The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

by Neil Landau

  Now we think he’s a cad. An adulterer. Despite his good looks and charm, the ease with which Don perpetrates his lies makes him all the more slimy. And he’s the lead character of the series. How are we going to root for him every week? And why should we care about him?

  The answer that’s gradually revealed in the central mystery of season 1 is that Don Draper is not really Don Draper. He’s an imposter. His real name is Dick Whitman. Don may be slick and successful now, but Don/Dick came from dire poverty. His father was a hobo, and we’ll find out later that his mother was a prostitute (which explains a lot about Don’s erratic relationships with women). Dick had assumed the identity of a dead soldier, Don Draper, in his effort to leave his past behind. Don/Dick’s secret is rooted in shame. His vulnerability is his desperate need to reinvent—or re-brand—himself. He gave his image a makeover and then set out to sell this newly packaged version of himself to the American public. It worked, and Don rose to the top of his game. The King Midas of Madison Avenue. But his secret was his Achilles’ heel and, deep down, Don was/is terrified of being found out, lest he topple from the heights of a skyscraper like the cardboard cutout in the iconic opening credits.

  His secret past was a strong “story engine” for the first season. Mad Men is serialized, but is not structured contiguously; in other words, each episode does not pick up directly after the previous one. After the infamous lawnmower episode in which a Sterling Cooper employee tragically lost a foot, the following episode picked up about a month later—and no one even mentioned the incident. We don’t follow the lives of the Mad Men characters according to real time, a la 24. Instead, we are dropped into their lives and quickly get up to speed on their current woes. Each character has a plotline that extends for the entire (relatively short) season.

  Character arcs on Mad Men are all in service of a specific central question for each character: Will the fortunes of Sterling Cooper rise or fall? What will happen to Peggy’s baby? Will Joan stay with her unstable, controlling fiancé/husband? Will Betty stay with Don? Etc.

  All TV series have several central questions to pique the audience’s curiosity to find out what happens next. The central question usually leads to some answers—that lead to even more questions (see Chapter 19, on cliffhangers). In addition to central questions that concern the future, many TV series also include a central mystery that concerns the past. With a central mystery, the question isn’t what’s going to happen; the question is what happened— and why?

  On Mad Men, Don’s wife, Betty (January Jones) discovers his secret and throws him out of the house. Betty divorces Don and gets remarried. But Don can’t divorce his past. It continues to shadow and plague him, fueling his self-destructive behaviors, even after he gets remarried and attempts once again to reinvent himself. Mad Men continues to put forth secrets and lies and scandals, but there has not been another significant central mystery to match this one—until the recent introduction of Bob Benson (James Wolk). And the blogosphere has been all a-Twitter.

  In the original pilot for Desperate Housewives, writer/creator/showrunner Marc Cherry establishes the main POV of the series with an omnipotent narrator, Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong). We learn in the pilot episode that Mary Alice committed suicide. It’s her voice-over narration at the beginning of each episode that sets the theme and tells us how her death impacted each of the housewives residing on Wisteria Lane. This long-running, ratings juggernaut explored the sudsy, scandalous and often very funny sisterhood, family, and love lives of four disparate women, each desperate in her own way. Given Marc Cherry’s solid comedy résumé, I’m told that ABC decided to recruit soap opera veteran, Charles Pratt (Melrose Place, General Hospital), as a consulting producer—and season 1’s central mystery was hatched.

  As Mary Alice’s close friends, Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross), and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), struggle to come to terms with the tragic suicide news, Mary Alice’s husband, Paul (Mark Moses), asks Susan, Lynette, Bree, and Gabrielle to sort through Mary Alice’s belongings, as he’s too overcome with grief. In a box of Mary Alice’s clothes, the women discover a blackmail note reading, “I know what you did. It makes me sick. I’m going to tell.” The postmark indicates that Mary Alice received it the day she took her own life. At the end of the pilot, Mary Alice’s son, Zach (Cody Kasch), awakens in the middle of the night to find his father unearthing a mysterious chest from the drained swimming pool in their backyard. And now, in addition to the central questions facing the present and future for each housewife, we also have the central mystery of who had blackmailed Mary Alice—and why.

  On The Mentalist, we track the central mystery of who murdered former TV “psychic” Patrick Jane’s (Simon Baker) wife and daughter. We know it’s a serial killer (so-called Red John) who had a vendetta against Patrick, but the killer remains at large and continues to vex Patrick who can solve every mystery that comes before him—but not that one. Patrick is compelled to give up his “practice” and join the California Bureau of Investigation as a consultant, using his acute observational abilities to “read” suspects and uncover the truth. While there are new cases in virtually every episode, the central mystery case of Red John is the horizontal line that runs through the entire season.

  On Bates Motel (creator/showrunners Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin), several mysteries are introduced in the first two episodes. Primary mystery number 1 is who killed Norman Bates’ (Freddie Highmore) father (who Norman finds in a pool of blood on the ground in the garage)? The possible suspects are Norman’s mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga), and her estranged first child, Norman’s elder half-brother/reprobate Dylan Massett (Max Thie-riot). Even though Norman seems genuinely shocked when he discovers his father’s freshly dead body, the chief suspect is Norman himself; it’s not the evidence that clues us in—but rather the Norman we remember from the classic 1960 horror film Psycho. And so, we enter this Bates Motel with our own baggage.

  Sure, this is a much younger, more innocent-seeming Norman in 2013, but he’s still creepy and there is the subtext of Oedipus which hangs over every mother-son scene, like a thick Oregonian fog (the show’s new setting is the fictional White Pine Bay). In this updated iteration, Norman’s mom is very much alive, a sultry Hitchcock Blonde, in vivid color. Recently widowed, she takes Norman away from their California suburb to begin a new life as the proprietress of the Fairview Motel that she bought out of fore-closure. But even before the new Bates Motel sign goes up, one of the previous motel owner’s kin, Keith Summers (W. Earl Brown), comes by in a drunken rage to scare them away. Undaunted, Norma warns the drunkard to get off her property or she’ll kill him. Later, Summers returns for revenge and tries to rape her—but he gets clobbered over the head by Norman and stabbed to death by Norma. Determined for a fresh start and desperate to avoid bad press at her new motel, Norma and Norman dispose of Summers’ corpse—setting up (open) mystery number 2: will they get found out by the town sheriff Alex Romero (Nestor Carbonell) who’s already suspicious of the pretty yet jittery Norma?

  Another mystery is set up when Norman picks up the old carpeting (blood-stained via Summers) and discovers a small sketchbook hidden under the carpet in one of the motel rooms. The sketches are Manga-style and depict a naked young female junkie, bound and gagged, a syringe going into her arm and multiple track marks. The drawings indicate that she’s a hostage in a shack in the forest—setting up closed mystery number 3. Norman’s new high school friend, Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) a quirky outcast who lugs around an oxygen tank due to cystic fibrosis, borrows the journal and calls Norma with news that she knows where the shack might be.

  Mystery number 4 involves a car that careens out of control and crashes near the motel. Norman and his new school friends race over and discover the driver is burned almost beyond recognition; it turns out he’s the father of one of the girls, Bradley Martin (Nicola Peltz), and he’s still alive but in a coma.

  In mys
tery number 5 (and this is all in the first two episodes!), Norma befriends “good cop” Sheriff Deputy Zach Shelby (Mike Vogel) to win him over to her side. Deputy Shelby confides to Norma that White Pine Bay has its own secrets and illicit wealth, and that these denizens are likely to take justice into their own hands with “an eye for an eye.” By the end of episode 2, Norman and Emma have discovered a marijuana field and are chased out of the forest and away from the mysterious shack by shotgun-wielding mountain men.

  Last, Norma sees Deputy Shelby diverting drivers and pedestrians away from an unrecognizable man burned to death and hanging upside down in the town square. Is this burning man Bradley’s father? Or yet another burn victim? This could be linked to mystery number 4, or maybe it’s a whole new mystery number 6—or even a serial killer/arsonist? If the new Bates Motel sign that buzzes like a bug zapper is any indication, the carnage has only just begun.

  On Many Series, Each New Season Brings Forth a New Central Mystery

  On Scandal, the short (seven-episode) first season focuses on the mystery surrounding Amanda Tanner (Liza Weil) who claims she had an affair with the President and was now pregnant with his baby. After it’s discovered that Amanda made up the story to help a political rival, she’s found murdered. But that story arc doesn’t end the central mystery of season 1. The larger mystery involves Olivia’s new hire, Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes), who’s revealed in the season 2 premiere to be Lindsay Dwyer, on trial for murder for allegedly killing her ex-boyfriend and six other people. As it turns out, Olivia has pulled some high-level strings in order to get Lindsey acquitted of all charges, which only deepens the mystery as we discover that Olivia has something to do with Quinn/Lindsey’s past. The season 2 central mystery orbits around election fraud and Olivia’s secret role in getting President Fitzgerald Grant into the Oval Office. The fun of this series is that Olivia not only fixes political scandals for her clients, but she is the scandal, too.

  On Lost, the central mystery is synonymous with the series’ intricate mythology (see Chapter 18, “Establish the Mythology”). Season 1 of Lost teases and taunts us with supernatural happenings on the remote tropical island, including a polar bear (?!), an unseen viciously carnivorous creature (referred to as the “Smoke Monster”), and the elusive, mostly unseen inhabitants on the island (“The Others”). There is also the mysterious French women, Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan), who was shipwrecked on the island sixteen years before Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and the other survivors crash-landed on the island. And then there’s “the hatch” which is later revealed to be a door down into a research station built by the Dharma Initiative (basically a series of science experiments that had been conducted on the island decades before). While the overarching central question of Lost never veers off course (will they ever get off the island?), the central mysteries vary from season to season. As one part of the mystery is solved, it only leads our ensemble of survivors to seek more answers—until the series finale when we finally discover the meaning of the island. SPOILER ALERT: In the flash sideways version, they all died instantly in the plane crash and the island was really limbo.

  While not essential, a little mystery in a pilot can go a very long way. The wisdom behind this adage is this: audiences are more compelled by what they don’t know than by what they do know.

  Interview: Damon Lindelof

  Damon Lindelof Credits

  Best known for:

  Star Trek Into Darkness (feature) (Producer/Writer) 2013

  Prometheus (feature) (Executive Producer/Writer) 2012

  Cowboys & Aliens (feature) (Writer) 2011

  Lost (Executive Producer/Writer/Co-Creator) 2004–2010

  Emmy Award Winner (Outstanding Drama Series) 2005

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Drama Series) 2008–2010

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series) 2005–2007, 2009–2010

  WGA Award Winner (Dramatic Series) 2006

  WGA Nominated (Dramatic Series) 2007, 2009–2010

  WGA Nominated (Episodic Drama) 2008, 2011

  Star Trek (Producer) 2009

  Crossing Jordan (Co-Producer/Supervising Producer/Writer) 2002–2004

  Nash Bridges (Writer) 2000–2001

  NL: My first question has to do with the Mystery Box Ted Talk that J. J. Abrams [Creator, Executive Producer of Lost] did—it seems like his message was a governing principle for the series. The title graphic speaks to that. It’s blurry, but as it gets closer and into focus, it disappears, so that it is just out of our grasp. Was that the storytelling strategy? Keeping things slightly blurred—always instilling in the audience the need to know more and then carefully doling it out?

  DL: I think to ascribe a specific strategy into the overall design of the show would be doing retroactive rewriting of history. I think the reality was that we had a very specific issue that we were dealing with when Lloyd Braun first came to J. J. and J. J. came to me. I was certainly involved in the same question, which was, “How is this a TV series?” We all know what an hour-long TV series looks like, so what is the thing that we’re going to present in the pilot of the show that gives people a sense of how the show is going to work? Because while it can be an enormously exciting idea of like, “Wow, I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” that can also backfire when, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” leads you down so many roads that it has no structure whatsoever.

  I think mystery was a word which appeared many, many times in my first meeting with J. J. I was clearly a huge fan of Alias which, although I really liked Felicity, Alias was a show that I was much more dialed into. At the time that I met with J. J., it was about halfway through its third season. I had all these questions about the deep and involved mythology of Alias which I wanted to ask him and the idea of that being his brand.

  A lthough he wasn’t openly talking about mystery boxes at the time, I think that we both were engaged by the idea that not only was Lost going to be a show set on an island that was incredibly mysterious and very unwilling to give up its mysteries but that every single character on the show had to be surrounded by mystery.

  They didn’t want to talk about themselves. They were deeply conflicted and troubled people. One of the most compelling mysteries that first season was just finding out who they were. Many of the characters would be unreliable narrators, who didn’t necessarily tell the truth, and we could dramatize this by revealing to the audience, “You’re now in on the joke. You’re behind the curtain. You got through the velvet rope.” We’re going to tell you that Locke [Terry O’Quinn] was in a wheelchair, but no one else is going to know on the show—just you and Locke. We adapted the format of a mystery show. Twin Peaks was a show that we mentioned a lot in our early planning sessions because it was huge on both my and J. J.’s pop culture radar in terms of shows we loved and were dialed into. It was a crowdsource show before the Internet even existed. The idea behind it was that you would watch an episode and when it ended you would need to go find someone else who had seen it, so that you could talk about it and theorize in an attempt to understand what the hell was going on there. And more important, it transcended, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Laura Palmer was an interesting question, but much less interesting than, “What the hell is this place, Twin Peaks, and why are people acting so weird?”

  NL: Like Blue Velvet, also.

  DL: Right, exactly. We felt if we could ground the show—and all credit to David Lynch, who is a genius, there’s something about his voice that’s very ethereal or strange or weird that makes him less of a mainstream jeopardized case. So if we went to ABC and said, “We need you to give us millions of dollars to produce this show,” we couldn’t sell them on weirdness. But we thought that Twin Peaks was a good thing. So when we submitted the outline to Lloyd, he loved it, but there were a couple things that concerned him like the polar bear and the monster in the jungle—which, for us, were the cornerstones of what the show was going to be, but were the only really strange thi
ngs that happened in the pilot that we had written. Lloyd said to me and J. J., “We don’t want to pull a Twin Peaks.” J. J. just looked at him, and this is the way that I remember it, and said, “You’re using Twin Peaks as a cautionary tale fifteen years after it was actually cancelled. Don’t we want to aspire to be like that?” The idea that although it’s ultimately a cautionary tale in that they only made thirty episodes, it completely and totally peaked and valleyed within a two-year period. They obviously tapped into something. We wanted to tap into that same thing, and find a way to not burn out on it. By not having a central mystery, but lots of mysteries, we’re ultimately going to engage the audience with the characters. I don’t think it was just the political thing to say or a way of deflecting focus from the mystery because the mystery was a huge part of the show. It’s what people were talking about. It’s the way that we ended almost every episode before we went to the Lost card. It was our bread and butter in terms of building audience investment. It was just a delivery mechanism for the real pill that we wanted people to swallow, which was an emotional investment in the people on the island.

  NL: How much of the mythology was worked out from the beginning? For example, was Charles Widmore [Alan Dale] always intended to be the super villain? Were “the others” always part of your plan? Was time travel and the hatch created from the beginning or did those things evolve?