The “Aha” Moment

When I think about all the pilots I’ve read/viewed over the years, there seems to be a common denominator between the pilots that transcend my expectations and those that underwhelm. To me, the most satisfying pilots deliver an unexpected “aha moment” by the end—and provide me with a sense of discovery and wonder. It’s that final trump card that I should have seen coming—but didn’t.

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to see the great mystery author Walter Mosley speak at a writers’ conference. Mr. Mosley is a charismatic orator and his talk was peppered with lots of valuable guidance and wisdom for writers. But the three words that remained indelibly etched in my brain are these:

Think of a Pilot Story as a Puzzle to Be Solved

Remember, audiences are usually more compelled by what they don’t know than by what they do know. So don’t tell us everything in the pilot. Create intrigue and suspense (even in a comedy) by withholding crucial information—until the final card is dealt. The audience may presume that they understand exactly what’s going to happen next, so switch things up with a well-earned plot reversal to keep them on their toes and surprise them.

A Subtly Foreshadowed Plot Twist Can Be a Potent Game Changer

Ideally, the viewer has patiently waited for something unexpected to happen that brings the whole pilot full circle, so give them what they want—but then leave them dangling, so that they’re impatiently waiting to discover more in the next episode and the next and the next…

There are myriad strategies for writing a pilot, but the ending is usually the clincher. It’s the last impression that the agent/producer/studio/network executive is left with—and it needs to deliver. There are three basic strategies to wrapping up a pilot.

Launching the Franchise

This pilot ending shows us how the protagonist’s role in a new setting is solidified toward future episodes—and in service of the show’s (week-to-week) franchise—and the central question/mystery/conflict/relationship/premise of the series comes into focus for the viewer.

In the pilot for Cheers, Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) snaps out of denial that her professor/fiancé is coming back for her, and she woefully accepts a waitressing job at the bar despite her love/hate feelings for proprietor Sam Malone (Ted Danson).

At the end of the pilot for Girls, struggling twenty-four-year-old, self-absorbed, aspiring writer Hannah Horvath’s (Lena Dunham) parents have financially cut her off. Hannah is devastated, forlorn, and a little bit terrified. But she dusts herself offand goes back to her tenuous existence in Brooklyn— and as she crosses the street, the spring in her step lets us know that she’s (probably) going to make it after all.

By the end of the Once Upon a Time pilot, outsider Emma Snow (Jennifer Morrison) decides to stay put in Storybrooke and the second hand on the town square clock starts moving again—as if by magic. Change is in the air and fantasy and reality are on a collision course.

By the end of the pilot for The Killing, the police locate a stolen car believed to contain the body of the disappeared girl. And seasoned Seattle homicide detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) delays her early retirement and an impending move with her son to Northern California to start their new life with her fiancé, because she is compelled to solve the mystery of “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” In the pilot script, Sarah instructs the uniformed officers to open the trunk of the car. As Sarah looks into the deadened eyes of Rosie Larsen, we can see that from her POV it’s as if the girl is imploring her to stay on the case. The last two words of the pilot script read: “Find him.”

The Final Montage

This type of pilot ending gives us a snapshot of the main characters in the series. It’s often accompanied by music and indicates where each character might venture in his/her life in future episodes. It’s primarily visual, but sometimes contains voice-over and/or economical dialogue. It gives the viewer a lay of the land in a poetic, lyrical way. Sometimes the camera cranes up to give us a global view of the characters in their respective worlds. Sometimes the camera is like a bee buzzing from flower to flower—and then settling down on one main flower: the main protagonist on the show. For examples of this type of ending, check out the pilots for Parenthood, Friday Night Lights, and Sons of Anarchy.

At the end of the pilot for Boardwalk Empire, we get a montage that demonstrates Enoch “Nucky” Thompson’s (Steve Buscemi) ascension to power: from corrupt county treasurer to notorious crime kingpin of Atlantic City during the Prohibition Era. The climactic montage sequence shows how Nucky’s brother, Sheriff Eli (Shea Whigham) kidnaps and murders Hans Schroeder (Joseph Sikora) as retribution for Hans beating his wife Margaret (Kelly Macdonald) so severely that she miscarries. When Hans’ body is found in a fishing net, along with today’s catch, Nucky frames Hans for the massacre of gangster Arnold Rothstein’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) men that occurred during an earlier botched bootleg heist. The revelation that Nucky ordered the hit on Hans is made clear when he innocently brings Margaret flowers in the hospital. We know from the first scene of the pilot that Nucky is a morally bankrupt opportunist, but by the pilot’s end, we discover his dark side, his true ruthlessness. Atlantic City is his town, and he’ll destroy anyone who tries to challenge him.

Earlier in the pilot, there are two particularly potent, revelatory moments that foretell Nucky’s transformation. In the first, as Nucky walks past a store-front nursery along the Boardwalk, he looks in the window and sees a nurse cradling a newborn baby. He is mesmerized by the infant’s purity and innocence. Then later in the pilot, Nucky walks past a storefront fortune-teller as she reads a customer’s palm to predict the future. She glances up and meets Nucky’s eyes, as if to say, What will be your future? Near the end of the pilot, Nucky’s driver, Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) presents Nucky with the spoils from the botched bootleg heist, saying, “It’s your cut of the proceeds.” When Nucky tells Jimmy that he never asked for the loot, Jimmy responds with, “You can’t be half a gangster anymore.” As a result, when Nucky accepts the blood money, his fate as a full-blown gangster is sealed.

The Final Discovery

The other type of pilot ending packs a stronger punch by essentially pulling the rug out from under us (which in a TV pilot is a good thing).

Here are more examples of pilot endings that succeed in pulling us into the deep end of the series in surprising ways:

• Alias: Sydney (Jennifer Garner) learns that she doesn’t work for a sector of the CIA (she works for the enemy), and so does her father. He’s not the mild-mannered guy she thought he was.
• The Shield: In the final montage, as Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba” thumps on the sound track, Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and Detective Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins) kill a drug dealer rival to their boy, Rondell Robinson (Walter Jones), in self-defense, and then Vic shoots fellow Detective Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond) in the face with the drug dealer’s gun. If we didn’t already realize Vic Mackey was a dirty cop, this is a major game changer.
• The Newsroom: The audience learns MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) was actually present for Will’s (Jeff Daniels) rant against America (not a hallucination); she was holding up the signs that prompted him.
• Homeland: Carrie (Claire Danes) finally convinces Saul (Mandy Patinkin) something is amiss with returned POW soldier Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) when she points out that Brody is seemingly sending a signal with his fingers whenever he’s being interviewed by the media.
• Scandal: The audience learns Olivia had an affair with the president, and perhaps he isn’t telling the truth about the woman who claimed to have had a relationship with him (the phrase “sweet baby” arouses Olivia’s suspicion).
• The West Wing: Near the end, the audience learns that Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) was instructed by the president to fire Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) for his comments on a talk show, and Leo was working behind the scenes to resolve the conflict and save Josh’s job.
• Mad Men plays its final trump card when Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who we’d assumed was a womanizing bachelor, goes home to his wife and kids in the suburbs.
• Damages reveals that Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) is the devil (more or less) when we see her tossing a studded dog collar into the Long Island Sound beside her beach house. Earlier, we’d witnessed the horrific murder of the dog as a fear and coercion tactic. And now we know it was Patty who ordered the hit.
• Lost builds to the reveal that they’re not on an ordinary tropical island because there are otherworldly creatures. They’re in a version of The Twilight Zone.
• By the end of the Modern Family pilot, we realize that Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) is Claire (Julie Bowen) and Mitchell’s (Jessie Tyler Ferguson) dad. And as “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King plays in the end scene, it’s Jay who is the vital link between this disparate but loving family.
• At the end of the pilot for The Following, former FBI agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) manages to apprehend an escaped convicted serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) and lock him up—but then we discover that Carroll’s followers are still at large and are actively continuing to carry out his nefarious mission.

NL: My first question is about the murder mystery that played over the two seasons. Did you reverse engineer the plot? In other words, did you start out knowing what you needed to reveal and then structure and back into it?

VS: That’s a great question because we didn’t. All we knew was that at the end of two seasons, we would reveal the killer of Rosie Larson [Katie Find-lay]. But, as far as creating enough material and journeys for each of the characters, over the course of twenty-six episodes, we started from the beginning and from a very character-based place, which was, who is this person? What is their backstory? What is their secret? How do worlds collide? How do secrets become unearthed? And partnerships, and friendships, and family— and a political campaign. We spent a lot of time walking in each character’s shoes before we decided that this was how it would all lay down—the macro plot of the conspiracy and how Rosie Larson walked into the middle of this plan—the final twist of who her killer was. Ultimately, it’s interesting because on Cold Case, we did the very opposite, or at least I did as a writer, which was fleshing out the beginning: Where do you find the body? How does this murder become unveiled and discovered? And then what are the final true moments of this person’s life before they were killed? And then filling in the middle. I knew the beginning, I knew the end, and it was my job at that point to put flesh on that skeleton. Inevitably the end would shift: place would shift, time would shift, things would shift, but for the most part the murder itself would stay intact with the murderer (who would be revealed by the end of each episode). But The Killing was a different type of animal. It was a longer form story. It took, obviously, more time to reveal the truth of the story, and in order to service that we had to be able to go on a very long voyage with these people who, overtime, we identified with and cared about.

NL: You definitely had a lot of plates to get up in the air, just in terms of getting us invested in each person and what they had to lose or what they had to gain from it—both in the political campaign, within the family, and with Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos). You’re saying though that you didn’t know that Terry (Jamie Anne Allman) would ultimately be the one who pushed the car in—and put the car in gear—that it was something that evolved? That Jamie (Eric Ladin) was the one who accidentally beat her up?

VS: We knew that in the original Danish series, Forbrydelsen, that the character of Ulrik Strange was the killer. And Søren [Sviestrup], who created the Danish series, wanted everything to circle back to something very personal and close to the family. And I loved that idea and having done a lot of research for the last fifteen years with cops—that is the great tragedy of the vast majority of homicides—it’s love and money. It’s the people you know and the people you love—and those are the people you kill. And that’s what was so resonant to me about the tragedy of homicide. I knew I wanted to elicit that feeling—that I wanted it to be a similar place for us. We got to it pretty quickly. Because it’s character based, there’s a ton of time we spend with these people. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t just connecting the dots plot-wise. There were almost two tasks at the beginning: one was to create the macro plot and we knew we would get to the place that was resonant with this particular killer, but what we had to do was say, “OK, let’s just not talk about plot, let’s talk about these people. And, from the characters, let’s start talking about all the different routes and the different roads and the red herrings. And all the different ways that the story could play out.” We knew that as we went along in the first two weeks of meeting in the writers’ room at the beginning of season 1, it was very clear that the world would get bigger and bigger and bigger. Because I loved the idea too that this seventeen-year-old girl from the wrong side of the tracks, crossed paths with this macro-world of powerful men and power brokers in a major American city and how that happened. Everything either had to build on or create a view for the audience into what Rosie was doing that night, who she was, and/or the bigger machinations that were going on in the city of Seattle.

NL: Was the Danish series one hour for each day of the investigation? Was it twenty-six days also?

VS: The Danish series’ seasons were shorter. They had a total of eleven episodes per season. But every episode of their story was one day—that was the DNA of the show which we brought to the American version.

NL: What’s so fascinating about the show for me is its profound exploration of grief. Because grieving is something that gets glossed over in just about every American story. We either want to shy away from it, or with how fast the news cycles go—what is a tragedy on Monday is not even in the news anymore by Wednesday. Everything just passes, when the reality with grief is that it’s an extremely arduous and up and down process. For me, I commend you and your team on letting us know how that feels on so many levels—and also making the body count—count. Every death resonates and has a ripple effect throughout each story and all of the relationships are impacted. To me, that’s one of the great triumphs of the show. When it comes to delving deeper into your characters in every episode and not just a new piece of information for the plot, but going deeper into character—do you have strategies for that? Because it tends to be the weakness that a lot of students struggle with—just digging deeper, finding the nuance, finding the subtext—and the unexpected. Do you create backstory biographies? Sarah is such a complex character. How did you conceive her complicated backstory?

VS: Research is extremely important to me because I think real life has all these nuggets of incredible scenes and incredible stories and characters— and we can’t beat it. It’s there out in the world, and we just have to pick off these specific moments. When I was writing the pilot and when the writers convened for season 1, we spent time—and I had spent time— with families who had lost their children. There’s a national organization (with a branch in Los Angeles) that was so generous with their time. They were such open books about what they went through. I am a cop writer, so I spend a lot of time with cops. In particular, Sarah was a compendium of four different women I had met over the years. Two of them were homicide cops and one of them was homicide and sex crimes on the east coast and one of them was an undercover detective in narcotics in Los Angeles. She actually introduced me to the person who became the basis for the Holder (Joel Kinnaman) character prior to writing the pilot. Hiding out with these undercover cops—I think that’s so important—you have to actually go; you can’t just look it up online. You have to actually go and meet the people and hang out with them or drink coffee with them. Just sit there and shoot the shit and see all those interesting things that they do and who they are and why they do what they do—which is the fascinating thing to me. I did that a lot with the political campaign, prior to writing the pilot, I went up to Seattle and met with various city council members in Seattle. That was my beginning point, before I committed pen to paper. I needed to go out into the world and see what’s there first before I rushed to any judgment about who these people are. Of course, the driving thing for any storyteller is that there’s an element of yourself or a thing that you feel this character can speak to. What we did with all our characters in the writers’ room in season 1 and prior to writing the pilot was just, “Who are they?” Don’t rush the plot because sometimes I do that, and I totally get why students do that because you want to see the action of the character. But I think you have to know who that person is, and then they’ll start instructing you in what they do—and it’s surprising.

In season 1, Holder smoked pot with the girls, and it was a surprising moment. We had spent weeks and weeks and weeks talking about this guy. The writers met the undercover cop he was based on as well as two other undercovers. We talked about them; we mused on them. We talked about Holder—where did he come from? Where did he grow up? What did his family look like? Who is he? It’s in these moments that scenes come out. It’s surprising—I didn’t even expect that that would happen. I was breaking the story and all of a sudden I was like, “Shit—what if Holder did this?” And, that actually was not even based on any of the research.

NL: Both Linden and Holder are very flawed and they’re both damaged. In season 2, we will find out how extremely damaged she is when she gets placed in seventy-two-hour hold. It creates a lot of empathy for her and deepens the stakes in terms of why she’s so driven. And for Holder, he’s a rookie trying to prove himself. Do you consciously think about likability and empathy and who we are rooting for? Because she’s kind of a bad mother, negligent from time to time. She’s very unconventional and very flawed— and yet doing something heroic and noble. Does it matter to you when you’re creating a flawed protagonist that she’s inherently likable and positive?

VS: It’s a good question because I think it’s one of the hardest things to do, but it’s essential, at least for me it is, that what the world thinks about your character stays irrelevant to you as you’re writing it. If you can see their humanity—and not by providing a litmus test that the world approves of, but that you approve of—that’s all that matters. In terms of Sarah and the bad mother question, it was essential to make her like many, many mothers that I know who are struggling and are torn and are wracked with guilt. I think a lot of people recognize that aspect of the character and that made her human. She’s not a TV mom who somehow juggles it all with a big smile on her face. We all come from places where we wish we could have done more. We wish we could be better—especially with motherhood—it’s such a sacred cow. That was very important for me in terms of all the characters—making them human. Ultimately, we’re all flawed and we have secrets and we’ve done things we feel horrible about—and we’ll do them again. But, those are the type of characters that I find interesting and I’m not even concerned with whether they are likable or not. If I see their humanity, that’s what matters.

NL: It’s a great answer because most broadcast network TV shows tend to idealize and sugarcoat stuff, and I like that she’s struggling. There were places where you really challenged me as a parental viewer, like when Linden’s son has the flu and she’s stuck at the precinct. I’ll admit that I judged her for that, but I could also see how heavily it weighed on her responsibility to crack the case. Mitch Larsen (Michelle Forbes) is also a flawed mom who chooses to leave her family to grieve, but in doing so (temporarily) abandons her sons and husband when they needed her the most. There are a lot of interesting parallels between Mitch and Sarah in terms of our empathy and how it shifts like a pendulum. The same holds true for Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell); in season 1, he’s slimy and I didn’t trust or like him at all. I thought, of course, he was the murderer early on and Gwen (Kristen Lehman) and Jamie also. But once Darren gets shot, our empathy shifts, and he swiftly earns our compassion. It was a great way to raise his political fortune, but he also genuinely seems to find redemption.

VS: Yes, that’s what we were hoping. I’m glad you felt that way about him.

NL: Regarding point of view—when you wrote the pilot and when you were conceiving the show, were there different points of view? There are times where we have an omniscient point of view, and times when it feels very subjective—where we’re in Linden’s head and we’re seeing things through her eyes. Did you ever wonder what the point of view in terms of telling the story should be? Did you have any rules in the writing room in terms of what you’re limited in showing or not showing? Or was it more organic?

VS: We, for the most part, used the device of three worlds—and all three worlds had their own point of view. So that created somewhat of a sense of omniscient point of view. If there was a rule, it was that we had to stay within the world of those characters. It was like the characters in that world were the only points of reference. But when a character got more and more important in the story and more of a player, then we could driftover and see them. Like in season 2, we saw Roberta [Patti Kim] and Nicole Jackson [Claudia Ferri] in the security room when they discovered that Sarah had…

NL: Right—when she smashes her hand in the door?

VS: Right, but it was tied to the security cam footage. There was always the delicate balance of how much we could show within the world. With any of the main characters in the world, we clearly could use them as reference points, to see what they experienced, but then when the secondary characters were introduced later, they had to earn weight in the story in order to be a part of it. The other thing you said in reference to the omniscient [POV]—it’s a good question in the beginning because Patty Jenkins directed the pilot and the finale. She had this brilliant visual conceit which was that the camera had a point of view, so the camera wasn’t just sitting there, flaccidly, recording and documenting. There was a very subtle point of view that the camera had—and I loved that. I loved it because it influenced all of her moves in the pilot. It influenced the freneticness of the camera, the slowness of the camera, the longing—she really infused the camera and us with these emotions as we took in scenes. And even the aerials, we spent hours talking about them.

NL: I actually noticed them in a particularly vulnerable scene. For example, there were shots that at the top of a high-rise building where it was just precarious. They weren’t just neutral interstitials. I felt like they did have that commentary.

VS: We shot the aerials after we shot the pilot. I realized that I wanted the aerials to be something, but I couldn’t articulate what that was. There’s something very evocative about seeing the city from a plane. Patty and I got to this place where those aerials were almost the point of view of Rosie—almost the point of view of a dead girl. They had emotion. It’s as subtle as coming out of a scene; you’d feel the sadness of that scene or you’d feel how askew things were in the scene. That’s how she went and shot the aerials.

NL: I hadn’t even thought of it in The Lovely Bones kind of way—as if looking down from heaven. Did you have tone meetings with subsequent directors where you would say to them, for example, “I want it to look like this character’s guilty in this episode”? Like in the “Donnie or Marie” episode, where it starts with it very much looking like Gwen is guilty, but then it shifts—and I’ve noticed this in reality shows sometimes where you think they’re subtly hinting who’s going to get voted off. The way that they’re showing a little bit more of that character or less of another character. Were those discussions ever conscious in terms of the way it was shot?

VS: Yes, absolutely. It always began with the script. Especially the “Donnie or Marie” episode, because we were very conscious of bopping between them, so in breaking the story in the writers’ room: How do you create the sense that “this is the one” or “no, this is the one.” Tone is really important to me. I think it’s probably really important to a lot of showrunners that we spend a lot of time with directors. Because you’re analyzing the script, you’re going over your hopes, page by page, visually for the episode both emotionally and thematically—and about the subtle turn at the end of the scene— what you’re supposed to think at the end of it.

NL: Was there a difference in breaking story on Cold Case and on The Killing? Obviously, I know they are completely different—they’re almost polar opposites. In terms of Cold Case, it’s one case which gets solved by the end. But did you break A, B, and C stories and structure the story in the same way or was it a very different process with The Killing?

VS: The mechanics of the documents that were created were very similar. I learned that from Meredith Steihm, the creator of Cold Case, and that process was hugely helpful. There are many documents generated before someone goes to script. You’re kicking the tires constantly without again robbing the story of its magic because you can overwrite—you can over-analyze something. So the mechanics of Cold Case and The Killing were very similar. The difference I guess was that besides having to spend so much time with these characters over twenty-six episodes that we had to have so much material and know them in such an intimate way—the cops included. The A story in Cold Case was the big story—that was the hardiest part of every episode and where we had to devote most of our time. With Cold Case, we knew season-wise what the B and the C stories were for our cops. This is what personally they were going through—and these were the scenes that we would pepper in throughout the season to show this arc in their character, but because 90 percent of the episode was about the killing—the investigation was its own mini-arc. That’s where the majority of the time was spent. Whereas with The Killing, what we had to do is take three big worlds and over the course of each season map out where each world was going. We had this gigantic board in the writers’ room with every character, every episode, and our touch points of each character’s development—what was going on with them over the course of a season. And, then there’s obviously the investigation— how the investigation is tied into Sarah’s backstory and Holder’s secret. It was this incredibly intense juggling session.

NL: In the season finale, the footage that Rosie shot on the video camera— it’s the closing valentine for the Larson family. It’s used in a totally different way than we’re anticipating. Because it seems like it’s going to be incriminating evidence, and it’s going to completely tie into everything. It’s bittersweet, but it leaves us with a kind of happy resolution. Where did this idea come from? Any final thoughts on the end of the season?

VS: We were in the room first season when we were talking about the big arc and how things would ultimately end, and we started to talk about this film camera because the film plays a part early on in season 1. Through the teacher and this revelation that she’s running around the city with this camera. We watched this young artist from Seattle, this fifteen-year-old girl, Olivia B. We were just looking at how young girls shoot things because we didn’t want it to look professional—what she was shooting at the beginning of season 1. There was this incredible beauty and voice of this girl, and we were all so moved by it. It was ultimately about this girl [Rosie] who you just think of as a victim, and in a way, has never been present. We don’t flash back to her. We are like people left behind in a real-life murder. You don’t get anything. You just get what’s left in her bedroom—in the album. And to have this graceful moment of just this giftto us, the audience and the family, but the audience mostly, we’ve never seen Rosie alive except when she was running in terror. We saw her on film for a split second at that dance.

NL: And there’s the very brief moment where Mitch is packing for the camping trip and you get to see the last moment when she was at the house alive.

VS: That was the biggest discussion: Should we have flashbacks of the victim? Should we see her? How do we make her a presence in the story and not just a body? But then the tension is that you don’t have anything except for the memories that she left behind. It’s heartbreaking. It’s eerie too and a little bit interesting to see. One of the homicide detectives I was telling you about on the East Coast, I think she fell in love with this guy who had been murdered because she just saw these things in his house. Well, not “fell in love,” but it was just interesting this relationship she had with the dead. This is not just about body counts, and not just about exciting plot and getting the bad guy—this is about the price of a life. And this is who this girl is and this is the tragedy of her loss and this is the hope of her life. And losing this is losing the world. Our final touch that we wanted to put on the story is that we get to see Rosie alive—that finally after twenty-five hours, we get to see what’s lost.

NL: It was a very beautiful, graceful endnote.