Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd edition. Pamela Douglas
cast. Friday Night Lights was a perfect case of honestly observed high school students written with insight. So if you’d like to write teen television, go ahead. If you choose truth as your guide, your script will ring true at any age.
Traditionally, the primetime evening, from 8 PM to 11 PM, was divided into components:
8:00 PM — family sitcoms featuring children, “Unscripted” game shows and contests, teen melodramas.
8:30 PM — more sitcoms, though not necessarily with children, “Unscripted/Reality,” teen shows continue.
9:00 PM — sophisticated comedies, hour dramas that are thoughtful, romantic, inspirational, or teen.
10:00 PM — the most sophisticated hour dramas for adults; on cable, serious half-hour “dramedies;” historic miniseries.
At least that’s how it used to line up. Of course, now you can view anything at any time on demand or by recording the show, and cable reruns its programming throughout the week. Most networks stream their programming on the Internet, and if for some reason you still haven’t caught the show, you can buy or rent the DVD.
So you’d think that the traditional schedule is meaningless. Funny thing, though — despite all the alternate options, most people still watch shows at the time they’re broadcast. Programmers at networks still vie to “counter-program” their rivals, and “appointment viewing” is still the goal — making people feel it’s so important to catch the latest installment of True Blood that they will make plans to be in front of a screen at 9 PM on Sunday night, even though they could easily view it any day later.
Most talented writers want to work on the 9 PM or 10 PM shows, and in fact those are the ones I recommend learning. When you’re out in the business, though, you may find more openings at 8 PM and in less lofty outlets at first. That’s okay, you have to start somewhere, and in Chapter Six you’ll read about breaking in.
True Blood
THE RULES OF SERIES TV
• AN HOUR SHOW HAS TO FIT IN AN HOUR.
Actually, a network or basic cable hour is more like 45 minutes, plus commercial breaks, although pay cable may take the entire time. Usually, scripts for drama series are between 50 and 60 pages, though a fast-talking show like The West Wing sometimes went to 70 pages. On networks that break shows into five acts plus a teaser, writers are stuck with reduced screen time, and find themselves with 8-page acts and scripts coming in around 48 pages. Each script is timed before production, and if it runs long (despite the page count), the writer needs to know what to trim in dialogue or which action to tighten; or if it runs short, where a new beat could add depth or a twist, not simply padding. And you need the craft to get it revised overnight, which leads to the next rule:
• SERIES DEADLINES ARE FOR REAL.
Your show is on every week, and that means there’s no waiting for your muse, no honing the fine art of writing-avoidance, no allowing angst to delay handing in your draft. If you can’t make the deadline, the show-runner has to turn over your work to another writer.
From the time your episode is assigned, you’ll probably have one week to come in with an outline, a few days to revise it, two weeks to deliver the first-draft teleplay, a gap of a couple of days for notes, then one week to write your second draft — a total of around six weeks from pitch to second draft (although polishes and production revisions will add another couple of weeks or so). Maybe that sounds daunting, but once you’re on a staff you’re living the series, and the pace can be exhilarating. You’ll hear your words spoken by the actors, watch the show put together, and see it on screen quickly too.
It’s fun until the nightmare strikes. On a series, the nightmare is a script that “falls out” at the last minute. It may happen like this: The story seems to make sense when it’s pitched. The outline comes in with holes, but the staff thinks it can be made to work. Then they read the first draft and see that the problems aren’t solved. It’s given to another writer to fix. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Preproduction, including sets, locations, casting have to go ahead if the script is going to shoot next week. Tick tock. Another draft, and the flaw — maybe an action the lead character really wouldn’t do, or a plot element that contradicts the episode just before or after, or a forced resolution that’s not credible — now glares out at everyone around the table. Yet another draft, this time by the supervising producer. Tick tock. Or maybe it’s not the writer’s fault: the exact fictional crisis depicted has suddenly occurred in real life, so the episode can’t be aired. The script has to be abandoned — it “falls out.” Meanwhile, the production manager is waiting to prep, and publicity has gone out.
I once heard a panel discussion where a respected showrunner told this very nightmare. The cast and crew were literally on the set and absolutely had to start shooting that day for the episode to make the air date. But they had no script. In desperation, the showrunner, renowned as a great writer, commenced dictating as a secretary transcribed and runners dashed to the set bringing one page at a time. A hand shot up from an admirer in the panel audience, “Was it the best thing you ever wrote?” “No,” he laughed, “it didn’t make sense.”
• DRAMA SERIES HAVE AN ACT STRUCTURE.
Put away your books on three-act structure. Television dramas on networks have for decades been written in four acts, though many broadcast shows now use five acts, and a few are broken into six. You’ll learn more about that in Chapter Four, where a teleplay is analyzed. For now, think about what happens every 13 to 15 minutes on a traditional network show. You know: a commercial break. These breaks aren’t random; they provide a grid for constructing the episode in which action rises to a cliffhanger or twist (“plot point” may be a familiar term if you’ve studied feature structure). Each of the four segments are “acts” in the same sense as plays have real acts rather than the theoretical acts described in analyzing features. At a stage play, at the end of an act the curtain comes down, theatre lights come up, and the audience heads for refreshments or the restrooms. That’s the kind of hard act break that occurs in television. Writers plan toward those breaks and use them to build tension.
Once you get the hang of it, you’ll discover that act breaks don’t hamper your creativity; they free you to be inventive within a rhythmic grid. And once you work with that 10- to 15-minute block, you may want to use it off-network and in movies. In fact, next time you’re in a movie theatre, notice the audience every 15 minutes. You may see them shifting in their seats. I don’t know whether 15-minute chunks have been carved into contemporary consciousness by the media, or if they’re aspects of human psychology which somehow evolved with us, but the 15-minute span existed before television. In the early 20th century motion pictures were distributed on reels that projectionists had to change every 15 minutes. Then, building on that historical pattern, some screenwriting theorists began interpreting features as eight 15-minute sequences. Whatever the origin, four acts became the original template for drama series on the networks.
But as the value of advertising segments declined on traditional networks, more commercials began to be inserted to make up for the loss, leading to series written in five acts. These may also have a teaser (explained in Chapter Three) which is sometimes almost as long as an act, giving an impression of six acts, each around eight to ten pages long. On the other side of the spectrum, premium cable series like those on HBO and Showtime have no act breaks, and may be structured more like movies.
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