Television Development

by Bob Levy

  A journalist once asked Clint Eastwood how he’s able to get audiences to care about his iconic Western movie heroes when he gives them so little dialogue. How is the audience even supposed to know to root for the hero? “In the fifth minute of the film,” Eastwood answered, “some people will kill his wife and his children and burn his house down.”5 In other words, Eastwood takes strong men and makes them victims, and that simple technique allows us to love them and root for them.

  The second character-defining technique we mentioned in the last chapter is to assign characters a want or, more importantly, to assign them a goal. Once we know what a character wants, we understand them. That’s why Disney-animated movie musicals always deliver what’s known as the “I Want” song at the outset of the story. Snow White sings “Some Day My Prince Will Come” so the audience knows what she wants. Once we hear that she’s looking for love we understand her, identify with her (“I want love too, I’m just like her!” we think unconsciously), connect to her and begin to root for her.

  In the Breaking Bad pilot, as I discussed in the last chapter, Walter White’s goal emerges toward the end of the sequence of victimization, about a third of the way into the pilot script: Walter sees a huge pile of cash on TV that cops had confiscated at a drug bust, and, after the reality of his terminal diagnosis lands on him, he decides to apply his expert knowledge of chemistry to make great drugs to earn his own huge pile of cash. That becomes the hero’s goal, his goal in both the pilot and the series.

  Goals

  The goal assigned to a character in a pilot story may introduce a series drive (in pilots these days it often does) or it may only serve the one pilot episode. Goals of effective pilot story lead characters have three important qualities. First, the best pilot story goals are concrete and specific. They’re a tangible thing, not merely a vague, amorphous, theoretical desire.

  I once had an awkward conversation with a senior member of a pilot I was working on while at lunch during location scouting. I realized he didn’t have the best handle on what our pilot story was. I asked him what he thought our lead character’s pilot story goal was, and he said her goal was to discover who she is. I agreed that she does want to find out who she is, but that was a theme of the series and not the goal of the pilot story. I argued that her goal in the pilot story was to find out who killed her brother. That’s a good pilot story goal: It’s concrete and specific. “Who am I?” is a great question, but it’s general and could take a year or ten years or a lifetime to answer. “Who killed my brother?” is more grounded and specific, and something an audience can expect to find a definitive answer to in the near term, like possibly by the end of the pilot. In fact, at the end of the pilot the lead did discover who killed her brother, that her father killed her brother, which then posed numerous other questions for the series: Why did my father kill my brother? Who helped him? Are other family members complicit in this crime? Ultimately, the payoff to the lead character’s pilot story goal framed her series drive: How can I avenge the death of my brother and bring my powerful father to justice?

  Creating a sympathetic, likeable pilot hero provides the viewer with someone to root for. Assigning the hero a concrete goal deepens our rooting interest in the story.

  The second important quality of a pilot story goal is that it should be relatable. The audience has to understand why the protagonist would choose that goal, and it has to make sense. At some level we need to be able to think to ourselves, “Yeah, if I were in his shoes, I’d want that too.” We might not have the moxie to become a drug dealer or to avenge our brother’s death by ourselves, but we understand how someone could. We believe in their goal. We may be startled by it, we might not have ever thought of it ourselves, but we believe it, and we believe in it. If Walter White had thought to himself, “Hmm, I don’t want to die and leave my family in poverty so I’m going to train myself to become a high-priced international hit man,” we never would have gotten on board. Becoming a hit man would have been a pie-in-the-sky goal that seemed out of reach and far outside Walter’s skillset. There’s an inherent logic to him leveraging his academic chemistry knowledge to cook pure meth – that makes sense! It’s not only logical, there’s an ingenuity to the logic that helps make it even more credible, more relatable to us. We buy into his goal.

  The third quality good pilot story goals offer is stakes. (I told you stakes would return to the practice of development in important ways.) There’s got to be something at stake if the hero doesn’t achieve his goal, or there’s not that much to root for. Finding time to eat lunch could be a concrete and relatable goal. But it has no stakes. If he doesn’t eat lunch then, he might feel a little hungry, but he’ll eat later. There are zero stakes to that goal. “I want to make money so my wife, handicapped son and new baby won’t starve when I die” are huge stakes! Gilligan’s pilot script goes out of its way to emphasize Skyler’s pregnancy and so deepen those stakes. Walter’s going to have another mouth to feed! He’s got to figure out a way to provide for his family.

  Walter’s goal to make money by becoming a drug manufacturer and distributor is a great pilot story goal for many reasons, but among them is that there are layers of stakes to it. I count at least four layers of stakes to this goal. Not only will his family be impoverished if he ultimately fails at the goal, he’s also in danger of getting caught by the cops (or, even worse, by his DEA brother-in-law) and being imprisoned. Which brings up a third layer of stakes: He’s in danger of getting caught by his family, chiefly his wife. Walter has to hide his criminal career from his wife (and the rest of his family) for years. Family secrets can provide powerful stakes and are common in many pilots, including comedy pilots. A last layer of the stakes of Walter’s pilot goal is – as we see dramatized explicitly in the climax of the episode, and as I mentioned in the last chapter – Walter is entering an extremely violent and stakeful world; the criminals he sells his first batch of drugs to turn the tables on him and try to kill him.6

  Gilligan introduces the stakes initially as emotional family stakes (“if I don’t provide for my family, they’ll starve”) and manages to escalate them within the episode into life-and-death stakes. Walter almost dies, but, thanks to his chemistry expertise, turns the tables on the drug dealers and kills them, and steals the money they brought with them to ostensibly buy the drugs, thus achieving a first victory as per his pilot story goal. That is some very effective pilot story writing.

  Before I move on to the other creative goals of pilot scripts, it’s worth taking a moment to talk about the power of Walter’s family secret. As I just mentioned, Walter keeps his criminal career a secret from his wife. We know now in hindsight that this secret served the series for years. Once that cat was out of the bag, Walter and Skyler kept their secret from the rest of their family, chiefly Skyler’s sister’s DEA-agent husband, for several seasons more. Here’s a point worth repeating: Secrets are enormously powerful in pilots. Secrets are helpful in series, but, specifically during pilot development, secrets can add a powerful layer of jeopardy and stakes, either dramatic or comedic. When I worked as a network development exec and my colleagues and I agreed that a pilot script was reading flat, one of our go-to strategies was, “How can we inject some kind of secret into this story and amp everything up?”

  The Basic Elements of Pilot Stories

  The second creative goal of pilot scripts is to tell a great story. In lieu of a thorough examination of story structure, which could fill many books and already has, let’s look at some of the basic structural elements of effective pilot stories.

  Giving the lead character a goal results in an important structural element of the pilot script: It drives action. Television is a visual medium. It craves action. The hero’s goal informs his action, directs his action toward something specific, relatable and stakeful that we can track and root for. After the hero and his status quo are introduced, an inciting incident propels him to identify a goal. Seeing the drug bust on TV and learning he has te
rminal cancer propel Walter to decide to become a criminal to provide for his family. That decision propels him into action.

  Action results in the next essential structural element of pilot storytelling, conflict. The hero takes action and someone or something (or several someones) tries to stop him. Walter takes action by first identifying a partner in crime, Jesse Pinkman, his former student. Jesse effectively responds: “No, I don’t want to be your partner.” Walter overcomes Jesse’s conflict, they team up, make their first batch of drugs, and try to sell it, immediately resulting in more and greater conflict. The buyers are criminals, criminals are frequently liars and thieves, and the criminals (as mentioned above) try to steal Walter and Jesse’s drugs and kill them. Conflict! Visual, physical conflict. Walter turns the tables, which leads to …

  Resolution. The conflict is resolved and the hero achieves his goal (or not). Pilots are hard to do well because there are so many burdens placed on them. They have to introduce wholly new characters and compel us to root for them. They have to introduce new worlds and make them clear and compelling. They have to dramatize a concept (as I’ll discuss in a moment) and demonstrate the potential for many more stories and episodes to come. But they also have to work as a great, singular episode of TV on their own. To do that they ideally need to tell a great story (or six good ones like the Pretty Little Liars pilot).

  Let’s review the simple structural elements I’ve discussed: Creating great lead characters the audience connects with and roots for; putting the lead characters into action toward a compelling, interesting, stakeful goal; confronting obstacles and conflict that results in even more action; ultimately driving toward a climax that resolves the conflict and the story by answering the question posed by the lead character’s goal. Does he achieve his pilot story goal or doesn’t he? Ideally, he does or doesn’t in a way that’s both surprising and yet wholly organic. Walter beating the killers at their own game is surprising because they’ve got guns and are professional criminals – killing people and stealing their drugs is what they do for a living and they look pretty good at it, while this is Walter’s first foray in crime. But Walter’s climactic pilot story “move” is also completely organic within the rules of the world Gilligan has set up.7 Walter’s climactic action is rooted in his chemistry expertise. He knows chemistry backwards and forwards and the fact that he thinks on his feet in a life-or-death moment and uses a chemical reaction to defeat the bad guys makes complete and utter sense. It’s both utterly surprising and yet completely true to the character.

  Pilot Story Endings

  The ending of the Breaking Bad pilot provides a great example of the challenge that endings of pilots almost always pose (as I also mentioned in the last chapter). The trick of pilot endings is that they can’t completely resolve the hero’s needs or there’s no series to follow it. If all the lead characters’ problems are resolved, the show’s over. Pilot stories that sound like that in pitch form frequently get the “It sounds more like a movie than a TV series” response from development execs. But, at the same time, pilot episodes do need to deliver satisfying conclusions, entertaining payoffs. A good ending.

  Like just about everything else it did, the Breaking Bad pilot handled its ending perfectly. It delivered on its hero’s goal – Walter makes money – but we know it’s not nearly enough to satisfy his series goal, his series drive, to make enough money to provide for his family when he’s dead. So the pilot is able to give its lead character a victory, but not a victory that obviates his series drive. We feel satisfaction watching his victory, but we know the cash flapping around Walter’s clothes dryer is only a drop in the bucket to achieve his much larger series goal of making enough money to take care of his family.

  One of my bosses in development at NBC used to have an expression he applied to many effective pilot endings: “Baby steps.” The hero doesn’t achieve his series goal (or there’s no reason for a series), but in the climax of the pilot story he takes his first baby steps to get there. The viewer sees him make an effort to achieve the skills necessary to demonstrate he has the promise of achieving his series goal, but he only takes his first (often victorious) steps. “Baby steps” is a common pilot story ending strategy.

  The ending of the Transparent pilot is wonderfully satisfying but in a completely different way. Creator Jill Soloway’s half-hour dramedy was about how a middle-aged father’s decision to change his life, to transition into a woman, affected his family. The pilot story goal of the lead character, Mort Pfefferman, Jeffrey Tambor’s character, was to tell his family about his decision to become a woman.8 He has a secret with potentially enormous emotional reverberations that he wants to reveal to his adult children. Mort convenes a family dinner to drop his bombshell, but he fails. He doesn’t tell them. Why he doesn’t highlights one of the interesting and subtle qualities of the kind of storytelling that creator Jill Soloway used for her series. She didn’t spell out all the reasons why characters made the choices they made, allowing the reader/viewer to infer their own interpretations. Maybe Mort doesn’t tell his children because he sees they’re all needier than he is at his own life-altering moment. Initially Mort fails at his pilot goal. But in the climax of the episode his daughter Sarah accidentally discovers his secret when she stumbles onto her dad dressed as a woman while she uses his house as a rendezvous for an adulterous tryst. The ending of the pilot story delivers Mort an unlikely, seemingly accidental victory (he achieved his pilot story goal) in a way that’s surprising and yet completely organic to the family of characters and the tone of family dysfunction to which Soloway has introduced us. Characters in Transparent don’t make ingenious plans and achieve them as a result of their courage and cunning like Walter White. Characters egocentrically self-destruct their way toward accidentally impacting their relatives in ways that unintentionally achieve those relatives’ conscious goals. The drama and comedy of family dysfunction generates action and resolution.

  In many ways, Soloway’s approach to storytelling is fundamentally different from Gilligan’s, less goal- or “mission-based.” Television development professionals are far more open to untraditional storytelling styles and strategies than ever before. The Breaking Bad analysis here offers one common storytelling style, but readers are encouraged to read about, watch and think about others as well.

  Proving the Concept

  The third creative goal of pilot stories is to demonstrate the concept. Not only to demonstrate the concept, but to prove it. One of the reasons some networks make pilots is to see if a concept that sounded great in a pitch works in actual practice. The pilot episode needs to demonstrate the concept to do that.

  What I mean by “demonstrate the concept” is this: There’s a version of the Breaking Bad pilot that focuses more on Walter White’s decision to break bad, the steps that lead him to a life of crime. There’s a version of that pilot script that ends with him having the light bulb moment: “I know what I’ll do – I’ll use my chemistry knowledge to manufacture great drugs and make a lot of money to provide for my family!” That version could have ended like this: Walter goes on the ride-along with his DEA brother-in-law and notices that his former student Jesse Pinkman is one of the criminals who sneaks away from the drug-bust. Walter goes and knocks on Jesse’s door. Jesse is surprised and confused to see his former high school teacher, and Walter smiles and asks if he can come in. The audience would be intrigued by the courage and ingenuity of Walter’s plan and would possibly look forward to watching him implement his plan in the next episode.

  Vince Gilligan didn’t design his pilot story that way, though, because he knew he had a responsibility to demonstrate his concept. He needed to show Walter and Jesse actually doing what they would do in episodes of the series, make and sell drugs and encounter all the obstacles that come with the life of crime (and the ingenious answers to those obstacles that spring from the mind of a brilliant scientist and soon-to-be criminal mastermind like Walter). Not only did Gilligan know he needed to
dramatize the premise of his series, he needed to give network executives a view of what the series would actually look like beyond the premise so they could evaluate if the concept – a schnooky high school teacher makes and sells drugs – had the potential to work in series. His pilot script succeeded in dramatizing, demonstrating and proving his concept.

  Sometimes writers are concerned that “speeding up the story” and having their lead character not only undergo the huge mental transformation to arrive at their new plan but actually to begin implementing that plan will look rushed or inorganic. The Breaking Bad pilot is so effective, in great measure, because Gilligan not only was able to persuade us of the logic of Walter’s idea, but because he took it further and dramatized Walter implementing his idea for the first time, along with the funny, scary, surprising and satisfying things that occurred as a result. He not only dramatized the logic of his concept, he demonstrated and proved that his TV concept would work in series: It was believable and entertaining to watch Walter (and his unlikely new partner) attempt and pull off crimes.

  Every pilot is different. The people who develop pilots typically assess and prioritize the goals of each unique pilot. In a sense, the Pretty Little Liars pilot that I helped develop did not demonstrate the concept in the same way that the Breaking Bad pilot did. The Breaking Bad series is about Walter making and selling drugs. The pilot showed that and proved it.