Remember, anything that applies to the characters counts doubly so for the protagonist. If your characters don’t have enough setups in the pilot, they won’t be interesting enough to carry a second episode. Above and beyond that, the central protagonist needs to be the most interesting of all, fleshed out with enough potential new material to keep audiences coming back episode after episode, season after season. They will be responsible for carrying the show long-term. The cast needs to do more than survive the pilot. While characters are the heart and soul of any story, in television, they are the most important element. Characters Are Everything, Protagonist More So The moral of the story? Yup, you guessed it: Know your audience. The mid-2000s remake of Battlestar Galactica tried to rope in a wider female audience by focusing on romance in later seasons, and the result turned the show into a soap opera in space-disappointing original and the new audiences alike. Now imagine if Pretty Little Liars was written to target 30-something males…it would have bombed. Shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Pretty Little Liars and Stranger Things nail their audience targeting. If the show doesn’t have a clear or specific audience in mind, then it will not be successful. This should go without saying, but it comes up far too often to leave out. Once they’ve reached their goal, where does the show go from there? Breaking Bad solved this by always creating a bigger goal for the protagonist to achieve once (or even before) the old has been solved. A show about thieves planning a heist is problematic in that the goal is far too easy to reach. With that in mind, part of what your pilot must do is setup the long-term future of the show-the “legs.” My Name Is Earl did this by using a wide-open concept with no foreseeable limitations (his list of wrongs to “right” can be as long as the sun, for all we know). A more open-ended concept typically offers more “legs.” A closed concept with one specific, attainable goal offers less of a future (if any). What do we mean by legs? “Legs” refers to the potential episodes the show can produce in the long-term based on the concept. Legs: The Show Must Go Onįor American television, “legs” are very, very important. But if you want to write an alien invasion show where humankind is the invader-now that’s an interesting twist people can get behind. It’s been done many times and hasn’t been successful. For example, don’t just write an alien invasion show. That said, make the concept grab the audience’s attention. Lost created appeal through the concept alone: A group of strangers become lost after crash landing on a mysterious island inhabited by strange forces, but while surviving on the island, each character finds individual purpose after having been “lost” in their personal lives back home. For example, “ER for women” was a successful concept that became Grey’s Anatomy, based on the success of an already existing show but with a new angle. If your concept is clear, it should be obvious what makes your show different from others and also make someone want to watch the show itself. What do we mean by “concept”? The concept is a fleshed-out version of the core idea for your TV show-the idea that makes your show different from every other show out there. The Concept Must KILLīefore you really dig into your show, take enough time to make the concept air-tight. When someone reads your pilot script, they will only be reading the tip of the iceberg, not the vast amount of backend work that went into producing those measly few pages. This is because when you write a pilot, you aren’t just writing the script for episode one you are creating a whole new concept with complex characters, multiple story threads, with as many setups and ideas for future episodes as possible. In fact, developing a good TV pilot can be the hardest and most involved of all three, even though the end result may only look like 40-60 pages from the outside. Many people jump right into writing episode one-the pilot for a brand-new show-thinking, “Hey, this will be WAY easier than writing that new novel of mine, or taking all that time to write a feature-length screenplay.” Great!īefore you commit to writing the pilot episode for your brand-new TV show, why don’t you take a look at these 10 helpful tips for writing that TV pilot that will make your writing life a little bit easier. So you want to write your own television show.
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