It sounds like American networks are flirting with the British way of writing TV.
The British version of The Office only ran for 14 episodes and was wholly written by two people, versus 201 episodes and 40 credited writers for the American version. The original House of Cards only ran for four episodes. Even long-running series tend to be produced in much smaller quantities, because the norm is six episodes per season rather than 22. You can try out a much wider range of ideas if you just make less of each thing. It isn't as immediately profitable, but some of those ideas will become export hits. Not every programme needs to be mass produced.
The traditional American model has been the 20 episodes per season and as many seasons as you can get renewals for.
In a lot of ways, I prefer shorter and fewer seasons for a lot of shows. At least for me a lot of shows outlive their welcome. Although that sentiment probably differs from that of a lot of fans.
The main thing I like about the British style is that they tend to make a season (series in British English) more self contained--they are less likely to end on a cliff hanger in the event the show doesn't come back.
I mean, what are the ways? If an American show fails, you'll get your beloved 1 season run. If it's popular, it keeps going. What's the problem? The Simpsons and The Office and South Park and Seinfeld all hit their stride at season 3 or so.
The incentives for writers and commissioners are totally different. In the American studio model, a one-season run is a failure. The process starts with the expectation that successful shows run for dozens or hundreds of episodes.
In the British model, you can try out a lot of ideas that just aren't possible in that framework. You can have more meaningful character and plot development, because you're not worried about dragging things out. The American sitcom trope of everything resetting to normal at the end of an episode just isn't necessary. Nobody at the network is going to tell you that you can't write out a major character half way through the first series. You can write tight, self-contained dramas that resolve within the course of a series without any cliffhangers. You can experiment with ideas that have merit, but don't have any obvious potential to sustain a long-running series.
The first problem is that these shows follow the Peter Principle. A show will continue to run until it becomes bad enough to be canceled. This means that many shows will have a bad, disappointing ending rather than a thrilling/touching/moving/memorable climax.
The second problem is that given that the story may or may not have to continue for another season, how can the main characters get any form of meaningful character growth? How can they get closure or a conclusion when the next season is around the corner and either a new problem has to be invented for them or the existing one has to be reopened/continued? This is similar to the problem that "villain of the week" shows suffer from, just on a seasonal rather than episodic basis.
This affects 1-season shows as well since: 1. If they only get one season it may be because they are bad. 2. The 1 season still needs to be written to allow for the possibility of a 2nd season, thus potentially making it less interesting.
Of course, for some shows those things don't really matter, since no one watches The Simpsons, The Office, South Park or Seinfeld for the character growth.
That isn't to say it is impossible to make a good plot-driven show with this format, just harder (and it is the reason why I rarely watch American TV shows).
I find the British model of 6-8 episode series, with a low possibility of renewal, leads to much better TV in my opinion. If you have to produce 20+ episodes of a series then your core story ends up being dragged out in 5 minute doses across all those episodes, and you inevitably end up with slow episodes where nothing much happens.
Compare for example Line of Duty with The Shield. Both on the surface dramas about corrupt police officers, but Line of Duty is relentless in its plot development - there’s barely a sentence that doesn’t lead somewhere, whereas The Shield has whole episodes with nothing much of consequence.
Id disagree with the British model having a small number of writers or just one can lead to some very poor scripts getting made - where a collective writers room would have either fixed or killed and bad script.
Also concentrating power in that way can lead to bullying eg why Christopher Ecclestone left Dr who or Russel Davis suiciding torch wood.
Sure, that’s the trade off, and for me I’d rather take the risk of a few really bad series or writers burning everything to ground. The alternative I see is a sea of highly polished but ultimately bland TV.
For every Doctor Who, being slowly driven into the ground by hubris, you’re going to get something like Detectorists, where the writing team had the good sense (and because theirs only really two of them, the power) to decide to end while it was good.
>> small number of writers or just one can lead to some very poor scripts getting made
You're right, but on the flip side it allows for new ideas, which are what the best TV shows have. I'll take a wide distribution of quality over everything clumped around the mean.
I still expect to see better, more original scripts from individuals compared with collaborative efforts. That's my experience from science fiction at least, where many good authors have paired up to write a book and it is nearly never as good their individual works.
You could be right about prejudices holding back the UK TV industry. I don't know much about that.
The variance is bigger. You get some absolute crap, but you also get idiosyncratic works of singular genius. British TV is often much weirder, for better and for worse. I think it's no coincidence that many American hits were devised by British writers - our scattershot approach is the TV equivalent of Y Combinator.
Channel 4 decided to broadcast Chris Morris's Jam. It wasn't an accident. They meant to do it.
Most modern high production value American TV follows a very simple and predictable format:
- first 2-3 minutes are an exciting blast of action or plot development
- 45 minutes of slow paced character development where nothing happens but you learn the nuances of the the shows world
- 10 minutes of a build up of tension
- 1 or 2 to setup a cliffhanger
- the next episode starts with action again and resolved the cliffhanger in a relatively unsatisfactory way that basically leaves the plot where it was
Some people enjoy this format, but I personally don’t. It feels like the entire purpose of an episode is just to get you to watch the next episode. To me, it feels manipulative and I refuse to watch the next episode when faced with a cliffhanger. The cynic in me also feels that this is entirely intentional to attract eyeballs.
That said, I know plenty of people who love the comfort of getting to know characters meander through a story-line, but these people love tv generally.
Nine women can't give birth to a baby in one month. There are inherent compromises involved in the writers' room division of labour. It's extremely difficult for 40 people to share a coherent artistic vision.
I'm weary of anything that enhances studios ability to exploit talent - this seems like a great way to get writers by the balls the way they have they've got the VFX industry. The company that did the CGI for Life of Pi (won best visual effects) promptly went out of business and that's typical for VFX firms on major projects because studios hold all the cards. They'll find a new/desperate shop that will agree to an absurd contract with infinite revisions. Writers have a strong guild though so hopefully they make sure this doesn't turn into a race to the bottom from writing talent.
correct, writers have the Writers Guild of America, VFX industry doesn't, they've tried with various initiatives to get one going but none have been successful yet.
Technically it's a guild, not a union. It's good for things like providing health coverage and making sure writers get paid and get credit. From what I understand, it has not been great at ensuring sane working conditions.
I met up with a pro TV writer I know and he said he was so happy the season was over because he could finally go to a mattress store and buy a new mattress. He said he didn't have time to do it for the last X months.
Basically being a TV writer is like working in video games; there's another person right behind you who would love to have your job because of the perceived glamor so terrible conditions persist.
Hollywood writers are glamorous? Hilarious. I've lived most of my life in SoCal and that's not really the general perception. Even movies about writers like Saving Mr. Banks don't depict it as a glamorous life, though Their Finest does a little bit.
Ultimately what drives screenwriters is their need to create. For those of us who do creative writing, be it for screen, dead tree, or compiler, there's this internal need for the work to make itself manifest. We're just the conduit for the story. That's why people put up with the conditions in the writers room, it's all for the story.
Hmmm. I thought that much of Hollywood's VFX work had been outsourced to Vancouver (and elsewhere). So there's a different dynamic at play than for domestic writers: a globalized race to the bottom.
Some of the absolute best television shows I have ever seen have all been planned and executed by a single script writer with a vision and an idea for a single story spanning over X seasons.
And the absolute best tv series I have ever seen didn't even bother with standard length episodes, they vary between 15 and 45 minutes depending on the content that needs to go into the episode that week. Turns out that if you get rid of filler B-plots or C-plots, the entire series becomes much better.
B5 was definitely in the first larger group I was thinking about, because it had a single writer with a vision. I agree that there's an awful lot of filler in there. Imagine what B5 would have been like without the stifling fixed-length episodes and need for filler B-plot and C-plot?
One show I was also thinking about was of course Game of Thrones. It has varying length episodes though, but they're all still pretty close at the one-hour mark.
It's interesting that no other show on Netflix or HBO, that wouldn't need to be bound by fixed-length, still isn't. There should be room to experiment more there.
I'm not sure there was a need for filler B-plot and C-plot. There's no particular reason it needed to be planned as 5 seasons if there wasn't enough A-plot to fill 5 seasons.
Hell, Severed Dreams felt like a season's worth of plot all on its own, and all the better for it.
What, a teen drama? Yeah, hear me out. It's a teen drama that avoids every single thing that make teen dramas crap. Single writer and director, storylines and characters are based on research of current issues, dialogue is accurate and not out-of-date, an extensive casting process found a bunch of fantastic age-appropriate actors, and the editing, the soundtrack, and the cinematography is off-the-charts good. If you liked the UK series Skins, you will love this.
The reason for the variable-length episodes is that the show aired in "real-time", so you would get clips throughout the week that are released on the website at the exact time the clip is supposed to be happening. So if it's a scene at the lockers on Monday morning at 11:03, the clip is viewable that Monday morning at 11:03, if it's a Friday night party, the clip becomes viewable that Friday evening, etc. Every week is then rolled up into that week's episode, so you can watch it like that as well. And this structure then automatically makes it so that some weeks have more drama than others, so that week's episode is therefore longer.
The show is currently the darling of the TV world with four remakes already started, two more remakes are filming, and a bunch more in the works. Because the show was an enormous success in Norway, and they managed to rope in teenagers, which is the exact demographic that the networks are bleeding like crazy.
(I liked it so much I spent months perfecting the English subtitles for it, because I got so angry at the fansubs that were floating around)
That's an amazing review - thanks for taking the time to write it! I'm going to check it out, and Skins as well, as I had never heard of it before your write up. You should consider starting up a review website - I'd subscribe...
Eh, not sure it's all art. Some mediums (like hollywood blockbuster movies and video games) lend themselves to more of a team effort than a solo artist one, and there are classics in those mediums/artforms too.
There are also quite a few British TV shows made by duos and small teams rather than a single creator, including some of the best in the medium. Like Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army and Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Whether you're producing content or buying it, those involved literally don't know how to make shows any better, given the constraints they have (get millions of viewers per show, make lots of money). They've found a way to optimize producing the shows that will make money: squeeze efficiency where you can.
And that will continue as long as people contribute to their business model, which is the most money and the most eyeballs. You will never get a reliable stream of quality, unpopular, arty, amazing shows, because they aren't the business model. How do we change this?
Fund different business models. Fund a whole new content development platform that distributes funds to productions that won't make much money or get many eyeballs, but will create more diverse content. As those become more popular, do deals with content distributors to help fund it.
I don't think there's enough people interested in quality content for this to work without serious budget-pinching, so I don't think it'll happen. You could try to create the platform and just hope the viewers/funders will come. But unless someone disrupts content creation, everyone will continue to be beholden to whomever can pay for content.
Another alternative is we stop paying millions to stars of hit shows, or some other production change, but that seems even less likely...
I don’t know how viable this is for TV vs books, but crowdfunding seems like a good model to get more niche stuff funded, maybe even an episode or two at a time.
Flashes of design sprint[1] came to mind as I read this.
The idea of planning a season, or more, before filming makes sense to me, especially as more shows become serialized. "Westworld" would not have worked if the writers did not have at least the first two seasons planned out. The same goes for "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul", although I'm not sure to what extent Vince Gilligan planned out the five seasons of BB or has planned the five seasons of BCS (a prequel to BB, by the way).
> Zlotnik compares his team to “venture capitalists in a creative medium, where the businesses are the shows. The [writers’] room is part of a system of staged investment that manages the risk.”
It’s interesting that the article makes this analogy, then compares mini-rooms to the gig economy. Are startup accelerators promoting lean methodology not exactly the same concept?
The difference between getting into YCombinator and being “accepted” as an Uber driver is that the former has significant upside potential. Is this true of a scriptwriter in a mini-room? Very possibly, from a career progression perspective. But there also may be some exploitation - is your writing credit for Show That Hit It Big worth less in a world where new scripts are churned out by other mini-rooms daily?
Makes you wonder what shows would be like if scriptwriters were given equity packages. But that wasn’t ever on the table. With or without this system, it’s tough breaking into screenwriting. This doesn’t change that - it’s just an optimization by the studio itself on how to use its human resources.
> “You’re budgeting and trying to imagine, ‘What are we going to need for the last episode of this season that hasn’t been written yet?’ ” he says. “Eventually, it comes and smacks you in the face.”
> Working out the story arc in advance gives a much better sense of what the show requires in terms of sets, locations, cast, and all the other expensive variables that go into creating a fictional world.
Its absolutely crazy US TV is developed in this way: make a pilot knowing nothing about any story arcs, and just hope you can budget and bluff your way to a finale?
It's blindly obvious it has been done this way. Hopefully this change will improve plots.
It's funny that there are US production teams considering the British way of writing TV episodes given that over here in the UK, there's talk of a few shows like Doctor Who moving to the US model instead:
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadThe British version of The Office only ran for 14 episodes and was wholly written by two people, versus 201 episodes and 40 credited writers for the American version. The original House of Cards only ran for four episodes. Even long-running series tend to be produced in much smaller quantities, because the norm is six episodes per season rather than 22. You can try out a much wider range of ideas if you just make less of each thing. It isn't as immediately profitable, but some of those ideas will become export hits. Not every programme needs to be mass produced.
In a lot of ways, I prefer shorter and fewer seasons for a lot of shows. At least for me a lot of shows outlive their welcome. Although that sentiment probably differs from that of a lot of fans.
In the British model, you can try out a lot of ideas that just aren't possible in that framework. You can have more meaningful character and plot development, because you're not worried about dragging things out. The American sitcom trope of everything resetting to normal at the end of an episode just isn't necessary. Nobody at the network is going to tell you that you can't write out a major character half way through the first series. You can write tight, self-contained dramas that resolve within the course of a series without any cliffhangers. You can experiment with ideas that have merit, but don't have any obvious potential to sustain a long-running series.
The second problem is that given that the story may or may not have to continue for another season, how can the main characters get any form of meaningful character growth? How can they get closure or a conclusion when the next season is around the corner and either a new problem has to be invented for them or the existing one has to be reopened/continued? This is similar to the problem that "villain of the week" shows suffer from, just on a seasonal rather than episodic basis.
This affects 1-season shows as well since: 1. If they only get one season it may be because they are bad. 2. The 1 season still needs to be written to allow for the possibility of a 2nd season, thus potentially making it less interesting.
Of course, for some shows those things don't really matter, since no one watches The Simpsons, The Office, South Park or Seinfeld for the character growth.
That isn't to say it is impossible to make a good plot-driven show with this format, just harder (and it is the reason why I rarely watch American TV shows).
Compare for example Line of Duty with The Shield. Both on the surface dramas about corrupt police officers, but Line of Duty is relentless in its plot development - there’s barely a sentence that doesn’t lead somewhere, whereas The Shield has whole episodes with nothing much of consequence.
Also concentrating power in that way can lead to bullying eg why Christopher Ecclestone left Dr who or Russel Davis suiciding torch wood.
For every Doctor Who, being slowly driven into the ground by hubris, you’re going to get something like Detectorists, where the writing team had the good sense (and because theirs only really two of them, the power) to decide to end while it was good.
You're right, but on the flip side it allows for new ideas, which are what the best TV shows have. I'll take a wide distribution of quality over everything clumped around the mean.
You could be right about prejudices holding back the UK TV industry. I don't know much about that.
Channel 4 decided to broadcast Chris Morris's Jam. It wasn't an accident. They meant to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ods9xtuox8
- first 2-3 minutes are an exciting blast of action or plot development - 45 minutes of slow paced character development where nothing happens but you learn the nuances of the the shows world
- 10 minutes of a build up of tension
- 1 or 2 to setup a cliffhanger
- the next episode starts with action again and resolved the cliffhanger in a relatively unsatisfactory way that basically leaves the plot where it was
Some people enjoy this format, but I personally don’t. It feels like the entire purpose of an episode is just to get you to watch the next episode. To me, it feels manipulative and I refuse to watch the next episode when faced with a cliffhanger. The cynic in me also feels that this is entirely intentional to attract eyeballs.
That said, I know plenty of people who love the comfort of getting to know characters meander through a story-line, but these people love tv generally.
Does the VFX industry have a similar thing in Hollywood?
Basically being a TV writer is like working in video games; there's another person right behind you who would love to have your job because of the perceived glamor so terrible conditions persist.
Ultimately what drives screenwriters is their need to create. For those of us who do creative writing, be it for screen, dead tree, or compiler, there's this internal need for the work to make itself manifest. We're just the conduit for the story. That's why people put up with the conditions in the writers room, it's all for the story.
Some of the absolute best television shows I have ever seen have all been planned and executed by a single script writer with a vision and an idea for a single story spanning over X seasons.
And the absolute best tv series I have ever seen didn't even bother with standard length episodes, they vary between 15 and 45 minutes depending on the content that needs to go into the episode that week. Turns out that if you get rid of filler B-plots or C-plots, the entire series becomes much better.
(Also, it definitely wasn't what GP was referring to, since B5 didn't vary its runtime appreciably.)
One show I was also thinking about was of course Game of Thrones. It has varying length episodes though, but they're all still pretty close at the one-hour mark.
It's interesting that no other show on Netflix or HBO, that wouldn't need to be bound by fixed-length, still isn't. There should be room to experiment more there.
Hell, Severed Dreams felt like a season's worth of plot all on its own, and all the better for it.
What, a teen drama? Yeah, hear me out. It's a teen drama that avoids every single thing that make teen dramas crap. Single writer and director, storylines and characters are based on research of current issues, dialogue is accurate and not out-of-date, an extensive casting process found a bunch of fantastic age-appropriate actors, and the editing, the soundtrack, and the cinematography is off-the-charts good. If you liked the UK series Skins, you will love this.
The reason for the variable-length episodes is that the show aired in "real-time", so you would get clips throughout the week that are released on the website at the exact time the clip is supposed to be happening. So if it's a scene at the lockers on Monday morning at 11:03, the clip is viewable that Monday morning at 11:03, if it's a Friday night party, the clip becomes viewable that Friday evening, etc. Every week is then rolled up into that week's episode, so you can watch it like that as well. And this structure then automatically makes it so that some weeks have more drama than others, so that week's episode is therefore longer.
The show is currently the darling of the TV world with four remakes already started, two more remakes are filming, and a bunch more in the works. Because the show was an enormous success in Norway, and they managed to rope in teenagers, which is the exact demographic that the networks are bleeding like crazy.
(I liked it so much I spent months perfecting the English subtitles for it, because I got so angry at the fansubs that were floating around)
The American remake, which isn't shit - as American remakes usually are - can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/SKAMaustin
There are also quite a few British TV shows made by duos and small teams rather than a single creator, including some of the best in the medium. Like Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army and Monty Python's Flying Circus.
And that will continue as long as people contribute to their business model, which is the most money and the most eyeballs. You will never get a reliable stream of quality, unpopular, arty, amazing shows, because they aren't the business model. How do we change this?
Fund different business models. Fund a whole new content development platform that distributes funds to productions that won't make much money or get many eyeballs, but will create more diverse content. As those become more popular, do deals with content distributors to help fund it.
I don't think there's enough people interested in quality content for this to work without serious budget-pinching, so I don't think it'll happen. You could try to create the platform and just hope the viewers/funders will come. But unless someone disrupts content creation, everyone will continue to be beholden to whomever can pay for content.
Another alternative is we stop paying millions to stars of hit shows, or some other production change, but that seems even less likely...
The idea of planning a season, or more, before filming makes sense to me, especially as more shows become serialized. "Westworld" would not have worked if the writers did not have at least the first two seasons planned out. The same goes for "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul", although I'm not sure to what extent Vince Gilligan planned out the five seasons of BB or has planned the five seasons of BCS (a prequel to BB, by the way).
[1] http://www.gv.com/sprint/
It’s interesting that the article makes this analogy, then compares mini-rooms to the gig economy. Are startup accelerators promoting lean methodology not exactly the same concept?
The difference between getting into YCombinator and being “accepted” as an Uber driver is that the former has significant upside potential. Is this true of a scriptwriter in a mini-room? Very possibly, from a career progression perspective. But there also may be some exploitation - is your writing credit for Show That Hit It Big worth less in a world where new scripts are churned out by other mini-rooms daily?
Makes you wonder what shows would be like if scriptwriters were given equity packages. But that wasn’t ever on the table. With or without this system, it’s tough breaking into screenwriting. This doesn’t change that - it’s just an optimization by the studio itself on how to use its human resources.
> Working out the story arc in advance gives a much better sense of what the show requires in terms of sets, locations, cast, and all the other expensive variables that go into creating a fictional world.
Its absolutely crazy US TV is developed in this way: make a pilot knowing nothing about any story arcs, and just hope you can budget and bluff your way to a finale?
It's blindly obvious it has been done this way. Hopefully this change will improve plots.
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-05-03/doctor-who-consid...
Would be kind of amusing if over time, the British way of writing episodes became the American one and vice versa.