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I was just talking yesterday with friend-of-the-blog Alisa about Scott McCloud’s fine book Understanding Comics, and then today I come across this. (This is the Kevin Kelly site, which I reached through Boing Boing) The excerpts are from McCloud’s new book, Making Comics. Scroll down. The illustration that blows me away is the one where he illustrates how faces displaying simple emotions can be combined to create faces displaying complex emotions. Look at the math of it! It’s beautiful. And somehow shockingly true. Just knowing that a fear face and joy face create a desperation face… yes! Yes, of course they do! And anger + joy = cruelty. Yes! My only disagreement would be with joy + sadness, which creates an expression he calls “faint hope” but which I would call “brave front.” Maybe it’s a matter of the recipe: two parts joy to one part sadness or vice versa.

I’m not even sure what this has to do with writing for television. But it’s making my writing cords vibrate, so it must in some way. I’m certainly struck by the way the complex faces make me want to write dialogue. McCloud clearly has the same instinct — disgust + surprise = “you *ate* it?!” Sounds about right.

I think what I’m struck by is how some of the ingredients in complex emotions had escaped my conscious awareness. The ones with ‘joy’ in them seem to particularly capture the imagination. The joy that’s part of cruelty… and the one captioned “Eww” — disgust + joy… I feel like I’ve just learned something about human nature, you know?

I’m also left wondering about emotions that aren’t here — smugness, for example. Is it maybe joy + anger, just like cruelty, but with more joy and less anger? Hmm. Or is this all way too reductive? Human emotions can’t simply be reduced to formulae better suited for combining Jelly Belly flavors. But it sure serves as a nice springboard for thinking about feelings.

Even a static scene of two people talking about their life philosophies can be fascinating if you track the emotions of the characters. I don’t know, but I feel maybe like now I’m a little more attuned to what that means.

I think we should all run over to Amazon and buy this book. We’re all there buying Prisoner of Trebekistan anyway, right?

Lunch: scrambled eggs with salsa and tortillas

The mission statement for this blog is to talk about the writing of spec scripts. But, fairly frequently, I meet people who don’t write at all, but who read because they’re simply interested in the process of writing for television. Hi, non-writers! Welcome! And, I suppose, you writers might also sometimes be interested in knowing something about the process beyond the spec script part.

Which leads us to a cluster of questions sent in by gentle reader Jason in Tennessee. He’s a Buffy/Angel fan, intrigued by the shows’ complex mythology. Take it, Jason!

“I’m curious about the way a mythology is developed — is it planned out at the beginning of a series by one person, or is it built slowly by several writers? Where does a seasonal arc come from, how is it broken up from episode to episode, and what sort of flexibility do writers have for including pieces of overall seasonal development into their own individual, stand-along episode?”

He goes on to ask “how the demands posed by outside forces (network politics, sponsorship, special effects, budgets, guest directors, etc.) impact the writers, and also the integrity of the show’s seasonal story arc.”

Holy cow, Jason. That’s a lot of questions. The answers, unfortunately, tend to vary wildly from show to show, so it’s going to be hard to be coherent here. Let me try.

The mythology of a show sets out the rules of the world and how the main characters fit into it. The basics of the mythology are actually part of the initial pitch when a writer is trying to sell a series to a network. So, yes, that is generally the work of one writer — the show’s creator. Of course, that creator will have had help and input from all sorts of places, including his or her friends, fellow writers and certainly from studio or network execs.

And, as you might expect, the mythology as initially devised doesn’t cover enough to take a show though many seasons without being augmented, altered and affected, as you point out, by outside forces. So the writers have to be a bit flexible. And sometimes of course, they have to ask for an audience’s indulgence. Androids don’t age, so please ignore our actor’s subtle wrinkling. Or, we know we had Frasier say his father was dead, but now he’s not, so… um… I guess he lied before?

Seasonal arcs, the continuing story lines that shape a season of a show are sometimes developed seasons in advance, but usually are planned during the first meetings of a show’s staff at the beginning of the writing year. They might be developed committee-style, or they might be decreed by the show runner. Sometimes arcs are sketched out separately for a number of main characters (Desperate Housewives, clearly, has this). And some shows, undoubtedly, don’t even have the arc planned, but rather let it develop. So I’m afraid there’s just no one answer to this one either.

But let’s imagine we have a seasonal arc in place. It doesn’t, obviously, come broken into 22 different segments. So, as the staff works together to “break” (i.e. devise a rough outline), for each episode, they have to figure out how, how much, and if, they are going to advance the arc in any particular episode. Since a writer is never sent out to write an episode until they have an outline, no individual staff writer really ever has to decide during the writing of an episode if they’re going to advance the arc or not. That’s already been determined during the break. But, again, there is variation here between shows — some allow writers more or less autonomy in making changes during the writing process. One show I know allows writers so much autonomy that an individual with a brainstorm could end up changing the whole season arc — you know, if the show runner liked what they did and didn’t send them back to change it. Other shows are very rigid.

Finally, we reach the question about outside forces. Again, it just serves to underline the need for flexibility in questions of this kind. Many a staff has laid out a season arc and started writing scripts only to discover that an actor is pregnant, quitting or untalented enough that they need to simplify some emotions. Or perhaps the network vetoes a choice. Or issues of cost might curtail the big season-ending parachuting sequence. Or maybe someone just comes up with a better idea.

However, two of the factors that were listed in the question aren’t really forces to worry about too much: sponsorship and guest directors. I’ve never been on a show where a sponsor affected our story-telling. And I’d be pretty pissed if it happened. And in TV, most directors are “guest directors” and they also have limited powers to affect how we write the show. They might have notes, and often they have suggestions for cool ways to shoot something that the writer might not have thought of. But it would be, I think, fairly unusual for a director to do anything that would affect a seasonal arc, or even the main point of any one episode. They simply usually weigh in too late in the process, after the script has been written, rewritten and approved by everyone involved.

So, there you go. The short answer: Every Show Is Different. This is one reason that I think it’s valuable to work on a variety of different staffs before you run your own show — you get exposed to many different ways to handle these issues. Television isn’t written by only one procedure. Even the Very Best Television is created in many different ways. Clearly, there’s more than one way to skin a cathode ray tube.

Lunch: I reheated a left-over Croque Monsieur from Campanile. Grilled cheese that tastes like fondue. Wonderful.

Friend-of-the-blog Lani wrote to me with a contribution to the ongoing discussion of when one cuts out of scene early versus when one cuts late. I thought her analysis was so good, not to mention poetic, that I’m presenting it to you here. Take it, Lani!

Lani: “You can cut on the lightning or you can cut after the thunder. I don’t think choosing one is a criticism of the other, but they definitely do give a different flavor to each choice. I haven’t seen “Little Miss Sunshine,” but I think that method [cutting early] would work because it’s so engaging. The viewer has to actively participate, to anticipate, in order to get it. And it’s interesting that directors are trusting their audiences’ sophistication and ability to do that. Yay for that! But with “The Office,” it’s more real. In real life, we can’t cut at the lightning – the thunder’s always coming. And even though we know it’s coming, there’s something that bonds us in the experience of it. The same way we’ve all lived through the awkward aftermath of a Michael Scott moment.”

Wow. Well said. Thanks, Lani!

Now, moving on a bit, I want to address a question I was asked recently about scene length as seen in a more mathematical light. A writer noticed that the produced scripts they’d acquired for the show they were specing had scenes as long as 4 pages in them, and asked me if that was unusual. Actually, it is not. Have no fear of writing scenes of any particular length, as long as the show customarily does so. Buffy sometimes had big group scenes that could be as long as 6 or 7 pages, while Gilmore Girls scenes often ran –and run — far longer than that! Do as your show does and you won’t go wrong. Some scenes simply contain a lot of stuff that needs to happen. If you get really nervous about it, break the scene up by making the characters move to another location during it, or maybe cut away to another story in another location and then come back to your monster scene.

Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich and pie, purchased from — get this — a Marie Calendar’s guy who came to our office to sell stuff directly from his travelling caravan of coolers! Wonderful!

We’re in for a treat today! Jeff Greenstein, the extraordinary showrunner/writer (Dream On, Partners, Will & Grace, Jake in Progress…) has been persuaded by this very blog to compile his favorite episode titles of the ones he has written. I adore this list and I thought you all might enjoy it too!

“Lows in the Mid-Eighties.” A flashback to 1985: Will and Grace have been dating for six weeks, and Will is increasingly certain he’s gay. When he finally comes out to Grace, it nearly ends their friendship. David Kohan told me at the wrap party he thought it was the best title we ever had. Certainly it was one of the few that didn’t contain a gay pun.

“Polk Defeats Truman.” My very first W&G, with a suitably smarty-pants title. A hubristic Will Truman cuts loose all his faithful clients in order to service wealthy Harlan Polk (serendipitously, the character was already named that when I got there!); shortly thereafter, Polk cuts Will loose, and Will’s business collapses. I even Photoshopped the famous photo for the script cover. These are the sorts of things you do when you’re in a new job and are trying to impress people.

“The Weekend at the College Didn’t Turn Out Like They Planned.” This was the last of my Dream Ons, the longest episode title in the history of the series, the longest episode title I’ve ever seen, and a cool steal from a Steely Dan lyric (it’s from “Reelin’ in the Years”). When Martin and Judith take son Jeremy to visit Ithaca College, Martin and Judith end up sleeping together, rekindling their relationship; meanwhile, Jeremy thinks a hot coed has blatantly offered to sleep with him, but she definitely, definitely hasn’t, and much embarrassment ensues.

“One Ball, Two Strikes.” Also Dream On. Martin’s obnoxious boss Gibby (Michael McKean) is convinced that all of his failures with women stem from the fact that he has only one testicle. Seriously. One of the funniest scripts I’ve ever been involved with (and the whole thing was David Crane’s crazy idea). “It makes them ill, you see — the thought of a man with only one plum in his lunch sack.”

Dream On had lots of great titles, many of them smart parodies: “Three Coins in the Dryer” (Martin finds romance in the laundry room); “The Rocky Marriage Picture Show” (a photo album prompts Martin and Judith to revisit scenes from their stormy relationship); “The Trojan War” (Martin and a girlfriend debate whether to get an AIDS test so they can stop using condoms); “The Undergraduate” (Martin dates a college girl, then falls for her mother)…

All the Partners episode titles were questions, an idea I stole from a Garson Kanin novel, Cordelia? Hence gems like “‘Why are the Blumenthals living in my house?” “Who’s afraid of Ron and Cindy Wolfe?” “Soup or a movie?” and the inevitable series finale, “Will you marry me?”

The much-discussed Friends “The One…” bit initially hamstrung any writer’s attempt to make a title interesting, but once Jeff & I entitled an episode “The One with the East German Laundry Detergent,” all bets were off. And I loved that they called their hundredth episode “The One Hundredth.”

Thank you, Jeff! Well, gentle readers, I think I’m going to have to work on a similar list myself! Stay tuned!

Lunch: the “kung pao spaghetti” from California Pizza Kitchen

Someone I know sends out a semi-regular email questionnaire with really cool thought-provoking questions. The most recent one asked what the reader would call their first album, should they ever have one. It’s one of those questions where you think you’re talking about a trivial physical object, and then you realize you’re being asked to summarize your own soul. Titles are huge.

The lovely Jeff Greenstein (our showrunner at Jake in Progress, with whom I had a delightful lunch today), had a standing rule that an episode title should not be the title of a preexisting work. Until he let me call my episode “The Two Jakes.”

I think he must be almost the only showrunner with that rule, since finding a name of a pre-existing book or movie or popular song or Shakespeare play that fits your episode is, of course, a classic trick. Sometimes a twist or a pun is added (allowing the title to skirt Jeff’s rule). As a variant, sometimes the reference is to a *quote* from a pre-existing work. Titles like this, that refer to previous works, are so common, in fact, that this blog entry will talk only about titles of this type.

Here’s how common it is: the first 13 eps of Battlestar include ones called “You Can’t Go Home Again,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” and “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down.” (which focuses on the character of Colonel Tigh.) House, which usually has very spare titles like “Kids” or “Autopsy,” has also had “Clueless,” “Failure to Communicate” and the especially amusing “TB or not TB.” Grey’s Anatomy eps include “A Hard Day’s Night,” “The First Cut is the Deepest,” and “Shake your Groove Thing.” One Buffy episode title is even a play on a product name! (“Life Serial”)

Note that it’s best if you don’t have to reach too far for the title. “Devil in a Blue Dress” might be a cool title, but not if you have to painfully insert both a devil and a blue dress into the episode just to make it make sense. On the other hand, if the title is SUPER cool, it might be worth a BIT of a stretch. The fact that the Frasier ep “Miracle on Third or Fourth Street” required that Frasier be unable to recall the street number, somehow made it even more charming.

You can even use titles like these as part of your I-need-an-idea-for-a-spec brainstorming. Since Grey’s Anat seems to use a lot of song titles, it wouldn’t be insane, if you want to write a Grey’s spec, to write down every song title you can think of, and then use that list as part of your brainstorming process as you’re casting about for stories. What would an episode called “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” look like? Hmm.

So why would Jeff have a standing rule against these types of titles? Here’s what he says: “Look at Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing titles. They’re all provocative, interesting, distinctive, memorable, and not one of them is the title of something else.” I looked them up, and he’s right. These West Wing titles include: “Five Votes Down,” “Let Bartlett be Bartlett,” and “What Kind of Day Has it Been.” And it occurs to me that another reason to abjure name’s-the-same titles is because the practice helps reinforce the idea that television is the lesser medium, eating the crumbs that fall from the corners of the mouths of Motion Pictures.

By the way, while we’re on this topic, one of my regrets in this career has to do with the title of my Ellen episode, in which she sleeps with her girlfriend for the first time and finds herself feeling shy and reluctant and virginal. It was called “Like a Virgin.” But I wish I had called it “Maidenhead Revisited.” Classier. In other words, don’t jump on the first virgin that walks by. Think it over, make sure you’ve got the best title for your spec. And consider Jeff’s advice… maybe there’s something even better than someone else’s slightly-used title.

Lunch: Spicy BBQ chicken from Ribs USA! And the leftovers will make an excellent dinner, too!

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