Tuesday, 14 July 2015

Top Ten Sitcoms - No. 10 - Bread

What are your Top Ten Sitcoms?

Not the ten sitcoms you think are the best? Not the ten most famous you think are good? But your personal top ten?

As part of my shameless attempt to promote my new book, Writing That Sitcom, and as a nod to the Buzzfeed culture of listicles, I’m going to work through my top ten sitcoms.

Hopefully, this won’t just be a self-indulgent exercise, but an informative one. I will try to make a few comments on why they’re important to me, but also what I’ve learned from them and, where possible, what we can all learn from them today – other than ‘I wish I was that talented’, or ‘I wish it was 1976 when there were loads of sitcoms and much less pressure on them’.

I’ve also kept it British. We can briefly look at my favourite Americans ones (eg. Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, The Phil Silvers Show etc), but the way British sitcoms are created, written, shot and evaluated is bit different from how things are done in LA. The audiences are different too, so for now, we’re staying in Blighty.

So let’s begin the countdown with my Number 10:

10. Bread

Yes, the much-forgotten, Sunday night ratings sensation, Bread. For those too young to remember, and too lazy to google it, Bread is a sitcom about an extended family, the Boswells, in Liverpool that scrap to make a living.

There is a strong mother at the centre of it, Nellie, who is fiercely loyal to her children, who all live together in a terraced house, with the granddad next door. Every now and then, the estranged husband, Freddie Boswell, would turn up. He’d run off with an Irishwoman, referred to as Lilo Lil. I watched almost every episode of this show as a child, or teenager, and have great affection for it.

A few years ago, I watched an episode which wasn’t quite as rewarding as I’d hoped, partly because the show had a serial, soapy element. The episodes often ended on a cliff-hanger rather than having a neat resolution. It was as much as family saga as anything else. There was quite a lot of location shooting, although the big core scenes were shot in a studio in front of an audience.

It also wasn’t as funny as I remembered. But this is not to say that there were lots of jokes that were now dated or fell flat. Carla Lane, the writer of the show, knows what she's doing. There were exactly as many laughs are she intended She was doing something more than a sitcom. More of a soapy, studio comedy drama.

Given it moves slowly, takes its time over jokes and has lots of characters, one would imagine this show was not a great success. And yet its one of the most successful sitcoms in BBC history. It was a monster hit show, running from 1986 to 1991. There are 74 episodes in total. It survived at least three changes in regular cast members: Joey, Aveline, Billy's girlfriend, Julie. Episodes regularly drew ratings of 14 million. I seem to remember one episode nearly hit 20 million. Yes, there was less choice back then, but that's a juggernaut of a show by anyone's standards. Carla Lane was doing something right. So what can we learn from this show?

Caring about the Characters
Carla Lane made us care about this family of characters so that we’re always rooting for them as they scrap to make a living, game the benefit system (DHSS), run businesses and trade stolen goods, all so they can put food on the table. We feel their pain and their joy. We’ve involved in their lives and the more we care, the more we laugh. And the more we care and laugh, the more like we are to come back next week, especially if there’s a cliffhanger involved.

I’ve read and watched quite a few sitcoms recently – mostly written by overeducated men in their 20s – in which the characters are rootless, heartless and charmless. It’s partly a function of the graduate culture in which people leave home and then get employment away from their family. But quite often, shows and scripts can reflect that lack of warmth, family and genuine emotion. Characters can come across as sociopathic, which can be funny in the short tem, but ultimately, you just don’t care about them. Bread is show full of roots, heart and charm. And people loved it.

My only frustration with the show was the number of peripheral characters, prospective boyfriends and girlfriends, that I felt got in the way of the comedy, which was always done best by the characters we knew loved. The show was a little unwieldy for half an hour, but given the strong communal nature of the show, a sprawling cast was probably inevitable.

Sense of Time and Place
The show seemed very Liverpudlian – to me watching in Somerset, at least. It felt like we were looking through a window on a world, including the Catholic/Protestant rivalries and mutual suspicions. (Aveline falls for a Protestant vicar). This show is infused with the spirit of the city, something that rarely happens now, especially in sitcoms. And Carla Lane knew that place – and had written about that place before in The Liver Birds.

Moreover, the characters are not longing to leave Liverpool. They love it. And they love their home. They have ambitions and dreams, but this is just sustains them as they try keeping their heads above water in tough Thatcherite Britain where the old certainties (and dockyard jobs) are gone. Whenever these characters venture out of their home town, it tends to go badly and they come scurrying back. The show is about home.

Catchphrases and Rituals
One of the things Carla Lane did was use catchphrases and family rituals to draw you into the family. The show was not short on catchphrases. From Joey’s ‘Greetings!’, through Aveline's 'Modelling' to Nellie Boswell’s 'Hello, yes' and her rant about Lilo Lil: ‘Don’t you dare mention her name in this house: She is a TART!'.

There were also rituals like taking the tray round to granddad (and getting an earful in the process) to the porcelain chicken being opened up for people to put their housekeeping money in. There are also the traffic cones they illegally used to reserve their on-street parking spots. It’s well worth thinking how we can all use devices like this to pull the audience closer and make them feel like they could just pull up a chair and be right at home like millions of us felt we could do in the Boswell household in Bread.

For more thoughts on sitcom - and getting the sitcom out of your head and onto some paper - get hold of Writing that Sitcom by yours truly.

Monday, 13 July 2015

Why The Cool Kids Never Liked David Frost

The Sitcomgeek book is finally here. Or there on Amazon, at least. Writing that Sitcom is available for Kindle and Kindle App now. (If you're interested, here's why it's on Kindle and not a 'real book').

Here is the intro to pique your interest yet further:

Pre-Titles 

Sir David Frost
They never liked David Frost. The cool kids, like Peter Cook and Willie Rushton, thought he was a try-hard. In a sense they were right. David Frost tried hard – and wasn’t afraid to be seen to try. And he really succeeded, fronting the legendary That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report as well as chat shows in America and Australia. He interviewed Nixon, launched a successful breakfast television show, and received a Knighthood.

Sir David Frost was some kind of genius. He tried. And succeeded.

For Cook and Rushton, genius should at least appear effortless. For Peter Cook it probably was. He had one of the greatest comic brains in the history of the English Language. Comedy seemed to come so naturally to him that it wasn’t even fun.

We Brits love the idea of the effortless genius. We love the Peter Cooks of this world (see also Peter Sellars, Eric Morecambe and even Oscar Wilde). We love their wit, their inventiveness and their charm. And we laugh at the try-hards. We never truly respect the David Frosts, despite their enormous achievements. In fact, sitcoms are full of hapless try-hards who will never get the respect they crave despite their best efforts.

Why start a book about comedy talking about Frost, Cook and Rushton? Because it’s easy to fall into three traps when thinking about writing comedy.
Willie Rushton

Trap 1 – The mistake of thinking Great Comedy Is The Work Of Unalloyed Natural Genius.

There are comedy greats, like Peter Cook, who seemed to have instincts that the rest of us can only dream about. But it’s extremely rare. And much of it is myth. Look into the history and you’ll discover that genius of sitcom often cut their teeth writing episodes of kids’ shows or sitcoms that really weren’t great or didn’t last. I’m not claiming to be a genius, but I did write some episodes of Chucklevision, as did Russell T Davies.

They say “You’ve either got it you haven’t”. Like all sayings, there’s an element of truth to it. There’s no point pursuing comedy writing if you have no aptitude for it whatsoever. You need to have some instincts for comedy, but they are only the starting point. Instinct is important, as is perseverance – and these two things will carry through as you learn the craft.

Trap 2 – The mistake of thinking Comedy Is Something Anyone Can Do.

There’s an increasing ‘competition’ mentality seeping into the industry. Well-meaning institutions like the BBC, in their attempt to find new comedy voices, give the impression that anyone with a good idea for a show will be able to turn in a smoking hot script without too much effort. It just takes a laptop, some strong coffee and a long weekend. And then if they’re lucky, they’re sorted for life. They’re ‘a writer’.

The problem with writing is that it seems easy. Typing is easy. But writing is not. Being a writer is not like ‘a real job’ where you have to study hard, sit exams and get qualifications. There are quite a few jobs you can’t just rock up and do. You can’t use your ‘natural flair for open heart surgery’ to get you a job cutting people open in a hospital. You need years at medical school and you have to pass exams. And you can’t just use your skills of rhetoric to simply ‘be a barrister’. These things take time.

Writing sitcoms is the same. It takes time to get good at it. You just don’t need any accreditation or specialised equipment.

But as we will see in this book, writing a script, especially a pilot script, takes months, even for those who’ve been working in the industry professionally for decades. Every now and then a ‘genius’ comes along who seems to have knocked out a brilliant script in an afternoon, but that’s not you. Or me.

This book assumes you are not Peter Cook. If you are Peter Cook, and your brain is just wired funny, throw this book away at once. Burn it. Delete it. Destroy it without reading the contents. I look forward to seeing your show on TV and buying the boxed set. But the odds are that you are not a natural. If you’re not someone special, like Sir David Frost, you’ll just have to put the work in.

Here’s one more dangerous idea floating around the place.

Trap 3...

To find out about Trap 3, have a look at the free sample on Amazon here.

Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Writing That Sitcom

Available for the Kindle/App now.
I’ve written a book that will be out soon. It's called Writing That Sitcom.

It’s based on this blog, but tidied up, considerably augmented, put in a useful order and the typos removed. It’s not full of hilarious showbiz anecdotes, because I’m a script writer. I never get invited to the kinds of places where those showboz anecdotes happen. Nor is it full of bitter complaints about how writers are being offered less and less money for more and more work, rights and graft. That’s for a separate, much longer book.

Since we’re on the subject of money and poor deals for rights, it’s worth mentioning that the book is only going to be available as an e-book, for the Kindle (or Kindle App). It was the only deal that made sense. I was offered a tiny amount of money for it to be a real book you can hold in your hands – that would be available from November. Next year. But as with all published books, the percentages are such that you need to sell a lot of copies to exceed even your modest advance. Given the market for technical books about sitcom-writing is pretty small, and the fact that almost all sales of this book would be a direct result of this blog and my tweets, it didn’t seem that the paperback route was very good deal.

This book doesn’t feature any whinges about money. As the title suggests, it focuses on getting from the idea in your head to a pilot script that you could bear to show another human being – and then what to do with that script, and how to use it to get you work on other people’s sitcoms. Then there’s some advice on working in other people’s sitcoms, as well as writing for radio and children.

So is this Sitcom-Writing Made Easy? No. No, no, no. Far from it. I’m at pains to point out that writing sitcoms is hard, and writing the pilot is the hardest bit. It is not for the feint-hearted. But knowing this is as important as learning about technical detail because if you don’t have the right attitude at the start, you will quickly become disillusioned at the amount of work it is. You might assume that it must mean you’re doing it wrong. But writing is hard, especially if you’re doing it right. You just need to keep going.

This is why the book is partly a pep-talk. And partly an intervention. I try to explain that if you want to be a sitcom writer, the road ahead is long and painful. But if you’re serious about it, going about it the wrong way is even harder. This is the wrong way:

The book will be out in the next few weeks. I shall obviously be keeping you thoroughly posted. In the meantime, listen to the Sitcomgeeks podcast.

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

There’s a New Podcast In Town

The world probably doesn’t need another podcast about writing, television or sitcoms. But we didn’t ask. I’ve teamed up with Dave Cohen and started one about the art of writing sitcoms for television, with an eye (or ear?) to radio as well. It is kindly hosted by the British Comedy Guide, and produced by Katie Storey. Episode 1 is out now and you can listen to it here (via Soundcloud, iTunes, etc)

The overall theme of our inaugural episode is asking what your sitcom is about – and working out what it’s really about. Like any decent movie, novel or play, a sitcom has a superficial setting, but it’s not ultimately about that setting. It has a theme or an attitude that informs everything. And that is what your sitcom is really about.

It’s important to think about this underlying theme before you launch into plotting and writing a pilot episode, or even an entire series. (Do not write an entire series uncommissioned. It makes you look a little crazy. I know people write entire novels on spec, but it’s not really the done thing in sitcoms. See here.) Here’s why: You’ll be asked the infuriating question ‘Why am I watching this show?’ and the answer ‘Because it’s on TV’ is not good enough.  George Costanza tries that one. It doesn’t work:


You need to know two big things about your sitcom:

1. Why Now?
We all know the secret of comedy is timing. But it’s not just in the delivery of the jokes you need to worry about this. It’s the delivery of the original idea. Ideas have their time. They can capture the mood of a moment, or a new social phenomenon.

This is clearly the case when you watch sitcoms from yesteryear. Hardly any shows are truly timeless. Even fairly recent hits like Men Behaving Badly which is regularly re-run on cable channels feel rather dated at times. And watch the first and last few episodes of Only Fools and Horses. They are very different in tone. Del Boy goes from dodgy market trader selling potentially stolen (‘hookey’) goods to wannabee yuppee and responsible husband and father.

Some show are timeless, especially ones that don’t look like contemporary life. Perhaps that’s why Blackadder is eminently rewatchable – apart from it being staggeringly funny. In Series 2, 3 and 4, they made a virtue of being a historical artificial studio show, even referring to it in Series 3 when Blackadder says he seems doomed to die on ‘this unconvincing grassy knoll’.

But most shows are contemporary – and commissioners tend be very reluctant to commission historical comedy. I’m not sure why. I think they worry that they look elitist. There haven’t been many commissioned since Blackadder, which is a shame because most overeducated comedy writers want to set a show in some obscure historical backwater.

So, given your show is probably set in the here and now, what’s the show really about, and why does it say something about now?

Porridge I mention on the podcast that I recently re-watched the first episode of Porridge. That show too had a resonance with the times. Fletcher points out that life outside prison wasn’t that much fun with cutbacks, strikes and a crumbling economy. So you might as well be in jail. It’s just a throwaway comment, but strikes a chord and gives a clue to the success of the show at the time (as well as truly brilliant writing and one of the best comic actors the nation’s ever seen). That, and the fact that they’re wearing uniforms that means that it doesn’t look so dated making it eminently repeatable without fear of cringing.

Sometimes I look back through old notes books and click on archived folders and stumble over ideas that are perfectly okay as situations for sitcoms, but I just couldn’t go back to because they feel so dated now. Or irrelevant, highlighting a social issue that’s no longer a big deal, or has been done to death. This is one problem with some ideas that have been working on for years. By the time, you’re in a position to pitch them, they feel like their moment has passed. In which case, think of something else.

You may be adapting something that has already found an audience in another medium. Mrs Brown’s Boys was a stage show for many years before it ended up on screen. But when it comes to you, a scriptwriter, creating a show from ex nihilo, it needs to be relevant today, so that when the commissioner says ‘Why am I watching this show?’, you don’t end up walking out and causing a scene, like George Costanza.

Here’s the other question. You may have a brilliant idea that speaks volumes about the times we live in, shining a light on a community of characters we’ve not seen before. But are you the one to write it?

2. Why You?
If you’re wanting to write a sitcom, you aren’t just pitching a 90 minute movie. One script. You’re pitching six episodes, which any commissioner will want to have potential for at least another twelve episodes. You’re essentially saying you can write nine hours-worth of your sitcom idea. Nine hours. That’s six ninety minute movies. Why should they trust you to write this idea?

The only way to convince them you’re the person for the job is to be passionate about it. You don’t need personal experience of what you're writing about, necessarily. I’m not an advocate of the ‘write what you know’ theory. I’ve written sitcoms about management consultants, Bletchley Park code-breakers and bomb-disposal officers. I’ve been none of those things. But I have read an awful lot about them and spoken to people who’ve done those things first hand, so the story ideas have a ring of authenticity about them.

Of course, if you’ve worked in a bookies for five years, you’ll have plenty of insights into life in bookmakers. Then you just need to work out why now is the time to be watching a show set in a bookmakers. Deep down, your show is probably not about gambling at all. It’s a metaphor for something. But what? Who knows? You probably need to.


So there are plenty of questions here – that only you know the answer to. There are plenty more questions on the podcast.

And if you have questions that we might know the answers to, you can email us at sitcomgeeks at the gmail.com.

Monday, 22 June 2015

Writing Actions Lines and Stage Directions

I think it’s become a bit of a given that someone describing the dream they had last night is intrinsically boring. Dreams feels so real and personal. But there is wide acceptance that you just can't convey that in a satisfactory way.

Stage directions can sometimes feel like trying to describe your dream – and about as pointless, given that anyone reading a script, from actors to producers to commissioners, notoriously don’t bother to read stage directions.

How should we approach actions lines?

Exactly the same way as you’d approach dialogue. Allow me to explain.

Treat Stage Directions Like Dialogue
I don’t mean that you should use the directions as your voice or monologue to the reader. That’s cheating. Especially when you convey something that isn’t visible on the screen, or said in dialogue.
Eg. TOM turns to his most hated younger brother, JOHN. He’s never forgiven him for being so selfish that he drove their mother away.
Maybe in the first page of a pilot script, you might get to do a tiny bit of that, just to establish who’s who so they don't have to refer back to a pitch document. You might get away with:
Eg. TOM turns to JOHN, his younger brother.
All the other stuff needs to be conveyed in dialogue, tone, story, body language, and/or props. The action lines are not a shortcut. They are setting the scene and describing action. But where you stop?

Somewhere.

Frequently earlier than you think. It is easy to write seven lines of continuous action in one dense paragraph. When you have one of those, you should be every bit as worried as if you’ve just written a character one dense seven line speech. Are you sure you want to do that?

People don’t speak uninterrupted that long very often. And even if they do, you want to be very careful about writing a speech that way. The old ‘start later’ or ‘finish earlier’ rule applies. It’s why every movie set in a high school or college, has a classroom scenes which starts with the teacher talking for five seconds before bell rings.

On the rare occasion a scene starts with a class starting, it turns into a dialogue, not a monologue, fairly quickly. Or the scene is totally derailed in some other way.

In the same way, you need to think twice, even three times, before big blocks of uninterrupted action, especially in a sitcom which is normally a talkie format. The expectations of tempo are completely different from movies.

The laws of writing dialogue apply. Do I need to say this here? Do I need to say this now? Could I say this more concisely?

Setting the Scene
The most obvious place to fall into this trap is the first page or two of a pilot script in which you’re setting a scene. Maybe you’re describing the diner or office where our characters are going to be spending the next seven years, all being well. Fine. We don’t need all the details now. The show will not ride or fall on how well you’ve described the background.

The characters are the key. Get them on. Get them talking – and give us the minimum amount of information so that we can follow what’s happening and who these people are.

If your character is a waitress who thinks she’s too good for the grim diner she’s working in, describe the diner in a line (eg. A diner in serious need of redecoration). Describe the waitress in a line (eg. VERONICA looks immaculate, her hair perfect and her apron spotless). And get her talking – and the mismatch between her surroundings and her appearance will be explained. We'll get hooked onto the character, and in time, you can tell us all about the jukebox or coffee machine, when it's relevant.

How much information is ‘the minimum amount’? I would argue it’s different in a movie script from sitcom scripts. In movies, you can build slowly, introduce a location, a texture and tone before anyone’s said anything. You might not have a line of dialogue for a few minutes. Fine. A bit of mystery is okay. Things can be unexplained. The viewer can be intrigued. They’re not going to walk out in the first ten minutes. You get that free pass at the start in movies.

In a sitcom, especially a studio sitcom, you need to get the funny people on fast. And you need to explain your situation and set-up so the audience is not confused. Because, as I say many times on this blog, confusion is the enemy of comedy. But any scene description that can be deferred probably should be.

Alright, Break It Up
Sometimes you’re stuck with needing to have seven or eight lines of action. In that case, look for ways to break it up into more manageable chunks so that it doesn’t look too uninviting. Normally, I try not to have more than three lines of action without a line break or a new paragraph. You might also be able to have a single line of action – especially if it’s action is a physical joke, or a single thought. Which is why I wrote 'Somewhere' above as a single line. To break it up as well as land a joke, albeit not a very good one.

In short, make sure that every line of action needs to be where it is, so that the script is as inviting to read as possible. And as easy to finish once they’ve started.

Even then, some people still won’t read all the action. And that’s fine. But if, after three pages, they’ve already decided they love your script (as they well might if you’ve got a strong start), you’re literally in business.

Monday, 18 May 2015

How to Make a Bad Sitcom

Some sitcom thoughts occurred to me after listening to another fascinating podcast from Scriptnotes -Ep197 How Do Bad Movies Get Made. Movies and sitcoms are obviously very different from each other, not least because a movie is finished work, rather than an ongoing one. A movie that just doesn't work is unsalvageable, where a sitcom pilot, or even a first season, might be 'good enough' to get a second season in which problems can be fixed.

So how does his happen with sitcoms? I've addressed this before in a post entitled 'How did this rubbish get on my TV?', in response to the howling indignation at Ben Elton's last sitcom, The Wright Way. It mainly deals with the emotional response at seeing a poor show on TV - and that feeling aggrieved doesn't really get you anywhere. We're going to take a different approach this time.

You watch a sitcom. It's bad. You ask how it happened. Surely they realised? How did the producer deliver the show to the channel and not know they’ve delivered a stinker? Here are some responses:

1. It’s Not Bad. You Don’t Like It.
The show may be very popular, but not to your taste. Equally, the show may be critically highly acclaimed but, in your opinion, unwatchable. Every year, there are new sitcoms which I don’t like that get good ratings or win awards. That doesn’t mean they are bad. Sometimes I’m surprised that something I think is technically flawed succeeds, but all that really goes to show is how little any of us really understands comedy. And how important taste is.

There are many different types of comedy. Some are quick, and disposable, like fast food. Others are more like fine dining. Which is best? It depends what you’re in the mood for, how much time you have and what you think food is for. Enjoyment? Or energy? Similarly, what is comedy for? Andrew Marshall has argued comedy should be treated as a utility, like water and gas. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I see the point. We all need to laugh, so let’s not be snobby about where we get our comedy from. Maybe the sitcom isn’t bad. You just don’t like it.

2. It’s Not Bad. It’s Good. Too good.
The show may jar with you in someway, but that’s because it’s doing something different. The tempo, or tone is not like anything else you’ve seen before. In a good way. But you’re experiencing the difference in a bad way.
Lots of people didn’t like Arrested Development. The ratings were never great and it was cancelled after only a few seasons. Critics loved it. Every single comedy writer I know loves it. It’s so densely packed with jokes, and moves so fast, playing with conventions of comedy that it might be a hard watch for some. To them, the show might be bad. Not to me. It's too good.

3. Right Show. Wrong Time.
The show is either way ahead of its time. Or way behind. The latter is more likely, having come about by commissioning that is trying to follow a trend (we need a show like The Office, or Miranda, or Mrs Brown!) – rather than setting trends.

4. Right Show. Wrong Cast.
Remember they wanted Michael J Fox to play Marty McFly in Back to the Future? And they couldn’t get him. So they went ahead with Eric Stoltz. And they shot for five weeks. Fives weeks. They realised it wasn’t working. The comedy was not coming across. So they stopped shooting and waited for Michael J Fox to become available. Ballsy.



In a parallel universe, they didn’t do that, and you’ve never heard of the film. So, maybe the sitcom you don’t like is actually working fine on paper. But it’s horribly miscast. Or the lead turned out to be less funny than expected. They might have even realised that, but they couldn’t change it because in TV, believe me, no-one will let you reshoot five weeks of sitcom.

5. Surely This Show Should Exist?
The show isn't funny because it has no soul. That might be because it was talked into existence by someone – an exec, a commissioner, a writer, an actor, a producer – who felt like a certain kind of show should be made. It didn’t need to be made. It was just possible. And somehow, it felt like the right show at the right time, it was greenlit because it had the right cast, the right look or filled a gap. The result can be a show that maybe isn’t bad. It just isn’t any good.

6. Mission Creep
Mission Creep is what happens when soldiers turn up to keep the peace, and end up getting far more involved in local politics or civilian affairs than they ever intended. The stated goals of the operation subtlely changed, week by week, month by month, until the no-one quite knew why they’d come in the first place.

This can happen with sitcoms. A show is dreamed up by a writer, or actor, or comedian – and is about one thing. One character. One concept. But it ends up being pushed and pulled in various directions, usually in order to get the show commissioned, so that it ends up being about something else – and ultimately nothing. And not in a Seinfeld way.

Mission creep can sometimes be beneficial. Some shows end up being about different characters or relationships from what the original writers intended, like Friends, which was meant to be about Monica and Joey. But they quickly realised the show was about Ross and Rachel. At least at that point it was. Other shows are not so lucky.

7. Two Shows in Two Heads
Or even Three Shows in Three Heads. The show the writer has written, and the show the director is directing and the show the channel has commissioned are not quite the same thing in their minds. In an attempt to marry up these false expectations, compromises are made, and the result is a disparate mess.

8. Blame the Writer

‘Who writes this sh*t’ is a common refrain when a show is deemed to be poor. The writers are often the first to get the blame. I hope I've shown how it's often circumstances beyond the writer's control. But there is, of course, a strong possibility that the show stinks because writer has written a lousy script. It happens. How often? Who can say?

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Give Them Hell

Chuck Wendig has a brilliant blog and this post is very insightful – and visceral – about storytelling. In short, your protagonist needs to make things worse. And worse.

And worse.

It made me think why I find it difficult to think of extreme stories when plotting a sitcom episode and here is one possible reason: the genre.

In a sitcom, your characters need to start and finish in the same place. Your show is not a serial, and needs to be viewable out of sequence. That's the commercial reality and the deal. But also the appeal. It’s baked into the art form.

In sitcoms, nothing changes and no-one learns. (As such, it's a pretty good description of life. Situations may change – like the relationship-flat-swapping in Friends – but no-one fundamentally changes personality.) A sitcom retains the status quo. Your hero wins a million bucks. They need to lose a million bucks. Someone’s house catches fire. Well, somehow, it needs to look exactly the same next week. And so every huge plot twist or story explosion needs to be untwisted or cleared up and put back together.

This can temper your imagination. You don’t give your mind fully to exploring total catastrophe for your characters because you’re worried that you won’t be able to think of a de-catasrophising solution.

But we need to put our characters through hell.

Messy Painting
It’s a bit like being in charge of a few small children. Whatever activity you propose, you’re going to need to clear up afterwards. And this will affect the activity you suggest. Want to let them paint with their hands? YAY! But bear in mind, you’ll have a lot of clearing up to do afterwards. Tables. Hands. Items of furniture in other rooms that somehow have blue marks on them.

We have to realise that we won’t think of big stories if we’re worried about how we’re going to put everything back together again afterwards. We need to trust ourselves to figure that out later. I’m sure I subconsciously try to think of a whole plot at once. I need to stop doing this. And I bet you do too.

So ask the question of your characters: What is the worst possible thing that could happen to them? And how can they make it even worse? What can they do that cannot be undone? In short, give them hell.

Two examples jump to mind, both from Blackadder. In Series 2, Lord Blackadder becomes Lord High Executioner, and in order to make life easier, he executes all his prisoners on a Monday. But the wife of one of them would like to visit him. Except he’s already been executed. That is a huge problem. You can’t get out of that one, or undo it. Farrow is dead. And trying to get out of that leading to farcical scenes such as the ones depicted below containing some of my favourite lines in all comedy. (Including ‘They’ve gone, Percy’).

In all honesty, I don’t quite believe they resolve Blackadder’s problem satisfactorily in that episode, but who am I to question the genius of Blackadder? And you do get some really cracking funny scenes.

The other example if from Blackadder the Third, in which it appears that Baldrick has burnt Dr Johnson’s dictionary. When Baldrick is ordered to steal a copy, Dr Johnson reveals there is no copy. So Blackadder has to rewrite the entire dictionary in one night. Funny.

What is the worst thing that can happen to your characters? How can they make it even worse? Don’t worry about how they get out of it just yet. The blue fingerprints on the piano stool can be cleaned off later. Right now, give them hell.

I'm running a free 90-minute webinar on Plotting Sitcoms on Friday 21st May 2021. Places are limited so sign up to the Situation Room for access to that webinar HERE