Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (5 page)

Today, the best shows that close each episode also have ongoing dramatic stories.
House
and
The Good Wife
, for example, have built followings on their continuing characters. But from a writing point of view, they are constructed as procedurals (more about that term later).

Serials:
Now, there’s a dirty word in some minds because it also describes “soap operas.” Daytime serials like
The Young and the Restless
and
General Hospital
used to have loyal viewers and succeeded according to their own aims. But primetime writers and producers don’t like to be identified with them because of the heightened melodrama (which is needed to drive the story enough to run five days a week), and the speed with which episodes are produced too often results in stereotypical characters, dialogue that lacks subtlety, and unbelievable situations.

Current heirs to soapy melodrama flourish in teen relationship shows, on the CW network especially. In the future, the inheritance may well be the Internet, where inexpensive, quickly-produced fare without known stars or elaborate production values can be made by anyone with a digital camera and editing software. And those episodes can run throughout the day and night.

Meanwhile, what about primetime serials that run on premium cable, basic cable, and broadcast networks? Decades ago, shows like
Dallas
and
Knots Landing
were described as “nighttime soaps,” and did have the overblown romanticism and hyperbole typical of their daytime cousins. But most primetime series aren’t like that anymore. Recent serials include award-winning dramas on HBO, Showtime, AMC, and elsewhere:
Mad Men, Dexter, Breaking Bad, True Blood, The Wire, Treme, The Sopranos, Big Love, The Tudors, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead
. And most of the acclaimed series on networks and other cable outlets use serialized storytelling along with closed stories.

A serial is any drama whose stories continue across many episodes in which the main cast develops over time. It’s called the “long narrative,” the epitome of what episodic television can offer: not one tale that ties up in an hour or two, but lives that play out over hundreds of hours. Think about it — as a writer you have the opportunity to tell a story that is so rich that it expands for years. At the conclusion of
NYPD Blue
’s twelve-year run, the series produced around 250 hours of story. That’s not 250 police cases (actually two or three times that many because each episode included several cases); the significance is 250 hours of living with these detectives and their cares, 250 hours dealing with the consequences of twelve years of experiences.

As you watch television, look for the way closed stories mingle with the long narrative. Not only will that give you insight into the show’s construction, but also a larger sense of what a story can be.

The Sopranos

COLLABORATION

If you go on to write for television, you’ll never work alone. Series are like families, and even though each episode is written by one writer, the process is collaborative at every step. Writers sit around a table to “break” each story, then review the outline and all the drafts together. Sometimes a writer may be placing a long arc in many episodes rather than writing a single episode. On
House
and
Nurse Jackie
, medical consultants — some of whom are also writers — supply essential scenes. And sometimes one writer may do a revision or dialogue polish on another’s script. The image of the isolated artist creating his precious screenplay secretly in the night isn’t the reality of life on a series. (Though that’s not to say staff members don’t write their drafts privately, or that they aren’t artists — some are brilliant!)

You may have heard the comment that happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Television staffs are full of writers, so how normal can they be? Dysfunctional staff families abound, but so do creative mixes that are encouraging and inspiring. As a beginner, you’ll learn tremendously on a staff. Read
Chapter Six
for how staffs function and tips for getting along and getting ahead.

But first, if you’re going to write for TV, you need to dump some misconceptions.

F
IVE
M
YTHS
A
BOUT
T
ELEVISION

MYTH 1: TV IS SMALL MOVIES.

Not really, though that does seem to make sense on the surface. Both TV dramas and movies deliver stories played by actors who are filmed and shown on screens. And many filmmakers — writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, editors, and so forth — work in both theatricals and television. In fact, Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg were involved with TV veteran John Wells at the inception of
ER
. Action movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer does
CSI
. Alan Ball, who wrote the movie
American Beauty
, became executive producer of
Six Feet Under
and
True Blood
. Melissa Rosenberg, an executive producer at
Dexter
, wrote the theatrical hit
Twilight
. And Frank Darabont, nominated for three Academy Awards, including for writing
The Shawshank Redemption
, is producing
The Walking Dead
on AMC.

A funny experience on a series brought home how connected film and TV writing can be. My agent told me that several writers had quit the staff of a show I admired. I couldn’t figure out why — the series was winning awards, it was renewed, and the characters had plenty of potential. Not to mention the writers were making a bundle. Maybe the showrunner was a monster. But I met him, a bright guy, no crazier than anyone else in town. So I went to work.

Dexter

First day in my new cubicle, I waited to be called to a story meeting, or given an assignment, or a script to rewrite. Nothing. I read all the magazines in the waiting room. Second day, I observed everyone else writing furiously on their office computers. Why was I left out? Had I offended someone? My mind fell to dark ruminations.

Finally, I popped into the cubicle next to me — “What are you writing?” The writer looked up, wide-eyed — didn’t I know? Everyone was working on their features. “He wants to do it all himself,” my fellow staffer said about the executive producer. “He keeps us around to bounce ideas and read his drafts. But he thinks it’s quicker if he just writes the show.” There I was on a TV staff and everyone was writing a movie. Pretty soon the studio pulled the plug on our feature scholarships, and that was the end of that job. But that illustrates an axiom: a writer is a writer, whether television or feature or for any new media.

Still, the more you know about features and television, the more unique each is. People go to movies to escape into a fantasy larger than life with spectacular stunts, effects, and locations. At $10+ per ticket, audiences demand lots of bang for their bucks. And teenage boys — a prime target for features — relish the vicarious action that big screens do so well. If you saw
Avatar
rerun on television, or rented a summer blockbuster, the giants of Pandora became toys, and armies of thousands were reduced to ants. Some bubbles are not meant to be burst.

From the beginning, theatrical features grew out of shared entertainment — think of crowds watching vaudeville. Television didn’t intend that kind of experience. In fact, the parent of TV is more likely radio. A generation before television, families gathered around their radios for vital information, whether the farm report or the war. And radio dramas were character-driven; beloved familiar personalities scrapping and coping with each other, bringing someone (often women, hardly ever teen boys) to tears or laughter every day. Close, personal, at home.

And real. Before radio, people got their information about the world from newspapers. That lineage continues in what we expect of television. Television became fused with what people need to know and what they believe is fact. So it’s not an escape, not fantasy, but the fabric of daily life.

Oh, you’re saying what about
Star Trek
or
Smallville
, for just two examples — they’re hardly real. Well, I did a brief turn on
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, and I can tell you the producers were interested in stories about people — people who lived in a distant environment with futuristic gadgets, yes, but the core was relationships among the crew, testing personal limits; and, at its best, the exploration wasn’t distant galaxies but what it means to be human. As for
Smallville
, the young Clark Kent is a metaphor for every teenager who struggles with being different, figuring out who he is and how to be with his friends. This is heart stuff, not spectacle.

Which is not to say you should write without cinematic qualities. The pilot of
Lost
opened with visually tantalizing images that drew the viewer into the mood and quest of the series. But even there, the focus was personal jeopardy: It began on Jack’s eyeball, then an odd sneaker on a tree, then a dog out of nowhere, and took its time placing us in a jungle before following Jack as he discovered were he was, moving without dialogue to the beach. Still tight in Jack’s point of view, only gradually do we see the crashed plane, and the first word from a distance: “Help!” Immediate, direct, close.

Screenwriting students are taught to write visually and minimize talk — “Play it, don’t say it.” Generally, that’s good advice, so I was writing that way when I started in television. Then a producer pointed to a chunk of description (which I’d thought was a clever way of replacing exposition) and said, “give me a line for this — they may not be watching.” Not watching? That’s my brilliant image up there!

But come back to the reality of the medium. It’s at home, not a darkened theatre. No one is captured, and the viewers might be eating, painting toenails, doing homework — you know how it goes. As the creator, of course you want to make the screen so beguiling they won’t turn their eyes away, but if the “viewers” have to get a point, put it in dialogue. People may be listening to the TV more than watching it. That’s not such a bad thing. Whereas viewers are distanced from the screen in theatrical films, voyeurs to other people’s stories, television drama has the effect of people talking to you, or at least talking to each other in your home. It’s compelling in a different way.

When students ask whether I advise them to write for features or television, after I tell them to try both, I ask about their talent. Do they have an ear for the way people speak naturally? Are they able to convey the illusion of today’s speech while actually writing tight, withheld lines? Can they write distinct voices for dissimilar characters? If they don’t have the talent for effective dialogue, I nudge them away from TV because action would be easier for them.

As you contemplate the differences between gigantic theatrical entertainment and what works on a family-sized TV or personal computer screen, take the next step: what sort of storytelling and filmmaking is likely to be successful on a screen the size of a cell phone?

So, no, television is not a small version of movies; it’s a different medium; and it’s bigger. Yes, bigger. The most successful features are seen by millions of people in theatres, and more when the movies are downloaded from websites, rented as DVDs, and rerun on TV. But even a moderately successful series, if it continues for enough years to go into syndication, is seen by hundreds of millions — all those lights glowing from screens around the world.

MYTH 2: TV IS CHEAP.

Well, I don’t think $5–$20 million to produce a single hour is all that cheap, or more than $100 million for a full season. Sure, when you compare that television hour to a two-hour feature whose budget is more than the GNP of several small countries, maybe it doesn’t seem so much. But at the high-end no one’s hurting in TV, and for writers, being on a series is a way to get rich (more about staff work in
Chapter Six
). Of course, not all series are on the high end, and the business side of television is more like a manufacturing company than an entrepreneurial venture. Pay scales (at least the floors) are set by guilds and unions, and a budget for the year is managed by the show’s executives. It’s a lot of money, but it’s all allocated. So toward the end of a season, some shows do tighten their belts. One showrunner gave me a single instruction as I joined his series: “It doesn’t rain in this town.” After he had sprung for high-profile guest stars, overtime shooting, and sweeps week specials, he couldn’t afford to make rain on the set for the rest of the year. You may have noticed another sign of overrun: the “wrap-around” episode — the one where the main character relives his previous episodes. Chances are, those memories were triggered not by nostalgia, but by the need to use clips instead of spending on production.