by John Vorhaus
You learn the rules of a show by reading sample scripts of that show and watching taped episodes. Read these scripts and watch these episodes over and over again, until you have an understanding not only of the show’s form and structure but also of its hidden logic, its taste in stories, and its sense of humor.
A show’s rules extend to all aspects of that show. Which character gets the main story? Who gets the secondary stories? Is someone a straight man? Do characters tell jokes and make wisecracks, or do all the laughs come from the characters’ comic perspectives? What sort of language do these people use? What topics are taboo? Do they make reference to the outside world or do they live within a hermetically sealed sitcom bubble? Will given characters act the fool? To write a spec script correctly, you need all this information and more. It’s not simply a matter of ready, aim, fire the pie.
SITCOM STORY STRUCTURE
Situation comedies are structured either as two-act or three-act tales. Mad About You, M*A*S*H, and Married . . . with Children are two-act structures; Murphy Brown and The Simpsons play in three acts. Each act ends with an act break, a big dramatic moment that (one hopes) creates a sense of expectation and dread strong enough to hold the viewers’ interest across the commercial break and bring them back for more.
In a two-act structure, look for your act break to be a moment of maximum dread. At the act break, things should be as bad for your characters as they can possibly get. If your story is about a husband and wife fighting, then at the act break the husband is banished to the couch or the garage or the best friend’s house. If your story is about characters trapped in the basement, then the act break is when they break a big pipe and the water starts to rise. If your story is about a character getting blasted on cough medicine with his new boss coming over, then the act break is when the boss arrives just as the cough medicine kicks in.
Not many years ago, some genius had the bright idea to divide the show into three parts and thus make room for extra commercials. By this logic, we’ll soon have four-act and five-act sitcoms, and eventually twelve-act sitcoms, with commercials every two minutes. Be that as it may, in three-act structure, as in two-act structure, it’s necessary for the moment before each commercial to have some real drama and urgency to carry the viewer over the break.
I like to think of my three-act act breaks in terms of trouble is coming and trouble is here. At the end of the first act, the characters know that a bad thing is looming. At the second act break,
the consequences of that bad thing have been brought home. This second break corresponds roughly with the moment of maximum dread in traditional two-act structure.
In an episode of Murphy Brown, trouble might be coming in the form of a summons for Murphy to appear in court and reveal a confidential source. Trouble arrives when she’s thrown in jail for not revealing the source. In an episode of The Simpsons, trouble is coming when Bart learns that he has to write a term paper by tomorrow morning, and trouble is here when he wakes at dawn, having fallen asleep in the middle of his work.
In any event, your act break or breaks must create a sense of expectation, a large, pervading, “Oh no!” feeling in your reader or your viewer. Here’s where your skill at making bad things worse will really come in handy. Again we face the surprising notion that comedy is less about laughs than about willful, perverse destruction of a character’s serenity and peace. Cherish this perversity and use it in your writing; if you use it in real life, they tend to throw you in jail.
No matter what happens in your story, remember that situation comedies are essentially circular; things always end up more or less back where they started. If a character gets fed up with his family and moves out of the house, clearly the act break is the moment when he leaves. Just as clearly, the story will end with the character having moved back home. Why this is so has to do with the episodic nature of commercial television. In the main, audiences return to a sitcom each week to see their favorite characters doing pretty much the same things they did last week and the week before that.
Which is not to say that there’s no change in a sitcom story. In fact, there’s a subtle and interesting change in every sitcom story, and understanding this change is the key to understanding sitcom story structure.
THE ARC OF STABILITY
Sitcom stories start out at a point of old stability, travel through increasing instability, and ultimately arrive at a new stability. You might have an episode, for example, where the old stability is that dad doesn’t allow his daughter to date. Through increasing instability, dad and daughter have conflict over this subject. Dad forbids, daughter defies, dad discovers, daughter lies, etc. Finally you’d reach a new stability, in which dad and daughter agree that dating is okay within responsible and agreed-upon limits. (If this sounds like conventional sitcom morality, it is, but then again, a sitcom is just a mirror on the world; it tends to tell people exactly what they want to hear. If not, it tends to get canceled.)
To take another example, the old stability might be a character’s denial that she’s growing old. Instability might come in the form of an accident or an illness or the death of a relative or friend. The new stability would be the character’s realization that she is indeed growing old, but that’s okay. The arc of travel from old stability to new stability is frequently a trip from denial to acceptance.
Notice how this type of story flows naturally from a point of departure to a point of maximum remove and back again to a point very near the original point of departure. Also notice that looking at your story on this level is a form of abstraction. Once you’ve identified an interesting old stability, instability, and new stability, you’ll find literally dozens of stories to explore built in this same vein. Do yourself a favor and explore all these alternatives at length. Don’t assume that the first solution is the best solution; always make room for the new idea.
Spend some minutes now and see if you can build some stories on a track from old stability through instability to new stability. I’ll start you off.
OLD STABILITY: A husband and wife love each other.
INSTABILITY: They feel mutually unloved, underappreciated, and taken for granted.
NEW STABILITY: They rekindle their romance and love each other anew.
OLD STABILITY: A teenage boy is living at home.
INSTABILITY: He feels crowded by his parents’ rules and moves into a bachelor flat with his buddies, where he discovers that independence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
NEW STABILITY: He returns home with a new appreciation for his family.
OLD STABILITY: A girl is in denial about her parents’ death.
INSTABILITY: A pet dies, and at its funeral, the girl falls apart and finally opens herself up to grief.
NEW STABILITY: The girl achieves acceptance of her parents’ death.
OLD STABILITY: A man has a job.
INSTABILITY: The man gets laid off.
NEW STABILITY: The man gets a new job.
This last example may seem absurdly elementary, but it’s telling just the same. If you can’t reduce your story to something this simple, then you don’t fully understand it yet. Like the Comic Throughline, this sort of shortcut serves both as a point of departure for deeper story exploration and as a means of checking to see that your story has an authentic arc of change. Give it a shot.
OLD STABILITY:
INSTABILITY:
NEW STABILITY:
OLD STABILITY:
INSTABILITY:
NEW STABILITY:
OLD STABILITY:
INSTABILITY:
NEW STABILITY:
In the end, structure without substance is like a chocolate egg with no nougat center. To make your characters’ changes of state interesting to the audience, you have to tell a worthwhile story—or two—and link them to a compelling, or at least an engaging theme.
A-STORY, B-STORY, AN
D THEME
Many, though not all, situation comedies slice themselves up into a-story and b-story. The a-story is the main story, the big problem, the heavy emotional issue with which a given half-hour of television reality chooses to concern itself. Typically, the a-story is given to the star of the show, the main character. Also, the a-story explores the theme of the episode. Whether that theme is, “tell the truth,” or “be true to your school,” or “don’t do stupid things,” it’s played out in the largest, deepest, and most dramatic sense in the a-story.
The b-story is much smaller and lighter than the a-story. Usually involving secondary characters, it carries far less emotional weight and gets less screen time than the a-story. In a well-crafted sitcom, there’s a thematic connection between the a-story and the b-story, in which the b-story comments on and amplifies the meaning of the a-story.
I like to think of the a-story as the melody and the b-story as the harmony. If your a-story had a certain Mr. Wacky hassling his boss for a raise, for example, then your b-story might involve Wacky’s kids dunning him for a bigger allowance. If your a-story involved Wacky trying to kick his heroin habit, the b-story might involve his girlfriend battling a coffee jones.
Do the a-story and the b-story have to be connected in this way? No, of course not: In the a-story, Wacky goes to jail, and in the b-story, his cousin has a zit. Or it may be that the a-story and the b-story only intersect when one solves the problem of the other. For instance, if Mr. Wacky has a dilemma over whether to fudge his taxes, he might find the answer in forcing his daughter to do her own algebra homework rather than cheat off a friend. Are stories stronger if they’re thematically linked? I think so. It’s harder to get this kind of story right, but the reward is worth the effort.
ANOTHER SITCOM STORY SHORTCUT
Because not all strategies work for all writers, I’d like to introduce another quick-and-dirty way to get a line on your sitcom story. To use this shortcut, think in the following terms: introduction, complication, consequence, and relevance.
The introduction to a sitcom story is the thing that gets the trouble started or puts the tale in motion. An out-of-town guest arrives. An old girlfriend turns up. A first date looms. A driver’s license expires. A vacation starts.
The complication is the thing that makes the bad situation worse. If the introduction is one character taking cough medicine, the complication is another character bringing the boss home for dinner. If the introduction is one character running for school office, the complication is another character entering the race. If the introduction is a character weaving a lie into an English essay, the complication is that essay winning a major prize. If the introduction is Mr. Wacky going to the doctor, the complication is discovering he only has three weeks to live.
The consequence is the result of the conflict created by the introduction and the complication. If two people are running for the same office, then the consequence is the outcome of the election. In the cough-medicine story, the consequence is when the cough medicine blows up, so to speak, in the boss’s face. The consequence of Mr. Wacky facing death is his coming to terms with his mortality, only to discover (since we’d like to run the series for another five years or so) that he’s not actually dying after all.
The relevance is simply a statement of the story’s theme. And, by the way, a theme is best expressed as an imperative, and instruction, a call to action. Stand by your friends. Do the right thing. Don’t fear the future. Stop and smell the roses. Accept your own mortality. Shower the people you love with love; that sort of thing.
Here’s how an episode of Gilligan’s Island might lay out. Introduction: An alien spacecraft lands on the island. Complication: Gilligan befriends the aliens, who agree to take him home. Consequence: Gilligan worries that the aliens will be exploited and lets them leave without him. Relevance: Do the right thing, even if it costs you.
Or suppose you had a sitcom called Bed and Breakfast about a couple’s conflict over how to run their little inn. Knowing nothing about these characters and their lives, you could nevertheless construct a neat little four-sentence story for them.
Introduction: Buddy books his old frat-rat pals and their poker game into the bed and breakfast. Complication: Beth books a group of genteel bird-watchers for the same weekend. Consequence: Things get out of hand, and Beth and Buddy have to cooperate to manage the crowd. Relevance: Communicate!
You may think that storytelling of this sort is facile—all surface, no substance. Certainly you don’t know everything you need to know about a story in four sentences. But everything you need to know is implied in those four sentences—if they’re the right ones.
As an exercise, take an existing situation comedy, or make up one of your own, and see if you can crack some shortcut stories for that show.
My show is called Mr. Wacky, and it’s about a former kids’-show host now running a retirement home for over-the-hill actors.
Wacky sets up an illegal casino to raise money to pay off the I.RS. The police bust the casino, and Wacky is thrown in jail. Wacky’s impassioned courtroom defense beats both the gambling charges and the I.RS. audit. Theme: Fight city hall.
Wacky’s doctor tells him to go on a diet. Wacky tries but fails to diet, and ultimately has a heart attack. During his near-death experience, he sees the error of his ways. Theme: Make your life count.
Wacky goes on a game show, where he’s a big winner. Then he discovers that the game is fixed. Sacrificing his new-found fame and fortune, Wacky blows the whistle on the crooked game. Theme: To thine own self be true.
This tool of shorthand storymaking (which works for all kinds of stories, and not just sitcoms) is especially useful when you’re shopping for story ideas. If you generate a long list of stories developed only to the level of introduction, complication, consequence, and relevance, you’ll know pretty quickly which are the good ones without having to do a whole lot of extra work.
Another thing to look for with this shortcut is what I call the implied fireworks scene. A well-structured sitcom story often suggests or implies a big, climactic scene in which all the fireworks explode or all the pies get thrown or all the hidden secrets get revealed. Just as you should be able to draw a line from old stability to new stability, in a well-structured story you can draw a clear line from your story’s introduction to its implied fireworks scene.
If your story’s introduction is a character taking home-brewed cough medicine, the implied fireworks scene is when the character acts outrageously in front of the worst possible person at the worst possible time. If your story starts with a lie, any lie, the implied fireworks scene is the one where the truth is finally told. Again, you can’t know the details of the implied fireworks scene just in a sentence, but giving it a name tells you where to look for answers.
Often the implied fireworks scene turns on a decision, which turns out to be the key to the entire story. Suppose you had a sitcom about a retired pro football player. In a given episode, he might get a shot at returning to the game. Without knowing anything else about that episode, you can pretty well be sure that the implied fireworks scene will be the one where the footballer decides, once and for all, what to do about his lingering pro dreams. Old stability: Character feels that his career is over. Instability: Character gets one last chance. New stability: Character accepts that the past is, indeed, past.
Spend some time now working with these storytelling tools and find out which ones work best for you.
STORY OUTLINES
Before you write a sitcom script, you’ll want to write a full and complete story outline. This document is a present-tense telling of your tale, incorporating as much detail, as much real emotion, and as much funny incident as you can cram onto the page. Typically, this piece of prose runs ten pages, more or less, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule on length. You simply want to tell the story as completely as possible, for your story outline will be
the blueprint from which you write the script.
Warning: If you’re new to writing situation comedies, this is the part of the process you’re most likely to overlook. Maybe you’ll say, “Outline? We don’ need no stinkin’ outline,” and you’ll plunge directly into your script, confident of working out the story as you plug along in the script. Folks, take it from someone who’s been there, that way lies madness. If you shortchange your time in outline, it will only come back to haunt you in script. Why? Story problems. By writing and rewriting and rewriting your outline many times, you’ll reveal your story problems and then solve them as they appear. It is several orders of magnitude easier to fix problems in outline than it is to fix them in script for the simple reason that you have fewer words, and far fewer pages, to change. Do yourself a favor: Obsess on the outline; make sure the story works before you go to script.
Here’s what a typical paragraph from a story outline might look like:
ACT ONE/SCENE ONE - WACKY LIVING ROOM – DAY
MR. WACKY is channel-surfing, marveling that all fifty-seven stations have managed to synchronize their commercial breaks. His teenage son, DWIGHT, comes in from school, acting nonchalant but obviously hiding something. Wacky pressures Dwight until Dwight reveals that a girl has asked him out on a date. This is bad? wonders Wacky. Is there something about Dwight’s gender identification that Wacky ought to know? No, no, Dwight’s a breeder; it’s just that this girl has a “fast” reputation, and Dwight heard that she’s only interested in his body. Dwight feels exploited. Wacky solemnly agrees that no one deserves to be treated as a sex object, but after Dwight leaves the room, Wacky pumps his fist in triumph: “Yes! My son’s a stud!”
Once you’ve completed a first draft of your story outline, you want to examine it at length for two things: problems and opportunities. Problems are flaws in the logic or the sense of your story. Opportunities are all the myriad ways you can make the story stronger and more interesting, and its scenes funnier, livelier, and deeper, before you even get to script.
