The Idea

by Erik Bork

  While it’s true that some TV characters also have murders to solve, patients to heal, cases to argue, or zombies to kill, most dramas—and virtually all comedies—use one of these basic unmet fantasies for each important character to drive their stories and to grab the audience emotionally. Most stories are about the characters entertainingly pursuing what they think will make their lives better and/or grappling with what seems to be making their lives worse, around that central fantasy. Ideally, the audience can understand and connect with these fantasies and enjoy watching them play out every week.

  Usually this “fantasy” is a character’s primary wish for their life, which has something to do with the way others treat them, their place in the world, and their basic life situation. It’s usually bigger than any one job, relationship, or measurable goal—although a specific episode might focus on something smaller like that. Usually it connects to love, belonging, respect, freedom, and/or the ability to succeed in one’s chosen best life. It’s about what life could be like, and what they wish it were like—if they were seen how they want to be seen and got to live the life they most want to live.

  In a series idea, I look for that one central thing that each important character is most haunted and challenged by—that one way in which they don’t have the life they want, and never will. Because they don’t have this, the characters—as in other types of stories—are generally not happy. They may have moments of satisfaction and resolution, but mostly they suffer and struggle. And they are consistently focused on how life is not giving them what they want in some specific area that obsesses and frustrates them. Their “stakes” are all about that.

  But unlike characters in a movie, novel, or play, TV characters don’t ever resolve or change this, or the show would have to end. The core of any series are these ongoing problems for characters—and ideally, one big problematic situation that affects everyone. Only very limited change is possible, because these difficulties need to remain with them all the way through the series, as its focus—for episode after episode after episode.

  “Life-Altering” Checklist

  If your idea can live up to this five-point mission statement, it should be “life-altering” enough:

  The stakes of the overall story problems clearly match one of the items in the stakes list in this chapter.

  The main focus of the characters’ problems, goals, and actions are all in their external life situations, not their inner lives.

  Those stakes are present throughout the story(ies)—not just in the last half or last quarter.

  The negative consequences of possible failure are clear, growing, and relatable on a primal human level.

  It’s a once-in-a-lifetime challenge for the main character, and it forces them to consider some fundamental changes. (In a series, episode stories are about microcosms of such a challenge, with limited character change.)

  7

  ENTERTAINING

  They call it the entertainment business for a reason.

  When writers are paid, and have a career at writing, it’s generally because they have figured out how to entertain audiences. Their work does this consistently and substantially, to the point where people will pay for the experience.

  Sounds simple, right? However, most writers don’t start out making it a priority to be entertaining. They instead focus on a lot of other things, which may be important but generally won’t lead to success in the marketplace unless “entertainment” is added in a big way.

  Entertainment is tied to genre. Audiences consume particular genres because they expect certain kinds of emotional experiences from them. They want to laugh, be scared, be moved, be fascinated, see amazing action spectacles, be whisked away to a fantasy world, etc. Part of the writer’s job is to figure out which sort of “entertainment” they want to provide and then to effectively provide it.

  Think from the audience’s perspective. What makes anyone pay to consume a story? What motivates them to cough up money for Broadway tickets, or a movie, or an HBO or Netflix subscription? What inspires them to make the effort and commit the time to check out a novel?

  It’s generally because they want to be entertained. They think the experience of consuming said story will engage them emotionally in positive ways that they enjoy. They decide to put their precious time, money, and attention into something and are looking to get something back. They’re a consumer of a product—not so different from any other product they might pay for and hope to get a certain result from.

  And so, like purveyors of any other sort of business one hopes to have a large, happy, paying customer base for, writers look to provide the kind of value that audiences seek.

  But that’s not quite so easy or straightforward to achieve. For one thing, audiences can’t tell us exactly what would most entertain them. They don’t tend to know they would like something until it’s presented to them. They might point to what they have liked in the past. But a writer can’t just repeat or copy what they’ve already consumed and expect the same impact.

  Writers generally need to start by making sure our project would entertain us, first, and that we love it. In order to create our best, most authentic and impactful work, regardless of genre, we need to have real passion for it, and it needs to please us. Nobody else will ever love it if we don’t love it first. But in the end, we are trying to create certain kinds of emotional experiences in strangers, as well. To manipulate their feelings.

  Most writers didn’t begin because they wanted to do that, exactly. Many don’t even think about trying to be entertaining. Most don’t start out in obvious entertainment genres, but instead write dramas that don’t have action, intense suspense, comedy, or other obvious entertainment elements to them. Instead, they chronicle normal life in a kind of realistic way.

  This is good in the sense that believability is a priority. And as we’ve said, writers who sacrifice the “real” on the altar of entertainment usually find it backfiring. It’s just that if one ends there, they often miss the point, in terms of what might make their work sellable—because they haven’t truly endeavored to entertain, and haven’t given the audience enough reason to want to pay for and stay with their work.

  Helping the Audience Escape

  To be entertained is to escape one’s normal life, in some way. We get to experience elevated emotions, of one sort or another, which are fun to experience—while engaging on a deep and committed level with someone else’s life experience for a period of time. Successful stories generally find some way to take the audience out of “normal real life” and catapult them to a realm where it’s really enjoyable to be.

  It’s almost like candy—a favorite movie, TV show, book, or play. One delights in it. It’s a joy to consume, even a guilty pleasure. It’s amazing the way one can feel so good, and so outside one’s everyday existence, while engaging with the story. Normal life and time seems to stop, even, and one is almost sad when it’s over or when they have to stop watching or put the book down. We’ve all felt that way before, and maybe it’s part of why we wanted to be writers—to create stories that have that powerful of a positive impact on people.

  This means going beyond simply writing something that interests us. Being interesting is good, even necessary, but it’s not enough. The previous paragraph didn’t describe what people do with a story that’s merely interesting. It described a powerful emotional engagement.

  No matter how much is “interesting” in our stories, that’s only a tiny fraction of what makes people consume them. They’re looking for stories to grab them emotionally and to take them into a feeling state of some kind, in addition to being interesting. In fact, if it entertains them enough, it doesn’t necessarily even have to be “interesting” at all.

  Being hugely entertaining is the trump card that can commercially outmuscle all of the other six PROBLEM elements. If you are massively entertaining to enough people, you often get a bit of a pass on things like originality and meaningfulness. You may be
able to stretch believability a bit more than most, if you’re careful. And the audience may not have to relate as deeply to specific characters if what is happening is so riveting to watch or read that they’re constantly hooked. Probably the only other element that has to be there, in all its fullness, is “punishing.” Because it’s very hard to be wildly entertaining if you’re not putting consistent pressure on your character(s). The two seem to go hand in hand.

  But I wouldn’t take this as a license to not take the other five elements as seriously, or to assume one’s work is so entertaining that it will rise above the pack. The best and most successful stories—including the kind that will get an unknown writer noticed—usually have all seven.

  Feelings We Like to Feel

  To entertain someone means to go beyond just telling audiences a story that they find relatable and compelling—even one where they can feel for the characters. That is all essential and good, but it doesn’t tend to be enough to make a writer successful.

  Instead, the process of watching (or reading) the story should be a pleasurable one, in and of itself, where its people, actions, activities, visuals, sound, etc., are consistently enjoyable to focus on.

  And it’s not just that it’s pleasurable. It has to bring them to fairly intense emotional states consistent with the genre. The audience is actually hoping to experience these when they consume a story. In other words, if it’s a comedy, they’re going to be upset if they hardly ever laugh. If it’s a thriller, they better feel fear and tension throughout. Every genre has its emotional “hit” that the audience is looking for.

  But not every type of powerful feeling is desirable and sought after in entertainment. For instance, no one pays or tunes in to experience despair or guilt. And it’s usually not “entertaining” to watch characters deal with money problems or medical challenges or bickering relationships or many of the other things common in real life. We consume stories to escape from all that and to be stimulated into feeling one or more of the following “entertainment” emotions, which can be mixed and matched and can overlap with one another:

  Amusement

  We all like to laugh, and comedies of various kinds are mainstays in any medium. But when people take in a comedy, they’re generally not looking to be mildly amused every once in a while. They’re looking to laugh, preferably out loud, as much as possible. It’s kind of the whole point. It’s what got them in the door. If a writer isn’t going to really work to make that happen, but is going for more mild or occasional comedy, then they might want to make sure they’re also strongly stimulating one or more of the following emotions, to compensate.

  It’s easy to fall into the trap a lot of writers fall into, where they don’t fully embrace the task of trying to make people laugh because that sounds too broad and silly to them. So they call their work “dramedy,” and say it will have some humor but also be kind of a drama. This can work at times, but often such scripts aren’t really that amusing and also lack the kind of truly dramatic situations, spectacle and stakes that could compensate for the lack of real comedy.

  Fear

  Like roller coasters or haunted houses on Halloween, stories can be a safe place to experience terror and panic. Somehow seeing someone else go through it, where we share the emotion but aren’t at risk like they are, is a fundamentally attractive thing for lots of people, especially when there is some resolution in the end—when the source of the fear has been vanquished, and someone the audience relates to survives.

  Fascination

  It’s not easy to make people become truly fascinated with what they’re seeing play out in a story. It usually requires presenting them with something that has real emotion to it, real stakes, and real spectacle, where they can’t look away. Something about it is so intriguing that they are eager to observe it, get more of it, and get to the bottom of it. When things are larger-than-life, are outside their experience, and seem like they really matter, audiences become fascinated. But take note: something can be interesting but not fascinating. Fascination is more active, emotional, pointed, and extreme.

  Shock/outrage

  Story twists and turns that really throw us—that shock us—get our attention. So do wild and unpredictable characters and events. Entertaining stories tend to explore outrageous situations and characters who are far outside our normal experience. It can be fun to watch and react to these people and things, as long as they are believable and there is something relatable at the heart of the story.

  Lust/carnal desires

  There’s a reason we like watching beautiful people looking and behaving in ways that stimulate desire on some level. If a movie tried to entertain with only pure lust, it would probably be considered pornography, but honestly consider how much audiences enjoy watching certain performers in certain roles, because this is a factor. And it’s not just a matter of casting. It’s a matter of writing characters and situations in such a way that you can imagine the audience accessing these basic emotions on some level as they watch people do what they do.

  And it doesn’t just apply to people. It can apply to material objects, cars, homes, lifestyles, even landscapes. Whenever an audience is thinking, “Damn, I wish I had that,” or, “That is some serious eye candy,” you are activating this emotion.

  Take a look at movie trailers and note how consistently they play on these sorts of feelings, be it through actions/explosions, sex, or just amazing visuals that are meant to wow us with their awesome spectacle. Some trailers play on all three of these, and literally every shot in the trailer is going for a kind of visceral “lust response.”

  Excitement

  Similar to fear, where our hearts are pounding with concern about what might happen next, excitement is when we feel like we’re being swept along on an amazing ride of some kind, and we’re breathlessly engaged with what is happening. It feels like it’s taking us away into a situation where everything matters, and what’s happening thrills us—not unlike a great sporting event, where every moment has our attention and we’re completely invested.

  In writing, tension is something we always want to cultivate. This way, the audience is caught up in the emotion and conflict to a really high degree, and everything that happens just turns the screws further in a way that’s really gripping to watch. They’re on the edge of their seats or turning the pages as fast as they can. They’ve lost all sense of time and space and are totally engaged.

  Awe

  This is a cousin to lust/carnal desires. Awe goes beyond mere eye candy. We can be awed by the scale of something we’re seeing, the difficulty of a challenge, or qualities of a character. While lust might make us go, “Damn,” awe will make us go “Whoa.” It’s more of an openmouthed, wide-eyed wonder, like walking into Willy Wonka’s main chocolate room for the first time, or watching Jake LaMotta fight Sugar Ray Robinson in Raging Bull. It’s not necessarily a positive thing. It’s just . . . awesome.

  Romantic love

  In stories focused on romantic relationships, we tend to become one of the characters, emotionally. We relate to what they’re going through. Romances elicit strong emotions of connection with another person, of being seen, understood, supported, and wanted—of bonding with someone we really want to bond with. In romantic stories, we generally have to strongly identify with the main character’s desire for their chosen partner. Of course, something has to get in the way of that desire for there to be conflict, but living vicariously through the emotions of love is a highly attractive and appealing experience for most people.

  Empathy/compassion

  We should always relate to the main character of a story in some way, but if we take “relatable” to an extreme, the audience might feel such incredible bonding with a character that they start to love them on a deep level and feel everything they feel intensely. It’s almost a love affair between audience and character. This sense of human connection can be really pleasurable.

  Eager anticipation

  Stories that
work create anticipation for the audience: a desire to see what’s coming next, to keep turning the pages, to keep watching, no matter what. This usually means big and important conflicts are at play, with huge stakes, and the audience can’t wait to see how they play out. It also means the plotting creates surprise and unexpected twists, even shocking or outrageous developments.

  At the end of the day, we want our audience to care so much about our characters and what’s going on that nothing else matters for them while they’re in our story. They are completely swept away. They have become the characters, and what’s happening to them really matters. So much is on the line, and so many high-conflict factors are in play, and so much is changing because of fresh actions by our main character and the forces against them, causing so much mayhem, and so much intrigue, that the audience is kind of rubbing their hands together, thinking, “I can’t wait to see where this leads,” and, “How is she possibly going to deal with that?”

  Ingredients to Add to “Drama”

  If our genre is simply “drama” of one sort or another, without life-and-death stakes, we might have an uphill battle, because drama, on its surface, doesn’t have an obvious method for entertaining audiences. It can feel flat, boring, and “real-life” (meaning not escapist at all). Or it can even be bleak and depressing. One has to work extra hard to find those elements within a drama that will really grab the audience and become their “candy.” Dramas tend to be hard to sell if they don’t have some other genre interwoven with them and/or aren’t based on something that was previously very successful in another medium.