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That recent post about the importance of having original specs, as opposed to specs for existing shows, cited one important exception. The Office. It is, right now, the ubiquitous comedy spec, so I want to talk about the special problems that accompany writing the same show as everyone else.

First, I want to mention that this all takes me back to when I was starting out. I attended a UCLA extension course on television writing during my first year in LA. The guy running the course asked us how many of us had Seinfeld specs. Every single hand went up — at least a hundred Seinfeld specs were represented in that room that night. I myself had *two* Seinfeld specs and should have raised both my hands. As The Office is now, it was simply the spec that every single comedy writer had. You know what I would love to see? A collection of the old Seinfeld specs of every high-level comedy writer working today. Because they all had them.

Anyway, keep the ubiquity in mind as you write your spec Office. Remember that it has to stand out from its siblings. And yet, it can’t be so outrageous, so unexpected, that it suggests that you’ve misread the source material. Big stories in spec scripts worry me, particularly for a show like this one that is about capturing small moments of personality. If a bus crashes into the building, I’m not seeing small moments anymore; they’ve been trumped by the Big Event. And I’ve lost the heart of the show. So make the emotions big — break someone’s heart, expose someone to ridicule, reignite joyous hope — but keep the events in the neighborhood of realism. Having to contain your sadness or your joy because you’re in the workplace doing something mundane… that’s powerful, it’s very “The Office,” and it doesn’t work if the workplace has been occupied by terrorists. (Remember that this doesn’t mean the actual show can’t tell these big stories — they get special leeway because they own the cameras.)

Not that you would do that. I’m just sayin’ that it can tend to be an impulse, when you know you’re writing a popular spec, to juice it up. Fine. Juice up the emotional content, not the event content. At least, that’s what I would do.

And, as long as we’re in the area, it occurs to me that some of you were undoubtedly in the middle of writing specs for existing drama shows when I put up that post about writing original pieces. Don’t stop what you were doing, please! Carry on. There is no reason to think that a spec for an existing show won’t be useful. There are certainly show runners who want to see exactly that. It’s simply that, right now, it probably shouldn’t be the only arrow in your quiver.

Lunch: leftover rice from the Persian place, with beans on top

When you’re pitching a pilot to a network, you don’t have to have already picked out a title (although I always have). You do have to tell them about the tone of the show. How funny is it? Does it have a sense of heightened reality? Is it gritty, with hand-held camera work? What other show does it *feel* like?

You don’t get to do that with a spec. A reader will instantly know if your spec is an hour or a half-hour, of course, but they won’t know about tone. And, unlike the executive in the pitch session, they don’t have anyone there to clue them in except the script itself.

That’s one of the reasons the title of a spec pilot is way more important than the title of a pilot you’re actually paid to write. With a spec pilot, there’s important prep-work that the title can do. If you write a spec called “Streetwise” you’re cluing your reader into something tonally different than with one called “Working Under Harriet,” which is also tonally different than “Poodleskirt Diaries.”

Lots of shows that are actually on the air don’t do this, of course. You can tell *nothing* about House from the fact that it’s called House. You can’t tell anything about tone or even genre from that title. But they have promos, publicity, Entertainment Weekly. You don’t, so think long and hard about that title. Make sure it’s doing more for you on that title page than just filling the space above your name.

Lunch: Lamb and rice and that rose-flavored ice cream from Shamshiri, a Persian restaurant

As I do periodically, I recently checked in with an agent to find out which established shows were currently being recommended as specs. I expected to hear that Grey’s Anatomy and House were still strong in hours, and that The Office was still the current hot half-hour. I also thought I might hear that Heroes and 20 Rock specs *might* be starting to slip onto the scene.

Other than that thing about The Office, though, which *is* still apparently *the* half-hour to have, my predictions were wrong. For the first time since I’ve been asking the question, I was told that the agent wasn’t recommending *any* established shows at all! Spec pilots, as well as original plays and short film scripts were *all* that she recommended for young writers putting together their collection of samples.

Wow. That’s kind of earth-shaking — causing me to scatter emphasis-asterisks like snowflakes. Or maybe it’s just taken me this long to listen to what agents have been edging toward over the last several years. I seriously expected to hear that, with the current healthy array of quality dramas, specs for established shows were rebounding. But apparently not.

Personally, I think this is a shame. So much stuff goes into writing a good original pilot that isn’t really relevant to whether or not a writer will be good on a staff. And, conversely, original material tells a reader nothing about a writer’s ability to capture an established voice. AND, spec features and plays don’t even tell the reader about the writer’s fluency with the limitations of television writing. So I sigh. But I pass the information along to you, gentle readers. And I will continue, as I have been, trying to post hints that will help you in the writing of these original pieces.

Lunch: corned beef hash, poached eggs, home fries

They did something very interesting on the season premiere of “Rome” on HBO the other night. Are you aware of this show? It’s wonderful. Bloody and funny and full of stuff you remember from Western Civ, only with real, fragile people in it and an occasional “as it is, so it ever was” wink to our own times. And, in this latest episode, there was also an interesting awareness that another writer had already tackled this subject matter. It is a unique and interesting problem. Spoilers ahead.

Okay, last season ended with Julius all bloody and dead on the senate floor. So at this point, you might be expecting some political maneuvering and speechifying from Brutus and Marc Antony. But imagine you’re the writer of this. You’ve got a substantial problem on your hands. Someone has already written those speeches. Someone really good has written those speeches. Do you really want to sit down and start figuring out something *catchier* than “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him…”? Man.

So here’s the solution they came up with… We get the maneuvering, and, sure enough, the speeches are on the horizon… but we don’t see them. Instead, we get this great working class guy in a bar in the aftermath, *telling about the speeches*. We hear about Brutus’ labored effort that went over everyone’s head, and then about how Marc Antony slayed ’em all with his beautiful pathos. We hear it from a character who was personally emotionally affected by the speeches.

This probably isn’t the choice the writers would’ve made in a World Without Will. It was distanced from the event, obviously. But it was still emotional, it was elegant, and it neatly side-stepped the problem. I approve. And I love the fact that the show pretty much assumes their audience is familiar with Shakespeare. Amazing. After all, there are shows that don’t even assume we’re familiar with the contents of the previous scene.

Now this problem, as I said, is unique, or it must at least be nearly so. How many shows have to deal with already having been written? But there is something very similar that can happen on all shows, and it can happen in your spec, too. Events can become predictable even if Shakespeare hasn’t gotten to them yet.

I’m sure you’ve noticed this as a viewer. Do you ever fast-forward through a scene, even on a show you enjoy, because it’s already clear exactly what’s going to happen?

Look for these scenes in your spec. Are there any that feel inevitable? Did you write them quickly but without excitement? Do you find yourself skipping them when you reread? If the end of a scene *dictates* the entire contents of the next scene, ask yourself if there’s some way to lose that next scene.

Cut it. Cut it. Cut it. After all, it ain’t Shakespeare.

Lunch: leftover chopped Italian salad from Maria’s. Not bad even the next day.

“Style” is a word that makes me nervous when it’s applied to clothing or home decorating. It just sounds so, risky, you know? If you attempt stylishness and fall short, then you’re just standing there in your seersucker culottes, looking silly and wondering what went wrong. But if you know what you’re doing, “style” is what sets you apart. It conveys confidence.

I noticed a stylish little scriptwriting move the other night on The Simpsons. A group of new army recruits is being addressed by their sergeant. We’re ANGLED ON the sergeant, giving his lecture. Talk, talk, funny, funny… and then he tells them all that due to lack of time, while he’s been talking, their hair has been cut and they’ve been put into their uniforms. ANOTHER ANGLE REVEALS that this is true. Now, of course, this is amusing because of the absurdity of it. But it is also incredibly elegant. Instead of using a DISSOLVE to indicate passage of time, the story has been advanced efficiently and in a way that underscores one of the main story points, that the pressure of an on-going war is speeding up the recruitment process. Also, I would argue, doing it this way emphasizes the recruits’ own sudden sense of powerlessness.

But that’s an animated show. They can do that stuff. What about something with real people in it? Well, a recent episode of 30 Rock did something similar. Tina Fey holds a co-worker’s baby. She twirls around with this baby in her arms, and then, suddenly, the camera angle reveals we’ve changed location. She realizes, at the same time the viewers do, that she is in her apartment. She has taken someone else’s baby home. Again, there was humor in the absurdity, and again, the story was elegantly and efficiently advanced, because the audience was put in the same position as Tina… startled with the realization of what must’ve just happened.

And it doesn’t even have to be played for comedy. The most shocking, wonderful moment on Battlestar was when the show “jumped ahead” one year. They could’ve handled this in a lot of different ways. They did it by pushing in on the tangled, burdened, top-of-the-head of Gaius Baltar, slumped on a desk, and then pulling out again to reveal that everything had changed. It was a stunning moment, made all the more stunning because it happened under our noses like a magic trick. Again, it was being used to purposefully disorient the viewers for a reason. In this case, the viewers got a sense of how unstoppable the events of the missing year were, how they had followed with a kind of inevitability from everything that led up to them. Ooh, it was nice.

So look at your script. Look at how you’ve got time passing, scenes following scenes. You know how to just slap events down in order now. So start looking for ways to be stylish about it. The things I’ve described don’t just look cool on the screen, they work on the page as well. They make you look really skilled. They’re style.

Lunch: sushi at Echigo. Skip the crab roll at the end, pay to have them bring you more whitefish instead. I did, and I have no regrets.

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