STORY MAPS: TV Drama: The Structure of the One-Hour Television Pilot

by Daniel Calvisi

  The Week-to-Week also addresses a pivotal part of any show: the audience. What will they see and how will they feel? Here is my estimation of the Week-to-Week for three of our sample shows:

  Scandal: Olivia Pope and her team solve a crisis for a client that mirrors her/their personal struggles.

  The Walking Dead: Rick and the survivors deal with a new threat from the zombies and their fellow humans.

  True Detective (Season 1): Cohle and Hart use more extreme measures to pursue the case as their personal lives go further off the rails.

  Keep in mind that a “premise pilot” may not utilize the Week-to-Week engine of subsequent episodes. For example, the Week-to-Week of The Walking Dead hinges on Rick’s interaction with his fellow survivors, but in the pilot, he has not yet met up with them. When you look at the beat sheets for our sample pilots (in Case Studies), try to determine if the pilot utilizes the same Week-to-Week engine as future episodes. (You’ll have to be familiar with the show to do this.)

  It should also be noted that heavily serialized shows may not even have a defined Week-to-Week structure. They will always have familiar devices, like in Game of Thrones it seems like someone is often being taken hostage, or in Mad Men they often present ad campaigns to clients. But those things don’t always happen. There is no way to predict which characters or plots will be focused on in each episode.

  This is why it can be especially difficult to pitch a serialized show: it’s hard for someone else to “get” the Week-to-Week. (But nothing’s easy to sell in Hollywood, so just write a show you would watch.)

  Where and how you begin your pilot is a crucial decision, considering that your opening pages are your first and only chance to grab the reader. So think long and hard about how you will bring the reader into the world of your story.

  You may want to utilize a framing device, like in True Detective with the interviews with Cohle and Hart in 2012, which prompt flashbacks to 1995 and 2002. The interviews establish the context for the time jumps, as well as provide key exposition.

  Your way in may be through a character. In Scandal, Quinn, the new hire at Olivia Pope’s crisis management firm, is the Newborn who acts as our proxy to get crucial exposition.

  Consider a high-energy, high-stakes opening scene to really grab your reader. We’ll never forget the explosive Teasers of our favorite shows: Sheriff Rick Grimes having to shoot a zombie child in The Walking Dead. Walter “Underwear Man” White crashing his RV in the desert in Breaking Bad. The plane crash sequence that opens Lost.

  However you open your pilot, just make sure you get to the story as soon as possible. The only person more anxious than the viewer is the industry reader. I know, because I’ve spent years being both!

  SEASONAL ARCS

  A TV season used to last 24-26 episodes. New episodes, interspersed with the occasional re-run (remember that term?), stretched the TV season from fall to early summer. As a viewer, by the time you got to May sweeps, you probably couldn’t remember how the season began in September, so techniques like subtle callbacks and bookending were not very effective.

  Today, only “broadcast” network (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) shows air over 20 episodes in a season. Outside of them, drama series seasons tend to be in the 10-13 episode range and new episodes air each week until the season concludes, creating an unbroken block of “appointment” television. If the network even airs re-runs, they will often save them for a marathon to precede the next season’s opener. If the series is an original from a streaming service like Netflix, then an entire season is made available at the same time. DVRs and streaming have made “binge” viewing and repeated viewings easier, so viewers are scrutinizing their favorite shows more than ever, and looking at each season as a whole.

  Great series come up with new scenarios and settings for each season that brilliantly continue the Compelling Crisis but with higher stakes, a new setting and a unique threat.

  Downton Abbey Season one ended with the declaration of World War I, so season two begins in a trench battle and deals with the effects of the war upon the Abbey.

  Mad Men Each season finds Don with a new mistress and a new threat to his secret identity. The time period advances, bringing with it new societal pressure and changes in the ad agency.

  Lost I had grown weary of Lost until they started using the “flash forwards” in season four that showed how the survivors got off the island. This device, coupled with the Showrunners’ announcement that the sixth season would be the show’s last, injected a new level of urgency into the show.

  Friday Night Lights The third season saw the coach pushed out of the comfortable West Side and forced to take a job on the East Side, where the football program had no money and a weak bench.

  Dexter Each season of Dexter introduced a “dynamic ally/villain” who learned Dexter’s secret and either wanted to kill him or join him. The Trinity Killer (John Lithgow) in season four and Lumen (Julia Stiles) in season five are good examples of this device.

  SERIES ARCS

  The best dramas also offer a steep arc of change over the length of the series. This may take the form of slowly answering a major dramatic question (What is the island?) or showing us the steps leading up to an inevitable end (On Downton Abbey, we always knew that their age of pomp and circumstance could not last.). The most interesting relationship in Justified was that of lawman Raylan Givens and his perpetual nemesis, Boyd Crowder. Fittingly, the series ended with a conversation between the two men, separated by glass, with Boyd clad in prison orange.

  In some cases, the creators know from the get-go how the series will end, and in others, they’re basically making it up as they go along. With Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan’s plan from the start was for Walter White to go from “Mr. Chips to Scarface,” although Gilligan has said in interviews that they often wrote Walter White into a corner without knowing how they were going to get him out. Mad Men begins in 1960 with Don Draper struggling to come up with a campaign for cigarettes and ends in 1970 with him creating one of the most famous commercials in history, for Coca Cola.

  You don’t have to know the arc of your entire series, but it can’t hurt.

  THE TV DRAMA

  STORY MAP

  The Story Map is a method of constructing and deconstructing a narrative that I originally developed working as a Story Analyst for major studios and production companies and honed over time as I worked with hundreds of writers as a consultant.

  This is how professional screenwriters structure their scripts, and in mapping an existing TV series, you can best see how they did it. The story map reveals the building blocks of the narrative. It's how modern shows are structured and paced, so your script should reflect this structure and pace on the page. If shows are edited this way, then your screenplay should be edited this way as well, so you suck in the reader and give them the experience of an audience member watching your show.

  I always advocate the use of outlines before you begin to write screenplay pages, and the Story Map is the ultimate outline template. This is form, not formula. It does not dictate your story choices; it merely offers a tried-and-true framework to hold your unique characters and plotting. You can use the map to solve story problems before you begin to write pages, saving you months of work and cutting out several ineffective drafts. The amount of detail you fill into your map is up to you, but you should fill in at least a few words in each category. The goal is to create a roadmap to follow as you write, ultimately making the writing process that much easier.

  I separate the map into the “Basic” and “Full” Story Maps. The Basic map compiles the main dramatic elements of the story with a focus on your protagonist, and the Full map breaks down the major “signpost” beats of the plot. Let’s start with...

  THE “BASIC” STORY MAP

  The Basic Story Map collects many of the elements discussed earlier in this book, like your Compelling Crisis, World, and Theme, and puts them in one place for easy reference. If your story is a hous
e, the Basic Story Map is the foundation.

  We already looked at partial Basic maps (in A Fascinating Protagonist) for protagonists from True Detective, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and House of Cards. Now, let’s look at the complete Basic Story Map for the pilot of Scandal.

  As previously mentioned, Scandal is a “third episode” pilot so the Week-to-Week is already in place and will not change once we progress past the pilot (at least for the first season. In subsequent seasons, Scandal became increasingly serialized, focusing on the main characters’ struggles rather than the “case of the week,” which is a common practice these days. But for our purposes, we will remain focused on the pilot.). In the case of a “premise” pilot like The Walking Dead, the Week-to-Week is not yet clear in the first hour.

  Scandal BASIC STORY MAP

  TITLE: SCANDAL

  THEME: Recognizing and sacrificing for true love

  COMPELLING CRISIS: Olivia Pope works in the shadows fixing others’ problems but she can’t fix her secret affair with the most publicly visible man in the world.

  WEEK-TO-WEEK: Olivia Pope and her team solve a crisis for a client that mirrors her/their personal struggles.

  WORLD: Crisis Management in Washington, D.C.

  PROTAGONIST: OLIVIA POPE

  DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC: Tough

  SKILL: Her gut instinct

  MISBEHAVIOR: Denies her own problems

  ACHILLES HEEL/FLAW: Her love for the President

  EXTERNAL GOAL: To prove Sully’s innocence

  INTERNAL GOAL: To stand up to the President

  CENTRAL CONFLICT/ANTAGONIST: Sully and the President

  DYNAMIC ALLY: Quinn

  SHADOW: President Fitzgerald Grant

  ENDING: Olivia inspires Sully to come clean and she decides to take on Grant.

  PILOT ARC: From cold and in control, to weak and vulnerable, to back in control.

  1-HOUR TV DRAMA BASIC STRUCTURE

  There is a standard narrative template used in the television industry that you can use to help guide you as you write your original pilot. From this point forward, I will be focusing mainly on the pilot episodes of Scandal, True Detective, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, House of Cards, Mr. Robot and Breaking Bad, but I encourage you to map your favorite shows to better understand their structure.

  The Basics:

  4-6 Acts: As you can see in “TV Script Lengths” below, many shows choose to call the first act a “Teaser.” Whatever the case, a one-hour drama screenplay is going to be broken into 4-6 acts in total. These act breaks roughly correspond to commercial breaks on advertising-driven networks.

  54-60 pages total: My recent research reveals that most pilots fall into this page range. Established writers often turn in longer pilots, but I suggest you try not to go over 60 pages.

  A, B & C story: There should be at least two plot threads in your pilot—these are referred to as your “A” and “B” stories. It’s up to you if you want to add a C, D or more. Each “story” represents a line of action, which is a character pursuing a goal with a beginning, middle and end.

  One of the most crucial decisions you will make is how many characters and stories to introduce in your pilot. If you cram too many in, it will feel too dense, and if you focus on too few, then the reader won’t get the sense of a bigger story that can sustain 100 episodes. You want a great ending, but it can’t pay off everything, otherwise it will feel too complete or “closed-ended”—like a feature—so you need to leave us hanging to some degree and wanting more. It sounds difficult, because it is! This is a balancing act that every first-time TV writer must learn how to manage.

  Cliffhangers: You don’t want your viewers turning the channel or your readers dropping your script, so it’s imperative that each act (and, ideally, each scene) leaves us wanting to find out what happens next. There should consistently be some sense of escalation of conflict/stakes, a surprising turn in direction or a new mystery to be solved. The end of an act is often referred to as an “Act-Out.”

  TELEVISION SCRIPT FORMAT

  A quick note on format. The basic formatting elements of a one-hour TV drama are essentially the same as that of a feature screenplay. Scene headings, action/description, dialogue, transitions, etc. are treated the same in a scriptwriting software program like Final Draft, but there are a few key differences.

  The most important difference highlights why a 4-6 act structure is so important to TV: the writer actually labels each act in a TV script.

  If you’re going to point out to a reader where you’re placing your act breaks, then you better be absolutely sure you’re placing them correctly! There is no place to hide.

  Unlike in feature screenplays, each act is labeled and usually preceded by a page break. For example, here’s the break from ACT ONE to ACT TWO in a hypothetical sample script (that may or may not be inspired by an actual show). Notice the underlined Act Markers and the page break in-between Act One and Act Two.

  Rick FIRES his Magnum, splitting the noggin of a Walker like a ripe grapefruit, or, at least, a grapefruit that happens to be filled with blood and brains.

  END OF ACT ONE

  ACT TWO

  INT. PRISON – DAY

  Rick plays air hockey with Carl.

  CARL

  Should we be wasting generator

  power on air hockey?

  I’ve seen some pilot scripts that did not bother with a page break after the end of an act, and I honestly thought they looked crowded, like the writer was trying to “cheat” and cram more in than they should. Tactics like this (using really small margins is another classic scam) are immediately obvious to a seasoned reader and mark you as an amateur.

  It should be noted that many pilots written for pay-cable networks like HBO do not use act markers or page breaks. These pilot scripts are written pretty much just like a feature, albeit with fewer pages (feature screenplays generally run in the 100-110 page range). The scripts for True Detective, House of Cards and Mad Men do not label act breaks, although Mad Men contains FADE OUTs where conventional act breaks would go.

  Even if the writers do not insert act break markers, a pilot script is almost always going to be structured in the conventional 4-6 act template.

  As with feature screenplays, a properly formatted teleplay page should roughly equate to one minute of screen time. One page = one minute. Thus, a script for a one-hour drama should max out around 60 pages. The current sweet spot for one-hour pilot scripts seems to be in the range of 54-58 pages.

  Keep in mind that although an average episode on an ad-driven network minus commercials runs only 45-48 minutes, pilot scripts must be longer, at least 50 pages. It is assumed that if it goes to camera, cutting and trimming will be done in post-production. It’s always better to have too much story rather than too little (but try not to exceed 60 pages).

  I’ve seen some pilots from proven show creators that run 70-plus pages, but their long résumé allows them to get away with it. New writers need to prove they can write a concise, active pilot in the industry-standard page range.

  TV Script Lengths

  There are standard page ranges for each act. For reference, I’ve listed the page ranges of some notable pilots below. These breakdowns are taken from the scripts, not the aired episodes. Notice the variations and the similarities in the ranges.

  The Blacklist (NBC) Pilot: Jon Bokenkamp

  Teaser: 1-12

  Act One: 13-21

  Act Two: 22-28

  Act Three: 29-38

  Act Four: 39-44

  Act Five: 45-57

  Bates Motel (A&E) Pilot: Cuse, Ehrin and Cipriano

  Teaser: 1-8

  Act One: 9-22

  Act Two: 23-39

  Act Three: 40-52

  Act Four: 53-58

  Act Five: 59-60

  The Good Wife (CBS) Pilot: King & King

  Teaser: 1-16

  Act One: 17-29

  Act Two: 30-44

  Act Three: 45-54


  Act Four: 55-64

  Devious Maids (Lifetime) Pilot: Marc Cherry

  Teaser: 1-4

  Act One: 5-18

  Act Two: 19-30

  Act Three: 31-39

  Act Four: 40-52

  Sleepy Hollow (FOX) Pilot: Kurtzman & Orci & Iscove

  Act One: 1-14

  Act Two: 15-30

  Act Three: 31-40

  Act Four: 41-47

  Act Five: 48-62

  Extant (CBS) Pilot: Mickey Fisher

  Act One: 1-12

  Act Two: 13-30

  Act Three: 31-43

  Act Four: 44-56

  Act Five: 53-58

  Looking at the page ranges above, you can see that it is the individual choice of each writer on how they want to break up their story. One writer chooses to label the first act a “Teaser,” whereas another labels it “Act One.” A “Teaser plus four” structure is essentially the same as a five act structure; it’s up to the writer how they want to present the material. The writers of “Bates Motel” chose to label the last two pages as “Act Five,” whereas they could have easily just tacked them on to the end of Act Four. (In sitcom scripts, a short epilogue or wrap-up scene is often labeled a “Tag.”)

  There is no absolute right or wrong way to break up your pilot script into Acts, but again, I suggest you stick to the general page ranges above, which are understood and implemented by most professional TV writers. If you turn in a script with 16 acts, you will mark yourself as an amateur.

  How do you decide which act structure will work best with your pilot? The best way is to find an existing series that is similar to yours in tone, genre, material, audience or any other factor you deem important, and use it as a structural template for your pilot. If you can’t find the actual pilot script, watch the pilot episode and write up a scene list. (When pitching your pilot, you may refer to this template show as your “comp,” so the other party can see how your series can easily fall into current programming habits. For example, if your pilot is a legal thriller about a female lawyer, then you could cite The Good Wife as your “comp.” It should go without saying that you should only cite successful shows as comps!)