Television Development

by Bob Levy

  8 Dunleavy describes Hill Street Blues as “a harbinger of American TV drama’s future,” and offers a comprehensive history and scholarly analysis of the series. Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television, 49–54.

  9 The argument that The Sopranos is an inverted cop show is a case I’m making to illustrate the centrality and fluidity of genre in television, in other words, a case I’m making for mostly dramatic effect. If The Sopranos was truly an inverted cop show, it would have primarily told stories about how Tony and his crew avoided being caught by the police. In other words, it would have told cop show stories – the investigating and catching of criminals – from the criminal’s POV, but The Sopranos didn’t tell those kinds of stories more than a handful of times in six seasons. The Sopranos is an inverted cop show only in a very loose sense.

  10 The Sopranos broke any number of traditional TV rules. While TV had explored flawed characters ever since Hill Street Blues, Tony Soprano was American TV’s first true anti-hero, a rootable protagonist the audience finds sympathetic despite deeply immoral behavior, which in Tony’s case included murder, lying and serially cheating on his wife. American TV has enjoyed a love affair with the anti-hero ever since.

  11 “Rootable” is not a word in the English language but is a word in Hollywood (Hollywood-lish?). When a writer crafts a story that engenders the audience’s rooting interest in a character, he’s created a “rootable” character.

  Further Academic Reading

  John Caughie, “Adorno’s Reproach: Repetition, Difference and Television Genre,” Screen 32, no. 2 (1991).

  Glen Creeber, The Television Genre Book (British Film Institute, 2001).

  Jane Feuer, “Genre Study and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 138–160.

  Stuart M. Kaminsky and Jeffrey H. Mahan, American Television Genres (Nelson-Hall, 1985).

  Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press, 2007).

  Brian G. Rose, ed., TV Genres: A Handbook and Reference Guide (Greenwood Press, 1985).

  Gregory A. Waller, “Flow, Genre and the Television Text,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 16, no. 1 (1988).

  Mimi White, “Television Genres: Intertextuality,” Journal of Film and Video 37, no. 3 (1985).

  4

  What Make Series Go

  “Story Engines,” “Franchises” and “Series Drives”

  For a movie to work it needs one great story. For a TV series to work it needs many. Dozens or even hundreds.

  One of the most common reasons that network development executives give for passing on a series pitch is, “It felt more like a movie.” They’ll go on to say,

  They pitched an interesting character and a great pilot story, but it feels like that’s the beginning and end of the concept, and there really aren’t many more stories beyond it that live up to the promise of the pilot story.

  To generate the number of stories TV series need, most series have some kind of “story engine.” Thinking back to our traditional “big four” one-hour drama genres, those genres all offer great story engines. The infinite number of cases inherent to those genres derives from the story engines built into them. Remember: cases = stories, and stories = episodes. There’s a term used in TV development for the kind of story engine at work in these genres: “Franchise.” It’s one of the stranger terms in the TV development lexicon (it sounds like a fast-food restaurant), and it has a meaning different from the more familiar use of the term in entertainment. A “movie franchise” refers to a concept, character or brand that sustains a series of several movies. X-Men is a movie franchise. James Bond is a movie franchise. This kind of franchise exists in TV too. CBS has a NCIS franchise. In TV development “franchise” has another meaning, and it’s one of the trickier terms to define and wrap one’s head around. Be patient, stay with me and I’ll make it clear. It’s a really important idea in development and one that’s used all the time.

  A franchise is the central element of a genre or concept – frequently a vocation or avocation (i.e., a job or a hobby) – that generates a number of stories; a kind of story engine.

  Cop shows have a cop franchise. That sounds obvious and circular. But let’s drill down further. The cop franchise within a cop show is specifically the acquisition and investigation of cases within stories. It’s the mechanism at the heart of cop-show stories. It’s the part of the cop-show genre that generates the stories. The cop-show genre is comprised of several elements including the characters (the cops) and the world (the police station, the detective bullpen, the city streets), but also the franchise, the mechanism at the heart of the genre that serves as its story engine and that provides a simple and fundamental structure to its stories.

  In a cop show the cops get new cases (their boss assigns them cases or a victim walks in off the street and drops a case on their desks or – more simply and commonly in today’s TV language – someone’s murdered and the cops begin investigating, i.e., the assigning of the case is implicit and occurs off-screen) and the cops perform their investigation of the crime. Those facets of the genre’s standard storytelling – getting cases and doing the work of cases, i.e., investigating – is the franchise.

  So what’s the difference between the cop-show genre and the cop franchise? One is a category of TV shows and one is the mechanism at the center of the category that makes it go, that actually generates and drives stories and the action within stories.

  Let me throw out a crazy scenario that would never happen in the real world but that helps illustrate the difference. Imagine a show about the professional and personal relationships among cops. There’s an ensemble of cop characters working in a cop world, a precinct station, but the only kinds of stories the show tells are stories about the cops’ relationships, their interrelationships among each other, relationships with their romantic partners and their families at home. The series never focuses on the cases, just the relationships. The cops solve crimes in the background of episodes because that’s their job, but the stories the series tells are never about the cases, never about them solving the crimes. That would be a cop show (a show within the cop genre) without a cop franchise. A show in the real world would never do that because the cop franchise is the most functional and valuable part of the cop show genre.

  There are many kinds of franchises. The franchises of the other three major drama genres are fairly obvious. Medical shows have a medical franchise: the acquisition of cases and the diagnosing and healing of sick people. Legal shows have a legal franchise: the acquisition, investigation and prosecution of legal cases. Private investigator shows have a PI franchise: the PIs acquire, investigate and solve cases. I’ll look at other kinds of franchises in a moment.

  Another way of looking at franchise is that it gives the characters of the series something to do. Most TV shows aren’t simply character studies. The characters need to do something, they need to take action, and because audiences expect a consistency of the kinds of stories a show tells, shows depict characters taking a specific kind of action. A franchise can provide that. Another important quality of franchise is that it often introduces new guest characters into the series, and it’s frequently these guest characters that bring new stories with them.

  All of the “big four” drama genres are case-of-the-week genres. The cop show franchise typically introduces a new case in each episode. There are other case-of-the-week franchises. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had what might be called a “monster hunter franchise.” The series Supernatural today uses a “monster hunter franchise.” Introducing new monster characters, hunting and eradicating them are at the heart of most stories and most of the action of the series, and that’s the show’s franchise.

  As with formats and genres, franchises aren’t something dictated somewhere by the TV gods or defined in stone. Franchises, like genres, occur organically as the result of the imagination of writers and other dev
elopment professionals who experiment and try new ideas. When they work, other development pros notice and try to repeat their success. They create new concepts that harness a successful new franchise and, if more iterations of that franchise thrive, the franchise might enter the TV development canon and be thought of as routinely as cop franchises or legal franchises. In other words, franchises become franchises because they work. If they don’t work, they go away until new development professionals come along willing to experiment again.

  Let’s look at a vocation one might think would make a good TV franchise but hasn’t. Journalism has proved not to be a successful TV drama franchise. You’d think it should: Journalism provides an unlimited number of cases, big stakes (though rarely life-and-death stakes), plenty of moral complexity and unending conflict. Yet journalism hasn’t proved to be a reliable TV franchise. The Newsroom on HBO lasted only three seasons (25 episodes) from 2012–2014. Pepper Dennis starring Rebecca Romijn attempted a journalism franchise on the WB network in 2006 and lasted only 13 episodes. The Name of the Game on NBC from 1968–1971 worked to a modest degree, lasting three seasons and 76 episodes. The only really successful series that used a journalism franchise in the last 70 years was Lou Grant, which lasted five seasons and 114 episodes from 1977–1982. That show succeeded, though, largely because it was a spinoff of one of the biggest hits of its day, the half-hour comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Lou Grant was one of the breakout characters on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and when that series retired after seven seasons, CBS spun off Lou Grant’s character into his own show, transposing the character from a half-hour comedy into a one-hour drama, recasting him from a Minneapolis TV news boss into the editor-in-chief of a Los Angeles newspaper. Unlike its half-hour predecessor, which was partly set in a TV newsroom, the one-hour drama Lou Grant made frequent use of its journalism franchise and succeeded in telling actual journalism stories. But one successful show in 70 years, a show that relied on a hit character the audience already knew and loved, does not a successful franchise make.

  Why? Why does one franchise work and become a staple of TV and another franchise does not work? Most development professionals are too busy working with franchises that do work to spend time guessing. But I can offer a couple of theories. One reason journalism has never become a reliable TV franchise may be because journalists tend not to be that well respected by American viewers. Polls that rank various professions rank cops, doctors and even lawyers much higher than journalists.1 A second reason might be that while journalists are active investigators, they’re not active in effecting outcomes. Cops put murderers behind bars. Doctors save lives. The climax of a journalism story is publishing or posting a story. While people’s lives may be affected by making the story public, the outcome is more an indirect byproduct of the journalist’s work than the immediate, hands-on way that lives are changed by cops, doctors and lawyers.

  Most Hollywood development executives are reluctant to develop journalism concepts, shying away from investing their limited development budgets to buy a pitch with a journalism franchise, or from trying to convince their network’s president and other corporate bosses to greenlight journalism shows to pilot or series. It takes a writer of Aaron Sorkin’s stature to get a journalism show like The Newsroom through a network’s development machinery. But then it serves as another cautionary tale when it limps to a modest handful of critical plaudits and underwhelming ratings. Development professionals look to recent experience and back through TV history to evaluate which formats, genres and franchises work. Depending on what kind of company they work for and that company’s appetite for experimentation and risk, they try new or traditionally unsuccessful formats, genres and franchises cautiously or not at all.

  Let’s go back to my weird, not-real-world example of a cop show about the relationships among cops and their friends, families and lovers but never about actual criminal cases. What kind of franchise does that hypothetical cop show have? (Remember, the point of the exercise was that it doesn’t have a cop franchise.) It has a soap franchise. While my initial definition of franchise referenced a vocation or avocation of its lead characters, the soap franchise is rooted in neither a job nor a hobby. It busts my definition, but it works, so it’s smack dab in the center of the canon of successful TV franchises. Relationships – romantic relationships, friendship relationships, family relationships and work relationships – generate stories and serve as the core of the soap franchise, a tested, proven and fruitfully prolific TV franchise. We might say that my hypothetical cop show is “a cop show with a soap franchise.”

  Returning to the real world, Hill Street Blues was a cop show with elements of a soap franchise. But because the balance of cop stories to relationship stories was tilted so far toward cop stories on Hill Street, because the actual cop franchise was so much more dominant, it wouldn’t be fair to say the show had “a soap franchise.” It’s probably more accurate to temper the analysis and say it “used elements of a soap franchise.” A more recent example, the legal show The Good Wife, similarly used elements of a soap franchise. While most of the show’s episodes featured main stories (“A-stories,” as they’re called) that employed a legal franchise, episodes also frequently told smaller B- and C-stories that emerged from the soap franchise.

  Most shows today employ multiple franchises. Game of Thrones is a great example. It employs at least four franchises. Two franchises are more dominant: a power franchise and a family franchise. A power franchise pits characters and groups of characters against each other in a prolonged battle for power. The Sopranos employed a power franchise. Many of the show’s stories were about Tony and his crew battling other crime families or factions for criminal control of their territory. A show as vastly different from The Sopranos as Gossip Girl also used a power franchise.2 While a soap franchise was clearly more dominant in Gossip Girl than the power franchise, many of the show’s stories dramatized Blair Waldorf battling for control of Queen Bee status, fighting for power over her schoolmates and social group, utilizing elements of a power franchise.

  Family is a second vital franchise in Game of Thrones and works hand-in-glove with the power franchise. The show’s battle for power is centered among families. The Starks versus the Lannisters is the central conflict in the series. In addition to stories of family power battles, however, stories emerge from timeless family issues like loyalty, trust and love as well as family dysfunctions like incest. Members of various families are separated from their clans or killed, and surrogate family units emerge, like the unlikely father–daughter bond between Sandor Clegane (“the Hound”) and Arya Stark. The Sopranos also employed a family franchise. While Game of Thrones intertwines its family and power franchises, pitting families against other families for power, The Sopranos used its family franchise in a different way, testing Tony’s paternal responsibilities with his external pursuit of criminal power. Breaking Bad employed a family franchise as well, along with its central criminal procedural and power franchises. It’s no coincidence that Walter White’s primary cop antagonist was his brother-in-law. Shows like Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, This is Us and Empire have utilized strong family franchises in a variety of ways.

  A third franchise at work in Game of Thrones is, like most one-hour dramas today, a soap franchise. Who’s in love with whom? Who wants to sleep with whom? Who’s cheating on whom? These and other relationship/romantic/sexual questions drive the action of numerous stories. Think of the effective Jon Snow–Ygritte story arc in seasons two and three. That storyline combined elements of the power franchise (the characters came from warring factions), but at the end of the day it was pure, delicious, sexy soap.

  Lastly, the series uses a fantasy franchise. The show uses “genre elements” (in the other sense of “genre,” the supernatural and fantastical sense) like dragons, direwolves and sorceress spells to tell and advance story.

  Game of Thrones’ unique balance of franchise elements – power, family, soap and fantasy – has pr
oven to be an extremely powerful TV formula. It’s also a very high-degree-of-difficulty formula, one that requires not only extremely large budgets and highly skilled talent at every level to execute successfully, but also one that requires an extremely solid and well-developed creative concept at its core. Increasingly in recent years TV development professionals have turned to IP for concepts as strong and proven as this one.

  One thing development professionals do when evaluating concepts, pitches, story outlines and pilot scripts is to assess the balance of genre elements and franchises. Is there enough going on in a given concept to generate a sufficient number of stories and episodes, or do we need to introduce another franchise? Is there a franchise inherent to the concept but only modestly exploited that can be dialed up even further? Is there enough entertainment value being generated by the concept to keep viewers satisfied, or do we need to recalibrate the balance of franchise and genre elements? Figuring out the right balance for success requires development professionals to know numerous TV genres and franchises and to understand how they work.

  Series Drive

  A second kind of story engine is “series drive.” A series drive is a specific goal that the main character wants and strives for throughout the life of the series and that the audience roots for him to get. An ongoing, overarching drive can generate many (though probably not an unlimited number of) stories.

  Breaking Bad offers a great example of series drive. Walter White spent almost the entire series trying to make money to provide for his family. After he made enough money to take care of his family (achieving his series drive) he had to convince his wife to accept his ill-gotten fortune (expanding the original series drive), and the series finale delivered a satisfying and definitive resolution to the series drive that had been introduced in the pilot several years earlier. In the series finale (spoiler alert) Walter White deployed a plan that effectively tricked his wife and family into accepting the money he had worked so hard and risked so much to accrue. Walter had a goal, a series drive, to provide for his family that not only lasted seven seasons but that generated stories for seven seasons as well. The series drive didn’t generate every story of the series, but it succeeded in generating many stories throughout the life of the series.