Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (43 page)

“My premise is, this is about series. If you just make a funny video of your cat drinking Jack Daniels or you lip-synching in your bedroom, that’s not a series. To be a series it has to have multiple episodes, to have a cast of characters just like a network or cable series, a consistent premise. We do write scripts. I would say half of my book is about the conceptualization and the writing. The aspects of production and postproduction are more part of the show-running, the supervision of the project.

“I insist that my students pitch a story before they write a five-page script. It’s just like with a longer show, that’s when you discover if you have a faulty premise or a problem with story structure. The same points in your book about knowing what the premise of the series is and understanding the characters and the long narrative — what I call the series question — you have to have that for an Internet series too. You have to know what the overall dramatic tension of the series is.

“Most of what’s on now is comedic. People are struggling with how to do drama in very short form because it’s difficult to build the tension in three minutes or five minutes. I think
Quarterlife
, which had eight-minute segments, did a pretty good job of it. Part of the principles of
Quarterlife
was that the producers (Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick), had extensive hour television background, so they said, hey, each act is an episode. We do five- and six-act television in hour shows and that’s what these episodes are. Clicking on the next episode is like coming back after the commercial.

“The essential questions are consistent: what’s a series about, how do you develop a series and characters. But the market and how you market is what will change. The best of what will be on Internet television will still have story structure. It will have some version of Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and end. We can’t help it. That’s the nature of who we are.”

WEBISODES

Well, let’s say you’re neither Joss Whedon nor Herskovitz & Zwick. If creating an entire new Internet drama series is beyond you because you’re not rich and powerful (or backed by some entity that is) and you’d actually like to pay your rent, what else is online for a writer? Consider Webisodes. Those are usually original episodes of existing broadcast series, sort of an “added value.”

For example, ABC’s
Lost
, which aimed for a wide audience, simultaneously played to its Internet viewers. When I spoke with showrunner Damon Lindelof for the Second Edition of this book, he noted: “We have to keep our eye on the mothership at all times and the best ideas will always end up on the show. But we have constructed very elaborate backstories to explain things, and those ideas would never end up on the show because they don’t really mean anything to our characters.

“If Jack and Kate were to learn the origin of the numbers, most people wouldn’t really care. So we decided let’s give the fans who really care about the origin of the numbers the answer. It’s a sci-fi-ish technobabbly thing and you can tell that on the Internet. So we constructed this Internet experience of a girl who investigated the Dharma Initiative and had the payoff be another Dharma film in which it was explained. But we could never tell that on the show or your head would spin.

“It’s not an alternate universe. It’s more like having a compendium besides a text that gives you a deeper understanding. Other mythology-based shows like
X-Files
and
Star Trek
also have a ‘canon.’ For us, we say we generated this and it is part of the
Lost
universe.”

Terry Borst, who writes the monthly “Alt.screen” column for
Written By
, sees the evolvement of eTV (enhanced TV) and ITV (interactive TV) as both a future opportunity for writers and a source of success for shows. “The resurgent interest behind dramatic scripted programming is due not only to great writing but also to the ease in which viewers can interact with each other on the Internet, quickly creating show loyalty, and spread the word to others. As that interactivity carries over to a one-screen television format, the chance to extend and expand the world of a show further increases.”

Now most shows have online components.
Dexter
boasts five million fans on Facebook (plus online games), and
Big Love
invited viewers to hear Margene confide her “secrets” about Bill. These made-for-Web episodes offer a sense of personal connection that comes partly from being viewed on your own computer screen, and partly from the feeling of access the viewers have — deciding when to how to receive their visitors.

In writing Webisodes, you’ll find some stylistic differences. The
Lost
team said that their writers give a lot of thought to the final viewing platform as it directly informs the action of each Webisode, “This intimate viewing model in which the stories are usually viewed alone on a small screen seemed to us to call out for more intimate, diary-like storytelling. We purposely avoided the more epic action type scenes that fill the network show and used the Webisodes to focus more tightly on the characters.”

You might think Webisodes offer break-in opportunities for new writers, and in a few cases staff is added for these non-televised episodes. But it’s turning out that the same writers on the regular show are writing the Webisodes too, mostly to keep the quality consistent and because it’s difficult for anyone not on staff to know where storylines are heading.

Of course, that doesn’t stop anyone from creating fan-based stories (which pre-date the Internet with
Star Trek
novels about escapades of Kirk and Spock that never happened on screen). But if you’re producing your own Web show, you’re right back to the Joss Whedon paradigm — okay if it’s a hobby and you can afford it, but unless you have the super-powers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s probably not a career.

THE WEB IS DEAD

“Chaos isn’t a business model.”

In August, 2010,
Wired
magazine exploded into the debate about the future with a feature “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” The article offers sophisticated analyses of economic and technical factors by
Wired
Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson and Contributing Editor and
Vanity Fair
columnist Michael Wolff. If you’re interested in that level of information, I commend this article which can easily be found on the “dead” Web. Here’s what’s happening: Back in 2001, the top ten websites accounted for 31% of views, but by 2006 the top ten commanded 40%, and by 2010 control by the top ten websites reached 75% and was rising. Investor Uri Milner, who owns ten percent of Facebook, remarked, “Big sucks the traffic out of small.” Wolff wrote that this development was “a familiar historical march, both feudal and corporate, in which the less powerful are sapped of their reason for being by the better resourced, organized and efficient — is perhaps the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age.”

So much for the promise to put all content in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop. Open, free, and out of control isn’t winning over the viewers, after all. Anderson wrote, “The story of industrial revolutions is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time.

“Now it’s the Web’s turn to face the pressure for profits and the walled gardens that bring them. Openness is a wonderful thing in the non-monetary economy of peer production. But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK.”

What does this mean for you, the writers (known as “content creators” in new media vocabulary)? You can still post anything you want on the Web, where so much is noncommercial. As Anderson noted, “The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the non-monetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.

“The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving.”

Wolff concluded, “We are returning to a world that already exists — one in which we chase the transformative effects of music and film instead of our brief flirtation with the transformative effects of the Web.

“After a long trip, we may be coming home.”

H
OME
I
S
T
HE
W
HOLE
W
ORLD

EXHIBIT A:
The Walking Dead
.

In November 2010, AMC announced the show’s renewal for a second season after ratings that reached more Adults 18-49 than any other show in the history of cable television. Simultaneously, its international distributor FIC (Fox International Channels) announced that the show had record-breaking premiere ratings in 120 countries in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and The Middle East. FIC’s international distribution is carried in 35 languages, reaching around 875 million people worldwide. Meanwhile, Americans viewed the show across all platforms including on-air, online, on demand, and mobile. All that is part of “New TV.”

But from a writer’s viewpoint, the show is entirely traditional. It’s an expensive scripted hour drama telling a “long narrative” serial through professional actors, skillfully creating suspense and character conflict, written in the same four-act structure as 20th century network dramas. The showrunner is a multi-credited American movie writer-director and the writing staff has worked on other shows. If you time-traveled from the 1980s to watch
The Walking Dead
, you’d understand how it works.

I mention that not to diminish this successful production but to keep the future in perspective. International distribution is essential to affording shows like this one, and if you’re creating a new series, you might keep in mind its potential worldwide appeal. But day-to-day as writers, good work is what it has always been.

EXHIBIT B:
LITTLE YURT ON THE PRAIRIE
.

Yes, that’s the real title, and it’s not a joke. It’s a Chinese adaptation of
Little House on the Prairie
due to premiere in China in 2011. Then there’s
CSI: Mumbai
, and
Ordre Public: Intention Criminelle
, the French version of
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
. And so forth, around the world. Of course cross-fertilizing goes in all directions:
In Treatment came
to the U.S. from Israel,
The Office
was British before American,
Ugly Betty
migrated from Mexico, many series, including
Battlestar Galactica
, have been shot in Canada, and global co-productions (too many to list) include major historic series such as
The Tudors
and
The Borgias
.

Rene Balcer, a producer-writer on
Law & Order
, observed in
Written By
magazine, “Welcome to the new electronic Silk Road. Through the ages, commodities like silk, tobacco, salt, and rice, that originated in one specific area, eventually became huge engines of global commerce. The global commodities were adopted to serve their own cultures. With time, these adaptations were themselves traded on the world market. Television series… have now become such a global commodity.”

It sounds like ever-more opportunity for creators of shows, especially writers who have multi-national insights or connections. But watch out: the future is not a worldwide Age of “PAX Television” (at least not yet). The kickback is a potential confrontation with distinct cultures who may regard Hollywood as a purveyor of colonialism through entertainment. When Hollywood products integrate themselves into international markets, cultural anxieties and political clashes become part of the debate about cultural trade generally. If you’re interested in this subject, you can read more about it in books such as
Globalized Arts: The Entertainment Economy and Cultural Identity
by J.P. Singh (Columbia University Press, 2010).

With that caution in mind, the future looks bright for you. Writers who are skilled in American-style TV storytelling are in demand all over the world, partly to transmit skills in places where TV industries are beginning, and partly to work on American series that are being adapted. In fact, the Second Edition of this book has been translated and published in Germany, China, Korea, Spain and elsewhere to date, and I’m often asked to consult with writers from other countries.

Meanwhile, if you are still trying to create your original series for the Internet, think big — electrons don’t know about countries or borders; there’s money and audiences beyond the 405 and 10 Freeways in Los Angeles; that’s a part of the future I can predict.

R
IGHT
N
OW

In his 1967 book,
The Medium is the Message
, Marshall McLuhan envisioned a world where people were connected not just by what they watched but because they were watching it together — a modern “electronic hearth” that replaced the neighborhood front porch. His idea of television — especially prime-time storytelling — as the heart of a “global village” still resonates.

But most American households now have some form of personal choice when they watch through recording, or watching on demand or online. McLuhan’s vocabulary has morphed into phrases like “time shifting” and “appointment viewing.” Beyond choosing when they watch, people are choosing how they watch, and directly influencing what they watch. Ron Moore, who ran
Battlestar Galactica
, said, “It’s going to just become ‘media,’ and it will stop having distinctions that no longer mean anything. TV and computers are going to become the same thing. You’re just going to have a box or boxes at your disposal, and you’ll put everything on this box ranging from blogs to what we know today as TV shows and movies.