John August

Television

Married showrunners

Television

Running a TV show is inconceivably exhausting. But is it better or worse to do it with the person you love? Mary McNamara has an article in the LA Times about [married TV showrunners](http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/06/entertainment/la-ca-showrunners-20110306):

> Imagine a world in which you and your spouse together write, pitch, sell, cast, staff and then make a television show — 12 episodes for cable, 22 for network. Writing is the easy part, the fun part, the part that you now barely have time to do because you now are managing writers’ rooms, actors and budgets, discussing with your spouse every living little detail, before and after the notes from network executives inform you what you’re doing wrong.

McNamara interviews the married showrunners of Blue Bloods, The Good Wife, Big Love, Hung and In Treatment. But I can think of several more teams in the same situation, both in features and television.

The perk, of course, is that you actually get to see and spend time with the person you love. The downside is that work never really ends.

> “You will disagree on what[ever] you are invested in,” says Dmitry Lipkin, who with his wife, Colette Burson, created and produces “Hung” for HBO. “It’s not something I would recommend if your marriage is in trouble,” adds Burson.

Pitching Star Trek

Television, Treatments

[Several](http://betweenthepagesblog.typepad.com/between-the-pages-blog/2011/01/cool-find-gene-roddenberrys-original-star-trek-pitch.html) [blogs](http://blastr.com/2011/01/found-gene-roddenberrys-original-1964-pitch-for-star-trek.php) have recently linked to this [1964 pitch document](http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Star_Trek/1_Original_Series/Star_Trek_Pitch.pdf) by Gene Roddenberry laying out his initial vision for Star Trek. It’s great reading for anyone interested in the Star Trek universe or TV writing in general.

Documents like this are still common in television. I’ve heard them called different things: formats, treatments, show outlines, write-ups, pitch documents.

Whatever you call them, they generally cover a few topics:

1. What the show is (logline, genre, themes, similarities to existing shows)
2. What happens in typical episodes
3. The main characters
4. The primary locations/sets
5. Special opportunities and challenges
6. Future episode ideas

In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), you can see similar write-ups for D.C., Alaska and Ops.

In the case of Star Trek, it’s not clear at what point in the process this document was written. Generally, pitching a show is something you do in person, with writer(s) meeting with executives. If the pitch goes well, you might leave a document like this behind — in which case it’s called, quite unimaginatively, a leave-behind.

Executives like leave-behinds because it gives them something they can use to pitch the show to their bosses. Agents and seasoned writers caution against them, because it gives executives specifics with which to find fault.

So instead of a leave-behind, you might send something like this over a few days later, writing up the pitch so everyone agrees what kind of show was discussed in the room, including issues that came up. Ideally, you would want your deal closed before emailing this over, but everything in television happens with a sense of rushed deadlines, so that’s hardly a given.

Looking through Roddenberry’s Star Trek write-up, it’s tempting to focus on all the things that changed. The Enterprise is the Yorktown. The captain is neither Pike or Kirk, but Robert M. April. Spock has red skin. Bones is Bones, but his real name is Phillip Boyce.

But it’s more helpful to marvel on how much of the vision and philosophy for Star Trek shows up in this early incarnation:

> The “Parallel Worlds” concept is the key to the STAR TREK format.

> It means simply that our stories deal with plant and animal life, plus people, quite similar to that on Earth. Social evolution will also have interesting points of similarity to ours. There will be differences, of course, ranging from the subtle to the boldly dramatic, out of which comes much of our color and excitement. (And, of course, none of this prevents an occasional “far our” tale thrown in for surprise and change of pace.)

A quick read through the proposed storylines gives a very strong sense of what the show would become. Some of these ideas became episodes; most didn’t. But they all feel like they could be part of the show.

You can read the whole thing [here](http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Star_Trek/1_Original_Series/Star_Trek_Pitch.pdf).

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. ((In fact, Cheers is a One New Guy pilot.))

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](http://johnaugust.com/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.

Angles, spacing and monikers

Formatting, QandA, Television, Words on the page

questionmarkThree quick questions:

(a) I was reading over a pilot example, and I saw a lot of angle descriptions, camera descriptions, etc. I thought that was a big no-no: don’t describe angles or try to “direct” via your script. Is that less a concern these days? Or less a concern when writing for TV than film?

(b) Ditto the spacing. I was under the impression that TV scripts had to be double-spaced, all dialogue in caps, etc. Is that not true for pilots?

(c) There is already a writer working on film/TV with my name (Joshua Siegal). I’m thinking of going with J. Howard Siegal. Do I need to get registered with the writer’s guild and such with that name? Is it a good/bad idea to find a unique name to write under?

— Josh

(a) Some screenwriters refer to the camera a lot. It’s not wrong, but it can annoy directors. I try to avoid mentioning angles and camera movements unless it’s very important. As an alternative, I use “we” —

RISING THROUGH THE CHIMNEY, we reveal Kruchkov.

He pulls the pin on a grenade. Drops it with a smile.

— and you should know that some people hate “we.” I think it reads better, but to each his own.

(b) The only way to know how a show is formatted is to read an actual script from the series. Single-camera TV shows are generally formatted like feature films, single-space. Multi-camera shows (sitcoms) are double-space. But there are exceptions, so never assume.

(c) Screenwriter names are not regulated the way actor names are, but yes, it’s a good idea to have a unique moniker. For example, there is already another [aspiring John August](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/my-namesake-also-a-screenwriter).