Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (7 page)

Despite the push to crowd more advertising into shows, the effort is doomed. Viewers recording on TiVo and other devices easily skip the commercials. Downloaded versions have ads, but not in a way that interrupts the story. So after several years swinging from four-act structure to five and six acts — between 2006 and 2011 — and an aversion to act break structure on premium cable, a surprising reversal has occurred. If you look at the writer’s first drafts of many hour dramas, ranging from
House
(which airs in five acts plus a teaser) to
Breaking Bad
to
The Wire
, you’ll see the four-act structure back again. From a construction viewpoint, it just plain works, even if it is adjusted in the final drafts later.

•   EACH SERIES FITS A FRANCHISE.

Not Starbucks, although enough caffeine is downed on late rewrites to earn that franchise too. Some typical television franchises include police/ detective, legal, medical, sci-fi, action-adventure, and family. Each brings expectations from the audience that you should know, even if you challenge them. For series creators, franchises are both boundaries and opportunities. You’ll find more about how shows are created in
Chapters Two
and
Five
, and in “Spotlight On Writing Your Pilot Script,” but you can get a clue why franchises are useful if you ask how hundreds of stories can derive from a single premise.

The solution is to find “springboards” that propel dramatic conflicts or adventures each episode. Those catalysts occur naturally in most of the franchises: a crime sets the cop on a quest for the perp; someone in trouble beseeches lawyers who must mount a case; a patient is brought for a doctor to save. The hook for each episode is rooted in a specific world in which sympathetic main characters must take immediate action. In other franchises — family, workplace, high school and romantic dramas, for example — springboards are less obvious, relying on conflicts between characters rather than outside provocations. In these, a personal inciting incident (even if it’s internal) sets each episode in motion.

Decades ago, audiences expected the franchises to deliver predictable storytelling where any problem could be resolved within the hour, as many procedural shows still do. Take westerns, for example. The template was the frontier town threatened by bad guys (black hats). The good guy marshal (white hat) wrangles with weak or corrupt townspeople, gets a few on his side (room for one exceptional guest role), defends the town against the black hats, and rides off into the sunset.

With that old formula in mind, think about HBO’s
Deadwood
. Yup, there’s the bad frontier town of rough nasties. And it has an ex-marshal, a lead character who left his badge in Montana to forge a future on the edge of the abyss. But similarities to the franchise are superficial. Everyone in
Deadwood
is surviving any way they can in a world without an outside redeemer, struggling to make sense of life in a moral wilderness.

Clearly
House, Grey’s Anatomy
, and
Nurse Jackie
all use the medical franchise, where doctors (and nurses) must deal with new cases each week. But if you compare them to older examples, such as
Marcus Welby, M.D
., you’ll see how far
House
and the others have to stretch to reflect contemporary life. Welby, the kindly doctor, free of deep introspection, worked alone in his nice little office. But real doctors and nurses face ethical and legal issues as they treat both the victim of a gunshot and the man who shot him, and they cope with their own humanity — guilt, exhaustion, ambition, and the competing pulls of the job and the rest of life, including romance and self-doubt on
Grey’s
, addiction on
Nurse Jackie
, and a doctor’s deep psychological issues on
House
. To express today’s medical whirlwind, the form itself needed to change.
ER
developed “vignette” techniques in which multiple short stories flit by, some on top of each other, and
Grey’s
continued that layering.

From the moment ABC slotted
Grey’s Anatomy
to follow
Desperate Housewives
, the network mandated the tone: “Sex and the Surgery.” Executive Producer Shonda Rhimes responded in
Los Angeles Magazine
, “I don’t think of it as a medical drama. It’s a relationship show with some surgery thrown in. That’s how I’ve always seen it.”

Meanwhile, the family drama franchise is flourishing — like
Big Love, The Sopranos
, and
Breaking Bad
. Some families. I suppose you could call
True Blood
a family drama too, because episodes emanate from relationships among the continuing cast (some of whom are related or “living” together) as much as external events. Not exactly
Leave It To Beaver
. Take a closer look and see if you can identify the elements that update the franchises on your favorite shows. Think about how you’d compare
Mad Men
to
The Wonder Years
— both character-driven shows of an era gone by. What has changed?

In the detective franchise, a light show like
Monk
on USA played out the traditional form: one detective gets one new crime mystery each week and, after investigating red herrings that fall mostly at the act breaks, cleverly solves it by the end of the hour. Though Monk’s obsessive-compulsive characterization was a fresh, entertaining element, structurally this was a basic “A” story series (more about A–B–C storytelling in
Chapter Three
). Check out the shows this basic cable channel mounted after the end of
Monk
to ride that popularity: quirky main characters in predictable plots.

This kind of imitation is hardly creative, but from a programmer’s viewpoint it’s safe, and if you find yourself in one of those formulaic shows, here’s my advice: use the formula, but inhabit it with people and their true feelings set amidst honest social concerns. If you fulfill the minimum expectations, executives may never notice how much further you’ve gone, and you’ll have a better writing sample for yourself (not to mention doing your soul some good).

On higher profile police/detective series, on both broadcast and cable, you’ll see mostly ensemble casts and complex intertwining plots that are propelled by issues in the news or social concerns. Some use cutting-edge forensic technology, as in
CSI, Fringe
, and several others, where the real star is science that engages the intellect. Detectives have always solved puzzles, of course, but the show’s audience seems fascinated with futuristic tools that try the bounds of human capability.

Series that rely on stories that are solved by investigative procedures are called “procedurals” and include forensics (
CSI
), detective work (
Law & Order
), and medical diagnoses (
House
) that follow clues to wrap up a new case each week. Procedurals will be discussed in depth in a Spotlight between
Chapter Three
and
Chapter Four
, including hybrid shows like
The Good Wife
.

Along with the many casually watched procedurals, viewers are following densely plotted novelized series with the kind of passion studio executives crave. Dana Walden, president of the 20th Century Fox Television studio, told
The New York Times
in October, 2006, “We were all having conversations about event drama, and an event drama
is
a serialized drama.”

But how many hours will people devote every week to intense serialized dramas? And if you miss the first few episodes, it’s like reading a novel beginning in the middle. Would audiences become commitment-phobic?

CSI

Several solutions exist: catch-up marathons (as all serialized shows on cable run), replays and streaming available on many Internet sites, and DVDs. In fact, sales of
Lost
after its first year validated the whole business of selling DVDs of entire seasons of series, which was just emerging at that time. On Showtime,
Dexter
, a character-driven psychological thriller, offers an interactive clues game on the Showtime website to hold its fans. Webisodes, going as far as parallel series produced solely for Internet distribution as were made by
Lost
and
Battlestar Galactica
, are now the norm.

Monumental history-based series such as
Rome
and
The Tudors
proved the staying power of dense storytelling, not just as “limited series” (which used to be called “miniseries”), but also across seasons similar to regular programs. Though history is necessarily book-ended by lives — Marc Antony and Cleopatra died, and so did King Henry, not to mention all those queens — and their long narrative is less than infinite, these shows are examples of developing depth of character in a societal context. After considering them, take a look at
Treme
, for a more recent, brilliant exploration of how to work stories through an extreme historic place and time.

Still, the broadcast networks find it prudent to fill their schedules with reliable procedural franchises. And yet, those are volatile too. For example, the action-adventure franchise that thrived in the days of easy bad guys like
The A-Team
and
Starsky & Hutch
has transformed to shows like
The Closer
, in which a character said “I’m in America observing an empire on its deathbed, a tourist doing charitable work among the addicted and sexually diseased.” In this context, Showtime’s
Sleeper Cell
was an ambitious attempt to dramatize a range of characters and motives that are unfamiliar to most Americans. The action and adventure in shows like those emanate from the terrain, rather than having the franchise itself control the story.

The Walking Dead

Nor could great drama like
The Wire
be defined by its franchise, though it obviously had cops and robbers. And obviously a family drama built on personal relationships among the ensemble. And obviously a spiritual quest built on confronting mortality and the will to survive, even in hell. It was all of those and more, which is part of what happens when creative possibilities are allowed to expand.

That’s evident in the range of science fiction — now there’s a genre that has boldly gone where science fiction hadn’t gone before on TV. While the Syfy Channel (owned by NBC-Universal) continues a predictable roll-out of fantasy adventures like
Stargate SGI
,
Eureka
, and any number of fright movies (
Mansquito
, anyone?), which serve its niche audience without extending it, the channel also lucked into the critically-acclaimed
Battle-star Galactica
, which was sometimes a more searing political allegory than even
West Wing
was, while venturing into contemporary relationships on the level of premium cable dramas. At the same time,
Fringe
, using a traditional science-fiction genre, became a network hit, attracting viewers who are not traditional sci-fi fans, and the adventurous programming on AMC is bringing not only
Mad Men
and
Breaking Bad
but also
The Walking Dead
— a quality drama about zombies.

If I had to guess the frontier of science fiction writing on television, I would look toward the characters. In 20th century sci-fi series, the leading edge was technology as used by fantasy heroes, usually “perfect,” in action-heavy battles between good and evil, which tended to play to children and adolescents. Though contemporary sci-fi/fantasy shows are as different as
Lost
is from
Fringe
or
Battlestar Galactica
or
The Walking Dead
, they all follow flawed human beings, and the questions they explore involve both relationships and serious issues about what it is to be a citizen of this planet; and they’re watched by wide demographics. With so much range in this franchise, if you’re interested in trying it, I suggest reaching up toward real dramatic writing, and leave cartoon-like thinking to the movies.

The vitality of 21st century television drama has re-interpreted traditional franchises. But that doesn’t mean they’ll disappear. When I was a beginner freelancing any show that would give me a break, I landed an assignment on
Mike Hammer
, a network detective series. At my first meeting, the producer handed me two pages of guidelines. The first was titled “Mike Hammer Formulaic Structure.” On the second were rules for writing Mike, for example, “Mike speaks only in declarative sentences.” To be a strong man, he could never ask questions, you see.