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4
Preparing the script
In this chapter you will learn:
• about the importance of having original ideas
• what a logline is and how to write one
• about what makes a good TV drama title.
The idea
Any story that you want to write you have to love – you have to want to tell that story because you are going to have to live with it and enthuse about it to other people for a long time. Because you are reading this book, I assume that you have ideas – ideas that you think will make great television.
I want you to think about those ideas for a couple of days and write them down. Then go back and look at the list and cross out anything that seems derivative of a recent or existing show. Your spec script needs to stand out, so doing something that is similar to an existing show will just get lost in the mediocre sea of familiar stories.
Hustle creator and writer Tony Jordan received Hustle-esque scripts at his production company Red Planet in the wake of its success. Jordan wasn’t interested. And why would he be? He was already doing Hustle. In the UK, drama producers look for something new and different rather than attempting a poor copy of an existing successful show.
In the US, there is often a feeding frenzy following a breakout hit of a show, as rival broadcasters seek to mimic that success with what they believe to be what the audience wants. However, you are writing an original spec script, so the rule still applies of creating a story that nobody else is doing. That is what will get you noticed, and not any pale imitation of a Dexter or Blue Bloods.
‘In America Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy all launched in the same season. All brilliantly original but the next year there were loads of shows that were derivative of them and none of them worked, not a single one worked. So the lesson is move on and be original again.’
Ben Stephenson, BBC Head of Drama
So return to your list and look at what is left. What is the story idea you feel most passionate about? Pick that idea and crystallize it into a logline.
The logline
A logline is a one- (or occasionally two-) sentence summary of a story which incorporates:
the who
the premise
the plot.
This sentence will act as a mission statement for your script. Within that sentence you will need to establish who it is about, what they do and the problem they face.
Below is a list of hit TV shows and a single succinct sentence that distils the essence of those shows. You read the sentence and you know the show. Viewers (and commissioners) take an interest in a new show if it has an interesting premise. All of these shows ran for several seasons, but the logline could still apply to any episode of every season.
Breaking Bad Walter White, a timid chemistry teacher who discovers righteous self-empowerment through a life of crime.
Cold Case A female detective engaged in unravelling long, unsolved murder cases.
Doc Martin About a cantankerous surgeon who moves to a small Cornish village where he is to be the new GP.
Grey’s Anatomy The lives, loves and lapses in judgement of five surgical interns at Seattle Grace Hospital.
Hustle About a team of con artists targeting various unsavoury individuals.
Joan of Arcadia Teenager visited by God in various guises.
Life Begins About a mother whose life is totally changed by the breakdown of her marriage and her need to find a job to make ends meet.
New Tricks: Comedy-drama about an unorthodox team of ageing detectives shunning modern investigative techniques in favour of old-fashioned graft.
The O.C. Arrival of underprivileged but streetwise teenager and the impact he has on the family who takes him in and on the community of Newport Beach, Orange County at large.
Scott & Bailey An exploration of the personal and professional lives of female detectives whose task is to track down killers.
Ugly Betty About an unattractive but talented young woman who’s hired by a Vogue-esque magazine to stop the boss’s habit of sleeping with attractive assistants.
Without a Trace About a New York-based FBI division devoted solely to finding missing persons.
Notice that all the descriptions are about a who – in most cases, the main character(s). The second key element is the world your character inhabits. The third element is a flaw or problem that the who has to overcome. These are the three elements that you must include in your logline.
Try this
Now look at your favourite shows and try summing up the essence of that show in one sentence. Do this as a party game where you use those single sentences and see if your friends can guess the shows. The ones that are easily and correctly guessed have the best loglines.
You will probably need several attempts to write the logline for your own show but keep it as succinct as possible. Make sure every word is needed. It will be the first reference that will entice someone into reading your script. It will be included in your covering letter or spoken aloud in a meeting or pitching session at a festival or during a phone call. Competitions, too, often request a logline alongside the script. As the name suggests, the logline will be used to log your script on a company’s system alongside the title.
The title
Titles are not necessarily the easiest to thing to create. Shows can often be developed without a title while others will have just a working title. The best TV show titles are creative and simple. The words used will need to convey something to the reader and entice the viewer.
New Tricks plays on the old adage that you can’t teach an old dog a new trick. What is the show about? A group of old cops who are set in their ways and who solve crimes the old-fashioned way. Hustle with one word sums up the world of the conman. Battlestar Galactica tells us it is a big nebulous futuristic space show. Blue Bloods plays on a term used to refer to royalty and in this case it is the ‘royal’ family of the NYPD – the Reagans.
Other titles can refer to the central character(s) – Chuck, Dexter, Luther and Scott & Bailey – and because those characters are strong and interesting creations the name is enough.
Don’t overcomplicate titles or use words which force the reader or viewer to refer to a dictionary to understand what you mean.
Try this
Below are synopses from two shows that have been seen on both sides of the Atlantic. For each synopsis I want you to write a title and logline. Try several for each. Later in the book we will reveal the actual logline and title of each show.
Synopsis 1
Alicia Florrick is a wife and mother who boldly assumes full responsibility for her family and re-enters the workforce after her husband Peter’s very public sex and political corruption scandal lands him in jail. Pushing aside the betrayal and crushing public humiliation, Alicia starts over by pursuing her original career as a defence attorney. As a junior associate at a prestigious Chicago law firm, she joins her long-time friend, former law school classmate and firm partner Will Gardner, who is interested in rekindling their former relationship. The firm’s top litigator and other partner, Diane Lockhart, likes Alicia’s work and her connections, so she and Will award her a full-time associate position following a trial period. Alicia’s rival for the post was Cary Agos, a clever young attorney, who, now bitter and vengeful, instead takes a job in the state attorney’s office. Alicia finds an ally and a friend in Kalinda, the firm’s tough and mysterious in-house investigator. Gaining confidence every day, Alicia transforms herself from embarrassed politician’s wife to resilient career woman, especially for the sake of providing a stable home for her children, 14-year-old Zach and 13-year-old Grace. Now that Peter is back home and planning to run for office again with help from Eli Gold, his cunning image consultant, Alicia continues to redefine herself and her role in her family’s life.
Synopsis 2
Emma Swan’s life has been anything but a fairy tale. A 28-year-old ba
il bondsperson, she’s been taking care of herself since she was abandoned as a baby. But when Henry – the son she gave up 10 years ago – finds her, everything changes. Henry is desperate for his mom’s help and thinks that Emma is actually the long-lost daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. Yes, the actual Snow White and Prince Charming. Even stranger, Henry believes that Storybrooke, the sleepy New England town he calls home, is really part of a curse cast by the Evil Queen, who has trapped fairy-tale characters in the modern world with no memory of their former selves.
Of course, ‘seen it all’ Emma doesn’t believe a word, but when she gets to Storybrooke, she can’t help sensing that everything’s not quite what it seems. As Henry shows Emma around with the help of his fairy-tale book, the town and its inhabitants (like Henry’s therapist, Archie Hopper, and the enigmatic Mr Gold) seem just strange enough to set off her already suspicious nature. She becomes even more concerned for Henry when she meets his adopted mother, Regina, who he suspects is none other than the Evil Queen herself!
Storybrooke is a place where magic has been forgotten – but is still powerfully close – and happily ever after always seems just out of reach. In order to understand where the fairy-tale world’s former habitants have come from, and what ultimately led to the Evil Queen’s wrath, you’ll need a glimpse into their previous lives. But it might just turn everything you’ve ever believed about these characters upside down.
Meanwhile, the epic battle for the future of all worlds, modern and fairy tale alike, is about to begin. For good to win, Emma will have to accept her destiny and fight like hell.
Key advice
Make sure your idea is original, not derivative.
Make sure the idea can be summed up in a succinct logline – remember, the who, the premise, the plot.
Titles are important – simple and memorable is best.
Industry interview 2: the script editor
INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: HAYLEY MCKENZIE
Hayley McKenzie is one of the industry’s most respected script editors, having worked on shows such as Blue Murder, Casualty and Hollyoaks. She also runs a highly successful script consultancy, Script Angel, where she offers a range of services to help writers with their scripts.
Nicholas Gibbs: What did your role as a script reader involve?
Hayley McKenzie: When you’re a script reader you’re very much more looking at the quality of the writing. It’s not your job to be considering a development slate or the needs of commissioners. Your priority is to serve forwards promising writing. And it is a fantastic job because of the sheer number of scripts that you read. I was reading for a lot of ITV companies, independents and for the BBC, doing drama and comedy. It was a really broad spectrum of genres and of quality of work because a lot of it was unsolicited, which meant that the writers didn’t yet have an agent and often had very little experience.
NG: So you became aware of what makes a good script?
HM: Before I became a script reader I was working for Jane Tranter in BBC Drama Serials as a development co-ordinator so I was able to read all the scripts we had in development. So I had a benchmark. You’ve got a very clear idea of what a good script reads like and you see how that translates because you see that finished project on screen. Very quickly you understand what makes a good script and you can then measure other things against that. I think if you just read unsolicited scripts I’m not sure you’d get a great idea of what makes a good script – that’s why writers need to read great scripts. You don’t have to be working in BBC Drama to do that. There are lots of websites out there where you can download scripts of television dramas and films.
NG: There are some scripts online that are earlier draft versions and some that are transcripts, which are not the same thing. My view is that transcripts don’t serve the same purpose and aren’t as useful as an earlier draft.
HM: I agree. A transcript is much more a reflection of the director’s interpretation of the script rather than what the writer delivered. They go through another metamorphosis once you go into pre-production and you get a director on board. The script performs a slightly different function at that point as well as it becomes a working document for a crew.
NG: What is the most common mistake you see in scripts that can be avoided?
HM: The most common is not having a clear idea of what the story is. I often go back to the writer, having read the script, and say ‘What’s the story?’ Often they can’t tell you in a sentence or two, and if they can’t tell you then they probably haven’t figured it out yet. It is so easily fixable and it’s a kind of slight frustration because I feel that clarity of vision is what should be driving and creating the script. I think it’s something that should have evolved before you send it out for people to have a look at.
NG: Is that lack of clarity down to people sending their work out too early or is it writers suffering from the wood-for-trees syndrome?
HM: I think that clarity of story is something that editors are really focused on and I completely get that often the writer in an early draft doesn’t know what the story is; they’re finding their way into this world, these characters. I am not a writer and I’m in awe of writers because they can sit there with a blank page and create something out of nothing in a way that I can’t. I know many writers who find treatments [story summaries] really, really hard because they don’t know their characters and story until they start writing the script and they start writing the dialogue. So I completely understand that a first draft is very much the writer’s way of finding their way into that story. But as a reader what you would expect is that they will have gone through that process, read that first draft and started to work out what that story is and done a rewrite before they send that script out and say: ‘This is my work.’
NG: Writers on their own can’t make things and the first person of contact is your friendly script reader who will make a decision on it. What does quality of the writing mean in that context?
HM: Well, as a reader I was looking for one of two things. It might be that there is a great idea in here which has been executed poorly but the fact that they have come up with an original idea feels interesting even though it is a bit of a mess. Alternatively, it may not be the most original idea but if it is executed really well then I’m interested because this is someone who’s really thought about what they’re doing, really quite practised at the craft already; it might be that they have other ideas that are more original. Of course a script that does both is an amazing find, but if it is either highly original or brilliantly executed then I would recommend it.
NG: How do you draw the distinction between, on the one hand, the good idea that has been poorly executed and where the writer may thrive on the feedback and, on the other, the writer with a good idea but who is ultimately not a good writer?
HM: I think in the early stages you give quite broad feedback to see whether the writer can take those suggestions on board and rework the points on the script themselves. If you find they are struggling, then you give increasingly detailed notes in order to try and help them.
NG: As a script reader, once you’ve made a decision, presumably that gets taken out of your hands?
HM: Ultimately, that is the biggest frustration of being a reader and it is the thing that made me become an editor. There were projects that I was really excited about that I then passed upwards and then had nothing to do with because you then move on to the next batch of 25 unsolicited scripts to plough through in the hope of finding another gem. We have to let them go and that’s quite frustrating. As you read more, you get a stronger and stronger sense of what you would do to help the writer to make that project even better, but you have to pass it on.
NG: What kind of ratio would you get in a batch of 25 scripts that you would pass on? Is it the odd one or two, or even fewer than that?
HM: Fewer than that. I think when you read more you become more confident in your judgements and you pass fewer upwards. I think in the early stag
es a nervous reader would pass lots of stuff up because they think there might be something there somewhere and you don’t want to be the one who has missed it. But as you become more confident in your own judgement, you pass less on and that makes you a very valuable reader. The whole point of you is to stop the Head of Development having to read 25 scripts of the 25 that came in. You are only really picking the gems out.
NG: When you become a script editor your role is as the writer’s friend, if you like?
HM: Your role changes enormously because it is no longer your job to judge the writer in the same way. Often someone else will have decided that this is the right writer for this episode of this drama and as an editor it is your job to help that writer deliver that episode. That’s the be-all and end-all. No matter how difficult that might be for you or the writer. That’s your job.
NG: What about something like Blue Murder? Were you in from the outset of that or did you come in later?
HM: If you’re lucky, then you’re in from the beginning of the process which means that it is your job to approach writers or agents. On Blue Murder we didn’t do a completely open call. I approached particular writers and particular agents, but word does get round in the community that Blue Murder is going again and you’re looking for writers. In addition to the people you’ve approached, you then get probably double the numbers who approach you with ideas. You’re looking for stories that feel different enough from what you did in the previous series but still sit within the parameters of what a Blue Murder story has to be.
Writing Television Drama Page 3
