Elephant Bucks. Sheldon Bull

       PICKING THERIGHT STORY

      Bob Ellison had been one of the top writers for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Now he was going to run a brand new sitcom for MTM, the highly respected independent studio that had produced The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Rhoda, Phyllis, WKRP in Cincinnati and a bunch of other hits. I was nervously sitting with him in his office on the MTM lot in Studio City. He was wearing a beautiful cashmere sweater I'm in a T-shirt. Bob was at the zenith of his career; I drove over there in a broken down Volkswagen. He was looking over a spec Mary script that I wrote. “What made you pick this story?” he asked me, kind of bemused, maybe even a little disgusted. I kept thinking, “Any minute now he's going to toss me out of this very swanky office.” So I stammered and said, “I wanted to test the premise of the series.” He looked at the spec script again and then back at me: “So you gave Mary a pimple on her.” (I'd written a script in which the Mary Richards character developed a medical problem that might prevent her from having children.) I shrugged and squirmed in my seat. I was sweating a river into my shorts. Maybe it was a poor choice for a story idea. Maybe it was offensive. I was just trying to get somebody's attention so I could get a job. Mr. Ellison said that even though he NEVER would have written a script with a story like mine, and even though what I had written was entirely inappropriate for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and was even in questionable taste, he was nonetheless impressed by how skillfully I told the story. He read the whole script because he was dying to know how the story came out. He hired me to work on his new show.

STORY IS EVERYTHING

      Whether you're writing a novel or a play or a comic book or a spec episode of a sitcom, the STORY is what holds the reader's attention. It isn't the jokes or the snappy banter between characters. It's the STORY! The story is what keeps them reading. If the reader is dying to know what happens next in your story, he's going to continue turning the pages. If he's bored by the story, he's going to drop your script in the nearest blue bin.

      I want you to have fun writing your script! Writers create their best work when they are enjoying themselves. Forget suffering for your art! Writing sitcoms should be fun! If you can't wait to get to the computer every day, you'll feel more confident, and you'll end up with a much better spec script. A good story is ALWAYS the difference between a script that is fun to write and one that is a chore.

      Too many of the writers with whom I have worked have not understood the importance of story. Too many have thought they could fake their way through a script with jokes and sight gags. This never works. Without the right story, you always end up stuck. Your scenes aren't funny. The writing process becomes laborious. You avoid working on your script or give up altogether. With the right story, your spec script is going to be easy and fun to write.

THE RIGHT STORY IS IN FRONT OF YOU!

      Think about the series you've chosen to spec. You've seen it a million times. You know it inside and out. But so far, you may have only watched the series as entertainment. There was never any reason to analyze it. Now you need to start picking this series apart. Your analysis will lead you to the right story.

       Your goal is to write an episode that sounds like the series you have chosen to spec.

      If your spec script sounds like the actual series, this suggests to people in Hollywood that you have the skills to write for TV. Writing for TV involves taking someone else's premise and someone else's characters and reproducing that premise and those characters in the same way that the series' creator would. If you're writing Seinfeld, you have to write like Larry David. Now, no one can do this perfectly. Only Larry David can write like Larry David. But you can learn how to get really close. Close enough to start working on sitcoms!

      The right story is the key ingredient to making your spec script sound like the series. If your story is consistent with the series, then the characters will be able to speak and behave as they do on the real show. Everything about your script will fall magically into place. It will. I've been doing this for thirty years, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the story is the linchpin of any good sitcom episode.

      So with all this build up, which story should you tell?

      Don't worry. The right story is there in front of you. I promise.

WRITE TO THE PREMISE

      Every situation comedy has a premise, a framework within which the characters were created and the stories are told. The premise, this framework, is also known as the situation. Thus the term situation comedy. It's a comedy about a situation. Well, what's the situation? What's the premise? What's the framework? Understanding the premise will help guide you to the right story.

      What was the premise of Everybody Loves Raymond?

      Raymond was about a married guy who lived across the street from his meddling mother. On Everybody Loves Raymond, they wrote a lot of “meddling mother” stories. That was the premise that the series was set up to explore.

      Look at the title: Everybody Loves Raymond. Was that a joke or did they mean it? As I watched this series over the years, I decided that everyone did love Raymond. Ray was a nice guy. Ray lived across the street from his parents because they loved him, and he loved them. Ray's wife, Debra, loved him. Even Ray's brother, Robert, loved him.

      So where did the comedy come from? Ray's mother, Marie, meddled in his marriage, which angered Ray's wife, Debra. Ray got caught in the middle of conflict between his mother and his wife. That was part of the premise, too. Ray was also a bit of a mama's boy. His mother, Marie, doted on Ray, and Ray liked it. But Marie's doting made Ray's brother, Robert, jealous. Ray often ended up in the middle of conflict between his mother and Robert. Ray's father was cantankerous and his parents bickered. Ray often ended up in the middle of conflict between his mother and father.

      So the premise of Everybody Loves Raymond might be more thoroughly stated as: “The not always successful efforts of a somewhat immature but well-intentioned man to live in peace with his formidable wife, his doting but meddling mother, his jealous and insecure brother, and his cantankerous father.”

      If I was writing a spec episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, and I wanted to demonstrate with my script that I understood the series and the characters, then I would write to the premise. I would write to the heart of the series. I'd come up with a story for my spec episode that involved a family conflict — a problem — which exploited all of the well-known