Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (16 page)

Chart 3.1 Basic Four-Act Grid

Chart 3.2 Sample Six-Act Grid

Chart 3.3 Seven-Act Concept

The titles on the top are the four acts of an hour episode. Remember from
Chapter One
that on network television (but not on premium cable like HBO) commercial breaks occur roughly every 10 to 15 minutes. Dividing 15 minutes into 60 minutes gives you the four acts. Now, an hour drama doesn’t really run an hour — it’s actually less than 50 minutes after commercials. And each act isn’t really 15 minutes — more like 12. Dividing 12 minutes into 48 minutes gives you four acts also. But for planning a first-draft script, figure that Act One ends around page 17 or 18 if the show has a teaser (more about teasers in a minute); Act Two ends around page 30; Act Three at 45; and Act Four around 60 (or anywhere from 50 to 60).

On the left of the grid you see numbers one through seven. Those are the scenes in each act. Why seven? Well, you won’t always have seven, in fact. Five solid scenes could fill out an Act in some cases, and in “vignette” shows where scenes are quick, you might find yourself counting up to nine or ten. The basis for the list of seven is the two-minute scene. Back to arithmetic, if an act is 14 minutes, and each scene is around two minutes, 14 ÷ 2 = 7.

F
IVE
-
AND
S
IX
-A
CT
S
TRUCTURE

In 2006 some networks and basic cable shows, including the popular
Grey’s Anatomy
and
Lost
, went to five acts, and ABC network mandated six acts for all its new shows. You can guess why: more commercial breaks. I don’t know any writers who like this change, which seems pushed by desperation to pump revenues when network advertising rates are declining and the audience has discovered the mute button, not to mention all the people who record shows to omit commercials altogether.

Like it or not, you need to find out if the show you’re speculating has four, five or six acts, and how to re-configure your structure. I suggest you begin with the four-act idea. Then take what used to be the teaser and lengthen it to around ten pages to create a new Act One. Be sure you open directly into the story with jeopardy or action or a provocative issue because this is where you need to hook the audience (and the reader).

Each of the succeeding acts will be shorter than in a four-act plan — roughly ten pages each. In a six-act structure, with acts only around eight pages long, think in terms of Act Six being a tag or the final shoe dropping, or a twist. You might see an Act Six that runs as short as five minutes. On
Nip/Tuck
, to use an example of a six-act (or teaser plus five) show, the writers experimented with completing all dramatic arcs at the end of Act Five (which is the same as a show with teaser plus four), and used the short sixth act to add a surprising twist that, in a way, was a teaser for the next episode because it incited a new issue or challenge rather than concluding the current storyline.

T
HE
M
ORE
T
HINGS
C
HANGE
…

…The more they stay the same. After all the uproar about going to five, six, even seven acts in an hour series, by the end of 2010 the pendulum had swung back. I asked around and discovered two phenomena: First, writers are planning their stories in the traditional four acts and making the adjustment to five or six in a later draft. Second (and this amazed me), writers I’ve never met on shows I don’t know were turning up at meetings with the grid from this book. Sometimes they knew where it came from, sometimes a colleague had just handed it to them on a piece of paper. So this little grid I invented for myself — and for you — has taken on a life of its own. Be fearless if you want to use it!

Among the producers I asked about act breaks are two of my former students, Kelly Souders, who is now Executive Producer on
Smallville
, and Wendy West, a Co-Executive Producer on
Dexter
. Both of them are interviewed more extensively in
Chapter Seven
, but their insights into this subject may be helpful here.

Kelly explained, “
Smallville
used to be in four acts and we had a very long Act One. So we split Act One in half — three scenes and four scenes. It used to be six to seven scenes. Now it’s a teaser and two small acts. We can do that because at the end of Act One we have an action beat.”

I asked Wendy how
Dexter
is planned since it has no act breaks as aired. Keep in mind that movies have often been discussed as having three acts (beginning, middle, end), in which Act Two is twice as long as Act One and Three, so in old fashioned terms, Act One of a movie is 30 minutes, Act Two is 60 minutes and Act Three is 30 minutes. But as soon as you add a midpoint in the center of Act Two (a usual dramatic turning point), you get a regular four-act structure. With that context, here is Wendy’s answer to how
Dexter
is structured without formal act breaks:

“The show reverts to a three-act structure. We break the beats by character and then do a weave. We put everything up on whiteboards where each character has a beginning, middle, and end, which is why I say it has kind of a three-act structure. Although in truth we don’t break anything by acts at all. We break it by character. Typically the big reversals are in the Dexter story, so we break that first, and don’t worry how the other character’s stories fit into it if they’re not inherently a part of it. The reversals are built into what journey Dexter takes in each episode. The reversals tend to come where you’d expect — page 40 to 45 out of a 55-page script.”

I also put the question to Peter Blake, a writer on the staff of
House
, when he visited my class at USC. He told us, “What I do and I recommend to all the other writers on
House
is write in a four-act structure and then add two act breaks. The doctors will go down a path — what is this disease? Then you have a diagnosis. They have a theory and at some time a treatment for that theory. And at the end of the act, it doesn’t work. That’s a really simple way to break the act. The audience has to be involved enough that they’re not going to turn off at the act breaks. Generally, I would beat out a very simple medicine story. Then I’d beat out the personal story. I use index cards and shuffle them around. I’d see which of the later acts is the longest and I’d divide that in half.”

T
HE
T
WO
-P
AGE
S
CENE

I use the two-page scene as a target for students partly because inexperienced writers have difficulty accomplishing a complete dramatic beat in fewer pages, and when they write longer than two pages, their scenes tend to lose focus or become redundant.

Historically, screen scenes used to be long, more like stage plays. If you look at great movies from the 1940s, like the ones starring Humphrey Bogart, you’ll see some scenes that run five or even seven pages. They reflect a different era where the slow evolvement of a dramatic moment, gradually experienced, was part of the pace of life. Currently, AMC, which has its roots in classic movies, runs shows like
Mad Men
where scenes are paced to explore subtle nuances, and may sometimes be several minutes long.

But we’re focusing here on what’s usual on current TV. Whether the change was caused by the 15-second information module of
Sesame Street
, or TV ads where a one-minute commercial is long and 30 seconds is normal, or the speed of computers, where you’re growling at the screen if a function takes two seconds — an electronics-savvy populace is quickly bored. If audience attention drifts, or is way ahead of where you’re going with the story, you’ve lost your moment. On television today, a one-minute beat is more welcome than a three-minute scene, and if you’re starting page four of a single encounter, that’s a red flag.

Notice also that I’m using the words “minute” and “page” interchangeably. That’s just shorthand. A minute per page may be an average, but it’s not always accurate. Pages of dialogue move faster, while action eats up lots of time. As with all my construction advice, I’m pointing out a general design, not policing whether you color outside the lines!

U
SING
T
HE
G
RID

If you’re using the grid to help you to understand the form of an episode on TV, I suggest that you begin by recording the show. Watch it all the way through and name the “A,” “B,” and “C” stories (or whatever number of stories your show has). Attach each story to one of the main cast, and then summarize that particular arc in a sentence. Keep going, creating a “log line” for each story.

Once you’ve figured out the stories, replay the episode. This time, write a letter in each of the boxes on the grid. For example, if Act One, Scene One is about the “B” story, put a “B” in that box. As the grid fills out, it will probably look sort of like a checkerboard with “A,” “B,” “C” (or other) stories following each other in a somewhat random pattern.

You’ll notice that the cliffhanger that occurs at the end of an act might not always be a suspenseful moment in the “A” story; it might be a turning point in the “B” story, for example. You’ll also see that sometimes one of the stories continues for several beats in a row, especially if it’s following a “line of interest” the writer didn’t want to interrupt. On other occasions, you’ll see one story interposed between beats of another; this might be used to convey a sense that time has passed between the beats in the first story (this skipping is also called an “ellipse”).

No rules exist for how this “checkerboard” should look, so don’t get hung up trying to match the order of scenes. You’re serving the dramatic tension of the stories, not some outside system. The point is to recognize the way parallel stories complement each other.

The grid may also help you track the arcs, and especially if your show is part of a serial, you might be surprised that one of the storylines ends in Act Three, or the “C” story doesn’t begin until Act Two, or Act Four is entirely about resolving the “A” story. That’s all okay. Again, the structure serves the story within the general parameters of a four-act episode with cliffhangers. So learn from other shows but don’t copy.

If you’re using the grid to create an original script, your first foray into the grid might be to jot notes about key points in the boxes: how the show opens, the “worst case” cliffhanger at the end of Act Three, and how the show will end. You might do that for the “A” story only, or for both “A” and “B” stories, leaving room to think about the “C” story later. Particularly with the act breaks, it’s helpful to reverse-engineer, stepping backward from the cliffhangers to the beats right before to fill in the actions that led to the jeopardy or collision. That reverse technique may help you to figure out your outline. (I’ll explain more about outlining in
Chapter Four
.)

T
EASERS

The excerpts you’ll read in this chapter are from a show that opens with a “teaser,” though not all series begin with one. A teaser, also called “a cold opening,” refers to dramatic material before the titles (before the name of the series and credits). It may be a one-minute “hook,” or as long as ten minutes that includes several small scenes, making it nearly as full as a traditional whole act. In any style, it exists to grab viewers faster than the enemy, which is the remote. The notion is to open the hour with an action, image, situation or character that provokes enough anticipation to keep viewers through the title sequence and into the first act.