Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (9 page)

PD:
Yet we can point to shows that have both, some that are a half-hour long and are awfully dramatic and hours that aren’t weighty.

DI:
I think that has a great deal to do with the proliferation of networks. There’s just more room to experiment and cross over. USA Network has a whole set of series,
Burn Notice
and
Royal Pains
, for example, that are tongue-in-cheek dramas. On ABC,
Desperate Housewives
is a drama that satirizes drama. The HBO half-hours seem to be situational, but portray more inappropriate heroes, as in
Hung, Entourage
, or
Eastbound & Down
. The half-hours on Showtime seem to be darker, delving into traditionally dramatic topics:
Weeds, Nurse Jackie, United States of Tara, The Big C
.

PD:
All of those are heavily character-driven more than situational and they tackle serious issues. How do they call themselves comedy?

DI:
Well I’d have to give them their own category: Dark Comedies. I was thinking about
M*A*S*H
in comparison to those shows and I don’t think you could find something as dramatic, as filled with humanity, than war. What’s worse than young people destroyed for a cause that was tenuous at best? But
M*A*S*H
was so much part of its time. You’d call it edgy in 1975, but you wouldn’t call it edgy now. You’d have to do it in a more graphic way.

These cable half-hours are in that tradition. In my opinion
Nurse Jackie
is a progeny of
M*A*S*H
, but
Jackie
can go so much further in depicting some really grim stuff. She deals with the day-to-day madness in somewhat the same fashion as the characters in
M*A*S*H
. There is a steady stream of wounded and dying, it’s soul-wrenching work, and the healthiest people — Hawkeye, Trapper — realize that if they can’t poke fun at it, if they can’t laugh, they will go insane, they will lose it. Jackie’s not away in Korea, she has a husband and family, but she’s just as dedicated to saving lives. The steady glimpse into tragedy, though, takes its toll in any hospital, and so she’s starting to fall apart inside, using drugs, having an affair. You couldn’t have done that thirty years ago. So the edge is further out there.

Mad Men

PD:
For years you wrote comedy and then you wrote for
Mad Men
. How is that different for a writer to change from comedy to drama?

DI:
If you do television comedy like
Cheers
or
Frasier
, in front of an audience, it was very much about attitudinal conflict. So as a writer of comedies you’re writing in a world where there are no unexpressed thoughts.

Writing for
Mad Men
was suddenly about the subtext. It was about insular action, almost novelistic. That was a big adjustment. I had written movies and I understood we’re telling it a different way. However in traditional TV comedy, where I grew up, we were writing argument to argument until we hit the real conflict and hopefully the funny. With
Mad Men
there was very little reaching a flashpoint.

I’ll give you an example. In the midst of the second season of
Mad Men
we were dealing with the character of Pete, our entitled account exec. The build-up had been Pete and his wife trying to get pregnant, and failing that, adopting a child. And his wife was constantly pressuring him. There was the conflict too of Pete being in love with Peggy. None of it was being expressed, but the audience is certainly aware of what’s going on with Pete and the pressure he’s brought on himself. There was a scene where Pete arrived home and his wife was going to confront him about moving ahead with the adoption and it was going to blow up. We were all struggling with what should happen. Then I remembered something my father had done when I was little. He came home one night and was upset about something at work. My mother had cooked him something he didn’t want. We lived in a second floor apartment. My father took the food and threw it out the window. It was a shocking thing. No argument up to it, just all that unspoken backstory pouring out in this incongruous act — this uptight patrician couple acting so working class. And Matt [Weiner] said that’s great; that’s exactly what we should do.

PD:
If beginning writers think they’re comedy writers but they want to write drama, what do they do with their talent? Can you do both in an hour drama? Clearly there are some hour dramas that are branded as comedies. The Television Academy and the Writers Guild didn’t know what to call
Boston Legal
— half the time it was judged in the comedy category for Emmy Awards and half the time as a drama. There are a lot of hybrids out there now.

DI:
The short answer is you can do both. Matt Weiner, who created
Mad Men
, did only half-hours until he switched gears and wrote the
Mad Men
pilot as a spec. That script got him on
The Sopranos
, where he learned a whole different approach under David Chase. After
The Sopranos
ended, Matt got to make
Mad Men
as he had written it.

The key in all of this is character. It really is about character. Drama or comedy, or both, that’s what drives you through a story. Even in a procedural like
CSI
, you’re still invested in writing three-dimensional characters, characters with desires and personal flaws getting in the way of their work. You really have to approach a script through the characters, no matter how far flung the idea, no matter how high concept it is as comedy — something like
3rd Rock from the Sun
— as wild and crazy as that was, the writers created a very definitive group of characters. They were from another planet, but there was a real family dynamic between them.

There’s no difference in that from watching
The Wire
, which may be the greatest television show I’ve ever seen. There you have a group of cops who are working together to counter the most base, despicable behavior by a group of people who themselves are being exploited by another group of people who are just downright evil. And these cops are thrown together and they all have their own problems. And yet somehow, they’re like family to the viewer. You’re wondering how this force they’re fighting against is going to affect their lives. What will be the fate? And plenty of funny things go on in that, humor on a level that is again very dark, but you’re laughing because it lightens the moment; it relieves tension.

New writers have to understand what creates character and how it guides you to tell a story. Real drama and real comedy are about some condition that people are afflicted by, or an obstacle in their lives, and you eventually find some way for them to deal with that dilemma.

H
OW
S
HOWS
G
ET
ON
TV
AND
THE
TV S
EASON

Fasten your seatbelt
— here comes a heady two-year ride, from the first glimmer of a new series, twisting through one year of development, and then barreling through a full season on the air. We’ll be touring the traditional network cycle, though you already know from
Chapter One
that TV is changing. Currently, many cable outlets (both basic and pay services) premiere series in winter and spring, and don’t compete with the network season, and some networks are testing year-round production so that they stay competitive with cable, especially during the summer. I’ll discuss those variations at the end. But now, take a look at the chart (
Chart 2.1
).

“Year One” represents the months of forming and selling a new series. See the dividing line before May? That’s when a new show first gets picked up by a network. In “Year Two,” we’ll follow a series that’s in production. Month by month, you’ll experience the process as if watching your own project grow up.

Let’s begin by making believe you have a great idea for a television series. Screech! That was the sound of brakes. You’re not likely to get your original show made if you’re a beginner. At least, you’re not going to do it by yourself. For decades, the custom has been to climb the ladder: You’d join a staff and go up the ranks until a network invites you to propose a series of your own. By then, the reasoning goes, you’d understand the way things work so you could reliably deliver an episode every week. No novice could have enough experience. Simply, no one would listen to you no matter how interesting your idea might be.

Chart 2.1 Traditional Two-Year Development and Production of a New Show

So let’s back up and understand why beginners don’t create new series. (I know, we haven’t even gotten to the first month, but hold on, you will get on the track.) Consider what a drama series does: It manufactures hour-long films that air every week and continue (the producers hope) for years. Your ability to come up with a pilot (the first episode) doesn’t prove you can write episode 7, or 20, or the 88th episode at the end of four years. It doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that the series has the “legs” for anyone else to derive a full season, either. (Having “legs” means a show has the potential to generate enough stories to last a long time.) And it surely doesn’t guarantee that you would know how to run a multimillion-dollar business with hundreds of specialized employees (actors, set builders, editors, office staff, directors, truckers, camera operators, electricians, composers… without even counting writers).

Television series aren’t bought or sold on ideas, but the ability to deliver on those ideas.

Now, don’t freak. There are ways. The closed loop of staff writers becoming showrunners who hire staff writers who will one day be showrunners is loosening. Sometimes feature filmmakers who have clout but no television experience are paired with TV veterans. A second infusion of outsiders is the twenty-something producers, often with a track record in small Internet series or credits in independent films, journalism, or published fiction, including graphic novels (comics). Since some outlets pursue teen audiences, they tend to prefer writers under 30. But could they have the experience to run a show? Here’s how it worked at
The O.C
..