Writing For TV: Go Big or Go Home

The television world is shrinking, and with it any chance of you – or me – working in it. It’s no secret that slots allotted to dramas were vanishing even before NBC’s decision to essentially go dark at 10 pm. Those dramas that do make it on the air have smaller and smaller staffs. Plus, even if there are open positions here and there, each canceled series tosses five to ten experienced pros back into the talent pool. Which means that there’s almost no reason for showrunners to take a chance on an untested writer – not when there are so many proven pros out there willing to work for minimum as long as they’re credited as “consultants.”

Unless your script is so good they can’t pass you by.

Your spec can’t simply be a good episode. It’s got to be bold, audacious, and big. It has to go places no one has ever thought of going before and do things no one has imagined doing. And it’s got to do it on the first page. Hell, on the first half page, because your reader may not bother going further than that. You’ve got to grab your readers right away and force them to keep reading.

In short, you need a gimmick.

No, typing your script in 3-D and including polarized glasses isn’t going to do it. What I mean by a gimmick is a transformative approach to storytelling that allows you to retell the series’ underlying narrative in a way that makes it seem new again. It’s a stylistic or structural element that shows that your vision is so intriguingly different that showrunners will fight to bring it to their series.

Let me give you an example: Joss Whedon’s musical episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, “Once More With Feeling.” In my mind, this may be the best hour of drama American TV has ever produced. (If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to do so immediately – but to completely understand its brilliance it’s worth seeing the previous six episodes of season six.)

I’m not saying you should write a musical episode of, say, Breaking Bad. Musicals, after all, have been done. But I’d like you to look at “Once More” as a template for an original way to tell a story using a narrative gimmick and understand a few simple rules to making it work:

Start at the beginning: “Once More” opens with Buffy bursting into song as she slays demons and doesn’t stop to explain what’s going on for several minutes. You want to do the same – tell your reader in the first couple of paragraphs that this is going to be different. The risk is, of course, confusing your audience. But if what you’ve got is intriguing enough, they’ll stay with you long enough for you to explain it in your own time. There’s no use in coming up with a brilliant gimmick that kicks in at the end of act one – because your reader may never get that far.

Make sure the opening is great: Buffy’s first song is brilliant – funny and sad and strange, and full of clever elements. (There are jokes in the lyrics, in the staging, even in the music.) Your opening has to be that good. You can’t hope that your gimmick is audacious enough that readers will give you credit for trying; you’ve got to execute the hell out of it. Because with this kind of script, you’re throwing down a gauntlet – you’re claiming to be better and fresher than anyone else out there. It’s like starting a joke by saying “I’m going to say something really funny.” Your audience is waiting, arms crossed, for you to fall on your face. That makes them admire you even more when they find themselves rolling on the floor.

Exploit, exploit, exploit: The only thing worse than a script without a clever premise is a script that has one – and doesn’t take advantage of it. Once you’ve come up with your killer gimmick, think it through. Think of all the possible ramifications, all the way you can play with your idea. In “Once More,” Whedon starts off with Buffy singing as she kills vampires – amusing enough, certainly – but then continually challenges himself by including almost every genre of song that’s ever come from a Broadway stage, even a pastiche of West Side Story’s insanely complex “Tonight” quintet. He takes time for little asides that show what kind of bizarre effects this musical plague is having on Sunnydale. When Lee Goldberg and I decided to revive the character of Mannix for an episode of Diagnosis Murder, we didn’t stop with hiring Mike Connors, although that would have been enough to bring us the publicity we were looking for. We took an old episode of his show, used it for flashbacks, and brought back the entire guest cast to “complete” that story. (Of course the story was wrapped up in the original, but we used the pieces to tell an entirely new mystery.) As exciting as your gimmick may be, you’ve got to remember it’s your starting point – you’ve got to find ways to build from the beginning.

Make the gimmick part of the plot: It’s really easy to write a “very special” episode of any show – you can make it a musical, make it black and white, have everyone speak in Shakespearean Iambic pentameter, do it in 3-D, in real time, in pig Latin. But unless the gimmick itself is a fundamental part of the story, then it’s merely a trick you’ve slapped on to make yourself look good. In Buffy, the musical numbers are the core of the plot – for some demonic reason, citizens of Sunnydale are bursting into song and then bursting into flames. The episode plot is about solving the mystery of the gimmick. No one can complain that Whedon just randomly added songs to a standard episode because he felt like it. (As in, say, the musical episode of Xena.) He found a story that demanded musical numbers.

Finally, the most important rule of all:

Make your gimmick essential to the story: In “Once More” the musical numbers start out as a gimmick and then resolve into a plot point. But, by the end, they’re something much more than that. Because in the story, the songs force their singers to reveal their deepest secrets. And as the episode goes on, each character admits something they’ve been keeping hidden, causing irreparable harm to several relationships. The climax has Buffy confessing a terrible truth she’s been concealing since the beginning of the season – an act with great consequences that she would never do without the dancing demon’s spell. (Nope, no spoilers here!) So what starts out as the “musical Buffy” episode ends up being “the episode where Buffy tells the truth.” It’s a huge, powerful character story (which is why I urge you to watch the earlier shows first; all the character dynamics will make much more sense), and one that’s only made possible by the “gimmick” of the musical numbers.

That’s what’s going to separate your script from anyone else’s. If you can pull your readers in with what looks like a clever gimmick, keep them amused with constant iterations and consequences of that gimmick, and then at the end show that what they’ve been reading is actually not just a gimmick but the essential element that creates an emotional story – and do it all within the rules of the show’s franchise – you will have a spec that will not only open doors, it will knock them down.

William Rabkin started writing for television 20 years ago. He wrote a spec, sold it to Spenser: For Hire, and has been working ever since. Rabkin has been a freelancer, a showrunner, and everything in between, and currently teaches TV writing at Writers University and screenwriting at University of California Riverside - Palm Desert's creative writing MFA program.