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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

This is an expansion of an idea I presented yesterday. But this time it comes with an anecdote!

When I was in grad school at UC Berkeley, I got a part-time job at a company that named products. It was a fantastic job and I loved it. While I was there, I heard a few rumors about a just-completed project in which the company had generated hundreds of fake movie titles. Some of the namers wondered out loud what the project had been *for*. Were they really naming movies, they wondered; is that how it’s done?

Within months, I got into the Disney fellowship. Although I was a television fellow, we all mixed freely with the feature fellows. Some of them told me about a brainstorming exercise they participated in as part of the program. They were given a long list – hundreds – of fake movie titles. They had to pick their favorites and then pitch stories to fit the titles. Where could such a list have come from, they wondered; do studios really have piles of potential titles lying around?

I will never know *for sure* if there was a connection.

But I’m sure that this is a pretty great brainstorming technique. And not just for features.

Throwaway
Dragonchasers
Circles
Pay in Pain
Scar Tissue

Those are titles of episodes of The Shield. Great titles. Evocative. Don’t they just make you all… speculative? What if your House spec had one of those titles? Your Battlestar Galactica? THEN what would it be about?

Playing this game doesn’t mean the resulting spec will even have this title, of course. It’s just meant to be a springboard, freeing your brain from its well-worn tracks. Personally, I have a great title for a series, that I’ve been rolling around for a while now. Someday, I’ll know what the show is.

Coming up: Oh, I’ve still got more to say about titles.

Lunch: Starbucks ice-blended mocha and a scone. Sound more like breakfast? Maybe, but breakfast was pasta in putanesca sauce.

This is a special supplemental post to tell you about a project from one of the other writers in the Andy Barker, PI writers’ room. Josh Bycel, a really sharp and funny writer, is also the founder of a non-profit organization that’s setting out to do some really great stuff. I’ll let him tell you about it:

“One Kid One World started with bringing a few soccer balls and some pens and paper to
a refugee camp in Darfur, Sudan. It has now blossomed into an organization
dedicated to making a difference in the lives of children around the
globe…one kid, one school, one refugee camp at a time.

OKOW’s first project is a campaign for the Nyamasare Girls School and
Orphanage in the Suba District of Kenya.

We are committed to raising a minimum of $20,000 to benefit the girls who
attend…most of whom have lost at least one of their parents to AIDS.
Nyamasare is the only girl’s school in Suba. It is an amazing refuge for
young women in a place where close to 70% of the population lives below the
poverty line, less than 10% of girls are able to attend secondary school and
the HIV/AIDS infection rate currently stands at 41% – the highest rate in
Kenya and one of the highest rates in East Africa.

The school desperately needs YOUR help. Your donation will allow 75 girls
to attend school for a year as well as buy them books, school supplies and
uniforms. In addition, the money will help build an athletic field and
dormitory and buy generators to power the school.

Please visit our new website at onekidoneoworld.org for
more information on:

1. How to DONATE or get involved.
2. The Nyamasare School and the Suba district of Kenya.

OKOW is committed to making sure that %100 of your donation goes to the
school. Not many other organizations can make that promise.”

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!

When I opened the letter from Shelah of Studio City, I was excited to see a page from a produced script fall out. It was like being a spy and getting a coded note. She enclosed the page, from an episode of Medium, so that she could call my attention to the show’s stage directions. She asks about the degree to which someone writing a spec Medium should imitate the show’s style when it comes to writing stage directions.

Here is a sample of what she’s talking about, taken from the script page:

—
ON ALLISON

…HEARING the DOOR CLOSE behind her. And she looks at the small mountain of files. And after a moment pulls herself up and out of her seat and makes her way over to them. And without all that much enthusiasm, picks one up and opens it, turns herself around and leans against the table as she reads…

THE FORM

…filled out in pen. And as Allison and we SEE IT, Allison HEARS IT…

—

Hmm. They’re good, evocative directions. But they’re very detailed (“… leans against the table…”). Especially for a series of actions that aren’t especially complex. To me, they feel like the writing of someone who wants to make very sure that a director films something a certain way, and that an actor gets the mood of the moment. They’re directions tailored for a production.

If I were writing a spec Medium, I would probably dial it back a bit. I want the script to *feel* like a real ep of the show, but I simply don’t want or need to go into this much detail. Although I want a reader to be able to “see” the actions, I don’t want to exhaust their patience with a lot of detail about who is leaning on what. I’m not writing for a director or an actor.

And what about the “Ands”? I’ve never seen that particular quirk, of starting so many of the directions with “And.” It’s clearly a device the writer is using as a sort of substitute for bullet points. If EVERY produced ep of Medium uses this technique, I would probably adopt and adapt it for my script… it could be done very subtly. But if it doesn’t seem to be an established trademark of the show’s scripts, I would probably just write the directions in the way that feels the most natural to me. After all, whoever reads your spec probably won’t have read so many produced Mediums that they’d notice or care about that particular difference.

Shelah apologetically uses the title of this blog entry in her letter. And I think it’s very apt as well as delightfully punny. Sometimes a compromise between your own style and the show’s style is the best solution.

Lunch: Chicken from Koo Koo Roo. No yams though. Sigh.

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