Identifying Sweet Spot by Genre

Unlike Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, when a viewer tunes in to a sitcom, they know what they’re going to get: the sweet spot.

The sweet spot of most sitcoms occurs when the characters are placed in variations on the same situation—they are put to the test. The insular Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons) in The Big Bang Theory routinely clash with the “normalcy” of the outside world. Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm finds himself in a cringe-worthy situation at odds with his skewed ideals. Phil (Ty Burrell) and Claire (Julie Bowen) on Modern Family continue to embarrass their kids and themselves in their quest to be ideal parents. Married … with Children milks laughs by treating marriage and parenthood as the ultimate punishment. The two men in Two and a Half Men are a modern day variation on Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.

One-hour drama series can also greatly benefit from clarifying and adhering to the sweet spot. I’m not suggesting a rigid formula for each series. I am suggesting that a series must deliver the promise of its premise every week. Hopefully, there will be unexpected character development that’s organic and earned from previous episodes. Hopefully, there will be twists and turns in the plot. But, at the core, the series sweet spot remains the same. This is the tacit contract the showrunner is making with the audience. Keep tuning in—and we’ll keep giving you new iterations on the same premise.

The sweet spot of a procedural series is the fresh, innovative element of the medical/legal/criminal case—and the surprising/unpredictability of the resolution. These shows are all puzzles, and the sweet spot is how the missing pieces fit into place toward the inevitable solution, but the challenge for writers it to avoid being too formulaic and predictable. Medical, legal, and police procedural series are all, essentially, murder mysteries. We tune in each week to witness the experts solve the cases; the killer might be a person or a disease. And as technology evolves, the issue has become less whodunit and more howdunnit.

Identifying Sweet Spot by Series

In The Walking Dead, the sweet spot is survival of the fittest in a post-apocalyptic world. The sweet spot of this series isn’t simply man versus zombie—that would get old and repetitive fast. Instead, the zombie-slaying is the backdrop for a disparate group of renegade survivors attempting to form a new society. They actually form an extended family and watch each other’s backs. The sweet spot of The Walking Dead straddles the fence between the genres of horror and family drama. The emotional core of the series stems from the relationships. The creepy, gory, chills, and thrills emerge organically from the constant threat of the living dead (who are also survivalists in need of fresh flesh). Remove the blood and guts and the show collapses. But if there were only gore, the show would also falter. And so this phenomenally successful cable series gives us both every week. It knows its sweet spot and finds the right balance. The central question of the series remains constant: Who will survive and how? The central mystery—what happened to cause this zombie apocalypse?—has never, and probably will never, be answered.

The sweet spot of Breaking Bad is how the formerly meek Walter White (Bryan Cranston) becomes a ruthless drug kingpin story set against a dysfunctional family drama with gallows humor, twisted alliances, devious minds, and self-delusion. Greed and power, corruption and cover-ups. The sweet spot is a group of novices playing in the big leagues and, against all odds, succeeding on their own terms. It’s a show that’s evolved from under-dog to top dog. The central question remains constant: Will Walter get caught—and at what consequence?

The sweet spot of Mad Men is the disparity between superficial appearances and the truth—an apt metaphor for the advertising trade. But the metaphor extends to power dynamics at home and in the workplace. It’s less of a show about who’s loyal and who cheats—and more a show about why. The tone of the series is slick, ironic, funny, and dark. Mad Men flourishes by digging deep into its cast of characters to help us understand their wholly self-destructive patterns; indeed, the more they each get ahead, the more likely they are to self-sabotage. Ads tend to show us a “perfect” version of reality, a life to which we all aspire. And the ultimate irony of Mad Men is how that lifestyle is unattainable.

The sweet spot of Homeland is duality. Brody (Damian Lewis) is both a war hero and a terrorist; Carrie (Claire Danes) is both a hyper-vigilant CIA operative and a traitor. Against this backdrop, how does one remain faithful to one’s ideals in a morally complex, dangerous world? It’s not a show about black and white. It’s a show about shades of gray. As characters’ perceptions and beliefs shift, we find ourselves asking more questions—and there are no easy answers.

The sweet spot of The Americans is half dysfunctional family drama and half Cold War espionage thriller. The best episodes operate on both of these levels simultaneously; dialogue is layered with delicious, duplicitous subtext. In the series, undercover KGB agent Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) is posing as a suburban hockey mom but no one has a clue (yet). And we get fun exchanges of dialogue laced with double entendre, such as when Elizabeth’s neighbor, Sandra (Susan Misner), mentions that she saw Elizabeth doing something innocuous from her kitchen window, then innocently adding: “I mean, not that I was spying on you or anything.” The sweet spot of this series was epitomized when Elizabeth’s husband and fellow KGB operative, Phillip (Mathew Rhys), posing in disguise as “Clark,” has no choice but to marry Martha (Alison Wright), the secretary to a high-level FBI agent so that he can use her to bug her boss’s office. In a small, civil ceremony, Clark and Martha say their vows before the Justice of the Peace, and standing beside him are Clark’s “family members”: incognito Elizabeth and their KGB supervisor Granny (Margo Martindale). As Clark says “I do” to Martha, Elizabeth is unexpectedly moved and saddened because she and Phillip never had a proper wedding ceremony; their marriage was arranged based upon politics and espionage—not love. And we realize that the steely, calculating spy Elizabeth might truly love Phillip after all. It’s the perfect intersection of premise and franchise, and the sweet spot of the series is typified by its smart tagline: All is fair in love and cold war.

NL: I’d like to discuss the “sweet spot” (to use a tennis racquet metaphor) of your remarkably long-running series, Bones. As the creator and showrunner, you seem to both honor and transcend the expectations of your series’ fans, season after season. So let’s start with your myriad of A story cases of the week. What makes a worthy A story for you?

HH: A stories come from a number of places. Every once in a while we will rip them from the headlines, but not much—especially not as much as in the last couple of years. Most of our A stories spring first out of finding an arena—a world that Booth [David Boreanaz] and Brennan [Emily Deschanel] can go into that maybe the audience hasn’t seen or thinks they know, but ours has a twist in it. A typical homicide where a husband kills his wife—the characters and the twists and turns would have to be absolutely fascinating to fill six acts. By the way, we went to a six-act structure in season 3 at the behest of the FOX network. We used to be a teaser and five acts. The teaser was in fact a teaser—a minute or two. With the addition of the sixth act, we needed one more plot twist. Bones is a procedural hybrid with characters and humor. There’s always a very personal storyline around the romance or lack of romance between Booth and Brennan. With six acts, we were pushed into this idea that we needed interesting arenas. It was not a conscious decision—we got shoved there by the network. Generally, a good arena will give you one or two plot twists that you don’t have to invent out of air. For example, we did our homage to The X-Files with the world of UFOs. And given the speed with which we have to push out twenty-two episodes, that’s a big gift.

It was very early in the first season that we realized that we were killing [overtaxing, burning out] our lead actors, and I knew we needed to figure out which scenes could we do without them. You can do a few with the squinterns (what we call secondary characters). But another way to do it was with the body find. The first scene is almost always an innocent person finding our [dead] body. What we want is to make people barf before five minutes into the scene and say, “What the hell—how did that happen?” And then that will generally lead into the arena.

NL: And the arena can also suggest possible red herrings? Like the episode with Bill, the reality TV personality who busts people for having affairs. You have the TV producer and various people on the show, which gives you at least one or two twists or turns.

HH: We’ve made an unspoken deal with our audience that the killer is not going to be someone we spring out of nowhere—we are going to meet them. That is a tough balance to do. If you go on the message boards, people have theories like, “It’s always the third person you meet.” The interwebs don’t really have a lot of effect on us, but it did make me think we have to make sure that that doesn’t happen accidentally. So we pay attention to that. We also need an arena which provides a wealth of suspects because you know you’re going to meet them probably before the end of act three and definitely before the end of act four. And we definitely don’t want people getting ahead of us.

NL: In the early seasons of the show, it seemed like by the end of act four, you’d have the climax of the show. You’d have the revelation of the suspect and then act five was very short—like an epilogue. Has that shifted? Because structurally, that’s actually a question that comes up in class at UCLA a lot now. It used to be that every one hour was four acts—a teaser and four acts. Now, most shows are five or six acts. Some because of the influence of TiVo. So the question becomes then, “Where does the climax happen?” I tell them it depends on the show. What about for you?

HH: It hasn’t been as interesting for us in a six-act structure to figure out who the killer is by the end of act 5 and then catch them in act 6. It’s generally that, once we know who that person is, we wrap it up. This is basically due to my boredom. For example, we have a serial killer now and we will know who it is by the end of act one—maybe even by the end of the teaser— because of the four or five episodes he’ll be in for the season. Then it’s the cat and mouse game. Most murderers are not coming back at our people. We’re chasing them. It’s a whodunit. The mandate that the writers’ room has is that the climax is probably going to be when Brennan realizes something forensically that the body gives a clue that he’s perhaps left-handed, not right-handed. The climax to the show is when she turns to Booth and says, “That’s the guy.” That’s the climax of the case.

NL: Then you have your B story to track and resolve—or advance—for the season?

HH: Yes, and our B story is very often more important to a chunk of the audience. They are watching the murder to get to the gushy stuff. And the other chunk is putting up with the gushy stuff to get to the murder. We try and have them resonate and join together in axis with our climax which is halfway through act six in the big exciting “who did it” scene when our puzzle is solved.

NL: For me, what I’ve noticed is that the A story impacts the B story or vice versa in terms of a thematic that is running through. Like the episode when Brennan and Booth were trying to decide whose apartment they were going to live in. So her lack of memory in the A story case triggered their fears of moving in together because of his father and because of her foster childhood. Do you consciously strive to have a unifying theme between A, B, and C stories?

HH: Our best shows are when something in the case resonates for them in their personal life. Our second best shows are where something happens in their personal life and they go, “Oh, that applies to this case.” That’s always a bit clumsier and seems more coincidental. My personal feeling about life is that the universe speaks to you. If you have something in your head, something that speaks to you, then the universe seems to provide a lot of examples of it occurring out there in the world. I don’t believe there is a mystic force speaking to us, but I do believe the universe is telling us something all the time. And when the two stories are not connected at all, they’re not our best episodes. They can be our best case and they can even be our best romantic episode, but if the two don’t hook into each other—it’s just not as good.

NL: I like when A, B, and C stories resonate on some type of level—even where there’s the DNA of theme in each story.

HH: I’m doing a pilot right now for CBS. That’s what I’m obsessed with— creating a universe. Storytelling is a way of ordering a chaotic universe and that is satisfying to us—that is why we like stories.

NL: What’s the internal story document process? Do you go from writers’ room to beat sheet to outline? What’s the timeline?

HH: Everything is as fast as humanly possible. The writers upstairs know that their best chance to get their words said by the actors are to do as many drafts as they can with notes from me and my right-hand man, Stephen Nathan, because I’m a big rewriter. It’s easier for me to do a rewrite than to spend time with a writer giving them notes. It’s one of my weaknesses as a showrunner. Every once in a while, some poor writer out there gets to do one draftof a script—and after all the revisions, nothing they wrote, no dialogue, will be said. And that’s tough on a writer to watch something with your name on it.

NL: Does it threaten their job security if that keeps happening?

HH: No, it doesn’t in any way threaten their job security because they’ve done their part. If the train of production catches up and you’ve got to take this script, it’s not their fault. You’ve got to pay a lot of attention to what people do for other writers. Because there are a lot of writers who will help other writers. You do your due diligence at the end of the year when you’re thinking about who to bring back and you have to take into account who helped other writers with their scripts. It takes a village. We don’t have a cutthroat situation. The room is very nice. They are supportive of each other. It’s not like we would get rid of the person who put the least amount of words on the page.

At CBS when I was doing Joan of Arcadia and Judging Amy, the network was comfortable with no outlines. I would call and pitch the stories to them. It would take five to ten minutes. I would say here are the beats while I was looking at a beat sheet. They would say fine, and the writer would go off. FOX wants to see the outlines and it’s their call. Here’s what generally happens. The guy who runs the room right now is Jon Collier, co-executive producer, who is just awesome at it. I don’t spend a ton of time in the room. I get pitched arenas, and then we discuss with Jon what the personal B stories might be in that arena. Then we go upstairs and the writer pitches six acts with the act endings. Stephen and I respond and give notes. That takes maybe an hour and a half to two hours. Then they turn that into an outline. I don’t look at outlines, neither does Stephen, but Jon and another co-executive producer, Kim Clements, produce the outline and send it to the network. Sometimes it comes back with questions, and then we beef it up. Then the writer goes off to write the script. And the faster they write the script, the faster they will get notes. Every once in a while, we will hand over a script from a junior writer to a co-executive producer to do a pass with our notes, so that the rewrite doesn’t have to be as big.

NL: Is the outline about ten pages?

HH: It’s twelve pages long.

NL: One of the things that was tough for me when I was first on staff on Aaron Spelling’s shows was that they required fifteen- to twenty-page single-spaced outlines which included everything. Then, what I learned when I went to other shows is that if the draftwould come following the outline, the co-executive producer would say, “It’s the outline”—and that was not a compliment. Because the script needs to transcend and elevate.

HH: Elevate is the word. It needs to get better.

NL: I think a lot of writers starting out don’t understand that and that’s the danger. If you spend all your time on the outline, you’re not going to make those discoveries later in the script.

HH: Because once you have people talking and interacting, what looked right in the outline can and should change in the script. Doing a procedural, certain things tend to stick like when you discover stuff, but how and who’s there can change radically. New writers should also know that if I give notes on a script and all that writer does is insert the notes—that’s not useful. It’s also not a good script. The notes should change everything. You can give three little notes, but it often means that every line of dialogue needs to change. To me, a real writer is someone I give a note to like: “You know, this scene should be a funnier take on this—not so melodramatic. And up here, I don’t know does she hate her mother or not?” and he or she goes ahead and changes the whole script to adopt those notes. The better a writer is, the more that that happens. And it takes courage because the outline’s been approved.

NL: There’s been some evolution with your characters with Temperance softening and getting into a relationship and having a baby. Do you have any comments on that and do you know instinctually when that evolution is supposed to happen?

HH: The changing of characters is the trickiest element to a network show. Twenty-two episodes a year, and if you’re lucky, five years—that’s 110 episodes. You have to keep the thing that makes the audience watch. I refer a lot to taking care of your story engine. If you knew that a show was going to last three seasons, and the question was, “Will they or won’t they?” you’d know where to parse it. We didn’t think we would last until Christmas the first year. We were always on the bubble,¹ so it was, “How do we keep two young, healthy, unattached people in a free society from going to bed?” I’m okay with the audience screaming and yelling and being unhappy, as long as they keep watching. I’ve said that out loud a few times and gotten into trouble for it. They hear, “You don’t like us. You don’t mind us being unhappy.” I don’t mind the audience being unhappy if I’m doing it on purpose and they’re still watching. What I really mind is the audience being bored or going away. The story engine on our show was the chemistry. First and foremost, it’s a procedural. We have to have good cases. There’s another question with network shows which is, “Do you try to get new audiences or do you try to hang on to the audience you have?” In the case of Bones, I was trying to hang on to our loyal, loyal audience, and it was a function of real life because we were bouncing around the schedule. For me, to turn my efforts into getting a new audience each night, I think we would have been dead. It appears that that was a good plan.

NL: Yeah—seven years on the air.

HH: We’re still bouncing around the schedule. FOX has never felt the desire to turn us into a hit. We mostly survived. They put us on after American Idol, and we could talk a lot as to whether that was a hit-making position or not. But we had to keep the story engine between those two to keep our loyal audience coming back week after week. I went as slowly as possible. At the end of season 5, I just thought, “Okay, they will take one more year. We are going to have them together by the end of season 6.” I knew how it was going to happen. I knew that a beloved character would die and that they would go to bed. The little giftfrom heaven was that Emily came to me and said, “I’m pregnant.” And I said, “Okay, we know what to do.” The horrible uncertainty went away. I don’t know exactly how we would have gone into season 7 if she wasn’t pregnant. I just knew they would have slept together. I had about five or eight things written out for what that arc could be, but none of them delighted me. My favorite one was not too far offfrom what we did—which is that they were going to try to get together.

No matter what they are doing—ours happen to be solving murders and raising a child now—they’re going to give you two different views of the universe.

NL: You also have your ensemble, and they get to weigh in with their points of view.

HH: I’ve ranked them on a line for rationality—the mystic over here and the rational over there. So oddly enough, her best friend, Angela [Michaela Conlin], was the farthest over to the mystical, humanist side of things. Booth is probably next to her. When we started, there was even someone more rational than Brennan, but that didn’t work out. But it was so that everyone would have a stance on everything they were going through.

NL: When you created the pilot for Bones, I know that you started with the books by Kathy Reichs and her experience and background as a forensic anthropologist. You hear a lot with pilot development about whether it’s a premise pilot, a non-premise pilot, or a hybrid. It feels like with Bones that it was not a premise pilot because they had already known each other when he picked her up at the airport. How did you make some of those choices and why?

HH: Some of it’s out of your hands. At that point, I think it was both studio and network—and certainly network—did not want a premise pilot. They just didn’t. I never understood this by the way. I love premise pilots. It was a thing for years.

NL: They were afraid that if the audience missed the first show, you would never get them hooked.

HH: I always thought that was faulty logic because then you’re starting as if it’s the second episode or the tenth. The math didn’t make sense to me, but I accepted it. I got as close to a premise pilot as I could. They knew each other and they hated each other from something in the past. It was a year later from the last time they had a disastrous outing as partners. I also had to explain why a scientist would be out in the world with a cop because in real life that wouldn’t happen. It had to be her insistence for some reason. We had all sorts of rationalizations: “I need to make sure the evidence isn’t … I’m a cultural anthropologist.” We just needed them to be together.

NL: Given the real science and verisimilitude, where does the show rest?

HH: I am delighted and surprised that either Popular Mechanics or Popular Science did a ranking of the procedural shows in terms of reality, and we won. Bones won. I think it’s because I don’t know enough to lie. We do lie. Angela’s machine did exist. There were seven of them when Bones started, but they were not being used for forensic things. They were doing things like climate mapping. It’s a multi-gazillion-dollar machine, and you can’t program it in five minutes. The rest of the forensic stuff is rooted in reality. We take out a million steps and we compress the time. You can get DNA evidence in an hour, but it takes two months in real life. The monstrous expense of what our team would actually do—you can’t do that. But our science is good. If we have a legitimate criticism in the writers’ room or from us [the executive producers] on a plot point or on the science, we say, “That’s not true. I call bullshit.” Anyone can say that and say why they don’t believe it. We all have to feel like it could really happen.

NL: Bones has been a great training ground for showrunners: Josh Berman, Noah Hawley, and Janet Tamaro. I know Josh had a lot of experience when he came here, but now he’s running two shows.

HH: He just had another one picked up. Josh is a force of nature and so is Janet.

NL: Besides “quality scripts on time,” what else would you say are the most important skills for a showrunner to have to be effective?

HH: There’s a few things I’m a fanatic about. One is that the director of the episode have a prep-able script the first day of prep [preproduction]. They are not wasting two or three days trying to work off an outline that might change. I think that’s the first responsibility. We have some kind of responsibility to our actors as well—to respect them. They are the face of the show. They have to go out there and say this stuff and make it work. They have to make it work. They have to feel listened to. You have to get trust with your actors over time. I put that right up there amongst the things you have to do. I think the toughest thing about showrunning is that, if you are doing your job well, everybody is a little bit annoyed at you, but doesn’t hate your guts. So if you’re someone like I am who likes to be liked, it’s not a perfect job because it’s very high pressure. Janet Tamaro, Josh Berman, and Noah Hawley—these are very, very good writers. Any number of the people I work with—Stephen Nathan, Jonathan Collier, Karen Usher—can be show-runners, but this is my job. Any one of them may be more right at any time than I am or have another way to do it, but it’s my job to be the showrunner. I could easily go work for any of these people and then they would have that job. And I’m telling you that the best job in the world is second in command on a show. Noah Hawley said a great thing to me when he came back after The Unusuals, which I think, aired on ABC about four times, but was critically acclaimed. He said to me that he had stood there right beside me when I was running Bones. And he used to think, “I wouldn’t do it that way. Oh, what an asshole.” He said that the shock of all of a sudden being that guy is like a tornado coming at you. I remember being this guy by the way, being second in command, and thinking I would do it way better and what an asshole my showrunner was. And then you step into the job, and everything is noisier and there’s yelling and a huge amount of chaos. It’s just so noisy all the time. Constant decisions. If you take the money and the credit, you have to do the job. It’s better to be second in command, it’s a little quieter. You can hear yourself think.

NL: Well, what’s the best part of being a showrunner then?

HH: Last year, I ran a new show called The Finder and we were getting there … we were getting there.

NL: I loved how irreverent everything was.

HH: That guy’s [Geoff Stults] a star. He deserved it. By the season finale, I said, “Give us one more. I’m telling you we know this show. We know how to use these actors.” I was very tired, and when it finally went down, I literally said to my wife, “We can go somewhere.” The most time I’ve had off since Bones started was nine days. And now there was three weeks that we could go somewhere. So we went to Europe and when we came back, I was immediately pitching another show. I don’t know why. I need to go to therapy and find out why. It’s so much work. You don’t get all that much more money for doing two shows instead of one. I have enough money. When The Finder went down, I felt terrible for my hardworking crew, but they’re all working now.

NL: So what drives you—do you know?

HH: Here’s what it is: I’m all excited about the next world. When I think about doing the series, I go, “Oh, my god.” When I think about the creative part of this character, it’s called Backstrom for CBS, I get all excited. I think about who might get cast in that role—and I have three or four people in mind. Each one of them changes the series in a way that’s very exciting to me. You get to create a world.

NL: And then run it. What could be sweeter than that?