John August

Ops

Premise pilots

Ops, Television

If you’re writing the pilot episode of a TV series, you have a choice to make: will this episode be more-or-less typical for the series, or will it be The Beginning?

The latter are called premise pilots, because they establish the underlying premise of the series — how it all came to be. In screenplay-speak, premise pilots contain the inciting incident of the entire series. Without this event, the series would be fundamentally different.

Many of the pilots you remember were premise pilots:

  • Lost: The plane crashes on the island.
  • Moonlighting: Dave meets Maddie.
  • Remington Steele: Con-man assumes role of fictional detective.
  • Buffy: Buffy moves to Sunnydale, meets friends.
  • Angel: Angel moves to Los Angeles.
  • Six Feet Under: Father dies, leaving funeral business to his sons.
  • Frasier: Dad moves in.
  • Heroes: An eclipse reveals people with superpowers.
  • Arrested Development: Father arrested.
  • 30 Rock: Liz meets Jack and hires Tracy.
  • Futurama: Fry awakens in the future.
  • Desperate Housewives: The narrator kills herself.
  • Star Trek (TNG): Characters meet for first time.
  • Star Trek (DS9): Sisko takes over as commander.
  • Star Trek (Voyager): Ship stranded in the Delta Quadrant.

Other shows start with non-premise pilots that could have just as easily been episode four:

  • Star Trek (TOS) (Both the Kirk and Pike versions).
  • South Park
  • The Office (British and U.S.)
  • Mad About You
  • The Simpsons
  • Gilmore Girls
  • Seinfeld
  • Law & Order

Remember: a premise pilot doesn’t mean introducing the setup to the audience. A premise pilot is about what’s new inside the world of the show. It’s the big thing that’s changed which marks this The Beginning.

For shows that last several seasons, it may become easier to argue that the events of the pilot weren’t fundamental to the premise. For example, if you only watch the first season of Cheers, it seems like a premise pilot, since it is the first time Sam and Diane meet. But several seasons in, it’s clear that Sam and Diane’s relationship isn’t fundamental to the show. 1

By the same logic, True Blood feels like a premise pilot now — Bill and Sookie meet — but as the show has evolved, it’s easy to see other moments that could have been the starting point.

Why this matters

Networks hate premise pilots. Studios, too. They will flatly tell you that they don’t want to make premise pilots. They may offer a few reasons why, but one stands above rest:

Premise pilots don’t feel like the show. It’s often hard to get a sense how a “normal” episode of the show will function based on a premise pilot. Watching fifteen pilots, the network wants to pick the shows it feels it understands. They want to know what episode eight will be like. That’s hard to do with a premise pilot.

So studios and networks will insist that they don’t want premise pilots. But secretly, they do: roughly half the new shows every fall begin with a premise pilot. The Good Wife is a premise pilot. Same with Glee, Mike and Molly, Undercovers, The Event, Vampire Diaries, Outsourced, Hawaii 5-0 and $#*! My Dad Says.

In fact, outside of true procedurals (body-of-the-week like CSI) and family shows, it’s rare to find a series that doesn’t start with something of a premise pilot. The trick may be to do it less overtly, introducing one small-but-important change in the world rather declaring this day one.

In the pilot episode of Friends, Rachel arrives at Central Perk in a wedding dress, having bailed on her nuptials. If this was called The Jennifer Aniston Show, it would clearly be a premise pilot. But because the six primary characters already had relationships — Ross and Monica already knew Rachel — I’d argue that it falls in a middle ground I’ll call One New Guy. You’re introducing a new member to an existing group.

The pilot for Modern Family includes Mitchell and Cameron presenting their daughter Lily to the rest of the extended family, but if she had been introduced in episode four or ten or twenty, the basic dynamics of the show would have been the same. Everyone already knew each other. The arrival of Lily made a good starting point for the audience, but it wasn’t the start of the family.

Similarly, Adam Scott joins the catering company in the pilot of Party Down. Structurally, the episode works like any other, just that characters are introducing themselves to him.

Both of these are examples of One New Guy. In Party Down, the newbie is more central to the action, but it’s not his show. You could do an episode without him, but you probably wouldn’t do an episode that focused on him but not the rest of the cast.

I’ve written one pilot of each type. D.C. is clearly a premise pilot: the gang meets and moves into the house. Alaska is a One New Guy, with a new prosecutor joining the team. Ops is very deliberately an ordinary episode, with the company already up and running.

You can find all three in the Library.

If you take away nothing else from this, let me stress again that a premise pilot isn’t about setting up the characters or world — every pilot has to let the audience figure out who’s who and what’s what. A premise pilot is about Something Happening that marks the pilot as the beginning.

  1. In fact, Cheers is a One New Guy pilot. ↩

WTF is a beat sheet?

Charlie's Angels, Ops, Projects, QandA, Treatments

questionmarkFirst, thanks for telling me to buy a new car. (I did.) Second, what the frak is a beat sheet?

I’ve taken screenwriting, short-story writing, and novel writing classes. I’ve taken filmmaking classes. I’ve read several writing manuals. Writers and professors all love to talk about the importance of beat sheets. While they are apparently the single most important thing a writer can ever do, they never show examples. And I’ve heard multiple definitions, from a one-sentence description of each scene to a detailed breakdown of every action in the script.

I’m beginning to suspect conspiracy. I don’t think anybody really uses beat sheets. They claim to in order to sound responsible, much like the myth of flossing. Can you post an example of a beat sheet and blow this mystery out of the water?

— Nick T.

Beat sheets are a form of outline. Each major plot point gets its own bullet point (or occasionally, a number). That’s it.

They can be a helpful way of discussing the storyline of a movie.

PRODUCER

What if Shoe and Dog’s dance number at Marvin Gardens came before Race Car discovered the Community Chest? We could get rid of these three beats, including Top Hat and Thimble’s knife fight.

SCREENWRITER

Did you know Inception wasn’t based on anything?

In the Library, you can see a minimal beat sheet that Jordan Mechner and I did for our never-shot pilot Ops. It includes a column showing which characters are in any given scene, and which one of us was going to write it.

For the first Charlie’s Angels, I did a series of beat sheets as we debated and formulated. This one shows a pretty close approximation of what I ended up writing for the first draft. Numbering the beats ended up being a huge help for conference calls.

(Trivia: You’ll notice there’s a villain character named “Lucy Liu,” which far predates the actual Lucy Liu being involved with the movie. That villain character was ultimately played by Kelly Lynch, while Lucy was later cast as the third angel.)

Note that beat sheets are also commonly written after there is a draft of a screenplay. I’ve asked my assistants to do a beat sheet of a script I’m about to begin rewriting so that I’ll have a roadmap of how things are arranged.

Audition scenes

Go, Ops, Projects, The Remnants

When you’re auditioning actors for a role, the scenes as scripted are sometimes not especially useful.

For example, if most of a character’s scenes are with groups of people talking, the auditioning actor probably won’t to have enough lines to really make an impression. And in television, you may need to cast a part that isn’t especially big in its first episode, but becomes more important later.

Knowing this, casting directors will often try to cobble something together. But a smart writer should also volunteer to write special scenes just for auditions. Sometimes they’re cut-down and rearranged versions of scenes from the script, but it’s also an opportunity to just come up with something new. On movies and shows in which I’m involved with casting, I’ll generally give the casting director specially-prepared sides a few days before auditions begin.

In the Library, I have an additional audition scene from Go for Mannie, whose character didn’t talk much but was crucial to the first act.

And I just added three audition scenes from The Remnants:

Chas, Mia and Wallace auditions

And all the casting sides for the Alaska pilot.

One added bonus of writing new scenes for the audition is that you don’t get completely burned out on the real scenes. After you’ve heard fifty actors read the same ten lines, they become meaningless. You don’t want to be on set hearing them again.

Writing silent scenes

Formatting, Ops, Projects, QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkI have a question about formatting for a script I’ve been working on. The concept involves some scenes being completely silent, but with an occasional sound coming through (i.e. everything’s silent, including speech, until someone breaks a glass and the shattering is audible).

I’ve tried a couple of different methods of formatting this but I’m not sure what makes the most sense. In early drafts, I just designated the scene as “Silent” at the beginning and capitalized the sounds that broke through. My writers’ group found this to be strange so in my latest draft I tried it with “M.O.S.” attached to every action that was supposed to be silent, but they didn’t like that either.

So now I’m kind of stumped on how to translate this idea to the page. Is there a way to format it that makes sense? I want it to be as clear as possible to readers.

— Cali
Seattle

My hunch is that you are doing too much, and it’s slowing down the read. A modern screenplay isn’t a list of camera angles and sound cues. It reads more like journalistic, present-tense fiction. (Think Hemingway, not Faulkner.)

If certain scenes are going to be silent, and other ones aren’t, my inclination would be to flag them in the scene headers, the same way you call out special events like [RAINING] or [DRIVING]. So in your case…

INT. KITCHEN – NIGHT [SILENT]

Within scenes, putting those few audible sounds in UPPERCASE makes sense. Remember, treat your readers like audience members, and think about it from their perspective.

For example, in the second pilot Jordan Mechner and I wrote for Ops, we had an extended sequence with no natural sound. It was important to showcase why this was going to be cool:

INT. KIDNAP SHACK – DAY

Brilliant shafts of sunlight burst through the corrugated metal walls of the shack. We don’t hear the gunshots or the hits — we simply watch as the holes open up.

Under the cot, Dagny is screaming, but we don’t hear it — we only see her open mouth.

EXT. JUNGLE – DAY

Only now do we see Gonzales and his men silently firing, emptying the clips of their fully-automatic rifles.

INT. KIDNAP SHACK – DAY

Vanowen is flat on the floor, looking out through a broken board. Sweat is dripping into his eyes, but he stays rock-solid.

EXT. JUNGLE – DAY

Gonzales signals for his men to stop. They listen. One man takes a few steps to his right.

INT. KIDNAP SHACK – DAY

Vanowen squeezes the .45 trigger. This SINGLE SHOT is deafening. (At this point, normal SOUND RESUMES.)

Look at your silent scenes from your reader’s perspective, and try to read them without knowing what’s happening next. You’re not nearly as curious what it sounds like as what it feels like to have the sound missing. Write that.