Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (23 page)

The challenge in writing procedurals is how to get beyond the technical to the heart. Donahue says: “The mistake we all make, including me and all of our writers on the first draft, is we do load it up with clues and we go to plot. Here’s the thing: no one cares about plot. No one ever has. But story — story is not the same thing. You look around and it’s the story of the guy who doesn’t want to lose or who wants to go the distance. That’s something people care about. Usually, that’s the “A” story. The “B” story of that is his love — does he get the girl or not?

“With our shows, the “A” story is investigation, but the “B” story is the emotional line. How does one of our characters on
CSI
feel about the case and what is it doing to them personally; or one family member of the victim is involved and how can we help them through this tough time? We have to keep switching back and forth between the investigative “A” story and the emotional “B” story. If you have Act One and it’s nothing but a clue takes you to this character, and that clue takes you to the next character, and our characters are only confronting them with evidence, you’re failing.

“We’re working on a story right now about a babysitter and there’s a murder in the house where she’s babysitting. We get prints of a man in the neighborhood. He says ‘I went in there to steal something.’ Yeah, well, why were you hanging around? Why was your nose pressed up against the window? ‘Well, I was dating the babysitter, that’s why.’ Well, suddenly, it’s not just a guy who was stealing something, but he’s telling us something about our suspect who we heretofore thought was so innocent. Now we find out she’s covering up the murder for her boyfriend. We find out later, they’re covering up for each other. The point is you’re not just interviewing the neighbor who says, yeah I robbed; I was a bad person. It’s what we call upping the stakes. Someone who presented herself as innocent is having a guy over for sex. Later, that whole story becomes a ‘Mrs. Robinson’ story because the babysitter’s mother was also sleeping with the boyfriend.

“Every person your characters investigate — and it has to be based on forensic evidence — doesn’t have to be guilty, but they have to give you something else so the story builds, builds, builds. The other rule is you have to have a warm body by the end of Act One, within the first 17 pages. You have to have a real suspect that informs the audience about the story they’re watching.

“A show’s job is to entertain. It’s plot-driven, and the writer should commit, tell the story, and let nothing get in the way — not educating the audience or political correctness or ‘arias.’ The hero must have desire. He must be thwarted. There must be complications.

“The difference the
CSI
franchise brought in was our production values. Each show, if it’s done right, is always going to be visually intriguing and ultimately satisfying. The filmmaking is changing, but filmmaking will never replace storytelling. What I find heartening is what’s always going to matter is the story and the execution of the story. When you get to the end, a good ending is surprising and yet inevitable. That’s what people are waiting for.

“So every story, whether it’s a medical show or a cop show or a soap opera, is a mystery. A secret is going to be revealed. When are other people going to find it out? How do we see a certain person get a comeuppance? And I don’t think that’s ever going to change. We want it the way we always wanted it to be. We want the ending we couldn’t get in our formative years.”

Of the many procedural shows on television,
CSI
is iconic — perhaps the purest example of this genre. Other shows with strong procedural drivers also feature serial stories that follow continuing characters.
House
would be a different show without Hugh Laurie’s screwed-up doctor and the relationships among his team.

One of the writers on the staff of
House
, Peter Blake, visited my class at USC and gave us a peek into his own writing process. Speaking of “The Tyrant,” an episode he wrote, he told us, “I asked myself ‘why would a doctor kill a patient?’ Well, to stop something even worse from happening. You always want to find the most difficult situations to write yourself into so you can write yourself out. You have to make the guest character as dark as possible. In this case it was a dictator who was about to commit genocide and this would stop it. Everything in the script builds to that moment.

“We had previously arced out the character relationships — where this episode stood in what was going on between Chase and Cameron. We talked about how to use that in the writers room. It got to the point that around this issue of Chase letting the dictator die leads to the breakup of their marriage.

“You lay out the bones of the procedural. Then you flesh it out. There’s a question, a dilemma for the characters. An episode I wrote for
The Practice
— a legal procedural — asked ‘what should you do if you represent a pregnant woman who keeps doing drugs?’ If you put her in jail that’s the best chance to save her life, but what if you were hired to keep her out of jail? That show often presented a moral dilemma for the lawyers.

“In
House
we look for conflict between the doctors, between the doctors and the patients, and between the patients and their families — often all of them.”

For artfully balancing procedural and serial strengths, look at
The Good Wife
. Here, the lead character Alicia Florrick begins with a dilemma we’ve witnessed on the news side of television — the philandering husband who must make a public apology with his wife stuck miserably at his side in front of the cameras. How could a show go anyplace but her private struggle and the family drama after that? What is a legal procedural with cases that close each week doing in this most personal frame? Have two shows been conflated into one for network ease? Or is it one show with layers that continue to unfold?

In a 2010 review for
The Chicago Tribune
, critic Maureen Ryan observed, “Once upon a time, cable dramas were very different from the typical network drama. That’s still often the case, but
The Good Wife
may be the most successful merger yet of the two sensibilities….

Robert King & Michell King

“Yet despite all its nods toward cable-style ambiguity and class,
The Good Wife
’s creators and executive producers, Robert and Michelle King, are mindful of the fact that their show airs on CBS, the most traditional broadcast network, and follows detective shows in which the bad guy is always caught by the end of the hour.”

I asked the Kings how they make the combination work.

“I’ll start with what brought us to it,” Robert King began. “We are not people who run away from the more procedural aspects of the show. We enjoy procedural when it’s really in top form. We enjoy it in movies. Some of the most interesting movies are ones with twists. Hitchcock is nothing more than very well executed procedural. So we like it. But we also know TV has flattened out the genre by having so much of it. Some of it’s very good, much better than movies. But there’s still a lot of it.

The Good Wife

“Our interest when we were writing pilots is that the best procedural is something that has repercussions for the characters and there’s only so many ways you can do that. Usually what TV does is have someone known to the hero having an impact on their lives. This hero — whether a cop, a lawyer, or a doctor — has to work to help the person who is in jeopardy. So it’s a little bit of a cheat because the only way you get people caring is they care about that person who needs help.

“We wanted to find a way that the caring, the personal aspect, was really about people’s lives. We wanted to personalize their home life and their work life. So that meant creating a real structure that was about character and only character. Clearly, you can’t just do that and say audiences will be interested. You do need issues and even procedurals within the personal lives so the story has plot twists and revelations. We enjoyed the human part of it and wanted that to become an essential part of the show.”

So, unlike
CSI
, the
Good Wife
was fashioned from character from the beginning. But amidst lots of character-based shows involving marriages and betrayals, this one brought an issue-based kind of storytelling from the pilot onward. Of course,
Law & Order
— a procedural empire — has always used news events, including scandals, to propel its episodes. But those came from the cases. In
The Good Wife
, the continuing cast itself has to deal with dramatic conflicts straight out of current day political campaigns.

I asked how they arrived at this choice.

Michelle King explained, “There were a series of scandals around the time we were thinking of what we would want our next show to be — Craig, Sanford, Haggard, Edwards, Spitzer. We became fascinated by the person whose story was not being told: the woman standing next to the man who was just getting slimed with his scandal. We started looking at that and noticed a pattern that, first, many of these women were staying with their husbands, which is kind of an interesting choice. And second, a lot of these women were attorneys.”

Michelle King told
BitterLawyer.com
, “I think the show began when we asked, ‘What are they thinking?’ And Robert and I started talking about it from there … We knew she had to go back to work and we had so many female lawyers to draw on.”

The Kings themselves are not lawyers — though legal procedurals in the past have generally been produced by writers with law backgrounds, such as David E. Kelly, creator of
The Practice, Boston Legal
, and
Ally McBeal
.
BitterLawyer.com
put the question to them directly: “Neither of you are lawyers. Do you think that helps you focus more on the dramatic elements and not be bogged down in legal issues?”

Michelle answered, “I don’t think it matters. We always start with the idea of a story, but we turn to technical advisors to make it more authentic.” Robert added, “It’s always a negotiation between creating good fiction and keeping it from being inaccurate. So a lot of times we have an idea, and a lawyer tells us that what we think should happen might not play out exactly as we see it.” Michelle admitted jokingly, “There’s a long, proud history of tweaking the law for dramatic purposes.”