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We’re talking about novelty specs. Those comically oversized eyeglasses you get in gift stores. Hee! Also, that’s how I’m referring to any non-standard spec script. The examples we’ve been talking about are specs written for shows not currently on the air. I contacted showrunner friends about this.

So, Tim Minear (Angel, Wonderfalls, The Inside), what do you think of novelty specs? Like, say, a brand spankin’ new Bonanza?

Tim: “It’s so funny you would ask this — I did a seminar at the screenwriting expo and when asked about specs I said write an I Love Lucy. Maybe even a dark hour version. I’d sure read that! But not Bonanza. No, no. Classic Trek, sure! An old Night Stalker? Okay! Alias Smith and Jones, even! But not Bonanza.”

Notice that Tim went right away to the postmodern version of the novelty spec. It really does seem to be the only version worth considering. It’s the dangerous option that Joss spoke of above — I mean, below. You know, in the previous post. This kind of spec is difficult. It’s risky. But…

Big risk, big possible payoff. Here’s a story as related by show-runner Jeff Greenstein (Will and Grace, Jake in Progress).

Jeff: “I once hired a young writer based on a spec That Girl, a very cleverly written script that boasted what was possibly the best cold open I’ve ever seen in a half-hour comedy. We open in a grim, squalid whorehouse in a bad part of New York City. A fourteen-year-old punk is doing shots at the bar as the madam shows him one filthy crack whore after another, and the kid just keeps turning them down: “No. Nope. Nah.”

Meanwhile, over at the front door, an anxious-looking Anne Marie enters and looks cautiously around. She turns to the bouncer. “Hi,” she says brightly. “I’m here for my audition.” (then, looking around uneasily) “Um… is this 336 West 86th Street?” “No, Sissy,” grunts the bouncer. “This is 336 East 86th Street.”

At that moment, the punk spots Anne Marie across the room and levels a finger at her. Turning to the madam, he barks, “I want… THAT GIRL!!”

CUT TO: Main titles.

Really, really funny script. I met the writer and hired her on the spot.”

Jane here again. With a little story of my own. I once read a spec Caroline in the City in which a sexually-transmitted ass-rash was passed from character to character throughout the script. It’s the only spec I ever kept. It’s in a cabinet in my home right now. If I were in a position to hire writers, I would want to meet that writer.

If you do it well, a novelty spec can get you noticed. It will certainly get you read. ALL the showrunners said they’d reach for something, anything, different. But if you do it poorly, if it’s unclear, crude (the ass-rash was walking a very fine line), unfunny, if it doesn’t demonstrate your skills, it can burn you bad. Because if you guaranteed that someone will remember your name… make sure you want them to remember your name.

So what’s a writer to do? Next entry, we’ll sum it all up.

If you’ve just joined us, we’re talking about writing a TV spec script. In a way, this is like analyzing the chemicals that make chocolate taste good; we’re taking something fun and making it into a bunch of hard work. Come join us!

Once you’ve picked the show you want to spec, and you’re noodling around, trying to settle on a story, or trying to structure a story, it’s really important to watch your show as often and as closely as you can. If you can buy or otherwise acquire produced scripts for the show, that’s even better. These used to be hard to get if you didn’t live in LA, but now the internet can help you find them. By the way, it’s worth the effort to find actual scripts, not the things you sometimes see in which someone has made a sort of ersatz script by transcribing the episode. But if you’ve got nothing else, even those will do for this stage of the process.

Whatever materials you have, study them thoroughly. Eventually, you’ll be using the produced scripts to pick up subtleties of the characters’ voices and the style of stage directions and preferred formatting of your show and many other fun and tingly things. But right now, you’re just trying to figure out how they tell their stories.

For every episode you have (tivo’d or in script form), try to reconstruct the original outline. Now you have a list of sets and a short description of what happens in each scene. This strips away the language and allows you to see the story, standing naked and shivering. Now you can examine it. You are a biologist, learning how this goose-bumpy little creature is put together. Here are some of the things you should take note of:

How many acts does the show have? (Not as simple as it sounds. Many four-act shows have recently gone to five, and three-acts to four. Try to find a very recent episode to check this.)

How many scenes in each act (on average)? Is any one act consistently longer or shorter than the others?

How many stories thread through each episode? Having A (main) and B (secondary) stories is common. Does your show have both? Does it venture farther into the alphabet?

What percentage of the scenes are devoted to the A story? To the B story? Are the stories often both functioning within the same scenes, or are they kept separate? Do they alternate?

What kind of event tends to occur at your show’s first act break? At its second? Third? Does the main character tend to take an action at any particular act break? Does he tend to face a surprise at any particular act break?

Is there a big action scene in each episode? More than one? In which acts? Or a big comedy scene with lots of physical humor?

Do the acts always break on the A story, or is a B story act break common?

Do events in the B story always end up influencing the A story? Vice versa?

How many pages are in each scene? (You have to go to the actual script for this one, but it’s important.)

How many of the show’s characters are in each episode? Are they always all there or not?

How much (if at all) has the main character learned or changed by the end of the episode? Some shows feature baby steps of emotional knowledge, others huge chunks of practical knowledge. Others take cynical delight in their characters’ refusal to learn.

Is there any commonality among the multiple episodes as to the kinds of things that are learned?

Are there any sets that are always used? Or other signatures you need to incorporate? (I’m thinking here of the balcony talks on Boston Legal, and similar.) Endings are good places to look for these.

Now that you’ve made your observations, you can make sure that your own episode will bear a strong family resemblence to its siblings. As strong as possible, in fact — at least structure-wise, and in terms of general story-shape. Not in terms of the actual events that happen in the story, obviously. Copy the skeleton, then hang your own scraps of flesh on it.

At this stage, you’re still looking to make your episode feel typical. Making it feel special is still ahead of you. We’ll get there.

Lunch: Homemade crabmeat cheesecake served at a “The Inside” writing staff get-together. Wow.

Hello, all! I hope you are all enjoying this or finding it helpful. I know I’m having a blast! Writing about writing is a good way to remind myself about the basics, too. It’s fun thinking about this stuff again; it’s been a while since I’ve had to write a spec. After a while we all become like Marley’s ghost, dragging behind us the chain we’ve forged from all the scripts we’ve written in our career. People take pity, and stop asking for samples.

I’ve been talking a lot about what not to do in your spec script, and I think it’s time to talk about a positive example. Forgive me for again using something from my own career, but man, it’s just so much easier that way. And I’ve already walked you though my bad Star Trek specs. And allow me to mention here a very troubled Perfect Strangers spec, a Golden Girls spec I completely abandoned and two (count ’em) two Seinfeld specs that make me cringe to recall them. But eventually, I wrote a Frasier spec years ago that served me loyally for a long time. I spent more time than usual coming up with the story, and I always felt it turned out well.

In my spec, Frasier was offended when a radio station promotional blitz featured his image on posters and billboards all over town, labeled as “Doctor” Frasier Crane. His ego drove him to attempt escalating tactics to remove the signs, finally culminating in a comedy set piece of him and Niles on a billboard platform in the middle of the night painting out the quotation marks. Eventually, Frasier realized that it wasn’t that he was afraid that Seattle didn’t believe he was really a psychiatrist, but that he wasn’t sure HE really believed it anymore. He needed reassurance that his radio career hadn’t taken his self-image as a doctor away from him. Ultimately, it was Martin, his father, who took advice he’d heard on Frasier’s show, unknowingly convincing Frasier he was still a good, effective, practicing psychiatrist.

This spec captured a lot of the central themes of that show. It was psychological, allowing Frasier to self-analyze. It had a big block comedy scene for Niles and Frasier. It showed Frasier torn between his most Niles-like impulses and his most Martin-like impulses. And it gave Frasier a way in which to learn and grow a little tiny bit.

Now, obviously, not every Frasier episode centered on Frasier. Niles was almost as important a character, and his arc drove many episodes. Martin, Roz, probably even Eddie could serve as the central figure for a produced episode. But with a spec, you aren’t just writing a typical episode. You are writing, in a way, the prototypical episode. The distilled, concentrated Essence du Show. Play with the most central character, using the themes that are most central to that character’s character, using a structure as close as possible to what the show usually uses.

But find a way to be fresh. Don’t do something they’ve already done a million times. Sound hard? Oh god, yes. But when you find that story, everything else will get easy. The act breaks will fall into place, jokes will come more easily, because the story will have a naturalness to it. Even as two prissy adult brothers correct punctuation on a billboard.

A big thank-you to Waylon Wyche, who wrote me a very much appreciated letter. Good luck, WW!

My Lunch: Chicken and waffles at Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffle!

Hey, remember Buffy’s mom? She had that brain tumor and she got really sick. But then she turned a corner and she got better, stronger, healthier every week. And then she dropped dead and it felt like the floor fell out from under your feet. That’s what happened to Jake in Progress this week. Every day, it seemed more and more likely that we were going to film the entire order, to shoot all 13 episodes. We showed up for work on Thursday, expecting to actually spend a late night re-writing episode ten. Then, not so much. Jake was gone.

Other than the five years at Buffy, I’ve walked into a new job every year of my writing career. This is quite normal. More shows die than live. During that year, you meet and work with a new group of people. The writing staff. You may see the actors now and then. If you spend a lot of time on the stage you may even see them every day. But the other writers… those are your people. Working on a writing staff is a strangely intimate experience. You share the room with these five-to-twelve people for very long hours, doing a job that requires you to discuss your own life and emotional landscape. The rules of the room don’t allow for a lot of “I’d rather not discuss it,” either, so there’s not much that goes unplumbed. And then, with very little warning it all ends with an extravagent lunch at Ivy By The Shore and a series of hugs. Everyone says “I’m sure we’ll work together again.” I’ve said that a lot over the years. Once it even happened. We worked together again.

I’ve loved my return to half-hour comedy. Joke-writing is a gloriously satisfying experience. And it’s mysterious. All the best joke writers I’ve ever known have at some point said, after pitching a very funny line, “I don’t know where that came from.” Artistic inspiration taking the form of a put-down joke or piece of wordplay. Now, that’s a fun job.

The Jake in Progress staff was great. I’ll miss all of them. I’m sure we’ll work together again. Sniff.

Yesterday’s lunch: rich corn chowder and a hot fudge sundae at Ivy By The Shore
Today’s lunch: health food from the gym

UPDATE: This post is misleading — Jake was not cancelled, merely had its order reduced. See the later post “Clarification” for more details.

A few politically-oriented web sites run by friends of mine have kindly linked to this humble blog. As a result, I understand that I’m getting some new visitors, all a-staggering in and blinking around at the non-political content in confusion. So I’ve decided to address the issue of politics in the writers’ room.

The general assumption seems to be that the creative forces in Hollywood are uniformly liberal and liberally uniform. And certainly, I’ve met more writers who identify themselves as democrats than those who identify themselves as republicans. But it’s not a hundred percent. Not nearly. And on almost every show in my career, I’ve found myself in a political argument at some point with someone to the right of me. (To the political right I mean, although in half the cases they were also literally to the right of me.) Sometimes these writers self-identified as conservative. But usually they thought of themselves as liberal, but just felt that “some people” “took things” “too far.”

I think this is because comedy writers tend to see sensitivity to the feelings of others as anti-comedic. Political correctness is the enemy of funny, they declare. If we eliminate jokes at the expense of those who are different than us, we’ll be left shivering and naked in a comedy landscape made of nothing but self-deprecation and puns. This is nonsense, of course. Any joke that’s only funny after you’ve glanced around the room to check the demographics, is probably not a joke worth telling. And I don’t just say this because such jokes are mean-spirited. Although that would be reason enough. Here’s why I say this:

Racist/sexist/homophobic jokes in fact tend NOT to be funny not only because they cause pain, but because they are bombs instead of scalpels. A joke that pokes fun at a person is sharpest, funniest, when it finds that perfect detail, the most subtle observation of what sets that person apart. Someone’s race or gender is unlikely to be the most subtle thing about them, and certainly it’s not the most specific.

This is the same as the difference between the truly talented impersonator and some guy who just “does accents.” One trades in the specific and one in the general.

I mentioned Jane Austen in another post. She was a master at creating characters with tiny precise foibles which were observed and punctured by other characters, also created by her. Fantastic. You know who else did this well? Frasier. M*A*S*H. Mary Tyler Moore. Ellen. Buffy. Get precise! It’s funny!

My lunch: Chicken noodle soup and a baked apple!

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