Structural Formats

Each show fits into a particular format that allows it to be easily identified. Dramas are generally classified as either procedurals or serials. Procedurals, such as Law & Order, CSI, The Mentalist, and House, M.D., deal with a new case each week. At the end of the episode, the cops will catch the bad guy, the lawyers will win their case (or not), or the doctors will save their patient (or not). Even though procedurals are much more plot-driven, sometimes they break format and deal with more personal stories. In the season 6 finale of Law & Order titled “Aftershock,” the entire episode showed how the cops and lawyers spent a personal day after witnessing an execution, a big departure from the follow-the-string, investigatory backbone of the series.

Serials contain more complex storylines that span multiple episodes or even seasons. Most serials use a direct pickup (or DPU) in which each new episode starts exactly where the previous episode ended (examples: Weeds, House of Cards, and the latter part of season 2 of Scandal).

Other serials, such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Homeland, are looser and begin new episodes in what might be the next day or week or month. Mad Men jumped ahead a year between seasons. Season 5 of Desperate Housewives made a quantum leap five years after the previous season and used flashbacks to bring the audience up to speed.

In the first season of The Wire, the cops’ mission is to arrest drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), but they don’t even know what he looks like! It’s not until the third episode that the police are able to locate an old photo of him. In a procedural where plots move much quicker, Avon would have likely been captured in one or two episodes.

Comedies are generally classified as either multi-camera or single-camera sitcoms. Multi-cam sitcoms, the more traditional format, are filmed (but usually videotaped) with four cameras running simultaneously on a stage in front of a studio audience, for example, The Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, Friends, and Two and a Half Men. (I Love Lucy was one of the pioneers of this format, with Desi and Lucy shooting each episode in chronological order for a live, in-studio audience to enjoy each episode like theater.) Many classic sitcoms (Taxi, Cheers, Happy Days) were shot on 35 mm film for a rich, movie look, but that’s a rarity in 2013 due to efficiency and expense.

Single-cam sitcoms such as The Office, Modern Family, and 30 Rock, employ one camera and tend to shoot more characters, scenes, and locations. Single-cam shows are more prevalent today.

To wrap your brain around the difference between multi-camera and single camera sitcoms, here’s an example I like to use.

On a multi-camera sitcom, we’re generally inside one of two or three main locations: the hangout/workplace, the apartment/house, and one “swing set” (optional interior location) depending on the story. If a character on a multi-camera gets mugged in the park, he will rush into a room out of breath, very distraught with ripped clothing, and explain to whoever’s present what just happened.

On a single-camera sitcom or dramedy, we would probably get to go outside to the park and see the mugging take place, along with the chase, and maybe even the race back to the apartment where he would then recount the story but with far less detail because we would have already seen it—unless it’s revisionist history for comedic effect.

Multi-camera sitcoms are more contained and primarily shot indoors on the same sets week after week. We come to view these places as familiar and iconic. The bar in Cheers was our bar, too. In fact, for the first two seasons of Cheers, we never left the bar. We went into the backroom, Sam Malone’s (Ted Danson) office, and maybe a bathroom or alcove. There were stairs leading up to a restaurant above the bar, but we didn’t actually go there for many seasons.

Single-camera comedies and dramedies (Modern Family, Louie, Parks & Recreation, Weeds, Girls) take us everywhere: inside, outside, up in the air, in the ocean—wherever the story needs to go, we get to go there as well. Animated comedy series (The Simpsons, Archer, Family Guy) can take us anywhere the writers can imagine without limitation; if it can be drawn, it can be done. There is also the hybrid sitcom, which blends multi-cam and single-cam characteristics, such as How I Met Your Mother.

The ABCs of Episodic Structure

The Teleplay: Basic Guidelines

Most half-hour, multi-camera sitcoms are written in double-spaced sitcom format and run around fifty pages.

Most half-hour, single-camera comedies and dramedies are written in single-spaced screenplay format and run approximately thirty pages.

Most one-hour drama series teleplays run between forty-eight and sixty-three pages. However, many pilot episodes run longer and then get cut down during the production process, especially in post-production. Teleplays for Moonlighting, The West Wing, and E.R. could run eighty-five pages or more due to their fast pacing and rapid-fire dialogue. But even at that higher page count, the produced show would fit into its one-hour time slot.

It’s not always easy to gauge the actual length of an episode until it’s shot. The rhythm of the actors’ deliveries, the pacing of scenes, editing styles, and musical interludes (such as on Glee) can impact actual length versus page length. For this reason, once a show is up and running and becomes a well-oiled machine, a series’ script supervisor will read the script and do a “timing” or estimate of the actual length of the episode. For a writer who’s trying to sell an original pilot script, it’s usually best to work within the basic page length guidelines (see “basic guidelines”). Aaron Sorkin gets to break the rules and do his own thing because he’s won Emmys and Oscars and is a genius.

When writing a pilot for a sitcom or one-hour drama, I advise you to study current, successful series that have the same tone, rhythm, and pacing that you’d like your series to have—and study the structure. Does it use a “teaser”? How many act breaks? How many scenes per act? Is there a “tag” or epilogue?

For script formatting—that is, how the words need to look on the page, line spacing, indentation, pagination, please read as many teleplays as you can and emulate the script format. I also recommend an excellent book that delves into this area with specific examples: Write to TV by Martie Cook.

NL: The Walking Dead is based upon comic books. In plotting your series, how much are you basing on the source material, and how much are you inventing?

GM: We invent most of the story we have here whole cloth. We crib major characters and plot points or settings from the comic books. So, for example, in the upcoming season, we introduce two major settings: one is the prison that Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and the core group of survivors we’re following discover and decide to take over and set up shop there. There are two major characters that are being introduced. One is Michonne (Danai Gurira) who is an African American woman. We consider her a soldier. She carries a Katana sword and she’s a fan favorite. So we’ve now worked her into the show.

We also have The Governor (David Morrissey), who is an arch villain in the comic book and he is the leader of a walled community called Woodbury. Our version of The Governor is very different. Our version of Michonne is very different. The way our characters are introduced. What they say. That’s all original to the show. We are doing our takes on these characters because we feel the fans want to see those characters dramatized, but we really make that material our own.

NL: In season 1, the first six episodes move very quickly. It seems like each one was almost like a feature film, and as much as I liked it, I thought it might be difficult to sustain that. So my next question is about pacing. How do you gauge the pace of the storytelling?

GM: That’s a great question because I think when the show first came out I was only a freelance writer that first season. I think there was a need to tell as much and to grab the audience because they only had a six-episode order. When we went to thirteen for the next year, we decided to slow down the pace and push in to examine some of the characters’ lives. This show developed into a character-driven cable drama that fit nicely into that paradigm. However, there’s a larger audience wanting to watch the show and those are horror fans and comic book fans. It’s a lot of youth. We have a much more eclectic audience than the typical cable drama audience. So when I became showrunner in the middle of season 2, my natural tendency was to put more story in. This is something that I really learned on The Shield and the first show I started on, Nash Bridges, where I was writing partners with Shawn Ryan. And Nash Bridges became a great training ground for other showrunners: Shawn and Damon Lindelof. So I wanted to move up the story and pack it in. At the time we started doing that in the second half of the season, we were airing the first half of the season, while we were already shooting the second half. And the feedback from the audience came in that it was very frustrating, frustratingly slow. That pacing was not something that the audience was responding to.

So when the second half of the season came out and I was responsible for all of those scripts, it seemed to answer an audience need, but we were already ahead of the audience. I believe we were responding to something we felt slowed the brakes on a little too much. I think we had to define what is the story we’re telling. We’re talking about an apocalypse. We’re talking about a civilization. We’re talking about desperate survivors. So the stakes are higher than a living room drama, and we were doing a little bit too much of a living room drama. So we started increasing the pace, and by the end of the season, it was pretty much where I wanted it to be. Moving forward, it’s interesting because I do want to pack a lot of story in and the risk is that you reach a tipping point where it’s too unrealistic or too fantastic or too shocking for the audience. It’s my job as a showrunner to say what is too much. I have to go with my gut. We do have episodes that I describe as a pool in a rainstorm, it’s just about at that level, but it’s not spilling over yet. I feel that it’s my job to both push the material and to make it exciting and surprising and satisfying the horror element which is unique to this show. This is the first show that I’ve worked on with a horror element. And yet, you want it to stay grounded and for it to feel real. This is really a debate that I have every day with our cast, our directors, our producers, and our network and studio, AMC. I would say that is one of the biggest challenges of my job right now.

NL: It’s a balancing act.

GM: Right. And the way I approach that is that I do have an overall arc for the season. But I focus on each individual episode and there are elements that I want to have associated with the show or incorporated into the show, but I can’t fit every thing in every episode. So instead I have sixteen episodes where some episodes can be a little more character focused and others could be a little more horror focused or action focused. Some could have some comedy. By the end of the season, I think the total experience will be satisfying.

NL: How vital to you is an overarching central mystery? Because in season 2, you had a few mysteries going. You had “What happened to Sophia (Madison Lintz)?” You had “What did Dr. Jenner (Noah Emmerich) whisper to Rick?” Etc.

GM: In a genre show like this that has a horror and science fiction element, the fans in the audience are very, very interested in mysteries. They want to know the rules of the game. They want to be convinced that this is a worthwhile ride. That the end of this experience will be satisfying. And there have been other genre shows that have not necessarily delivered a satisfying experience and that is disappointing to a very, very dedicated fan base. I’m aware of that. However, I am not that type of a writer. I don’t feel that the mysteries are why people watch TV. Because my bottom line rule of TV is that it’s cool people doing cool shit every week. That’s it. Let’s break down that sentence. Cool people doing—doing—cool stuff every week. Not learning cool stuff every week. They need to be active. To have their backs against the wall. To be in dire straits. They need to made desperate choices. David Mamet says that drama is basically a decision between two horrible choices. That is certainly something that we use on this show. I’ve worked on a number of other TV shows in which writing staffs try to go for the big payoff and revelation. That only works sometimes. I actually think there’s too much emphasis on revealing the answer to a mystery as being satisfying to an audience. We didn’t do it on The Shield, I’m not really interested in doing it here. For example, “What caused the outbreak?” is a question that people ask a lot. Who cares? That’s not part of the original comic book. So, what do you do with the information that you have? If you look at the episodes in the back half of season 2, I think that that’s important. That’s the type of storytelling that I’m very interested in.

Let’s look at the major revelation of season 2 that Sophia’s in the barn. Sophia steps out of the barn. We could have stopped the show there. Instead everyone is paralyzed by the horror that she was right under their noses and Rick, who doesn’t know what to do, steps forward into a leadership position and does what no one else is able to do. This revelation led to character action and then the show ended. So to me, that was a scene of character action, not revelation.

NL: What about the role of theme? The first six episodes seemed to very much be about the theme of survival.

GM: Yes.

NL: In season 2 what emerged for me were the themes of hope and faith. There’s a whole episode where they go to a church. Then there’s thematics where the A, B, and C stories connect. How aware and deliberate are you about thematic links between the stories?

GM: When we are trying to achieve something artistic, you let some type of energy or spirit flow through you. You have to be able to listen and you let the work reveal itself to you. And the minute you try to inject your ego into that, it actually screws things up. The Walking Dead is the first show for me where theme is important as we’re developing it. On other shows, particularly The Shield, the theme became apparent very, very late in the game. When we sat down to break season 3, we had some ideas and I had some larger themes that I wanted to examine. When I pitched it out to all of the other, non-writing producers and then to AMC, I did approach it thematically and usually when I’ve done that, it usually feels like horseshit. It feels like something I’m just telling an executive so that get what box the show is in. But it turned out to be true and there were certain themes on season 3 that we keep coming back to. It just works. What we try to do is focus on the story, and then when we step back, we see that the theme is there. And now we have confidence in the story. We do not try to construct the story to fit the theme.

We broke this season in detail for eight episodes and then we went off and wrote them. And then when we came back in to fill in those next episodes, the theme still applied and was still connecting. We’ve had two themes for this season, and they’ve both been very necessary lifelines to get through all the confusion of the daily making of the show.

NL: Are Rick stories always going to be your A stories?

GM: There are different forms to tell a TV story. And in an ensemble piece like this, you’d usually have the Rick character as the A story, someone else would be the B story, and someone else would be the C story and then you would intertwine those stories. That doesn’t always equal a theme. It just pushes the ball further on each one. That is the case with Game of Thrones. When you watch an episode, you watch an installment where all of your characters advance, but that episode may or may not be a total story within itself. We do have elements of that A, B, C story here, but I think for the most part we reject it. I think we look at each episode as having a beginning, middle, and an end—and whatever fits to that theme for that episode. For instance, the episode when the girl steps out of the barn and when the herd overruns the farm at the end. Each character has a place in that larger story. This is the first time I’ve ever worked on a show that’s rejected the traditional A, B, and C story format—and gone for more of just “What is this episode about?” What gets lost in that is perhaps the opportunity to examine particular characters. Sometimes minor characters just stay minor characters. That’s a risk, but I feel the story drive of the engine is strong enough that it will be satisfying to the audience.

NL: In season 2, you started to introduce some flashback elements.

GM: When I joined the writing staff, there was a tendency to try to embrace those flashbacks. I have rejected those flashbacks, so in the episodes where I’ve been a showrunner—and I’m open to doing flashbacks—but I’ve rejected them here because I don’t believe that flashbacks are an element of horror films. They’re an element of science fiction films. When you introduce flashback, you start playing with the space-time continuum. I think it takes you away from the visceral and immediate horror. At the end of the day, I feel that The Walking Dead has to be a horror show—that’s what’s unique about it. I don’t find flashbacks scary. They were just giving more information or explaining the rules. Part of the difference between the first half of the season and the second half is that I focused on the horror elements.

NL: If you’re not identifying things as A, B, and C stories, what’s the process of doing outlines and beat sheets?

GM: I don’t use outlines. I’ve been taught to react or follow my gut from reviewing a written script. An outline is an interesting tool, but I can’t shoot an outline. It’s really about the script and the execution of the script. I really feel like outlines take up a lot of valuable writing time and that they are used to engage TV and studio executives. So that they can cover their asses and know what’s being written. None of their notes are applicable to script. So we write a two- to three-page story document and send it over to the network. It’s written in paragraph form. It’s what we’re going for in the episode and what the major set pieces are. I leave it to the individual writer to write it. What I do is work offof the beat sheet, I can work offof two or three words per beat. For example, “Rick kills Shane.” I don’t need to flesh that out. All script problems, for me on The Walking Dead, come down to structure problems. But if the structure is right and you start in a linear fashion, I have confidence in the writing staff that we can execute it. There was one scene I wasn’t happy with and I went back in to re-beat it and discovered that it was a structure problem. And a beat sheet for me is a piece of scrap paper with ten words.

NL: In the pilot episode, there weren’t any act breaks. It was regular screenplay format. But now you’re using four acts, correct?

GM: We use five acts actually. They split us into a teaser and five acts. There were four acts—good catch. AMC wanted an additional commercial break. Let me say this though, I absolutely love TV. I’m a student of TV. I loved TV when I was a kid. I’m more of a TV guy than a film guy. So when I first joined the show, those act breaks were not important, and I feel that those act breaks are an important part of the viewing process. What do you go off of?

Look at our season finale last year [in 2011], there was a huge zombie attack in the first half, and yet in the second half, there was very little zombie stuff except for Andrea (Laurie Holden) in the woods. That’s very different, so you really have to make all those act breaks count.

I do find that TV shows that embrace the TV form embrace the act break. There are some people who say, “Our TV show is not really TV. It’s like making a film every week.” Which I find disparaging to the art of TV, and I could certainly say if you look at all the great TV shows on TV today, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Homeland, hopefully, The Walking Dead, and you count the total number of hours that those shows produce, you’ll probably come up with seventy or eighty hours. In turn, name fifty feature films this year. So the action is all in TV right now, it’s all in TV. And yet, there’s this snooty attitude in TV that when it’s good, it’s rejecting itself as TV. “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” No, it’s TV and it’s very well done.

People really, really care about this show. They feel emotionally invested. So much so that they cry when our characters die. But name a horror film when you cried when a character died. That doesn’t happen. You never cry in a horror film.

NL: What are the biggest challenges of running a show?

GM: I’m sure a lot of people tell you time management. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think one of the biggest challenges for me is to not settle. There are a lot of people, including myself, I have fifteen producers on this show. They’re all talented. They’re all smart. Some write, some don’t. They all have strong opinions. It’s hard for me to get fifteen people to agree. It’s hard to listen to all of their notes. I have a very open door policy, in which I invite everyone’s notes, from the cast, from the director, and hopefully, I get a lot of input while the script is being written and I can then use the best ideas. It’s hard to (1) not take a barrage of criticism and feedback personally and (2) to make sure that everyone feels heard and yet not lose my vision as the showrunner by trying to make everyone else happy. I still have to realize that I have to be the singular vision for the show—that’s my job and that’s how the show will hopefully be successful. The rule that I’ve been following is that I only do something if I love it. If I absolutely love it, I believe it will work, and right now, I’m in that position. I think in the past on other shows, I tried to be too amenable to other people, too accommodating, and perhaps I didn’t stick to my guns. But you never want to be a tyrant or a dictator or shut down someone else’s creative voice.

The other challenge is to keep the show grounded—to keep it real. And yet, to deliver something that has a horror element. Part of horror and science fiction is that there’s a sense of high adventure. You want action, but you never want it to tip over into something unreal or ludicrous. If you have a clear direction, all the other stuff works itself out. And you go for a vacation at the end. Showrunners don’t sleep.

NL: Do you do a polish or a final pass of each script?

GM: I do an extensive polish on every script, if needed. There are many times that I will say I write a lot of each script. I don’t put my name on it. I have several scripts this year that I’ve written every word of and have not put my name on them. I have an executive producer credit on all of those. It’s my job as the showrunner. When I first became a showrunner on Crash, I didn’t rewrite some of the writers because I liked them. But then, I realized that part of my responsibilities as a showrunner is to be the voice of the show. So if a show comes out and it’s not necessarily my voice, the producers, the cast, and the crew might feel that it’s off. So no matter how well written—we do have a very, very talented writing staff. I’m very proud of them. But I also have a very specific thing in mind. I also try to push the material. I very often write stuff that people don’t think is going to play because I have a very stripped down writing style. So when people read it, it feels sparse and a little awkward and yet what I’m doing is writing directly for camera. I write the way I know the scene is going to be edited. So when you read my writing, you say, “Wow, I saw that.” You see everything there—including the silences and the looks from the actors. I’m writing less and less dialogue. I’m just letting the picture tell the story. I’ve gotten better at suppressing my ego and letting the story reveal itself through the writing.

One of the scenes I was really happy with is when Rick finds Carl (Chandler Riggs) sitting in a hayloftand he gives him a gun. He says, “I wish I had more to say, my dad was good like that.” You just get a whole sense of who this man’s father was. We know that Carl has lost his grandfather and that Rick is an inarticulate hero. And he gives him a gun which ends up being the gun that will kill Shane (Jon Bernthal). It’s a very underwritten scene, and if you look at how it’s filmed, we just set up a camera. Man enters frame and sits next to his son. Push in for a little coverage and get out. It’s very simple. On the page, when you read it, it might read a little flat, but then when it comes together, it plays, it’s right. I’m very careful not to overwrite, particularly on this show where things can get overwritten.

NL: What’s the best thing about being a showrunner?

GM: I have two answers. One, I realize how lucky I am and that I have a great giftin the sense that I get to do what I want and tell stories and work with talented writers and directors and that some studio puts up millions of dollars to make each episode. There are so many filmmakers and artists around the world trying to figure out how to do their art. I can’t take that for granted. I get to come to work every day and whatever I am passionate about will get made right now. And that’s very, very exciting. So I see being a showrunner as a gift. Last week, I went to Atlanta and I screened our season premiere for the cast and crew. Everybody cares so much about this show. Every part of the organization just loves The Walking Dead. And I’m the one person in the entire organization that gets to see everybody else do their best work. So I get to see the writer who’s excited about the fact that they found a great scene or they’ve got a great pitch. I get to see the casting agents excited because we got the perfect person. I get to see the director excited and the cameraman excited because he’s going to get the best take. And it goes all the way through special effects and the music. The composer, Bear McCreary, is fantastic. It goes all the way to this little studio at Warner Bros.—this little sound mixing room— and you walk in there and there are three guys and they say, “We just love this episode. It’s the best show we’ve worked on.” And they’re so excited. I’m the only person who gets to go through the whole process from inception to completion. That’s really special. That’s what’s unique about being a showrunner.