Inside the Room

by Linda Venis

  In the next scene, we find Julian paying for a drink at the bar with the cash he just earned. Not a word of dialogue is spoken, but you understand who Julian is pretty quickly. We thought this character was unique and we introduced him in a unique way.

  When we pitched Julian and all the other characters in Big Weekend to the network, we knew them inside and out. We knew what TV shows they liked to watch, their eating habits, their quirks, their first sexual experiences, their politics, ad infinitum. If you know what a character’s favorite TV show is, it gives you a way to start a scene. It gives you jokes. It gives you dialogue from character. It gives you and the audience an insight into the character. If your character enjoys a pickup basketball game every once in a while, you have a locale to play out scenes.

  Create Your Characters’ Past and Present

  In preparation for the actual writing of the pilot, you have to know everything about your characters and everything that makes them funny in future episodes. I mean everything. What we see on the page or on the screen is only the tip of the iceberg. You, as the writer, have to create the whole iceberg before you write FADE IN. Create a backstory for your characters. What was their childhood like? Who were their parents? Who were their friends? Did they have money? What did they study? What social class were they in? Were they popular in school? Did they date? What was their sex life like?

  On Friends, Monica had a backstory of being extremely overweight as a child. This detail informed dialogue and jokes for the five other main characters, especially her brother, Ross, and gave the writers a flashback episode. When creating Modern Family, Steve Levitan and Christopher Lloyd made Phil Dunphy a former college cheerleader at Fresno State, which gave a story line to Phil and his daughter Haley when they visited his alma mater in “Go Bullfrogs!” Look deep.

  Describe your characters’ lives in the present. What kind of relationships do they have now with family, friends, and lovers? Where do they work? How do they relate to the other characters at work? Do they have children? How do they parent? What do they look like from head to toe? Where do they live? What are their hobbies? How do they like to spend their leisure time?

  Draw on Characters from Your Own Life

  Who makes you laugh? Is it your cousin with the wild laugh and the catchphrase “Yeah, so what?” Is it your ego-driven best friend who talks fast to hide the fact that he thinks slowly? Is it your cuttingly sarcastic ex-girlfriend who gives herself a pep talk every morning? Think about the people in your life, bend them, tweak them, change their names, and put them in your pilot. All of this is still only the tip of the iceberg. Keep looking deeper. Keep asking your own questions until you have a full character history, past and present.

  Explore Your Characters’ Psyche and Behavior

  Dig deeply into your characters’ psyches: their flaws, attitudes, idiosyncrasies, complexes, and dreams that drive them through a story. Jessica “Jess” Day (Zooey Deschanel) on New Girl was created with an aversion to confrontation. Also among her personality traits is her tendency to burst into song, sometimes making up lyrics reflecting her situation. These are compelling characteristics that play out throughout the series.

  What characters do, what decisions they make, what complications they bring into their lives because of who they are, is funnier than what they say. Audiences remember behavior long after they’ve forgotten the funny lines. When people talk about the show the next day, most everyone will say, “Did you see what so-and-so did last night?” “Did”…not “said.” Behavior drives story. Behavior creates the context for the jokes.

  Take a character (and a real person, in this case) like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. All the stories on that show, all the funny situations, are generated by who Larry is. He’s a man who can’t go a full day without getting himself into an awkward or stressful situation. We look forward each week to seeing what ridiculous and often surreal problem he’s going to have to get himself out of and, in doing so, get himself into further hilarious trouble. None of his problems would occur if he weren’t someone who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, who couldn’t keep his nose out of everyone’s business, who couldn’t let things be. The whole show emanates from his character flaws.

  Establish Your Characters’ Relationships

  Once you’ve got your main characters fleshed out, the next most important thing is to set up how they relate to each other. While these relationships will evolve as the series continues, your script won’t become a series unless there is a firm foundation for the characters’ interactions with each other from the get-go. On Seinfeld, nobody ever liked Newman. The cast’s attitude toward his character charged all the scenes with him. Eventually, all Newman had to do was show up at Jerry’s door or run into the gang on the street, and the audience would already be laughing, waiting for how they were going to avoid him or bite their tongues because they really needed him.

  Since your pilot’s regulars are going to be in all the scenes in various groupings, sometimes all together for a couple of scenes, you have to know what drives the relationships intimately. Is one character always eager to please and annoyingly upbeat? Can another always find the positive side to anything? If her apartment building were burning down, would she say, “At least now there’s an unobstructed view of the Hudson River”?

  A word of advice: Six characters is a good number. Stop there. All your characters have to be involved in the script, moving and talking and pushing the story forward. Remember, you have to service all of them and the reader has to follow them. Anything over six lessens your chances of keeping all the balls in the air.

  Develop the Humor in Your Characters’ Relationships

  How these characters will be funny together is key to your series’ success. Look for opposites, conflicting lifestyles, rivalries, and past disastrous relationships. Love/hate is always good. Two guys in love with the same girl: One guy is brash and self-centered; the other is shy, way too sensitive, and tongue-tied around her. It’s familiar, yes, but introducing another character, a third guy—someone she’s hopelessly and confoundingly in love with—can make it fresh.

  For instance, her new boyfriend is seriously overweight but kind and caring, not like all the jerks she’s used to dating. He’s going through the Biggest Loser phase of his life and hopes to lose beaucoup pounds by Christmas. She’s committed to helping him through the first hundred pounds. We now know what everybody wants and what everybody is afraid of. The first two guys can’t believe they might lose this girl to a needy guy with a weight problem. The needy guy just won the lottery by landing this beautiful girl, and is going to take walks with her and listen to her and make her his special lasagna, provided she eats it in another location. And he’ll even put up with her two guy friends. When he calls out for a group hug, she’s amazed by his openness and acceptance of her friends. The brash guy’s response is, “Dude, you’re already a group hug.” The shy guy hugs him, hoping to impress the girl. End scene.

  Put It All Together: The Opening Scene

  Establish the tone and your characters for the reader as fast as you can. Look for simple, efficient ways to tell the reader who they are in the first few pages. If you can do it on the first page, even better. Here’s an example of how to do it.

  Let’s say your show is about two guys sharing an apartment. One guy, let’s call him Ralph, is an obsessive type A with a big heart. The other, Jerry, is easygoing, very likeable, but is drifting through life at the moment without purpose. Scene one can start with Ralph, focused on cleaning up the place, rearranging furniture, changing his mind, obsessing. On the page, his behavior fits his character description. He’s being the guy you want the reader to know and like from the first beat on page 1. He’s a compulsive multitasker, so he’s on the phone giving directions to his place to someone who’s lost but close by. He’s talking about how badly he feels having to kick his pal Jerry out. He’s trying to be strong, because he knows he has to do it. There’s the big heart. We’re still o
n page 1. From the bedroom comes Jerry in boxer shorts and with bed head. That paints a picture, but it has to be filled in with some character description. Jerry is a person who was born with a Xanax gene that helps him sleep peacefully through the night and forget that he hasn’t worked in over a year.

  JERRY

  Another awesome morning!

  He’s obviously a positive guy.

  RALPH

  It’s two in the afternoon.

  JERRY

  Brilliant. So I can crack a beer without looking like a guy with a problem.

  RALPH

  Tell me you’re going on some interviews today.

  Big-hearted Ralph is still hopeful.

  JERRY

  I’ll be surfing the Web for employment opportunities, interspersed with a conservative amount of virtual 3-D porn. You should check that out. First-class.

  Clearly, Jerry is deep in denial. So now the reader knows what the problem is. These friends have a confrontation ahead of them, one that could change their friendship forever. We meet them as the problem is getting out of hand. From the conversation on the phone, we learn that Ralph can’t financially carry his friend anymore. Maybe the person on the other end is his cousin and she is looking for a new place because her building went condo or burned down. When she arrives, Jerry is still in his shorts and has cracked a beer. Cousin Nicky needs a description, a quick snapshot of who she is—maybe she’s a driven, outspoken career woman who wonders why she can’t maintain a relationship. When she walks in she could show us why, by burning Jerry.

  NICKY

  I don’t know how else to say this, but…

  (indicates underwear)

  Your doggie door is open.

  JERRY

  Sorry. For very long?

  NICKY

  I’m guessing since you were twelve.

  She’s outspoken. She can continue telling us about herself by getting right down to business with Ralph.

  NICKY

  I’m on my lunch hour. Show me my room.

  Whoa! That’s news to Jerry. Ralph hasn’t broken the news to him yet. We’re probably on page 2 now. Nicky’s move shows us that she’s a little insensitive too and sets the story off in motion.

  By taking time and getting the character descriptions onto the page as sharply as possible, backing them up with behavior and dialogue, the people in your script can come to life quickly and get your pilot rolling right away.

  Don’t Forget the Jokes

  A few things about the jokes: Bottom line…you can either write jokes or you can’t. One can’t be taught to be funny. Writing a joke is a very special art—maybe knack is a better word. You can learn how to make a joke better, but the DNA of a good joke is elusive, and as far as I know, nobody has broken down the genome.

  When writing a pilot, test all the jokes regularly. If the script is still making you laugh after a few months of perfecting it, that’s a good sign. A pilot should contain as many “home runs” as possible, which doesn’t mean overloading it with jokes. It means pushing the writing to a higher level, so you wind up with solid funny moments. If you find yourself writing a line that makes you think, Yeah, that’ll be funny, you’ve failed, because you’re thinking…not laughing. Scrap it, and write another one.

  Choose Your Format: Premise Pilot or Typical Episode

  A strong pilot is a sample of everything that will happen in the series. It sets the template, tone, and style. You have to introduce the world and your characters and hint at the series arc. You have to describe the series and what you can do with action and dialogue. There’s a whole lot of stuff to accomplish in the pilot, and there are two ways to write it: as a premise pilot or as a typical episode. You have to decide, based on all the work you have done so far, which is better suited to your material.

  The Premise Pilot

  A premise pilot spends a lot of time fleshing out the Big Idea, providing information about the world, placing each character in it, and explaining his/her current situation. Sometimes the premise pilot shows some kind of big change to an already-existing world; the starting point is at the moment the main character’s world is turned upside down or changes.

  The premise pilot can be challenging to write because it often includes many things about the world, including people, that may never be seen or dealt with again. However, the fact of the matter is that more than half of the pilots ordered every year are premise pilots. A premise-based pilot launched the multi–Emmy Award–winning 30 Rock, which kicks off when Liz Lemon, head writer for a Saturday Night Live type of sketch comedy series called The Girlie Show, is called upstairs to meet the new vice president of East Coast television and microwave oven programming for NBC GE Universal Kmart, Jack Donaghy. This opening episode focuses on Jack trying to convince Liz to hire loose-cannon movie star Tracy Jordan to draw in young male viewers to The Girlie Show and the crew reacting to this news.

  In Mike & Molly’s pilot, Molly hears Mike share at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, falls for him right away, and asks him to speak to her fourth-grade class. The overweight teacher and police officer then become a couple. Again, this marks the beginning of how the main characters meet. Premise pilot.

  The classic series Mary Tyler Moore dealt with the life and trials of a young single career woman and her friends, both at work and at home. In the pilot episode, Mary Richards, on the rebound from a busted relationship, relocates to Minneapolis, where she quickly finds a new apartment, an associate producer’s job at WJM-TV, and new friends. Premise pilot.

  The best thing to do for your pilot if it’s a premise pilot is to choose the most obvious starting point, yet try not to be too obvious about it.

  The Typical-Episode Pilot

  Writing a typical episode for a pilot is just that. You’re writing an episode that could fall anywhere in the first three or four airings of the show. This form of pilot introduces your characters but also gives us a sense of what future episodes will be like, how your characters interact every week. My personal preference is to write a typical-episode pilot, because I think that to get a feel for the universe, everything should be in place and everybody should already be rockin’ and rollin’. It demonstrates how your show’s story engine runs and that it can keep running for a long time.

  The pilot for The Office (US and British) is a typical episode. In the US version, Michael Scott gives a tour for the documentary camera crew and first-day temp Ryan Howard. We find out about Jim and Pam’s relationship and meet the rest of the characters. Along the way, the pilot becomes a typical episode because it deals with a problem that the series regulars could face anywhere along the history of the show: the news that corporate headquarters is planning to downsize an entire branch.

  The South Park pilot has Cartman telling the boys about the nightmare he had where aliens abducted him from his bed. Kyle and Stan try to convince Cartman that the dream was real. This could have easily been episode six or twenty-six. Typical episode.

  The Middle is a show about the daily mishaps of Frankie, a married woman, and her semidysfunctional family and their attempts to tackle life in the city of Orson, Indiana. In the pilot, Frankie desperately tries to close a sale with disastrous results; her daughter, Sue, tries out for show choir with calamitous results; and her son Brick has trouble relating to his teacher with odd results. Typical episode.

  “What If?” Scenario: A Nonpremise Pilot Turned

  into a Typical Episode

  I’m going to share with you a scenario I’ve written that has absolutely no connection to any New Girl pilot, either living or dead, and it’s designed to show you that there are many ways to turn a story on its head. If you’ve got a premise pilot in your head, but you think it might be better for the marketplace to deliver it as a typical episode, keep thinking. Keep twisting it. Then decide which pilot format is best to tell your story.

  The pilot for New Girl is a premise pilot. Jess Day, an offbeat and quirky teacher, leaves her cheating longtime boyfrien
d and moves into an apartment with three single males she’s never met before: prickly bartender Nick, womanizer Schmidt, and intense personal trainer and former athlete Coach. The guys try to help “adorkable” Jess reenter the dating world.

  With a few adjustments—actually, some radical changes in story—it might have been a typical (nonpremise) first episode. Suppose Jess has been living with the guys for a while now. She’s also been dating a guy for a few months, and he asks her to move in with him. She’s totally smitten. Maybe he’s one of those guys that she thought she’d never get. Her roommates don’t like him and question his motives. They have to deal with her leaving, and she has become such a big part of their lives. They could reminisce about how she first came to look at the apartment and they weren’t sure about letting her live there. Flashbacks.

  But the story is basically about how she learns that she’s not ready to move in with another guy yet, given her last relationship. This is a deal breaker for the guy she’s going with, because he’s one of those serial live-together guys. So she ends up staying, and through this story, the audience sees how Jess came to live with her roommates, why she feels safe, and that there might even be a potential romantic interest in store with one of the roommates.

  Simple and Emotional

  Successful series tap into what the audience wants to see again and again—something they can care about. How do you achieve this in your own pilot? Keep it simple; keep it emotional.

  All in the Family was a classic sitcom that ran from 1971 to 1979, topped the Nielsen ratings for five years straight, and is on most everyone’s top ten list. In the pilot episode, Mike and Gloria Stivic plan a surprise party to celebrate the twenty-second wedding anniversary of Gloria’s parents, Archie and Edith Bunker. Simple. The entire episode takes place in the Bunkers’ living room in the working-class neighborhood of Queens, New York, with the four main characters and next-door neighbor, Lionel. Simple. A heated argument quickly erupts between Archie (a World War II veteran and, as he came to be widely known, “a lovable bigot”), and Mike, a self-important liberal college student, thus kicking off the first of many conflicts that captured the generational, social, cultural, and political divisions in America in the 1970s while keeping its viewers cracking up. Emotional.