by Bob Levy
Series drives that function as story engines are a relatively recent phenomenon on the TV landscape. Case-of-the-week cop shows and doctor shows 50 years ago didn’t employ series drives. In a sense, the drive of the characters in those shows was implicit and general. One could say that Detective Joe Friday’s series drive in Dragnet was simply to solve crimes, to keep the streets of Los Angeles safe. But series drives as we think of them today are much more concrete and specific than that.
Creating a series drive that can succeed as a story engine for many seasons is very challenging. A show like Revenge is a good case in point. That show placed so much emphasis on its series drive that it actually used it as its title: revenge was the lead character Amanda Clarke/Emily Thorne’s series drive.3 But one of the reasons the show couldn’t sustain its audience much beyond its first successful season was that it couldn’t sustain its series drive. The show demonstrated that an audience would root for a character to achieve revenge (an idea that common TV development wisdom thought unlikely), but the series discovered that the audience wouldn’t keep rooting for her to achieve it forever. If Emily Thorne was going to set out to get revenge, the audience expected her to get it within a reasonable period of time. When faithful viewers returned for the second season and it became clear Emily Thorne wouldn’t fully achieve her series drive anytime soon, viewers began to lose interest. The show tried to adapt to the diminishing appeal of its waning series drive by dialing up soap elements of the series. The concept of the series depended on a strong series drive, however, and the show’s audience eroded during an attempt to dial up one story engine to bail out another.
Pretty Little Liars relied on a frothy mix of series drive and soap franchise beginning with its pilot, and the series managed to sustain that healthy balance and achieve success. The series drive was rooted in the lead characters’ search for answers to mysteries that the show slowly paid off. The mysteries included questions like who was “A,” the unseen character who threatened and taunted the four lead “liar” characters, and who killed the four girls’ best friend Alison and why? The interplay between stories generated by these series mysteries (finding answers that resolved the mysteries was the show’s series drive) and the various characters’ soap storylines proved to be a successful entertainment formula.
One of a showrunner’s jobs during the life of a series is to make creative adjustments that emphasize a show’s strengths and de-emphasize its weaknesses. Often the strengths and weaknesses of a show aren’t apparent until after the development phase, when the show has had a chance to “find itself” over the course of episodes or even seasons on the air. Other executive producers, network and studio current executives, and sometimes network and studio presidents assist the showrunner in the process of identifying strengths and weaknesses. But truly reinventing a show once it’s on the air is very difficult and rarely successful. Abandoning a series-defining series drive and replacing it with a different story engine can risk alienating the audience’s expectations and rooting interest. One reason that creators are so handsomely rewarded financially and that development executives command elite stature at networks and studios is because the crucial opportunity to align the various elements that comprise a successful show, the time to get the basics right, is during development.
Notes
1 Harris Insights & Analytics has conducted Harris Polls over the years, studying America’s most prestigious occupations, and doctors, police officers and lawyers consistently rank higher than journalists. The most recent poll was conducted in 2014: https://theharrispoll.com/when-shown-a-list-of-occupations-and-asked-how-much-prestige-each-job-possesses-doctors-top-the-harris-polls-list-with-88-of-u-s-adults-considering-it-to-have-either-a-great-deal-of-prestige-45-2/.
2 Fun-fact: Gossip Girl inherited The Sopranos’ soundstages at Silvercup Studios in Queens, New York, when the crime series retired in 2007. The Waldorf family apartment interiors stood where The Sopranos’ New Jersey MacMansion interiors had stood for seven years.
3 The lead character in Revenge played by Emily VanCamp had two identities: her true identity at birth, Amanda Clarke, and an identity she created for the purposes of her revenge scheme, Emily Thorne.
5
Concept Ideation, “Areas” and “Takes”
Most TV series are based on original ideas created by TV writers, despite the fact that television has become more interested in IP in recent years than ever before. This is one of the qualities of the American television industry that has distinguished it from the movie industry. While the feature film industry from its beginnings has relied heavily on adaptations of pre-existing intellectual property like books, plays and true-life stories, for most of its 70-year history TV has depended on original ideas sprung from the minds of TV writers.
Following the first decade of American TV when many early scripted series were adapted from successful radio series, the next 40 years were structured to encourage experienced TV writers to create shows based on their own original ideas. Young writers would work their way up the writing staffs of other writers’ shows, observing and learning from more experienced creators and showrunners, absorbing lessons about producing, TV storytelling, and strategies to sustain series for many seasons. After a writer had earned veteran status by staffing on shows for five or seven years, he or she (although mostly “he” in that era) would be encouraged by his agent to come up with an original idea for a show. Many writers looked to proven genres and wondered,
How can I update this genre? How can I mine the things that make this genre so successful but change them up in a way that makes it feel a little fresher, a bit more modern and relevant? How can I take it in a slightly new direction?
The most talented, successful and experienced writers were welcomed by network and studio development executives to pitch their ideas. In that era it was extremely rare for anyone other than a highly experienced veteran TV writer to be given a chance to pitch a TV network.
In the past 20 years two major changes have occurred in TV development. First, adaptation has become much more attractive to development professionals. From Game of Thrones to A Series of Unfortunate Events (both based on novel series), from House of Cards to Jane the Virgin (both based on foreign TV formats), from The Walking Dead (based on a comic book series) to Scandal (based on the life rights of a real person), networks and studios have turned to IP for source material for new shows. There are many reasons for this. Leslie Morgenstein, the President of Alloy Entertainment, a division of Warner Bros. Television that develops books and produces the adaptions of their IP into TV and movies, identifies one important reason, “Building a show is really hard. When there is a bunch of creative material pre-existing it makes it a little bit easier.”1
The second important change is that network and studio development executives are now far more open to fresh voices, to hearing pitches from less experienced TV writers and from writers who may have no experience in TV but have proven themselves in ancillary fields like features, theatre, journalism and even podcasting. Talent agencies and studios may pair less-experienced TV writers with veteran TV writers to help the less experienced writer navigate TV development and production and to assure network development executives that an experienced hand is helping steer the ship.
Despite the recent upswing in IP adaption, however, most new shows still emanate from writers’ original ideas. And while it’s the writer of the pilot episode who receives the “created by” credit (as we’ve discussed), an underlying idea that informs a pilot and a series – even a kernel of an idea – sometimes originates with other members of the development team. Many TV producers spend a lot of time searching for IP to adapt, but producers (and staffs of their production companies) also spend time trying to originate new ideas for shows. Network and studio development executives also brainstorm ideas for new shows, hoping to identify even a kernel of an idea that might inspire a writer to develop it into a full-blown TV show concept.
; In 2003 the president of ABC, Lloyd Braun, had a simple but unique idea. His favorite movie of recent years was Cast Away with Tom Hanks, and he told his team of executives that they should develop a one-hour drama about an ensemble of castaways on a deserted island. The reality show Survivor was still new at the time and an enormously popular hit; some of his executives referred to the idea as “scripted Survivor.” ABC’s drama development department followed through on their boss’s pitch, and that development process resulted in the series Lost. A TV executive, in this case the president of a network, had the kernel of an idea for a series, and his development executives developed that idea into a huge hit show.
Areas
These simple kernels of ideas are sometimes referred to informally as “areas.”2 Producers, agents and development executives pitch areas they’re excited about to TV writers they think have the right skillset to develop the ideas, and the writers then decide if they’re sufficiently inspired to imagine a show emerging from them.
While network presidents sometimes experience sudden light-bulb moments, producers, development executives and others also employ more formal processes to generate new ideas for potential TV development. A word for this process is “ideation,” the process of creating ideas. (Although there is a word for it, no one in the industry actually calls it that.)
If you remember the broadcast network development calendar discussed at the end of Chapter 2, you’ll recall that the development cycle begins each new season with network brainstorming. Network development executives typically begin each new cycle with development retreats in which execs travel off-site, away from their offices for several days, frequently holing up in fancy hotels, to brainstorm new development strategies, generate new ideas and in some cases ideate specific development areas. Lloyd Braun pitched “ensemble TV Cast Away” at an ABC development retreat.
Network execs typically begin this process by reviewing their most recent development cycle and assessing the successes and disappointments that emerged from it. They then look at their upcoming schedule of programming (in part the results of that last development cycle) and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Based on these assessments and their prognosis of competing networks’ upcoming programming schedules, they spend their retreat devising a new development strategy for the new development cycle. They might look at their fall schedule of shows and say, “Superhero shows are really working on our network. Let’s think about looking for more of those.” Or, “Let’s see if a writer can come up with a completely fresh take on a dysfunctional family comedy that no one’s ever seen before.” At the end of the development retreat the network development execs codify the specifics of their new game plan and share them with the rest of the industry so writers, producers, agents and studio development executives have an idea of what kinds of shows to target for that network. These lists of development targets are known as “network needs.” Each network disseminates its network needs to the rest of the industry, and producers, studio development executives and agents gather all the networks’ network needs information to help guide them as they develop their slates of new projects, steering projects they’re working on to the specific needs of prospective buyers.
Many development professionals have long been skeptical of chasing network needs in the belief that network execs toss aside official strategies once they start hearing ideas better than they have ever considered. Network needs have also grown less relevant in recent years as networks look for more “out of the box” ideas that execs never imagined or anticipated. Most networks still disseminate network needs, but they’re often less specific and detailed than they used to be and tend more to be a list of types of shows a network is not interested in developing.
Writers who are interested in network needs information get it from their agents. Unrepresented writers and others outside the industry will find it difficult if not impossible to find current networks needs intel. It’s considered proprietary industry information and usually doesn’t show up on the internet. The reality is that unrepresented writers will find it virtually impossible to book actual network pitch meetings (we’ll discuss this dynamic in more detail in Chapter 9 on agents), but unrepped writers can best approach thinking about targeting pilot ideas to specific networks by studying networks’ current programming, the genres, styles, tones and subject matter a network has developed in recent years.
Network development execs sometimes brainstorm more specific creative ideas and areas themselves. Typically these more specific ideas won’t be disseminated widely along with the general network needs, but rather are targeted to specific writers that execs want to work with. A network development exec might, for example, reach out to a writer via her agent to 1) inquire if the writer is planning to develop that year (a writer may be prevented from developing by a writing staff contract that requires her to work exclusively on a show and precludes the distractions of development), 2) inquire if the writer has her own ideas that she’s already developing and 3) ask if she’s open to hearing the network’s ideas. If the writer is available to develop and open to hearing new ideas, the network development exec invites the writer in to meet at the exec’s office, asks what kinds of shows she’s interested in developing and then potentially pitches her the area that emerged from the recent network development retreat.
Development execs and producers also regularly meet with writers in what are known as “generals,” meetings in which there’s no specific agenda (like hearing a formal pilot pitch), but rather they are merely general meetings, opportunities for execs to get to know writers’ personalities (and vice versa) and meet them personally after reading and responding to their written work. (Producers, directors and actors also go on generals, laying the foundation for potential future professional collaborations.) Sometimes development execs and producers use writer generals to float areas or IP and see if a writer might be interested in potentially pursuing the ideas with them in the near future.
Concept Ideation
The ideas that execs come up with sometimes just pop into their minds in moments of inspiration, but often ideas and areas that development professionals create result from more formal ideation techniques. These techniques are used at network and studio development retreats, by production companies and by other entertainment companies to spur the concept ideation process.3
The first and most fundamental ideation technique emerges from a simple question that begins many TV development brainstorming sessions: “What’s in the Zeitgeist?” “Zeitgeist” is a German word that literally means “ghost of the time” or, more loosely, “spirit of the age.”4 The Zeitgeist (pronounced “zite,” rhyming with “might,” and “geist,” beginning with a hard-g like “guest” and rhyming with “heist”) is what’s going on in the deepest currents of a society at a given time. The Zeitgeist doesn’t refer to a trend or a fad. It’s bigger and deeper than that. The Zeitgeist isn’t something that lasts for a couple of years. The Zeitgeist is something that lasts at least a generation.
Bitcoin is a fad. Income inequality, on the other hand, is in the Zeitgeist. Income inequality has been a phenomenon developing in our society for several decades and most likely something we’ll be living with for a long time to come. It’s a deeply rooted issue with many causes and factors, but its effects are relatively recent and touch almost all of our lives in one way or another.
Income inequality emerged at a development ideation session at Alloy Entertainment, the company I used to work for that created the book series Gossip Girl that was adapted into the TV series. The Alloy team brainstormed new ideas at a development session in the year 2000 and discussed how America was living in a “second Gilded Age.” (That the company identified a genuine current of the Zeitgeist is underscored by the fact that we’re still very much living in the second Gilded Age nearly 20 years later.) The first Gilded Age occurred in the US in the late nineteenth century when the original generation of industrial robber barons, the Rockefellers, Carnegi
es and Vanderbilts, displayed their extraordinary wealth (the extreme affluence of their own period of income inequality) with opulent homes and extravagant fashions lavished on the women in their lives. The wives and daughters of the richest of the rich managed the social hierarchy of these mega-rich families, sometimes scheming and manipulating against their social rivals. Ground zero of the first Gilded Age was New York City.
The development team at Alloy believed income inequality was “in the Zeitgeist” and that the second Gilded Age, the new era of extravagant wealth of Wall Street hedge-fund billionaires and tech entrepreneurs, could be an exciting area for entertainment development. Because Alloy’s publishing arm focuses on the young adult (YA) segment of the commercial fiction business (books aimed primarily at teen girl readers and usually based on stories about teen girls), the result of that development process was Gossip Girl, an entertainment concept about the teenage children of the ultra-rich and the middle-class kids who attend fancy private schools on scholarship. The world of New York City’s second Gilded Age served as the backdrop for what became a 15-book novel series and eventually the TV series. While the TV version never actually drew a large audience, the show struck a cultural nerve. When development professionals succeed in tapping into the Zeitgeist in the right way, a cultural phenomenon like Gossip Girl is possible.