even tweaks and plays on the old forms. A drama on broadcast television is 44 minutes after commercials. But on the Internet there’s no limit to the length. And there’s no limit to how narrow a story or characters can be.

A television show about the world of antique wooden boats is a really small world, but you could probably get advertisers for it. If you spent little enough money to make the show it could be a profitable venture. What may become a great opportunity for invention is not limited by time constraints or budget.

On regular television you have to do a pitch, present that pitch, write a pilot, get approved, get it shot, and finally get it on the air. If you go through that process and it fails, you don’t have the opportunity to make the show. You lose everything you put into it.

There’s a producer who couldn’t have been more on top of the world. He created
Veronica Mars
, top ten list. But after three years the network canceled it. So what does he do? He goes with his friend and creates
Party Down
in his backyard. He just shoots the pilot himself then shops it around, and Starz buys it. That’s an example of a pilot they made for themselves because they thought it might be fun, but then it has a whole new life.

So the effect of that is the way a person can develop TV is different. There are new opportunities because of the low cost of production. There’s a new opportunity to write something, to shoot it, to look at it, and say you know what, I was wrong. I’m going to change this and rewrite it again. You have the potential to incorporate production into part of the rewrite process if you choose because the economies of scale have come down over time. And things now can look great. You can have zero trade-off in production values between something you made yourself and something you paid millions of dollars for.

The number one most-watched drama in the world, according to the creators of
House
, is
House
. And the last episode of the show was shot using a camera I could go out and buy for about a hundred dollars. We were always approaching this time, but now we’re here.

The result is that the barriers to producing ongoing television series have disappeared. All you need is the talent to do it. You’re rewarded for your innovation because you get to create characters you love, which increases the chance of an audience falling in love with your show, creating characters and situations that are not mitigated by a network or studio.

So you’ve got innovation on the creative side, innovation on the production side, and then you have the opportunity to distribute it yourself. If nobody wants to pay you to distribute it, you can post it for free and build an audience. After a few years of building a fan base it could come to television. And then if that show comes to television and lasts a few years, you could make a deal to get it back so you could continue it. What could potentially happen is a show could be born in a creator’s home, produced by the creator, run on the Internet, go to television, but the show would not have to end when it comes off of broadcast television.

What is television? What do great television shows do? They create character narratives so people want to check in every week to see what’s happening. The greatest things that have ever been on television are the wonderful series, both hours and half-hours. What we now have the opportunity to do is make those shows without television, without approvals, without the financial requirements.

I love having my job in broadcast television, and I don’t want to quit it, but one day it will be over and then I don’t want to be limited to go out and have my specs sent around as the only test so somebody can judge me as a writer. I can do all those things, but in addition I can make my shows, put them on the Web and build an audience of not just fans, but also an audience of executives in Hollywood who know what I’m doing, and who are interested in the kinds of shows I’m making.

This is such an exciting time. When was the last time writers were presented with this kind of chance to start a new tradition? When shows migrated from radio to television, many of them kept the same traditions, with similar sponsors, similar act breaks. The televised play, the proscenium comes out of that tradition also. Now we’re one step further from our grandparents’ media as we go out into the real world with our cameras and interact with our audience.

Another dimension is the opportunity to have a dialogue with the audience.
Star Trek
always had its conventions people could go to. But now fans, like the fans of
Glee
, are following what the actors are doing on Twitter, are getting perspective on what writers are doing in the writers room, having an almost real-time conversation with the creators. For some creators it’s a gut check for what you want to do on the show.

An extension of that is a computer innovator who has invited people to collaborate online in creating a TV show. What if a writers room is not ten people, but thousands of people who could weigh in. Managed properly, you could create a show that has thousands of loyal fans who are not only participating but also marketing that show. We’ll see what can happen.

What will survive are the shows that speak to an audience, the ones that make people feel they have to check in each week and see what’s happening to the characters.

A T
OUR
O
F
T
HE
F
UTURE

Not really. Any attempt to tour the future will be wrong, as I explained. But, keeping in mind David Goetsch’s projections, I’m going to lead you through a brief survey of the innovations circa 2011 that may affect you as television writers.

INTERNET DRAMA SERIES

Joss Whedon, creator of the iconic
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(and its spinoffs) is a believer. His self-produced, self-funded musical
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
was a Web pioneer, streaming online for free before becoming available for sale on iTunes, where it shot to the top of the charts. He says he was inspired by shows he’d seen online like
Star Trek: New Voyages
, a show created by fans of the original series.

It was the middle of the 2008 Writers Strike and everyone was out of work. So he pulled together members of his family and some actor friends, and everyone worked for free. When
Written By
magazine asked Joss to explain his business model, he remarked “Somebody coming to me for business advice is like somebody asking a guy who makes balloon animals how to pick up women.”

When the strike ended, Joss went back to work on
Dollhouse
on traditional television, though his experiment from 2008 (available on Hulu with commercials) has had millions of downloads by now. But the question remains, as
Written By
asked, “Can his success be replicated by others? Or is it only possible for a Joss Whedon with his fervent fan base, critical support, and name recognition that’s rare for a writer?”

Larry Brody, in “Field of Dreams or Mine Field” (
Written By
, January 2009) opened his article: “2009. The Year of Video on the Web. The Year that TV Viewing Habits Change Forever. The Year That All of Us Learn to Stop Worrying and Love
Hulu.Com
. The Eve of Destruction of Traditional Television. And the Dawn of Total Interconnectivity. Convergence Time is here.

“Pull up your comfy living room chair and surf the Internet on your TV. Pull up your even more comfortable ergonomically correct office chair and watch TV on your desktop PC. Be even hipper and more relaxed by using your laptop to do both in the intimacy of your bed. It’s a Slingbox world, kids. And it’s
free! free! free!
”

But when Brody spoke to actual writers of Internet shows he discovered, as one told him: “If your skill set is restricted to slapping words together to create dialog and imagery that is hilarious, thrilling, or involving, the Web can still be an exciting new medium… as long as you have the resources of a Joss Whedon. You can hire the crew and performers you need. And if it takes off, you have a calling card that could land you a ‘real job.’ But if you’re merely a writer who spends every waking hour trying to land the next real job, becoming Web proficient… is more likely to lead you to a career working on other people’s projects than to one in which you get rich writing your own.”

One solution — if you’re truly dedicated to making your own Internet show — is to start small. Tiny. Ross Brown, author of the book
Byte-Sized
TV (Michael Wiese Productions, 2011), works with students to create that kind of series. I asked him to describe his process: