So what are you up against?
Getting into TV is hard. TV is a multi-million dollar, high-risk industry. There isn’t a producer out there waiting for you with a big bag of money. The reality is that however talented you are, however exciting your material, unless you’ve been taught how to write within the insanely difficult storytelling restrictions imposed by the TV business model you’re a risk that producers may not be prepared to take. Why? Because sadly, if you can’t hit that deadline with what’s needed, you could jeopardise the whole project and lose the company millions.
Television’s ‘Just in time’ business model.
TV’s ‘just in time’-style business model not only requires upfront the bible, pilot and usually first season’s storylines ready to take to investors, but also, if investment is found, complete plans of episodes (scenes, sets, characters) set in stone weeks even months ahead of drafts being written - so that actors can be hired, sets built, costumes made, locations chosen all ready to go on a specific date, while the writers are actually writing drafts.
Okay, you’re panicking - every writer panics the first time they hear this and it gets worse. But forewarned is forearmed. Stay with me.
How ‘worse’?
The structural skills you’ll need are not those you've learnt about the Hollywood conventional one hero, single chronological journey. TV structure is utterly different. It has to be. It’s about multiple protagonists, multiple interwoven stories, ongoing carefully split-up serial content and specific screen time. TV writing requires an entirely different mindset.
You need to learn how to:
- create and multiple vividly powerful storylines at speed to order and to specific length
- know how to split each story into beats and interweave keeping coherence and rising suspense to multiple cliffhangers
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work within a maze of restrictions including limited sets, locations, actor availability and many more.
Finally, you need to be so utterly in control that within eight days of the plotting meeting, you could write and submit a plan for an episode with a specific number of scenes and
- multiple interwoven storylines all inserted
- all sets and characters and scene content clearly specified
- several stories all ending in cliffhangers
- a running time accurately estimated at fifty-two minutes thirty seconds
And do it all without writing a scene or a line of dialogue.