Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (24 page)

Actually, the show has three prongs, not two — family drama, legal procedural, and significantly, political satire, in its acute observations of judges and behind-the-scenes machinations that get people elected. Darkly comic moments drop in like sparks in otherwise procedural scenes, for example a scene when a tough woman military court judge enters, holding a glass of dark liquid, and Alicia is warned to watch out, “she’s doing another cleanse.”

In a deliciously complex dinner scene from a second season episode, the Florrick family attempts to impress a potential campaign contributor by celebrating Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Everything goes wrong as they try to prove they are pro-gay rights, and pro-Israel, while the bright teen daughter confronts the donor about the Gaza blockade, Alicia’s gay brother tries to persuade her to leave Peter, Peter’s patrician mother bizarrely offers that she has a Jewish friend, and Alicia toasts the visitor with “atone,” all while campaign manager Eli Gold (modeled on Rahm Emanuel) struggles to win the visitor’s endorsement. It manages to be tense and funny, human and philosophical, rich in both character and plot all at the same time.

In some episodes, the show is closer to
The West Wing
than
NCIS
, which precedes it on the CBS schedule. It would seem a hard sell to a traditional broadcast network. The Kings had been writing and producing pilots for nine years before
The Good Wife
. Even with a strong track record, it’s important to get the backing of a large production entity or studio, as I told you in earlier chapters. So before going to the network, they pitched the opening image to Scott Free, the production company run by Ridley Scott and Tony Scott. Ridley Scott’s movie credits go back to
Alien
and
Thelma & Louise
, and together with his brother Tony, they have a long list of television productions since. Later, when they went into production, they staffed up with writers whose credits included
ER, Big Love, The Practice
, and
Boston Legal
.

Robert King described his pitch: “The scandal press conference was happening and the camera starts on the man, but our camera starts looking at the corner of the TV image and finds the wife next to him. That’s who we’re following. And then we go right into her head seeing this piece of lint on his sleeve. It was the opening sequence that we hoped would engage the listener.”

That general approach, centering the viewer in the life of the character, often with a strong sense of place or viewpoint, has become a template for the show. “In all our episodes we have to know what our opening image is. It’s a kind of DNA the story flows from,” Robert King explained.

But once they’re past the pilot and into planning the episodes, how do they navigate? On many traditional procedurals, the showrunners don’t use a writers room at all. It isn’t necessary when episodes are free-standing and depend on cases solved in an hour, without important memory for the continuing cast. To the extent those shows have arcs for the continuing cast, they are handled by the showrunner, sometimes just a couple of scenes added to the final draft after the credited writer is finished.

But
The Good Wife
is a hybrid, so Robert King explained, “In the first year, we mapped out where we were in Alicia’s life … We’re not like cable that has only 12 episodes. We do 23, so we had to find a dramatic engine that would take us through the season. So much of television has melodramatic cliché. Anything we could do to avoid cliché, either using something on a current events level or a paradigm shift level, we did.”

Michelle King told Maureen Ryan, “What’s been fun with exploring Alicia is seeing how far she’s come. She started out really unsure of her footing professionally. As she’s gone on, she’s become far more secure in what she does. And she hasn’t been unethical, but she lives more in gray areas than I think she anticipated at the beginning….

“And even though it’s a show about the fallout from a political scandal and a woman torn between two men …
The Good Wife
never comes across as soapy or melodramatic. The show is too subtle for that, yet the charged attraction between Alicia and each of the men in her life isn’t minimized either … When we started out, we would have that half-page of dialogue explaining what was going on. Then we realized we didn’t need it. [The cast] is so skilled that the audience gets everything.”

“We were always fascinated by how the Clintons worked and how they both became powerful,” Robert King told Ryan. “We kind of want to see, now that Alicia has found security in her work, how does that threaten her husband? Does she need her husband?”

The Kings explained that in the writers room the staff begins with where they are in the character’s arc and then matches that to the case. That’s different from
CSI
, which begin with the case, and different from
House
, which plans A, B, and C stories involving the medical mystery (A), Dr. House’s struggle in the episode (B), and a relationship issue among the doctors which has to play out in conjunction with the case (C). In
The Good Wife
, the spine of the show — the series question — might be phrased something like “Can a woman maintain her identity and integrity while standing by the husband who betrayed her?” or even “How does a good person survive in a world of sharks?” So each episode answers the core question in some way, both in the family scenes and in the law firm where her personal issues are echoed.

Finally, I asked what they look for in writers, or what they suggest for students interested in speculating an episode. Not surprisingly, they never mentioned legal background — they have researchers and lawyers on staff for that. And they didn’t mention expertise with procedural plotting either. What they said they look for is deep understanding of the show from having watched all the episodes and done your research (widely available on websites). Most important, bring some personal connection to the struggles of these characters, some life knowledge that fits these characters. And that bit of advice is good for any show, procedural or not.

As this book awaited publication, a procedural arrived with fresh possibilities for the genre.
The Killing
, on AMC, expands the franchise of cop shows and embraces the global nature of TV while holding an audience through a season of deep reveals. Some reviewers questioned whether
The Killing
is even a procedural because crime solving feels secondary to character development. Actually, this show is both plot-driven
and
character-driven.

We discussed how
The Good Wife
is also both. In that show, however, the legal (and political) procedural is distinct from the family drama. The franchises intersect in
The Good Wife
, but can be planned separately.

The Killing
goes further because it’s impossible to disengage the clues to Rosie’s murder from her parent’s grief and how their marriage is changed. It’s equally impossible to separate the job from the life of Detective Linden for whom the search
is
her emotional reality. The various suspects, including politicians, are far more than red herrings — each struggles with his demons and angels, and we’re invested in those internal tensions as much as we are involved in the case.

Based on a Danish TV series,
The Killing
is the opposite of the many fast-paced American crime shows that exploit disturbing images, delivered with a light touch, presenting and then solving horrific violence in an hour. Veena Sud, the writer-producer who runs
The Killing
, is herself a veteran of network procedurals as the former showrunner on
Cold Case
. Comparing those two shows suggests how far the genre has come.

W
RITING
Y
OUR
O
WN
E
PISODE

H
EARING
V
OICES

(The following impressionistic essay appeared in
The Journal
of the Writers Guild of America.)

“…Trumpet at his lips, he listened to the notes bounce from brick rooftop to rooftop until, finally, he knew the rhythm of the echoes. He’d based his music on those intervals. People called him a genius, but he knew what they could not understand — that he had merely listened.”

That’s from a short story I wrote in college, when I believed music exists before it is played, that a statue is inside the marble block and the sculptor cuts away whatever is not the statue, and that for writers — now we come to it — characters exist beyond what is written, with larger lives than fit on film. They’ll talk to you. You merely have to listen.

You catch a character the way a surfer catches a wave, waiting in still water until it wells up from a source as invisible as it is powerful.

Whaddya want? That was a kid talking
.

Okay, okay, we know what it’s really like. In some scripts, catching a character is more like catching a bug mid-flight on your windshield.

Working writers have to hear other voices. “You want it good or you want it Friday?” Yeah, yeah, I know, good
and
Friday… and it better be Friday.

The voice of my first movie business boss plays in a perpetual loop. Greenly arrived from the East Coast, I had landed a studio development job. I brought the boss a script by a New York friend and naively blazoned it with the kiss of death. I called it beautiful. I can hear the boss now, over his thick cigar, “Don’t tell me that shit!” He’s making boxing moves like Norman Mailer. “Man to man! Action! Action! Get it?
Mano a manol
!” He’s snapping his fingers in my face. “Is it going to make 100 million? Is it? Is it? That’s what you tell me. You come in here and prove it’s going to make 100 million.” A sucker dare. No one can prove any movie will make a dime. But I didn’t know.

He didn’t snap his fingers in your face. You’re over the top, and that character is running wild. Stop him!

Okay, okay. He didn’t snap. But the rest is true. I soon left the studio job for a writing career. The denigrated New York author went on to win a Pulitzer. And the executive retired richer than both of us.

What’s that got to do with the voices?

They don’t come easy. Sometimes you have to snare them.

My field is television drama. I’ve had the chance to learn from a few great writer-producers who provoked their staffs to what drives a real person, not just what gets a laugh or twists the plot. Where else do you find a 22-hour narrative of evolving characters? Immediacy. Intimacy. Power. Like a hard-charging river. But we all know what’s along the banks: some cesspool shows.

When I was a beginner, I went for an assignment on one. It wasn’t exactly a cesspool, just stagnant. The series characters were moved like toys to fit a franchise. While the producer described contrivances he wanted me to write, the characters in my head screamed, “Can we have the bathroom pass?” With enough craft, you can do an assignment like that. Fake it. Kind of like a worn-out love affair, and as deadening.

Then, in the midst of the script, a character surprised me with a line that could only have come from her. Gotcha! The sound of her voice was like having her address. And once I knew how to find her, she forced the characters who answered her to be as real. And they made their world whole. Once you’ve had it good, you don’t want it any other way.

Right, like you do that every day
.

No. Staring at the computer screen with a belly full of caffeine and terror, I know what it’s like to have nothing on a character besides every
thing
. Facts. Stuff that has to happen at the act break. Wind whistling on deserted shores. But I’ve learned something: craft can be a tugboat that pulls you out to where you can hear the voices.

So,
you gonna get to Joan of Arc, or what?

Not Joan. But there is a connection. The high when you’re flying with a scene rolling out like it’s alive — that euphoria is worth putting up with the detractors and distractions. It’s like an all-nighter when you can’t get enough of each other, you and the characters, and no one wants to sleep again ever, and it’s already all there… just listen.

* * *

I decided to begin this chapter about preparing you to write your own script by quoting that article so we don’t lose sight of the source — where writing really comes from — as we focus on the nuts and bolts of craft.

F
INDING
Y
OUR
S
TORIES

Whether you’re setting out to write a spec script or you’re on a staff vying for an episode assignment, you’ll need to choose subjects which (1) fit the medium, (2) complement the specific show, (3) contain events that will play on screen, and (4) express your unique experience or fresh insights. Yes, you can do all four.

Ideas that will work on television have the scale and intimacy I discussed in
Chapter One
. So look for character-based subjects that benefit from scenes with dialogue.

To fit an existing show, you need to have watched that series so much you can hear the characters’ voices in your head. And you’ll have figured out the kinds of springboards the show uses to impel stories, and its pace and style.