The classic case of the wildly different private persona in contemporary TV drama, of course, is Dexter Morgan, in the successful Showtime series Dexter. Let’s look at this protagonist a bit more closely:
Dexter Morgan
In public Dexter Morgan is an excellent forensic scientist for the Miami Police Department. He is a well-respected professional who has a reputation for specializing in blood work (there is an irony). The perceptions of Dexter as a social, personal animal are mixed. He is not an innately social animal but he has a perceived close bond with his foster sister, Debra, and is in a relationship, of sorts, with Rita and her children. This makes him appear normal and disguises his true self, which we only see in private or when the audience hears his true thoughts through the use of voiceover. This private or true Dexter reveals that he is, in fact, a serial killer and responsible for many, many murders.
Now Dexter is the hero of the story. Come again? I know. A serial killer is the hero. How can that be? People watch the show in their millions and root for the serial killer. Why is that? Dexter has a private dilemma, a dramatic tension that sees him fight between his own base urge to kill because it satisfies him and the morality he has inherited from his late adoptive father. Dexter’s solution is to fulfil his murderous desires by killing people who can possibly deserve it. Who deserves it? Other killers, especially murderers who appear to have escaped justice or who threaten to unveil Dexter’s dark secret.
In that light, Dexter is almost a superhero. In a perverse way he is doing something good by doing something bad. He has a terrible secret, a character flaw that he can never share or he will face the punishment that society inflicts on those who kill.
Finding a flaw in your lead character will make your protagonist human. Serial killers are publicly portrayed as being the personification of evil. In Dexter’s case he is a human being, like everyone else, trying to find his place in the world, to find acceptance – a universal theme.
‘What if I created a surgeon who wasn’t cut from the usual cloth? He would have to retain the God complex. I want a surgeon to have a God complex. You don’t take the top of somebody’s head off and start fiddling inside their brain without a fairly inflated view of your own worth. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. But I was interested in somebody unexpected being a surgeon. Somebody without the accent and manner you might expect, somebody who might look and sound more like the man who came to repair your washing machine. A man who was a deity at work and all too mortal at home. That, surely, would make a good starting point for a drama. A surgeon who was both God and Everyman.’
Peter Bowker, Creator and Writer (Monroe)
Think of your major characters and their flaws and vulnerabilities. Make them interesting. It is from those character blemishes that you will maximize the drama, the story. This element should feature in your logline. The protagonist needs a goal – a task to fulfil – which is set up in the opening pages by the Inciting Incident (see Chapter 8).
Once you have answered the questions about your protagonist, the answers may help you to get an angle on him or her. You could go into further detail and that will be down to your personal way of working. Remember all this character biographical work need not be included in the script but it will shape the way you write your character in terms of dialogue, action and decision making. Remember your protagonist will have to be proactive.
Introducing characters
When you introduce your character for the first time in the script you will need to distil all this knowledge into three or four words and/or phrases that encapsulate that character for the reader. Below are some examples of how characters have been introduced in scripts:
Captain Jack Harkness (Doctor Who) He’s impossibly handsome, dashing – the jawline of Dan Dare, the smile of a bastard.
Rose Tyler (Doctor Who) She’s 19, her bedroom’s a mess, she’s got another bloody day at work, and she’s so much better than this.
Willow (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) She is shy, bookish and very possibly dressed by her mother.
Xander (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) He is bright and funny and will one day be suave and handsome. Till that day arrives, he’ll do the best he can with bright and funny.
Mickey Stone (Hustle) Late thirties, sexy, inscrutable.
Ash Morgan (Hustle) A rather scruffy man in his early fifties, but looking much older, careworn.
Sam Tyler (Life on Mars, UK) Smart, lithe, mid-thirties. If he were a flavour, he’d be spearmint.
DCI Gene Hunt (Life on Mars, UK) Emerges like a bear from a cave. Leather jacket and Texan cord tie. He shoves an Embassy No 6 into his mouth.
Olivia Dunham (Fringe) She’s 32 years old, beautiful but real. A deceiving innocence.
Peter Bishop (Fringe) 35, handsome, fit. A quiet glance and you see a swagger. Drive, confidence. A close look shows a sadness.
Don Draper (Mad Men) Early thirties, handsome, conservative, and despite his third old fashioned, he is apparently sober.
These brief introductions distil the character when we first meet them. These descriptions offer a kind of pithy character statement that gives you the essence of the character which should guide you through the script. They may, of course, become changed by the experiences of the story. Those of you who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer witnessed Willow undergo a dramatic change from when we first meet her, from shy mummy’s girl to powerful lesbian witch!
This is a process you can apply to all your characters but you will need their reason for being – namely, what is it that your character wants within an episode or within the series and what do they actually need? We’ll look at this idea more closely below.
Wants
Wants are what your characters’ goals are for your story. In detective stories the police want to solve the crime, catch the perpetrator and see justice be done. In medical dramas the doctors and nurses want to cure the patient, make them better and send them home. In relationship dramas a character may want to escape a marriage while another character may want to save a marriage.
Identify from the story you’re telling what is it that each character wants? Do they all want the same thing? Does everyone agree? Let’s hope not, or else there will be no conflict and without conflict there is no drama. Ask what obstacles are in your hero’s way to try and stop him getting what he wants. (We will look at this again in Chapter 8.)
You want your stories to be populated with characters with differing views, social abilities and outlooks. Each character needs to serve a different purpose. Your characters will need to react differently to the same stimulus.
If you’ve ever seen somebody walk into a plate-glass shop door, you’ll recall how the different shoppers reacted to this incident. The first thing you’ll note is the sound of laughter from people who loved the slapstick nature of it. In contrast, there will be the person who will go and help the unfortunate individual. No laughter from them; instead they empathize with that person because they may have hurt themselves and will go to help. There will also be other people who go to react in a similar way but are not the first to reach the victim. They will hover, ready to help if needed, along with other people who hover because they want to look as if they are helping.
There will be people who would have heard the crash of the person’s head as it hit the door and will be curious to know what happened. They will ask any eyewitness and will either react with laughter, dismissiveness or sympathy depending on their personality.
Then there will be the individual who knows, out of the corner of their eye, that something has happened but do not want to get involved. They keep walking, head down, pretending nothing has happened. In character terms that individual is the most interesting because it begs the question: what has happened in their lives that they block out an incident like this?
And what of the victim? Would it change the attitude of any of those people if it wasn’t just a stupid accident? What if the victim had been pushed? What if the victim had become
ill or had a condition that affects their balance? Would people’s attitude change either in the moment or after the incident when this information becomes known?
Characters need to have different approaches and attitudes. Look at Life on Mars. The character of Sam Tyler tries to use the modern policing techniques of the twenty-first century to solve the crime of the week. DCI Gene Hunt’s approach is very different and very un-pc for modern tastes. They both have the same goal but deploy different attitudes and strategies to achieve results. The resulting conflict creates engaging drama.
If you go back to the first synopsis at the end of Chapter 4 you may recognize the show. It is The Good Wife which stars the excellent Julianna Margulies as our heroine Alicia Florrick. In the synopsis several regular characters are referred to and their role in relation to Alicia, namely, as ally or enemy. For example, the young lawyer Cary Agos is an enemy since he loses out to Alicia for the full-time associate position at the Chicago law firm. His vengeful and bitter motivation will be different to Alicia’s.
Needs
Your characters’ needs do not usually coincide with their wants. In terms of television storytelling, needs are often unachieved until the very last episode. The workaholic detective/salesman/doctor/builder may need to concentrate on his family for a happier life rather than work every hour that God sends. Sexual tension between two characters can sizzle over several series, but consummation is constantly postponed because other things get in the way. (If they do get together, be pretty sure they won’t be together for long because an ex-lover or wife will turn up, or one of the characters will be abducted or die!)
You may also have guessed that our second synopsis in Chapter 4 was from ABC’s Once Upon a Time. The show’s heroine is Emma Swan who wants to be with her young son, Henry, whom she gave up for adoption. However, what she needs is to accept and believe what Henry tells her – that she is the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming and that she has a destiny to save all the fairy-tale characters that are trapped and live in Storybrooke.
Try this
1 Create a scene in which an attempted mugging takes place.
2 Select one of your characters and place them in the scene.
3 Write the scene.
4 Now rewrite the scene but this time using a different character.
5 Repeat, replacing your character with another of your characters.
6 You will end up with several versions of the same scenario but with different results. This will be as a result of each character’s individual reaction to what happens to them.
Key advice
Characters are at the heart of successful TV drama.
Make sure you know your character back to front, even if everything you come up with doesn’t make it into the script.
Make sure your character is multidimensional – not all good or all bad, but a real human being with needs, wants and inner conflicts.
When you first introduce a character, make sure they make a splash!
6
Dialogue
In this chapter you will learn:
• that dialogue must be used as sparely as possible and must always move the story forward
• how speech rarely states the literal truth about the speaker but hides a plethora of hidden motivations
• how to create individual voices for each of your characters
• how dialogue is shaped not just by personality but by context, too.
Dialogue is well-edited conversation. In television drama, a visual medium, dialogue accounts for around half of the script. Within any script the dialogue has to move the story along, convey key information and help define character. If you can achieve more than one of those things at the same time, then you are honing your craft to a higher level – and that impresses.
When you write any word of dialogue you need to ask yourself whether it is really necessary. If you can show the same thing with an image or through action, then go with the image and/or the action rather than the spoken word.
Script dialogue may appear natural but the reality is that it is an artificial construct which, hopefully, is not noticed as such. Superfluous words should be cut and the characters should only say what they need to say, though in their own way. Good dialogue is precise and economic and not obvious. Think of it as if you, the writer, who has to pay for every spoken word you use. You will then use only what is necessary and effective.
In 1974 the Moody Blues, one of the biggest and most successful bands of the time, stopped working together. The reason the band members cite is that, after an extensive world tour in which they lived in each other’s pockets all day and every day, they stopped talking to each other because they knew what the other guy was going to say. The band members resorted to code – ‘Conversation number 15’ or ‘Joke number 9’. In that bizarre situation they did not expend any unnecessary words because they already knew them. That is what you have to do as a scriptwriter.
With any piece of dialogue you need to ask why your characters are saying those words. Very often what is said is not what is really meant and can be contrary to what the character is thinking.
All dialogue is lies
Characters in television drama should never be seen to say what they mean. All characters have secrets, be they scandalous or inconvenient, that they don’t want to be revealed. Everyone wants to present themselves in the best light. What a character’s secret is and how they choose to conceal that secret adds layers to the character and reveals the truth about their feelings.
Most dialogue scenes in television drama are duologues – where two characters have some form of conversation. However, there will always be one character that drives the scene. Perhaps they want to convey information to the other character or get information out of the other person. In either case, it should not be an easy task.
Dialogue should not be on the nose. That is, it should not be obvious. It should be about what is not said (subtext) – about the difference between what is said and why it is said. The truth is people always want to be seen in the best light and often dance around the real topic in the room. Arguments between husband and wife over the husband not taking out the garbage again will not be the real cause of conflict between the couple. It could be the affair the husband had two years before for which the wife has never really forgiven him or the debt they have or the behaviour of their wayward child or their dead relationship. Two cops working side by side have an unspoken love for one another which reveals itself through their day-to-day banter. In television drama it is actions that show the truth, not the spoken word.
When people greet each other at work in the morning and ask ‘How are you?’, the reply will be the stock ‘All right’, ‘OK’, ‘Well, you know’. Of course, you don’t know but you can sense that something is wrong.
In David Shore’s hit medical series House, Dr Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie, has the mantra ‘Everybody lies’. It is a good mantra to adopt when writing dialogue. In emotional terms, people rarely say what they mean because, if they do speak the truth, there will be an impact and consequences. Watch any drama and there will invariably be a big secret which has to be kept concealed. This creates dramatic tension. Drama is driven by the revelation of that secret and, once that secret has been uncovered, then nothing will be the same again. Characters will put in a conscious effort to sidestep, misdirect or lie outright to avoid talking about or revealing the secret. Sometimes the secret is an open one but confronting it is avoided because there will always be the raw emotion that burns at the heart of a character’s being.
Speech patterns
One of the common problems new writers have when writing dialogue is that they tend to write every character using the same speech patterns, namely their own. The result is that every character speaks in the same voice, which also happens to be that of the writer.
Writing clear and distinctive dialogue is one of the hardest but one of the most necessary skills to master in wr
iting for television. You will have to develop an ear for dialogue and the only way to do that is to listen to people. Listen to conversations in public places and take note of the rhythms and cadences of real people talking. You will have to master the art of getting those unique voices down on paper.
There is an oft-quoted test that everyone in the industry from script readers to executive producers use when reading scripts – and writers should use it, too. The test is to cover all the character names in your script and just read the dialogue. For any piece of dialogue, from the distinctive way it has been written, you should be able to work out who is saying those words.
So how did you get each character to sound different without giving each character a different accent? (Never, ever do that!) This goes back to how you develop your characters. Think about their status, their job, their education and, most importantly, their prevailing attitude.
In the pilot episode of David E. Kelley’s Harry’s Law the second act opens with an exchange between the show’s heroine, Harriet ‘Harry’ Korn, and district attorney Josh Peyton. Read this now (Figure 6.1). Notice how the dialogue for both characters is distinctively different and how that reflects their attitude and traits as characters. As mentioned above, most scenes are duologues where one person wants something. Here Harry wants something from Josh but Josh doesn’t want to play.
Writing Television Drama Page 5
