by Bob Levy
Effective TV stories almost always have stakes and some stakes are bigger than others. Life-and-death stakes are among the biggest of TV stakes. Most TV shows rely on smaller, emotional stakes. Will the young woman get the guy of her dreams? Will the family members forgive each other and reunite despite the latest crisis that threw them into conflict? Comedy is just as dependent on story stakes as drama. Comedic stakes are also typically emotional stakes – embarrassment and humiliation are common comedy stakes.
Stakes larger than life-and-death stakes are found in comic book superhero stories. Those stories sometimes offer save-the-world stakes, save-everyone’s-lives stakes. If Superman doesn’t spin the earth backwards and rewind time, all humanity will die! “We’re all doomed” is about as big as story stakes get.
The big four one-hour drama genres deliver dependable life-and-death stakes. Cops solve and prevent murders. Doctors save lives. Lawyers protect society from murderers and sometimes doom guilty characters to death sentences. Private investigators solve murders. Providing big story stakes is a crucial element in these genres’ success.
Another important element these drama genres offer is moral complexity and moral choices. In most stories in these four genres someone has to make a big moral decision. Should the cop bend the law because he’s sure the bad guy is guilty even though he hasn’t found all the evidence that’s required? Should the doctor try an untested drug because there’s no other remedy and the girl will die if the doctor doesn’t?
Introducing moral complexity to the decisions a protagonist has to make to achieve her goal helps make stories more interesting, dramatic, heroic and surprising. Good storytelling often finds a way for the protagonist to confront difficult moral choices and reason his way to a surprising decision that leads to climactic, decisive action. The jobs at the center of the big four drama genres provide those kinds of complex moral choices on a regular basis.
A final element of the big four drama genres worth pointing out is fundamental to all drama and to all storytelling: conflict. The cop wants to find the murderer and the murderer doesn’t want to be found. The conflict in medical shows is frequently man versus nature; the doctor is in conflict with an illness. The very picture of a courtroom – the defense sitting at one table and the prosecution sitting at the opposing table – couldn’t externalize conflict more clearly. In many PI series the bad guy is aware he’s being followed by the PI hero and a cat-and-mouse game of conflict ensues. Cops, doctors, lawyers and PIs are jobs that define TV genres that can deliver reliable, inherent conflict.
Three of these four genres – cops, doctors and lawyers – are still vibrant today. From Chicago P.D. to The Good Doctor to The Good Fight, these genres still generate successful new series. The PI genre, however, which peaked in the 1970s and 1980s with shows like The Rockford Files, Mannix and Moonlighting, effectively ended in the 1990s with the retirement of Magnum P.I. The few successful iterations since then, like the British Sherlock reboot, rejigger the genre, casting the PI as a freelance investigator working with or for the police department, effectively converting the genre into an extension of the still thriving cop show. Time will tell if the Magnum P.I. reboot revives the dormant genre.
While our current era of sophisticated premium cable and streaming series often eschews traditional genre conventions, some of these shows are actually contemporary variations on decades-old traditional genres. As fresh and edgy as Steven Soderbergh’s one-hour drama The Knick may have looked (it lasted two critically lauded seasons on Cinemax in 2014–2015), it was a contemporary iteration of the decades-old medical genre. Not only was it set in a medical world, it used medical cases to inform stories, just as ER, Marcus Welby, M.D. and Dr. Kildare did before it. The Knick looked and felt vastly different from those earlier shows (employing graphic gore, nudity and R-rated language, in stark contrast to its genre ancestors), but it also hewed to many of the genre conventions those earlier series helped invent.
Let’s look at one other drama genre that will help expand our definition. One of the shows that I developed and produced, Gossip Girl, belongs to another successful one-hour genre, the primetime soap. The genre earned that name because it appropriated many of its storytelling devices and structures from daytime soap operas (a whole other TV format with its own distinct genres).
The primetime soap genre was spawned in the 1960s with the successful half-hour drama series Peyton Place, which was adapted from a successful 1957 novel and movie, and which transformed two young actors, 19-year-old Mia Farrow and 23-year-old Ryan O’Neal, into stars. While Peyton Place introduced the primetime soap genre, the most successful and arguably influential primetime soap was the original Dallas, which aired for 14 seasons beginning in 1978. In 1990 the Fox network developed a variation on the genre targeted specifically at its young audience, Beverly Hills 90210, spawning the primetime teen soap genre, a sub-genre of the primetime soap. Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, The OC and Gossip Girl are all heirs to the relatively recent TV genre that Beverly Hills 90210 originated.
One of the structural devices that primetime soaps appropriated from daytime soaps was “serialized storytelling,” stories told over the course of multiple episodes or even multiple seasons.5 Most TV series in the 1960s told stories that began and ended within each episode, known as “closed-ended storytelling.” Daytime soaps and primetime soaps like Peyton Place used “open-ended” or serialized storytelling that spun out continuing stories over many episodes. Most TV series until relatively recently employed closed-ended storytelling structures – with the exception of the primetime soap genre – but that changed around the turn of the millennium. For the past 15 to 20 years almost all TV series have used serialized storytelling to a greater or lesser extent. Even today’s most traditional cop shows that tell “case-of-the-week” closed-ended stories often introduce story threads that take many episodes to weave to a resolution. For the bulk of the history of American scripted television, though, serialized storytelling was the domain of the primetime soap genre.
A show like Gossip Girl clearly didn’t have “cases” in the same way cop shows or medical shows do. And it only very rarely told stories that generated life-and-death stakes. What then are the elements that define the primetime soap genre and make the genre thrive?
The primetime soap is a genre that’s primarily about relationships, the complexities and vagaries of contemporary relationships: romantic relationships, sexual relationships, friendship relationships, family relationships and sometimes work relationships. Whereas a cop show often poses the dramatic question, “Who is the killer?” and the medical show asks, “Can we save the sick patient?” primetime soap stories pose dramatic questions like, “Who wants to sleep with whom?” “Who is sleeping with whom?” “Who’s cheating on whom?” “Who’s lying to whom?” and “Who’s keeping secrets from whom?”
While primetime soaps don’t offer “cases” per se (let alone an infinite number of them), and generally don’t involve life-and-death stakes, their stories do often involve moral complexity, moral choices and conflict. Unique to the primetime soap genre are two subject matter ingredients not essential to the traditional big four genres: romance and sex. If there isn’t romance and sex, it ain’t a primetime soap.
Another defining component of primetime soaps is a large ensemble of characters. There are two reasons for this. The first is so there are enough possible configurations of romance and sex relationships within the ensemble of series regulars to avoid running out of new pairings within the first few seasons, and, second, so they can implement another important storytelling device borrowed from the daytime soap opera form: multiple stories told concurrently. This episodic structure intercuts among two or three (or more) different storylines within a given episode. Each story involves a different series regular or two, requiring enough characters to populate the multiple storylines within a given episode. In the first 50-year period of TV history (and rarely today) most series told one story per epis
ode. Primetime soaps, however (like the daytime soap formats that inspired them), always tell multiple stories in each episode.
Almost all TV today incorporates some elements of the primetime soap genre (in ways most shows in the past did not), including traditional genres like cop shows. The arc of TV history is one toward increasing sophistication and complexity. While most series in the twentieth century hewed to the conventions of a single genre, most TV today involves mixing genres, the hybridization of genres. I’ll explore when and why that began to happen in TV in the next part of this chapter.
In the comedy space, the domestic comedy genre that ruled the broadcasting era, the first 50 years of TV, continues to dominate today in the form of Modern Family, Mom, Black-ish, Speechless, The Goldbergs and many others. Family may be the single most universally relatable subject matter. We all have family experiences of some kind – for better or worse. Scripted series television, especially half-hour comedy, has mined that infinitely relatable material with enormous success for 70 years. In the next chapter I’ll look at ways family subject matter has been used in TV drama.
Before I move on to concept, it’s important to point out another common meaning of the term “genre” in use today. While the use of the term here is academically apt (and I’ll use it in this sense throughout the book), the expression “genre show” refers to shows that have some kind of supernatural element. “Genre show” is really a super-genre, a category of shows that include many sub-genres. All “monster” shows (like vampire shows and werewolf shows), all fairy-tale reboot shows, all sci-fi shows, and all superhero shows are “genre shows.” Shows that don’t use any supernatural elements, like cop shows or primetime soaps, are not “genre shows.” In reality most shows falls into some kind of genre category, but the expression “genre show” currently denotes supernatural genre shows.
Concept
At its simplest, the term “concept” refers to an idea for a show. When development professionals talk about concept, though, they’re usually talking about an idea with more meat on the bone, with enough detail to suggest the promise of a TV series. An “idea” might be, “Let’s do a show about a high school chemistry teacher who uses his expertise to make great drugs.” That’s a good idea. But applying more mental elbow grease to that idea brings it to a higher level of creativity:
When a nerdy high school chemistry teacher learns he’s dying of cancer he decides to provide for his pregnant wife and handicapped teenage son after he dies (because they’ll be impoverished if he doesn’t) by secretly using his advanced chemistry knowledge to manufacture the best methamphetamine and become a drug lord.
Now that’s a concept!
Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of modern anthropology, believed the work of civilization is to transform the raw into the cooked, nature into culture.6 That’s what development is: taking raw ideas and developing them into products of popular culture, identifying good, raw ideas and figuring out the additional creative ideas that turn them into series that can tell great stories for several years.7
In TV a concept includes the most specific but elemental parts of a series that make the series unique, that make it go and that make it distinct from every other TV show and every other show within its genre.
There are different ways that development professionals might describe a TV series concept, but most of them include three basic elements. First, a concept usually identifies the lead character or characters. Who is at the center of the series? Who’s the show about? Whose action defines the primary action of the series? The character/s at the center of a series concept may be “a nerdy high school chemistry teacher” or “a group of police detectives who work at … .”
Next, TV concepts usually define the world the series is set in, the setting and time period the action takes place. Where is home base for the lead characters? When is the show set? In the present-day, the past or the future?
Third is the “goal,” the thing the lead character is trying to achieve, the thing the lead character does in the series. In most cop shows the goal of the lead characters is to solve crimes. The lead character’s (or characters’) goal defines the action of a series.
In the Breaking Bad example above, the lead character is the nerdy high school chemistry teacher. We also have a glimpse of other characters essential to the concept, his wife and son, but it’s clear the driving force of the series is the high school chemistry teacher. The world of the concept is more implicit, but it’s there: the school, the family home and the criminal world of drug makers and drug dealers. The lead character’s goal is to make money for his family by making and selling good drugs. That’s the action that drives the series.
Those few story elements – the lead character, the world of the action and the kind of action the lead character takes in pursuit of his goal – define the concept of the show and are the essential conceptual elements to understand what the show is and what makes it go.
In the real world, over time, most shows expand beyond what’s circumscribed in their initial concept. In many ways, that occurred with Breaking Bad. But our focus is on development. Development is about creating a compelling concept that can be pitched in a network conference room and then dramatized and demonstrated in a pilot. In effect, a successful pilot proves the concept. After the development phase most TV series take on a life of their own. They grow and evolve, shaped by the team that steers them toward perceived strengths and away from perceived weaknesses. Before that can happen, though, the project must undergo (and survive) the development process, and almost all successful TV series begin with a simple but strong concept that suggests the promise of many episodes. A good concept that undergoes effective development can be strong enough – despite its simplicity – that it continues to serve as the creative foundation of many episodes and many seasons, as the concept of Breaking Bad did. While the series grew beyond its original, simple, foundational concept, it stayed true to that concept and continued to mine stories directly emanating from it throughout the life of the series and ultimately resolved – answered if and how the lead character achieved his goal – in the series finale episode. Most good, successful, long-lasting TV series are based on concepts as strong (and simple) as that.
Creative executives at networks and studios sometimes try to reinvent a show’s concept during the run of the series, and the effort almost always fails. As we defined it in the first pages of this book, development is partly about identifying good, strong concepts, and one thing that means is determining at the outset if a concept has the inherent creative strength to sustain many episodes and many seasons.
Format, Genre and Concept: Then and Now
In the middle section of this chapter I talked about the dominant TV genres in the twentieth century, and I offered the observation that TV programming has evolved toward increasing sophistication and complexity over time. How did that happen? The short answer is that artists, namely TV writers, innovated on existing forms (formats and genres), and other development professionals were smart enough to empower them and capitalize on their genius.
In 1981 Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) changed the cop show genre and changed American scripted television in ways that are still felt today.8
Cop shows before Hill Street were typically simple police procedurals like Dragnet (1951–1959, 1967–1970), shows that emphasized the process steps cops take to solve crimes over dimensionalized characterization of heroic cop characters. By the late 1960s and 1970s the cop show genre expanded to portray heroic cop characters solving crimes in exotic and sexy worlds like the original Hawaii Five-O (1967–1980) or Vegas (1978–1981), or they focused on outsized (but heroic) lead characters like the shaved-head, Tootsie-Pop chomping Kojak (1973–1978) or the street-wise Baretta (1975–1978).
Hill Street Blues creator and showrunner Steven Bochco (who died in 2018) was as interested in the personal lives of cops – their characters and their relationships, both among each other and outside the police
force – as he was in cop cases. Cops for the first time stepped off the hero’s pedestal and were depicted as complex and sometimes flawed characters. Who and how they loved was as important to the stories as how they solved crimes. The style and tone of the series followed Bochco’s interest in character and relationships. He employed a cinéma-vérité production style, and the show’s tone was more adult and more honest than what the audience had come to expect from the genre. While Hill Street is appropriately revered in TV history (and was both commercially successful and critically honored in its day – it received 98 Emmy nominations), its lasting impact stems from one of its structural innovations. It was the first cop show to appropriate soap storytelling structure, crosscutting among three or more storylines per episode and utilizing serialized storytelling. Both devices were unheard of in cop shows and most other one-hour drama genres at that time. Almost all dramas today employ those storytelling techniques, a legacy of the innovation and success of Hill Street Blues.
If Hill Street Blues revolutionized TV’s dominant drama genre in 1981, another show nearly 20 years later upended all the rules of TV genre that had defined the first 50 years of American TV.