The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

by Neil Landau

  The wildcard. Some shows employ teasers that don’t always fit into an established pattern of the series. In season 1 of the anthology show, American Horror Story, some of the teasers consist of past grisly murders that took place in the creepy house that serves as the main setting of the show, while other teasers give backstory on key characters.

  In The Walking Dead, many teasers deal with the survival horror aspect of the show, while others touch on poignant character moments. In the season 1 episode “Vatos,” the teaser opens with sisters Andrea (Laurie Holden) and Amy (Emma Bell) reminiscing about their father while fishing on a serene lake, and ends with another character, Jim (Andrew Rothenberg), curiously digging ditches. This is in stark contrast to the gory, suspenseful teasers that routinely place the characters in dangerous situations.

  A kickass teaser is like an irresistible appetizer before the main course of a meal. It needs to whet the audience’s appetite and leave them hungry for more. If there’s a “tag” (epilogue) at the end of the episode, think of that as dessert.

  See interview with Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin on the companion website: http://www.focalpress.com/cw/landau

  16

  Hit the Sweet Spot

  TV pilots are always creative experiments. There is no guarantee that the series is going to work based on the first prototypical episode. And even if the pilot is totally brilliant, there is no guarantee that the series will be able to sustain that level of writing week after week.

  The fact is, despite best efforts and good intentions by smart, talented showrunners, the vast majority of new series get cancelled. The networks don’t know why—and if they did—they’d course correct and fix the maddeningly inefficient, hyper-expensive process called pilot season. Extenuating circumstances, disclaimers, and excuses abound when a new series fails to connect. Was it:

  right series/wrong time slot?

  weak lead-in show?

  too much competition at other networks?

  premise too risky/groundbreaking/provocative?

  too gimmicky?

  stale premise/too derivative?

  fatally flawed casting—with lack of chemistry between leading characters?

  lackluster advertising campaign?

  all of the above?

  In tennis jargon, the sweet spot is the center of the racquet; when the ball connects at the core, it’s the source of its greatest power. The same holds true for a TV series.

  Identifying Sweet Spot by Genre

  Unlike Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, when a viewer tunes in to a sitcom, they know what they’re going to get: the sweet spot.

  The sweet spot of most sitcoms occurs when the characters are placed in variations on the same situation—they are put to the test. The insular Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons) in The Big Bang Theory routinely clash with the “normalcy” of the outside world. Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm finds himself in a cringe-worthy situation at odds with his skewed ideals. Phil (Ty Burrell) and Claire (Julie Bowen) on Modern Family continue to embarrass their kids and themselves in their quest to be ideal parents. Married … with Children milks laughs by treating marriage and parenthood as the ultimate punishment. The two men in Two and a Half Men are a modern day variation on Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.

  One-hour drama series can also greatly benefit from clarifying and adhering to the sweet spot. I’m not suggesting a rigid formula for each series. I am suggesting that a series must deliver the promise of its premise every week. Hopefully, there will be unexpected character development that’s organic and earned from previous episodes. Hopefully, there will be twists and turns in the plot. But, at the core, the series sweet spot remains the same. This is the tacit contract the showrunner is making with the audience. Keep tuning in—and we’ll keep giving you new iterations on the same premise.

  The sweet spot of a procedural series is the fresh, innovative element of the medical/legal/criminal case—and the surprising/unpredictability of the resolution. These shows are all puzzles, and the sweet spot is how the missing pieces fit into place toward the inevitable solution, but the challenge for writers it to avoid being too formulaic and predictable. Medical, legal, and police procedural series are all, essentially, murder mysteries. We tune in each week to witness the experts solve the cases; the killer might be a person or a disease. And as technology evolves, the issue has become less whodunit and more howdunnit.

  Identifying Sweet Spot by Series

  In The Walking Dead, the sweet spot is survival of the fittest in a post-apocalyptic world. The sweet spot of this series isn’t simply man versus zombie—that would get old and repetitive fast. Instead, the zombie-slaying is the backdrop for a disparate group of renegade survivors attempting to form a new society. They actually form an extended family and watch each other’s backs. The sweet spot of The Walking Dead straddles the fence between the genres of horror and family drama. The emotional core of the series stems from the relationships. The creepy, gory, chills, and thrills emerge organically from the constant threat of the living dead (who are also survivalists in need of fresh flesh). Remove the blood and guts and the show collapses. But if there were only gore, the show would also falter. And so this phenomenally successful cable series gives us both every week. It knows its sweet spot and finds the right balance. The central question of the series remains constant: Who will survive and how? The central mystery—what happened to cause this zombie apocalypse?—has never, and probably will never, be answered.

  The sweet spot of Breaking Bad is how the formerly meek Walter White (Bryan Cranston) becomes a ruthless drug kingpin story set against a dysfunctional family drama with gallows humor, twisted alliances, devious minds, and self-delusion. Greed and power, corruption and cover-ups. The sweet spot is a group of novices playing in the big leagues and, against all odds, succeeding on their own terms. It’s a show that’s evolved from under-dog to top dog. The central question remains constant: Will Walter get caught—and at what consequence?

  The sweet spot of Mad Men is the disparity between superficial appearances and the truth—an apt metaphor for the advertising trade. But the metaphor extends to power dynamics at home and in the workplace. It’s less of a show about who’s loyal and who cheats—and more a show about why. The tone of the series is slick, ironic, funny, and dark. Mad Men flourishes by digging deep into its cast of characters to help us understand their wholly self-destructive patterns; indeed, the more they each get ahead, the more likely they are to self-sabotage. Ads tend to show us a “perfect” version of reality, a life to which we all aspire. And the ultimate irony of Mad Men is how that lifestyle is unattainable.

  The sweet spot of Homeland is duality. Brody (Damian Lewis) is both a war hero and a terrorist; Carrie (Claire Danes) is both a hyper-vigilant CIA operative and a traitor. Against this backdrop, how does one remain faithful to one’s ideals in a morally complex, dangerous world? It’s not a show about black and white. It’s a show about shades of gray. As characters’ perceptions and beliefs shift, we find ourselves asking more questions—and there are no easy answers.

  The sweet spot of The Americans is half dysfunctional family drama and half Cold War espionage thriller. The best episodes operate on both of these levels simultaneously; dialogue is layered with delicious, duplicitous subtext. In the series, undercover KGB agent Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) is posing as a suburban hockey mom but no one has a clue (yet). And we get fun exchanges of dialogue laced with double entendre, such as when Elizabeth’s neighbor, Sandra (Susan Misner), mentions that she saw Elizabeth doing something innocuous from her kitchen window, then innocently adding: “I mean, not that I was spying on you or anything.” The sweet spot of this series was epitomized when Elizabeth’s husband and fellow KGB operative, Phillip (Mathew Rhys), posing in disguise as “Clark,” has no choice but to marry Martha (Alison Wright), the secretary to a high-level FBI agent so that he can use her to bug her boss’s office. In a small, civil ceremony, Clark and
Martha say their vows before the Justice of the Peace, and standing beside him are Clark’s “family members”: incognito Elizabeth and their KGB supervisor Granny (Margo Martindale). As Clark says “I do” to Martha, Elizabeth is unexpectedly moved and saddened because she and Phillip never had a proper wedding ceremony; their marriage was arranged based upon politics and espionage—not love. And we realize that the steely, calculating spy Elizabeth might truly love Phillip after all. It’s the perfect intersection of premise and franchise, and the sweet spot of the series is typified by its smart tagline: All is fair in love and cold war.

  The sweet spot of a series is where the show lives every week. It’s the intersection between the show’s genre, tone, theme, central conflict, franchise, and central question/mystery.

  Interview: Hart Hanson

  Hart Hanson Credits

  Best known for:

  Bones (Executive Producer/Writer) 2005–2013

  The Finder (Executive Producer/Writer) 2012

  Joan of Arcadia (Consulting Producer/Writer) 2003–2004

  Judging Amy (Executive Producer/Co-executive Producer/Consulting Producer/Writer) 1999–2003

  Snoops (Co-Executive Producer/Writer) 1999–2000

  Cupid (Supervising Producer/Consulting Producer/Writer) 1998–1999

  Stargate SG-1 (Writer) 1997–1999

  Traders (Creator/Supervising Producer) 1996–2000

  Avonlea (Writer) 1992–1996

  NL: I’d like to discuss the “sweet spot” (to use a tennis racquet metaphor) of your remarkably long-running series, Bones. As the creator and showrunner, you seem to both honor and transcend the expectations of your series’ fans, season after season. So let’s start with your myriad of A story cases of the week. What makes a worthy A story for you?

  HH: A stories come from a number of places. Every once in a while we will rip them from the headlines, but not much—especially not as much as in the last couple of years. Most of our A stories spring first out of finding an arena—a world that Booth [David Boreanaz] and Brennan [Emily Deschanel] can go into that maybe the audience hasn’t seen or thinks they know, but ours has a twist in it. A typical homicide where a husband kills his wife—the characters and the twists and turns would have to be absolutely fascinating to fill six acts. By the way, we went to a six-act structure in season 3 at the behest of the FOX network. We used to be a teaser and five acts. The teaser was in fact a teaser—a minute or two. With the addition of the sixth act, we needed one more plot twist. Bones is a procedural hybrid with characters and humor. There’s always a very personal storyline around the romance or lack of romance between Booth and Brennan. With six acts, we were pushed into this idea that we needed interesting arenas. It was not a conscious decision—we got shoved there by the network. Generally, a good arena will give you one or two plot twists that you don’t have to invent out of air. For example, we did our homage to The X-Files with the world of UFOs. And given the speed with which we have to push out twenty-two episodes, that’s a big gift.

  It was very early in the first season that we realized that we were killing [overtaxing, burning out] our lead actors, and I knew we needed to figure out which scenes could we do without them. You can do a few with the squinterns (what we call secondary characters). But another way to do it was with the body find. The first scene is almost always an innocent person finding our [dead] body. What we want is to make people barf before five minutes into the scene and say, “What the hell—how did that happen?” And then that will generally lead into the arena.

  NL: And the arena can also suggest possible red herrings? Like the episode with Bill, the reality TV personality who busts people for having affairs. You have the TV producer and various people on the show, which gives you at least one or two twists or turns.

  HH: We’ve made an unspoken deal with our audience that the killer is not going to be someone we spring out of nowhere—we are going to meet them. That is a tough balance to do. If you go on the message boards, people have theories like, “It’s always the third person you meet.” The interwebs don’t really have a lot of effect on us, but it did make me think we have to make sure that that doesn’t happen accidentally. So we pay attention to that. We also need an arena which provides a wealth of suspects because you know you’re going to meet them probably before the end of act three and definitely before the end of act four. And we definitely don’t want people getting ahead of us.

  NL: In the early seasons of the show, it seemed like by the end of act four, you’d have the climax of the show. You’d have the revelation of the suspect and then act five was very short—like an epilogue. Has that shifted? Because structurally, that’s actually a question that comes up in class at UCLA a lot now. It used to be that every one hour was four acts—a teaser and four acts. Now, most shows are five or six acts. Some because of the influence of TiVo. So the question becomes then, “Where does the climax happen?” I tell them it depends on the show. What about for you?

  HH: It hasn’t been as interesting for us in a six-act structure to figure out who the killer is by the end of act 5 and then catch them in act 6. It’s generally that, once we know who that person is, we wrap it up. This is basically due to my boredom. For example, we have a serial killer now and we will know who it is by the end of act one—maybe even by the end of the teaser— because of the four or five episodes he’ll be in for the season. Then it’s the cat and mouse game. Most murderers are not coming back at our people. We’re chasing them. It’s a whodunit. The mandate that the writers’ room has is that the climax is probably going to be when Brennan realizes something forensically that the body gives a clue that he’s perhaps left-handed, not right-handed. The climax to the show is when she turns to Booth and says, “That’s the guy.” That’s the climax of the case.

  NL: Then you have your B story to track and resolve—or advance—for the season?

  HH: Yes, and our B story is very often more important to a chunk of the audience. They are watching the murder to get to the gushy stuff. And the other chunk is putting up with the gushy stuff to get to the murder. We try and have them resonate and join together in axis with our climax which is halfway through act six in the big exciting “who did it” scene when our puzzle is solved.

  NL: For me, what I’ve noticed is that the A story impacts the B story or vice versa in terms of a thematic that is running through. Like the episode when Brennan and Booth were trying to decide whose apartment they were going to live in. So her lack of memory in the A story case triggered their fears of moving in together because of his father and because of her foster childhood. Do you consciously strive to have a unifying theme between A, B, and C stories?

  HH: Our best shows are when something in the case resonates for them in their personal life. Our second best shows are where something happens in their personal life and they go, “Oh, that applies to this case.” That’s always a bit clumsier and seems more coincidental. My personal feeling about life is that the universe speaks to you. If you have something in your head, something that speaks to you, then the universe seems to provide a lot of examples of it occurring out there in the world. I don’t believe there is a mystic force speaking to us, but I do believe the universe is telling us something all the time. And when the two stories are not connected at all, they’re not our best episodes. They can be our best case and they can even be our best romantic episode, but if the two don’t hook into each other—it’s just not as good.

  NL: I like when A, B, and C stories resonate on some type of level—even where there’s the DNA of theme in each story.

  HH: I’m doing a pilot right now for CBS. That’s what I’m obsessed with— creating a universe. Storytelling is a way of ordering a chaotic universe and that is satisfying to us—that is why we like stories.

  NL: What’s the internal story document process? Do you go from writers’ room to beat sheet to outline? What’s the timeline?

  HH: Everything is as fast as humanly possible. The writers upstairs
know that their best chance to get their words said by the actors are to do as many drafts as they can with notes from me and my right-hand man, Stephen Nathan, because I’m a big rewriter. It’s easier for me to do a rewrite than to spend time with a writer giving them notes. It’s one of my weaknesses as a showrunner. Every once in a while, some poor writer out there gets to do one draftof a script—and after all the revisions, nothing they wrote, no dialogue, will be said. And that’s tough on a writer to watch something with your name on it.

  NL: Does it threaten their job security if that keeps happening?

  HH: No, it doesn’t in any way threaten their job security because they’ve done their part. If the train of production catches up and you’ve got to take this script, it’s not their fault. You’ve got to pay a lot of attention to what people do for other writers. Because there are a lot of writers who will help other writers. You do your due diligence at the end of the year when you’re thinking about who to bring back and you have to take into account who helped other writers with their scripts. It takes a village. We don’t have a cutthroat situation. The room is very nice. They are supportive of each other. It’s not like we would get rid of the person who put the least amount of words on the page.