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02/20/2007: An Atypical Route to Spexcellence


You know how some shows have one episode with a totally atypical structure? I'm thinking of the Emmy-winning "Three Stories" episode of House which was set in a classroom and consisted of flashbacks to past patients, one of whom turned out to be House himself. I'm also thinking of the "Out of Gas" episode of Firefly and the "Unfinished Business," episode of Battlestar Galactica, both of which told stories in different timelines simultaneously. Episodes like these are often the most memorable shows of a series. But they're not typical.

So the question arises: Can your spec be an episode like this? My answer -- after some thought and internal debate -- is yes.

It's tricky, because a large part of the point of the specing exercise (spexercise?) is to write an episode that feels like a produced ep. If your spec is different than all or almost all of their produced eps, then you haven't really accomplished that. But if you execute your spec (spexecute?) properly, then that won't matter. Because another large part of the point of the exercise is to write an episode that is as good as the very best produced episodes. And playing with structure can allow you to do some very powerful stuff, memorable stuff, stuff to get a script noticed.

Telling a story that plays with time can be a great way to dig deeper into the characters by letting us see them at a time before the series started (as the Firefly and House episodes do), or during a time that the series simply didn't show us (as the Battlestar one does). Often, in stories like these, we learn something about why a character is the way they are. There is little that is more powerful than that.

You have to be careful, of course. Don't hang an act break on whether or not your main character is going to be killed in the past for example. And don't just assume any origin story is worth telling -- make it startling and yet oh so illuminating.

The structure should help you tell the story; it shouldn't be the story.

But if you've got a great one of these eps in mind, even if it breaks the rules, I say go for it.

Lunch: a cookie and water from the Universal commissary. A too-late breakfast stole my appetite.