Alex Epstein - Crafty TV Writing: Thinking Inside the Box

Why You Want to Write TV

When I was first coming up in the biz, movie writers looked down at TV writers. If this doesnt work out, theyd say, theres always TV. TV writers had an inferiority complex: Id love to work in movies. But I cant afford it. (Even then, TV writers made more money.) A movie could be made for a niche audience, but not TV. The three networks only aired shows that the entire country could watch. It was the 80s, and Miami Vice was the most innovative thing on television.

Then cable blossomed. Now everyone from HBO to the Playboy Channel to PAX to FX to Showtime is producing their own flavor of programming. Groundbreaking pay cable shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under have forced the networksnow five of themto push the envelope on language, nudity, moral darkness, and narrative invention. Today, the sheer appetite that all these channels have for programming means that an offbeat story has more of a chance of finding a home on TV than it does in a movie theater.

Thats all good. But its not why you want to write TV.

A movie is a one-night stand. Every movie invents its own world, its own characters, its own tone, its own dialogue style, its own way of coming at a story. Even sequels change the rulesjust look at the difference between Alien and Aliens . You spend a night with a movie, and you move on. Thats exciting, but its limiting. How deep can your audiences relationship with a movie be? How much can you, as a writer, show the audience about characters theyll never spend more than two hours with? For the writer, a movie has the frustrations of a one-night stand: all that emotion, and in the morning its over.

A TV series is a relationship. Its world lasts, whether its lost dinosaurs, cops n DAs, or yuppies competing for a job working for Donald Trump. Each episode shares that world and fleshes it out. We get to know the same core characters better, coming to love or hate them. A series tells stories with a consistent tone, reusing the same narrative structure, allowing it to concentrate on the richness of those stories.

As a writer, youre the person wholl spend the most time with your characters and their stories. If youre a movie writer, youll be the one creating the world and then losing itespecially if, as usual, youre not the one asked to write the sequel, or even the shooting draft. If youre a TV writer, you can get to play in the world you and your fellow writers have created for as long as your show runs.

Thats fun. It also means that TV is about twice as hard to write as movies. How do you find a format that can sustain 100 episodes? How do you create characters who will be consistently compelling over that many stories? How do you find a tone you want to sustain from fall through to spring? How do you lure the same viewers back week after week?

The answer is in the template . Every TV show, whether drama or comedy, fiction or reality, has hidden rules that define what it doesthe format of the storytelling, the goods that every episode must deliver. Delivering those goods according to the templates hidden rules, while still keeping your stories surprising and compelling, makes TV writing hard. Delivering those goods regularly and on time, facing notes from everybody from the assistant director to the head of the network to the actor calling from the set, makes TV writing harder. If writing a movie is a one-night stand, writing TV is like a marriage. There are a lot more rules, and you have to work at it harder. But you get an experience thats richer and deeper, that can fulfill you for years or even decades.