Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd edition. Pamela Douglas
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.
FIVE MYTHS ABOUT TELEVISION
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