by Neil Landau
When you tune in to watch House, M.D., you already know the new patient’s illness is going to be a medical mystery that defies a cure. But what you don’t know is just how the misanthropic Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) is going to solve it.
Effectively servicing the franchise of a given series puts a new, unpredictable, provocative spin on a case. Ideally, this new spin will emerge from the characters’ relationship to each new case. What psychological “buttons” might a new case push in a character? What are the main challenges to solving the case? If the case is too easy, it’s not viable. It must challenge the series regulars in some way and serve up an inconvenient truth.
The difference between a mediocre series and a great one is the showrunners are always digging for a new vein of gold. Depending upon the genre of the series, the gold within each episode will be the moral dilemmas and gray areas of the main character(s).
Hybrid Procedural–Serialized
While case of the week series are franchises most easily grasped and serviced, not all TV series follow this procedural “formula.” Some series, such as The Good Wife, are hybrid series—equal parts legal procedural and serialized drama.
The hybrid one-hour drama series has followed the playbook from many successful cable TV series, such as Dexter and The Following, in which cases can play out over a course of several episodes or even a full season (or as The Killing painfully learned via viewer exodus, over two seasons). The television business is rapidly evolving to embrace new technologies and to meet its audience’s viewing habits, so serialized series, are now much more easily digestible than they were a few years ago.
The advantage to a franchise that offers closed-ended cases is that viewers can watch each individual episode in any order and still feel satisfied.
Serialized shows, on the other hand, require much greater viewer commitment, and if you miss more than a few episodes, it might feel daunting to tune in (the way many viewers started to feel after missing too many episodes of Lost, 24, and Game of Thrones). Of course, nowadays viewers can DVR and download episodes, so that they can catch up at their convenience.
A huge challenge for all shows with a serialized element is pacing. How much plot progression needs to happen from episode to episode? If the story unfolds too slowly (as was the case during the first half of season 2 of The Walking Dead), the audiences might grow grumpy and restless. If the story moves too quickly (such as, arguably, the second season of Homeland), the audience may cry foul about credibility or complain about rushed, sloppy plotting at the expense of character depth.
Servicing the franchise of a series is not only about choosing which cases and/or plotlines to explore, but also about the pace of delivering new information, clues, discoveries, and resolutions.
A big part of servicing a franchise is hitting the “sweet spot” of your series. I’ll have a whole chapter dedicated to this very question later on. For now, suffice it to say that it’s imperative that you identify the major currency of your series’ franchise—and spend it wisely.
In Homeland, the currency of the series is our not knowing whom to trust. Who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy? How do they coexist? Who will prevail and at what cost?
In The Walking Dead, the currency is a core group’s survival against seemingly insurmountable odds.
Central Question
Central questions explore the potential of the future. A good central question stokes the audience’s curiosity and their need to know more. How is this problem going to be solved? What’s going to happen?
All great TV series present us with strong central questions. The Sopranos makes us wonder how long Tony and his cohorts can prevail in the organized crime business, along with Tony’s sanity and the impact their dirty dealings continue to have on their lives and the lives of their loved ones.
Central questions are the key ingredient in “must-see TV.” We’re waiting to see how a crime story or a love story is going to play out. As long as we keep wondering and anticipating and discussing and posting—we’re going to keep watching. As soon as all questions are answered, the series is forced to either introduce new central questions or end.
In Girls, the central question—aka franchise—is, Will Hannah (Lena Dunham) and her twenty-something friends ever find a lasting sense of fulfillment in their lives?
Parenthood is a nuanced, bittersweet saga about three generations of the Braverman family, with an emphasis on the POV of the three siblings. Arguably, the Friends theme song, “I’ll Be There for You,” applies to this brood where blood is thicker than water.
Parenthood can be equal parts lighthearted and intensely emotional, in contrast to its similarly themed ensemble sitcom cousin, Modern Family—which also explores three generations of family, but goes for laughs, with a much broader (albeit grounded) tone and zanier situations.
Modern Family’s stylistic interview format provides the show with faster, slicker pacing which highlights each episode’s theme. I would also argue that the interview format (borrowed from The Office) makes Modern Family a higher concept show. The franchise, in this case, becomes the exploration of what happened and why—like family therapy. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but it enables the audience to feel like we’re confidants. And these interviews not only “break the fourth wall” by having characters talk directly to the unseen, unknown interviewer (aka the camera, aka the audience), they also provide us with an added perspective on the weekly proceedings—which heightens the humor and drives home the central question/unifying theme of each episode.
In a softer concept series, the basic franchise is the exploration of the main characters’ quest for the ecstasy of success versus the agony of defeat— and coping with the interstices. A useful way to articulate the franchise of a “soft” concept show is, “Each week, the characters will struggle to achieve ___________.” The specific struggles of the characters are the source of drama and comedy. The potential for failure, existential pain, disappointment, regret, and humiliation provide the stakes.
In Friday Night Lights, the central question/franchise was, Will they win or lose the big game and will it help them overcome their quotidian problems?
In The Big Bang Theory, the central question/franchise is, Will these geeks and nerds ever fit into the mainstream and feel like “winners”?
Game of Thrones offers us the ongoing power struggle between two kingdoms, so the central question is, Who will win?
In Breaking Bad, Walter White incrementally builds a crystal meth empire, and then struggles to protect it. The central question for Walter is, Will his megalomaniacal hunger for money and power ever be enough?
Walt had been such a milquetoast “loser” in his life that now he’d rather die than suffer defeat. Following his terminal cancer diagnosis, Walt’s desperate need to provide for his family motivated him to cross the line into the drug trade. What started off with good intentions has gradually devolved into winning at all costs—even if it means losing his wife and son. As Walt’s physical health improves and his cancer goes into remission, he becomes addicted to the danger and power. He peddles crystal meth, but he’s an adrenaline junkie. When I interviewed creator/showrunner Vince Gilligan (see Chapter 5), Gilligan commented that Walter White’s “superpower” is his ability to delude himself in order to justify his actions. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before antihero Walt becomes a tragic hero. From the heights of his wealth and power, Walt has nowhere to go but down.
In determining the franchise for your series, you might conceive both the overarching, “umbrella” central question for the long haul, as well as the more finite season arcs—also in the form of questions—from season to season.
In some series, these questions are thematic. Season 1 of Mad Men seemed to examine the theme of living and selling the American Dream, while season 2 shattered that dream, coming to terms with truth in advertising and in life.
Each season of Dexter offers a new super villain (aka “Big Bad”) who
challenges and defies Dexter Morgan’s (Michael C. Hall) vigilantism. The central “umbrella” thematic question of this series remains constant: What is justice?
In Revenge, the central theme is, Can vengeance lead to peace of mind? For Homeland, the series theme is, Can the war on terror ever be won?
Central Mystery
The franchise of some series lies in unraveling a central mystery about the past. What happened? How, when, where, and why—and what will be its impact on the present and future of our series regulars?
In Lost, the series mythology was its franchise. The astute creators/showrunners instinctively knew that a series franchise that relied solely on whether or not a group of castaways would ever get off the island wouldn’t be enough. Gilligan’s Island depended on wackiness and stupidity, which made being shipwrecked look like a whole lot of fun. (The laugh track helped us suspend our disbelief as to why movie star Ginger Grant brought her entire wardrobe on a “three-hour tour” and why the millionaire Howells brought along all their cash.)
Yes, Lost offered us the central question of how the jet crash passengers were going to survive, but it also quickly presented us with aberrations of nature, paranormal activity, and the ever-expanding mysteries of the island itself. The central question may have initially been, How are we going to get off this island, but soon morphed into bigger existential questions, such as What the hell is this place? Why are we here? Who else is here? And even if we can find a reliable source of daily sustenance, can we ever overcome our sins from the past? And even if we do, does time even exist? Did our existence ever matter? Why are we still alive? Are we still alive?
Once Upon a Time is a fable that exists in two worlds: the mythological land that exists long ago in the pages of a storybook and in the “present-day” small-town slice of Americana known as Storybrooke, Maine. This enormously inventive and imaginative series alternates between the present “reality” and the past “fantasy,” and the impact the past has on its present characters who have a doppelganger (or double) in Storybrooke. The series borrows this conceit from The Wizard of Oz, in which the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion all have a counterpart in the “real” world back in Kansas.
The main franchise of the series is based upon the central question of whether love can be stronger than fear (aka magical spells/curse). In season 1, the Evil Queen placed a curse on the enchanted storybook characters that followed them to Storybrooke. The Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla) felt robbed of love and fulfillment, so she cursed Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas) to a land where there would never be any happy endings—which, ironically, was the Evil Queen’s greatest desire and therefore her happy ending. The pilot of this series set up this franchise: each week we’ll see if the evil spell can be broken and if our characters will transcend the curse and find love—or not. There is also the underlying thematic question of what’s real and what’s illusion.
The present-day story centers around Emma Snow (Jennifer Morrison), who manages to pierce the bubble of the once frozen in time, hermetically sealed Storybrooke. Emma starts out in the series as a cynic in counterpoint to the earnest young believer, Henry Mills (Jared S. Gilmore)—who is her biological son given up for adoption. We root for Emma and Henry to reunite. As mother and son, they belong together, but not if Henry’s adopted mother, Regina Mills (also Lana Parrilla), has anything to say about it. Turns out that Regina is not only the two-faced, villainous mayor of Storybrooke, she also happens to be the Evil Queen. Snow White and Prince Charming have counterparts in Storybrooke, who are also meant to be together, but that’s another huge struggle and part of why we watch each week.
In the much darker, perverse anthological miniseries American Horror Story, each season begins with a new tale of fright set in a new location with a new cast of characters. As in all haunted house or asylum horror stories, the safety and sanity of the characters in the present is played against the ominous mythology from the past. The sins of the past obliterate any chance for a happy ending. It’s not a coincidence that season 2 was set in an asylum ruled by a tyrannical nun, Sister Jude Martin (Jessica Lange). There was no atonement or catharsis, and the only escape from existential pain was lobotomy or death.
TV characters need positive goals in the specter of negative consequences. Without this positive/negative charge, there is no conflict. And without conflict, there is no drama or comedy. In this way, all TV series are about winning and losing.
Interview: Michael Rauch
Michael Rauch Credits
Best known for:
Royal Pains (Executive Producer/Writer/Director) 2009–2012
Life Is Wild (Executive Producer/Creator) 2007–2008
Love Monkey (Executive Producer/Creator) 2006
Beautiful People (Executive Producer/Creator) 2005–2006
Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (Executive Producer/Director) (film) 2001
In the Weeds (Writer/Director) 2000
NL: The franchise of your show is medical cases, so I’m wondering how you approach each medical mystery. Do you start with the ailment or do you start with character?
MR: There really isn’t a specific formula for us. We always have an A medical story and usually have a B medical story also. The episode will begin with a blue-sky period where you start with a completely empty white board and you end with an outline. On this show, I would like that to happen within two weeks. And, oftentimes we’ll come in with a medical condition that feels like this is a fun one that we haven’t done and that will work in the show, and then sometimes we’ll come in with a theme or a character and work the medical condition around that. So, there’s a lot of different ways it works. We have a medical consultant who sits in the room with us a couple days of the week. We have two on set medical consultants, and after fifty-six episodes of this show we are well-versed in where to find—whether it’s from an ad or from a magazine or from a website, we are just always noting down very cool medical stories that we hear about or read about. Usually, the writer of his/her own episode will come in with something and sometimes we’ll feel like, “You know what, this is a great A story,” and sometimes, “You know what, it feels more like a B story. It has three or four beats in it and not six or seven beats in it. So, let’s use this as a B story and work an A story around the theme.”
NL: So, you’re a seven-act show, if it’s a teaser, plus six acts?
MR: We’re actually six acts. We are a teaser, four acts, and a tag. That structure was given to us by the network and it’s worked pretty well for us. We’ve had some situations where our tags are shorter than the network wants them to be. We had an episode last year where we had our first death on the show. It was very important to us to have the announcement of the death be the entire tag, but it was about a minute and 20 second scene and the network basically said, “You can do it, but our research shows that if you hold a tag off that long, people will think the show is over.” They’re not going to stick around to see the commercials. They see it’s 9:56 and that’s it. So, we were swayed to take a scene from act four and put it at the top of the tag which built the tag into about four minutes. And, it didn’t really hurt our original intention at all.
NL: So you’re a showrunner who adheres to having A, B, and C stories connected by a unifying theme?
MR: Absolutely, and sometimes the unifying theme is self-evident to a viewer, and sometimes it’s just something we talk about for a larger arc in the season. But, it does feel like the storytelling is more organic and more cohesive if there’s one single theme, even if we have to stretch it a little bit. But, there is something that is holding all the various stories together. With season finales and usually the last two episodes and the first two episodes, themes just kind of pop up because we know where we have to get to. So, it’s often easier for us to begin the blue-sky process with a theme and start tying in the other stories around that. And, right now, we’re breaking our twelfth episode and a theme has occurred to us
toward the end game of breaking it as all the stories have started to rise to the surface.
NL: Do you ever approach a whole season or arc of episodes with a thematic?
MR: We do. In fact, the episode I was citing about the tag where there was a death, it was a storyline about a character that we had no intention of bringing back, but we wanted to have a patient die and this felt like a good character to do it with. He was played by Tom Cavanagh, a character named Jack O’Malley, because he was such a likeable character and he connected very well with Hank [Mark Feuerstein] and it felt like if we’re going to kill someone, we should kill someone who we really care about and really like and we won’t expect it. Jack’s death and his story about Lupus connected to Hank, in terms of Hank never having lost a patient since he’s moved out here. It happened once when he was in the E.R. in Brooklyn in the pilot. But, it was about his growth of learning to let go and to let himself open up emotionally to patients and what the risk of that is. So, that kind of theme is what helped us find the Lupus story which then brought us to the death of the character. It was an arc that we played throughout the third season.
NL: And very unpredictable for your viewers.
MR: It was—it was very unpredictable. We were concerned about what the feedback from our most loyal viewers and, overall, it was very positive. The people who were upset by it seemed to be upset by it in a good way, in a way that was unexpected and satisfying and let them believe that we’re not quite sure if what we think is going to happen is actually going to happen. Which has happened to us this season too; we ended season 3 with the brothers getting into a big fight. And everyone expected that in the first episode of season 4 that they’ll kiss and make up. We decided that we would play almost the entire third season building to this fight. And, if in one episode, we just resolved it, it would feel cheap and it would feel unearned in terms of our storytelling and in terms of the integrity of the show. So, we’ve stretched it out to the first few episodes, and I know there have been fans who have been unhappy with that because to them Royal Pains is everyone getting along and Hank and Evan getting along. But, we feel good about being able to play this out because it feels real and authentic to what happens when people who love each other—whether professional colleagues or brothers—get in a big fight; it takes some time for them work it out.
