by Erik Bork
For a “straight drama” to be entertaining to a large audience, without life-and-death stakes or some procedural investigation element, it usually needs to feature certain additional entertainment elements. The following is a list of ten that are commonly used. Note how each of the thirty film and television examples show up in at least two categories each—meaning they add at least two of these elements to their “drama.”
Comedy
Glee
Jane the Virgin
Gilmore Girls
Six Feet Under
Forrest Gump
American Beauty
Rich, beautiful, possibly famous people
The O.C.
Downton Abbey
Nashville
Beverly Hills 90210
Dallas
Dynasty
This Is Us
Empire
The King’s Speech
Sunset Boulevard
The Social Network
Amadeus
Citizen Kane
High-spectacle period settings
Downton Abbey
Gone with the Wind
The King’s Speech
Amadeus
Major betrayals, backstabbing, hidden agendas
Empire
Jane the Virgin
Dallas
Dynasty
The O.C.
Amadeus
Casablanca
The Social Network
Music as an integral element
Glee
Nashville
Empire
Amadeus
Entertaining-to-watch activities with lots of spectacle, conflict, emotion
Friday Night Lights
The Sopranos
Six Feet Under
Schindler’s List
Amadeus
Gone with the Wind
Raging Bull
Major amounts of sex, romance, and conflicts/rivalries over same
The O.C.
Friday Night Lights
Jane the Virgin
Downton Abbey
Gilmore Girls
Beverly Hills 90210
American Beauty
Gone with the Wind
Casablanca
Outrageous people
The Sopranos
Empire
Jane the Virgin
Dallas
Dynasty
Forrest Gump
American Beauty
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Good Will Hunting
Citizen Kane
A Beautiful Mind
Amadeus
Rain Man
The Social Network
Sunset Boulevard
Raging Bull
Intriguing foreign worlds
The Sopranos
Downton Abbey
Schindler’s List
The Shawshank Redemption
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Amadeus
Gone with the Wind
Inspiring depictions of love/family shining through, despite major conflicts
This Is Us
Gilmore Girls
Downton Abbey
Forrest Gump
A Beautiful Mind
Good Will Hunting
The Shawshank Redemption
Rain Man
You might notice a common theme here. All these elements tend to make things “larger-than-life” for the audience. The stories exaggerate real life in some way that makes them really fun to watch.
Rich, Sexy, and Glamorous
On one-hour television, these extra elements to augment “drama” can be especially important. When we don’t have life-and-death stakes and procedural “cases” (or the constant comedy that half-hour shows tend to have), we need something else that makes audiences really want to watch. Some combination of these elements tends to be necessary for commercial success. And the more the better, really. Successful shows tend to have many of these things working at once.
Television is as much about providing an escape from normal life for its viewers as movies, novels, or plays are. Perhaps more so. We tune in at 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday because we want to be swept away into something that really engages and entertains us. Generally speaking, we’re not looking to watch normal life, with all its mundanities. We want to see characters on some sort of “adventure of the week,” where certain problems have arisen that they must deal with—and when they try to, things spin further out of control.
Comedies have an easier time of it, in some ways, because if they’re truly funny, almost anything goes. One can depict a very wide variety of characters and situations on television, and if it makes people laugh, it provides the escapist entertainment they’re looking for. Comedies don’t need to depict exaggerated life situations as much, and can be more about the “everyday,” as long as they deliver laughs.
Dramas don’t have it quite so easy. They have to find some other way to provide that escape. And if it’s not life-and-death stakes, it usually means providing some wish fulfillment for the audience in the form of characters with lives most of us don’t have but might fantasize about. For this reason, drama series are often filled with really attractive and wealthy people with lots of story conflicts related to their romance and sex with other attractive and wealthy people. That’s typically not the entire show (or it would be straight soap opera), but it’s an important element of many prime-time dramas. The audience is fascinated to live vicariously through the characters—not because their lives are similar to their own, but because they live in a larger-than-life world.
Ideally, the characters are still relatable, and even complex and deep, and the writing incisive and real. But this “sexy soap” element is still a key part of the appeal for many drama series. Fame, power, money, beauty, glamour, sex, and high spectacle of some kind are typically in the mix and are all a part of what provides “candy” for the audience.
Many one-hour pitches I’ve heard (and some I’ve pitched myself) that don’t quite work are earnest portraits of real life, with all its somewhat sad compromises, without anything to really excite the audience and transport them to somewhere that is fun for them to be.
One-hour concepts that sell generally focus more on the escapist element. Ideally, they’re also “about something” more than that, and present believable, memorable characters who the audience connects with. But writers tend to stumble when they don’t realize they have to take care of the “entertainment” challenge, first and foremost, with any series idea.
“Entertaining” Checklist
If your idea can live up to this five-point mission statement, it should have a good chance at being entertaining enough:
I’m clear on what sort of emotional entertainment experience I’m offering my audience—and why it’s desirable to them.
Fans of this sort of story (or series) and this genre will get what they pay for—because I make that central to my mission here.
Something larger-than-life makes my story/series feel like escapist “candy” to its audience—so they’re always wanting more.
It focuses on elements with a primal, universal, emotional hook for the audience—it’s designed to make them feel.
I will keep surprising, intriguing, and delighting them with how my story/series plays out and what my characters do and say.
8
MEANINGFUL
Say we’ve got a fresh and original story idea that has solid entertainment value built into it through a specific genre, with a relatable main character who is growingly punished as they actively pursue a goal with truly life-altering stakes, in a way that all feels completely believable, understandable, and real.
If that is the case, we’re way ahead of most writers. And if professional readers agree that we achieved all of those things (which, of course, is a big “if”), then we might truly be off and running with the project. But there’s one other thing they—and audiences—might ask. One oth
er thing that can be the difference between the project really going somewhere and not. And that question is . . .
What’s the point?
Meaning, why did we write it, and what is the audience supposed to come away with in the end? What does it explore that goes beyond its specific plot, characters, and scenes that has some relevancy and value in their own life—or the human condition in general—that they can take with them, so that it’s not just a brief and forgettable ride?
In other words, what is truly meaningful about it at the end of the day—to the characters and also to the audience?
What Is It REALLY About?
What we’re talking about is theme. Theme refers to the universally relatable questions about how to best live life, and solve the problems in it, which underlie many stories. The Godfather might be about the son of a mafia don who takes over the family business to protect it, but on a thematic level, it’s about loyalty vs. individuality, family vs. country, and innocence vs. experience. It explores these issues, which don’t have easy answers to them, in a rich way. And it makes the film much more than just an exciting gangster movie. (Though it is also, quite pointedly, that.)
Meaningfulness is probably the most optional of the seven PROBLEM elements, in the sense that projects can sometimes succeed without it. If a story is entertaining enough, especially, audiences can partially forgive it for being totally lightweight and forgettable.
But for starting a career and being seen as a formidable writer—and for creating powerfully impactful stories— meaning matters greatly. The greatest, meatiest, and most memorable stories say something, somehow, about deeper concepts that resonate with people in a significant way. These are the kinds of stories that become truly beloved by a culture, that win awards, and that make a writer’s name.
Theme emerges by examining competing priorities in life through the specifics of a story, which ultimately reflects a point of view about the best way to be in the world, and the most effective way—at least in a situation like the one at hand. I’m not talking about facile, obvious arguments, like whether racism is good or bad or whether one should be selfish or giving. A good theme weighs competing goods or competing evils against each other, and dramatizes why it’s so difficult to make a choice sometimes, or to change. It doesn’t offer easy answers. Any thematic outcome or judgment in the end is earned, gradually, over the course of the story. It’s not just thrown out there in a quick and easy way.
Theme often occurs to a writer—and starts to be explored—fairly late in the writing process. It doesn’t have to be there from the beginning. In fact, it can be better that it isn’t. Some writers start with theme—what they feel they want to say—and make that more important than telling a solid story, one that has all the other six elements. This usually doesn’t work so well. Such themes will tend to come off heavy-handed and overly simplistic, and the writer can be handcuffed by their theme obsession, such that they are unable or unwilling to really fulfill the other six elements.
Whether ideas for theme are there from the outset or not, they will tend to grow and flower later in the process, after the other elements of story have been worked out. It might even take multiple drafts before the key themes really make themselves evident. But at a certain point, theme deserves conscious attention, to make sure that the underlying questions of a story are being effectively explored and developed.
This may be the trickiest part of writing because theme is not right there on the surface. It’s a subtle, underlying set of dynamics that colors everything but never quite takes the foreground. The audience’s focus is always on character, dialogue, action, and plot. Within and behind all that is theme, but it can be hard to put your finger on.
I’m intrigued by the “Dramatica” theory about how stories work. Its basic premise is that the most complete stories have four different “throughlines” going on at once. The first is the personal story for the main character. The second is the overall situation that all the characters are concerned with. And then it adds something really interesting: the idea of an “influence character,” whose presence stimulates the main character to consider changing in some fundamental way. The fourth throughline is the relationship between these two characters, which is generally the most passionate, important, and in-depth relationship in the story.
This “influence character” is usually not the antagonist. Often, they’re an ally, love interest, or mentor—like Hannibal Lecter or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Or Julie in Tootsie. Or Furious in Boyz n the Hood.
Just making sure a story has such a character and relationship can add a depth and personal element that it might otherwise lack. It’s a similar concept to what Save the Cat! calls the “B Story”—which is usually a relationship that has some major conflict to it, and which carries the theme. That theme is often tied up in the main character’s arc and to what extent they change at the end. This relationship is what tends to push that potential change.
Dramatica suggests that each of the four throughlines also explores a particular thematic conflict between two opposing values, which consistently crop up in its scenes. So, while one throughline might explore confidence vs. worry, another might focus on instinct vs. conditioning.
Whether or not we buy into Dramatica’s take on it, this is the most elusive aspect of any story—how to subtly communicate these themes beneath the surface of our characters and plot in a way that seems believable and natural but still resonates in the end.
It’s also tricky to believably track character change. It has to feel earned. A very common note on scripts is that someone seems to change suddenly and arbitrarily in the end, and we didn’t see the progress and causes of that change in a believable way. They seem to just instantly be different in the end because the writer wants them to have changed. But it hasn’t been layered in successfully throughout the script, such that readers feel the realness of that evolution and buy into it.
Somehow theme and character arc have to keep coming up, and developing throughout the story, for the end result to make sense and land with the audience. Whatever pressures make the main character even consider changing have to be consistently making an impact, such that the audience will ultimately buy the character’s arc.
Theme is not necessarily evident in a logline—which should focus on the main story problem and what’s original, punishing, relatable, and entertaining about it. But if we were to expand our logline into a synopsis of a couple paragraphs, up to a full page, we would definitely want to hint at the thematic elements so that the reader of the synopsis gets what the story is really “about.” But even then, to come out and state that the story will definitively explore or touch on certain themes and character change tends to make readers skeptical. It could all seem too pat. So, one tends to hide or embed these within the arcs of the story and characters. Just as in the script itself, readers should usually feel and sense themes, without being overtly told what they are.
Sometimes when people ask us what a story is about, theme is what they’re really looking for: “What are you trying to say with it, why did you write it, why could only you write it, what is the point of all this, and what’s the larger takeaway?” They might only ask this because the idea isn’t really working for them, and they’re trying to politely understand where we’re coming from. But they might ask it because they are intrigued by the other PROBLEM elements and want to go further, to kind of complete the picture.
It makes sense that thematic questions are the final thing they want to know about. If we led with theme, we probably wouldn’t grab them, or sell them on the idea. But it can help seal the deal of their interest as the final piece that makes the whole project feel like it has weight and depth.
Sometimes a writer won’t have solid answers to these questions and hasn’t really thought about it. It was just an interesting idea to them—they hadn’t considered that it had to have a larger “point.” And again, some stories don’t, and can still be successful. But usually write
rs want their work to have meaningfulness, and it’s even why they wanted to write it, in the first place. So where is that found? Often, it comes from their own personal connection to the story, and what it explores.
It helps to be inspired, on some level, by our own life experience or strongly held feelings and beliefs, so that what we’re writing reflects us in some way. Ideally, the story idea delves into something personal to us, beneath the fictional elements on the surface of the plot. Our fascinations and passions fuel what we’re creating. And it becomes an opportunity for us to make value judgments of some kind that reflect our beliefs.
This is not just about making some characters obviously “good” and others “bad.” Overt and obvious judgments tend to not feel real, convincing, or interesting. It’s more about subtly shading what the audience is meant to take away from the various choices, behaviors, and outcomes throughout the story. We show what works and doesn’t work, and what the consequences are of the paths characters take. And in the end, that all adds up to something. The audience may not be able to put it into words, exactly, but they feel they have witnessed something that resonates as meaty, deep, and having a point of view behind it.