11
Know who and what they’re up Against

Creating stakes: Give your protagonist(s) something to gain and something to lose. The antagonistic forces on a series will serve to escalate the stakes and intensify the urgency to solve a given problem. Think about the role of time in your series. Notice how characters in all genres are always rushing somewhere—they must hurry and do something or else.

In The Killing, detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) is all set to move to California with her fiancé and her teenage son when she gets assigned a murder case. Sarah plans to wrap the case up quickly so she can move on with her life, but the case gradually turns into a sprawling conspiracy that drags on for weeks. The case ruins her relationship with her fiancé, jeopardizes the custody of her son, and puts her life at risk. And those are just the stakes for one of the characters. This case destroys many lives and careers as it changes the political climate of the city.

In Homeland, the stakes intensify for Carrie (Claire Danes) as her feelings for Brody (Damian Lewis) complicate her mission to protect America from a developing terrorist plot. Carrie’s affection for Brody turns into love, which compromises her judgment and puts her career and reputation at risk. The stakes are heightened for Brody as well, who finds himself at odds with his new celebrity status as an American hero, his conflicted allegiance to terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), and the disconnect with his family who learned to live without him.

Weeds raises the stakes for protagonist Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) with each passing season. Recently widowed Nancy operates a modestly successful marijuana business in the upscale suburban-gated community of Agrestic, and as her business literally grows, so do her problems. Among other challenges, Nancy faces off against rival dealers, a shrewd DEA agent (whom Nancy eventually marries, complicating matters), and the leader of a drug cartel (whom Nancy also marries and bears his child, further complicating matters). Also at stake is the welfare of her two sons. The dysfunction caused by the drug trade ropes her eldest son Silas (Hunter Parrish) into the business, and leads her youngest son Shane (Alexander Gould) to sociopathic behavior and, ultimately, murder.

In sitcoms, the stakes aren’t “life or death,” but they should feel like it. In the season 4 finale of Friends, Ross (David Schwimmer) calls his bride Rachel at the altar, but her name is Emily! It’s a gut-wrenching moment that dooms his marriage and further muddles his complicated relationship with Rachel (Jennifer Aniston).

In How I Met Your Mother, Ted (Josh Radnor) learns that his fiancée has never seen Star Wars, his all-time favorite movie. Ted says to his friend Marshall (Jason Segel), “If Stella doesn’t like this movie, I can’t marry her.” Ted anxiously observes his fiancée as she watches the film, hoping they’re compatible. This is a trivial problem linked to a much larger, deeper fear of intimacy—and the stakes of a lifelong commitment could not be higher for Ted.

Man against man. The most common obstacle comes in the form of a person—the antagonist. The goals of the protagonist and antagonist come into direct conflict with each other. In 24, the antagonist is almost always a terrorist with a specific anti-American agenda. Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) must foil a series of escalating attacks carried out by the antagonist and his henchmen.

Sometimes the identity and motivation of the antagonist are unknown. In Person of Interest, a complex machine predicts murders before they happen, but the machine only delivers the identity of a person. The protagonists are tasked with discerning if that person is the potential victim or the antagonist.

The antagonist could also have supernatural abilities. In the fantasy series Once Upon a Time, protagonist Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison) struggles to break the curse that the Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla) has cast on the town of Storybrooke.

Sometimes the antagonist might be someone that the protagonist is trying to help. In the pilot for Scandal, political fixer Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) must prove that a decorated war hero didn’t commit a murder. Olivia discovers the veteran’s alibi, but revealing the alibi would out him as being gay. In order to complete her mission, Olivia must convince the reluctant war hero to tell the truth.

Man against society. Characters often have the burden of facing a social construct far beyond their control. In The Wire, the drug trade systemically corrupts the city of Baltimore. In season 3, disaffected policeman Major Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom) secretly legalizes drugs in the most abject areas of West Baltimore in a desperate attempt to curtail the growing drug violence. Even though his plan works, the societal pressure requiring a hard-line stance on drugs ultimately destroys his experiment as well as his career.

In House of Cards, the social construct standing in the way of protagonist Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is Beltway politics. After failing to receive his promised appointment to secretary of state, Frank schemes to get more power. However, he can’t simply take the president’s job. Instead, he must orchestrate a byzantine plot to become vice president in order to position himself to win the presidency in eight years.

In Game of Thrones, the political barriers are medieval. Ned Stark (Sean Bean) agrees to become Hand of the King, the king’s trusted adviser. Ned eventually learns the king’s heir, Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), is illegitimate. He was the product of an incestuous affair between the queen and her brother. As the king’s health fades, Ned honorably tries to find a righteous succession plan, but he’s betrayed by his allies and sentenced to death by Joffrey after he’s dubiously crowned king.

In The Walking Dead, the zombie apocalypse creates a society completely devoid of laws. It’s purely survival of the fittest. In the season 2 episode “Nebraska,” protagonist Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and two of his cohorts encounter a pair of survivors in the bar of an abandoned town. The survivors implore Rick to allow them to join his group, but Rick refuses. As their anger swells, Rick shoots them dead before they have the chance to shoot him.

Man against self. Sometimes the main character is his own worst enemy. In Mad Men, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) fights to conceal his checkered past, a far cry from his urbane advertising executive persona. Don also grapples with his serial philandering, which comes into conflict with his role as husband and father.

In Breaking Bad, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) constantly battles his own hubris. Instead of taking money from his former colleague for cancer treatment, Walter embarks on the reckless journey of becoming a meth kingpin. Presented with several opportunities to walk away, Walter forges ahead. He doesn’t quit until his wife finally gets through to him and shows him that he’s accumulated too much money to count—far more than his initial goal of $737,000.

In Nashville, Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) is the young country superstar who wants to be taken more seriously, but is plagued in both the past and the present by her drug addict mother. She is both independent yet vulnerable which causes her to be reckless and angry all the time. Her inability to admit she needs help and wants love may just keep her in the one place she doesn’t want to be—alone.

In Revenge, Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) is similarly trapped by her anger at both the death of her innocent father and her terrible memories of an abusive childhood full of foster homes and juvenile prison. But where Nashville’s Juliette lashes out, Emily is cool and reserved. Her intense focus on revenge has made her numb and is also blinding her from seeing that it’s coming at the cost of other people she cares about—including her long-lost love, Jack Porter (Nick Wechsler). In the season 2 finale, Emily finally admits who she really is to Jack, so we’ll have to see what they’ll do. Will he feel betrayed and turn against her, or will they join forces and align against their mutual adversaries?

Man against nature. Mother Nature can serve as a powerful adversary to the main characters. In Lost, the survivors battle mysterious forces, but they also encounter the pitfalls of being stranded on an island: scarce resources, rough terrain, and dangerous wildlife.

In medical dramas such as House, M.D., doctors continually face an array of deadly organic pathogens moving through the atmosphere invisibly.

Mother nature can also be an ironic adversary, incidental to the main obstacle. In Breaking Bad, Walter and Jesse (Aaron Paul) cook meth in an RV in the middle of the New Mexico desert for the purposes of privacy. However, in the season 2 episode “4 Days Out,” Walter and Jesse almost die of heat exhaustion as a result of being accidentally stranded in the solitary desert.

Man against fate. The main character may find himself against an inevitable outcome. In Boss, unscrupulous mayor of Chicago Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer) receives a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, an incurable disease that causes hallucinations and loss of motor skills. Tom battles uncontrollable delusions, which affect his perception, judgment, and memory.

Characters often suffer the consequences of random fateful events. In Friday Night Lights, star quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) gets paralyzed from the waist down after a brutal hit on the football field. The harrowing injury causes a ripple effect in the football-crazed town of Dillon, Texas. Jason’s promising football career is over, ill-prepared backup quarterback Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) is thrust into the starting role and searing spotlight, and head coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) suddenly finds his job in jeopardy, which could mean uprooting his family yet again.

In sitcoms, the characters are often ill-fated by the construct of the show. The passengers of the S.S. Minnow are not going to get off Gilligan’s Island.

In Married … with Children, Al Bundy is fated to be a sad-sack loser, pre-destined by the “Bundy Curse.” In the season 8 episode “Luck of the Bundys,” everything suddenly goes Al’s way, much to his skepticism. Once Al finally embraces his good fortune and declares, “Al Bundy is a winner!” everything immediately falls apart.

In My Name Is Earl, petty thief Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) attempts to avoid a grim fate by embracing karma and making amends for all the wrongs he’s committed in his lifetime. Earl reaches this epiphany after losing a $100,000-dollar lottery ticket—and only finding it after selflessly picking up trash to atone for years of littering.

Man against multiple forces. As evidenced by some of the preceding examples, antagonistic forces can intersect. The more obstacles, the better, so long as they’re organic to the story.

Intersecting antagonistic forces are most effective when they’re thematically linked. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is constantly at odds with law enforcement and rival families, but he’s also at war with himself. The constant threat of losing his family is the source of his panic attacks, which is what causes him to find a therapist.

NL: This chapter is all about stakes—physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences for characters—and will also encompass sources of antagonism. I’d like to begin by discussing Touch. Are you in production yet for season 2?

TK: We’re in preproduction. We’ve written the first couple of episodes and have broken a few others.

NL: You wrote the pilot, did you reverse engineer? Did you start knowing how the season would end?

TK: I knew that I wanted the first season to center around this child custody issue that Keifer Sutherland [as Martin Bohm] and his son [Jake played by David Mazouz] have. His son is in a board and care facility. And, in this board and care facility, we start to feel that something is not right—that there are other secrets there. We were asked by the network to not introduce any serialized element for the first six episodes to give the audience a chance to sample. A lot of statistics have found that there would be large groups of new viewers who would come in to watch a show within the first six weeks. To not alienate them, you would have a stand-alone episode. So, we didn’t introduce a serialized element until we killed off Danny Glover’s character [Arthur Teller]. There were little questions in the first six episodes in that there were strange things happening in the basement of this place behind room number six. But there was very little you would have to know in order to watch those first few episodes. Once that serialized engine started, we slowly ramped it up until the final three episodes until it is very clear that there is something up in the board and care and that people are interested in Jake. There’s a mysterious corporation called AsterCorp who clearly have some designs on Jake. This all ramps up to an exciting season finale where Martin takes Jake and runs. We are able to end the season with them landing in California. We introduced also late in the season the idea of Maria Bello’s character [Lucy Robbins] as a satellite story that you didn’t know how to connect at all. Only to find out that she is the mother of Amelia [Saxon Sharbino] who was the girl in mysterious room six and those two stories collide in the last thirty seconds of the finale. That will hopefully propel you into the second season that takes place in Los Angeles. The first season was all about this board and care and the introduction of these antagonistic forces. The second season is all about finding Amelia.

NL: Do you already know if she’s alive? Or who has her?

TK: Yes, we introduce all of that into the season premiere of the second season. We tell you where she is and we tell you who the major antagonists of the second season are. We put a face to the AsterCorp villains. It turns out to be more complicated than that because it turns out to not be necessarily AsterCorp, but one person inside the company who is a younger genius who has made AsterCorp a fortune by producing these algorithms that have predictive qualities for customers and various shipping routes that are shortened. So we introduce that character whose name is Calvin Norburg [Lukas Haas] who had sold his algorithm company to AsterCorp for quite a bit of money a few years ago. He’s the one who’s been interested in Amelia and Jake. We’ve also introduced the idea, in a spiritual way, of the idea of “The Thirty-six.” That there are thirty-six chosen people which comes from the Kaballah, the lamedvov tzadikim [spelling from Wikipedia], which are the thirty-six righteous ones. It says that at any time are on the planet there are thirty-six people who keep the world from spinning into evil. They are righteous people unaware of their own position and power in the world. Humble usually. It’s not necessarily heads of state. It’s the butcher down the street who doesn’t gyp you for two cents a pound on ground chuck. We introduced this through the character of Avram [Bodhi Elfman], a Hasidic Jew. It turns out that there is something to that and something that Calvin is interested in. He has Amelia and is using brain mapping to figure out these algorithms. He’s twisted, but he starts off with some very altruistic motives thinking that he’s going to make the world a better place by taking these abilities that people like Jake have and make it a better, more connected place.

There are two antagonistic forces: one represented through the corporate idea of Calvin with resources and money and the other is a fallen version of one of these thirty-six who is a former priest and has decided in a twisted way that there will be no other idols before God. So he is trying, one-by-one, to kill them. So that is a tangential force that is going to be a threat.

NL: So you have a central mystery from the past that is always running through, but you also have central questions regarding the present.

TK: One of the truths about working in television—especially when you introduce a serialized engine that depends on you having things mapped out many, many episodes ahead—the truth is that things change for any number of reasons. And sometimes it’s for reasons you never saw coming.

NL: Like you have to write an actor out.

TK: Exactly. Or someone you’ve hired that you thought was going to be great is terrible or difficult. The relationship you were going to hinge a tremendous amount of story on—you get the actors together and they have no chemistry. You’re a heat-seeking missile. You go where the heat is. You want the show to speak to you as much as you speak to it. And it will tell you what it wants to be. It’s a very organic process that is a river that’s taking turns that you’re not fully in control of. That’s part of the excitement, but part of the challenge as well.

NL: Like writing yourself into a corner and not knowing how to get out?

TK: You try not to write yourself into a corner, but sometimes there are some shows that turn on that idea. There are some shows where you want the audience to go, “How are they going to get out of this one?” And the audience has almost a gladiatorial relationship with that show. They want to see it get to the brink of jumping the shark and then somehow pull itself out of it. There’s a thrill ride quality to that. As much as you hope that you can avoid those things, you really can’t.

NL: I had that feeling when I thought: “How is Martin going to get Jake out of the facility?” You always had Clea [Gugu Mbatha-Raw] in the gray area of wanting to be loyal to Martin and yet also trying to do her job. It was totally organic. Almost all of your stories have to hinge on what is considered a bad word for screenwriters: coincidence. And yet the whole theme of the show is that synchronicity exists that these are not really coincidences that we are all connected by this thread. Do you have certain rules for writing this way? For example, I believe that coincidence can work best in fiction if it makes things worse for the protagonist; but if it helps or makes things easier for the protagonist than it can feel forced. Your thoughts?

TK: I actually wish that I could be more articulate about it. It’s one of those things that we looked at so hard that it stopped having rules. It’s like when you stare at something too long; it loses its essence. We did so much talking about whether this is coincidence or synchronicity. Is this sentimental or sappy? I’ve never worked on such a show that had such a thin rail that you ride on. One degree to the left sentimental becomes sappy and one degree to the right and magic becomes coincidence. It was a very hard thing. It was really just a gut reaction in the editing room and a pulling back. It’s a very nebulous thing that happens in the editing room. You get the right piece of music and the right shot and the right performance with the right take. You cut it the right way and you do a digital push-in at the right moment, and it somehow works. Take one of those elements out and it falls apart. This was one of those shows where there were not a lot of rules. You just had to go into the editing room and see whether it landed or didn’t. I think there were times on this show when it worked really well. That moment of coincidence felt less convenient and more magical. And those were the ones that worked for us. One of the things about the show is, as you said, it boldly states from the outset that this is what the show is about. Then you get a little bit of license when it happens in the fifth act. Part of the fun of the show is that it is like a procedural in that way. When I did Crossing Jordan, you had a dead body that you rolled into the show in the teaser and somebody did that body wrong and you had to figure out who. So you would introduce three suspects. In the end, you hoped that you would have that moment when the audience says, “I never saw that coming. I thought it was the brother-in-law.” And, in a way, Touch does very much the same thing. It introduces threads of stories, and you don’t have any idea how they are going to come together. Everything hinges on that moment where you say, “I didn’t see that coming.” That sense of never seeing it coming hopefully trumps the coincidence factor because in reality it’s a show about how coincidences are real. And if you know how to look at them, then metaphorically they start to become a valuable tool in your life. Hopefully, if the show has said anything, it’s that the smallness of your own life, or what you think is insignificant, actually has great significance. That everything matters, and if that’s the case, then maybe you’ll live your life in a more conscious way.

NL: There’s a great sentiment in one of Jake’s voice-overs where he says, “We’ll send three billion e-mails and 19 billion text messages and yet we will still feel alone.” So on the one hand, we’re all seeking connection, and on the other hand, we all feel separate.

TK: Yes, and I think that’s a sentiment that the audience is feeling very much right now. They feel very connected, but that communication doesn’t give them a sense of community. The technology that’s allowing us to be that connected has the dual effect of making us feel more isolated. We can retreat into Facebook, but we don’t go out to eat with our friends any more.

NL: Crossing Jordan was very localized and Heroes was very global. Is Touch going to continue to be global?

TK: Yes. One of the issues we did have production-wise is doing the number of worlds we did. While that’s fun and exciting for the audience, it’s very hard to produce. We’re going to try in the second season to do one less story each week. But it will continue to still have these satellite stories that give you a sense that these things are connected. In many ways, the show taught the audience very slowly how to watch it. It crept up on people; ramping up to a very serialized finale. The second season will start with that same serialized energy. We’ve earned this new engine.

NL: If it’s going to be more serialized, is it going to be contiguous? Where you start up exactly where you left off?

TK: At times. The first season was only over a few week period. I think the second season will follow that same model. I think what happens when you inject too much time into a story is that the audience starts to feel that. They start to feel the pressure deflate. The shortening and compressing of time really does help to put tension on things.

NL: Will the voice-overs continue?

TK: Yes.

NL: It’s so great because you have a character who doesn’t speak on screen, who only speaks in voice-over to us. And his words are so poetic and wise. When you constructed the pilot in terms of stakes, Martin’s antagonistic forces were his son who he’s not quite sure how to handle; you also have Child Protective Services who wants to take him away; and Martin is trying to keep his job, and then you bring in the corporation.

Having a child who you can’t communicate with becomes the central goal of the show. It’s a quest for communication. Little by little, he begins to read these small signs that his son has. Actually in the pilot, he learns a very big one that his son is actually trying to communicate with him through these numbers. It’s that revelation that is the big engine of the show: “My son is trying to tell me something, I therefore must be his eyes and ears in the world and go out and do what he is trying to tell me to do.”

NL: Martin mentions that “bad things will happen if he ignores the numbers and Jake will suffer,” which adds another element of stakes.

TK: We introduce this idea that he was in a type of psychic pain, if these numbers were not remedied. The premise is basically that Jake can see the patterns in the universe and when all is status quo, the numbers all line up, and when they’re not, there’s an anomaly. The anomaly presents itself as a number and you must go out into the world and try and find out why that particular number is anomalous in that episode. Until that number is righted and rectified, Jake is feeling some kind of psychic pain for the world. That’s the spiritual essence of the show. He is clearly a mystical connector that has some greater purpose in the world. Housed in this frail, seemingly insignificant, disenfranchised person, is someone who holds many of the secrets of the universe.

NL: What attracts you to characters with extraordinary abilities? It seems like that in itself creates this conflict between the thin line of what is a blessing and a curse.

TK: That’s it, actually. I had a long freelance career before I did series television. I did any number of genres from horror to teen comedies to thriller, so I didn’t move into this superhero thing until Heroes. So I haven’t always had this fascination, but I have to admit when I did think about people with extraordinary abilities, it wasn’t about the genre, it was about the struggle it presents for a character. The conflict that it presents. If you are someone who has a job which you are struggling in or a woman you are trying to get to fall in love with you or a dying parent that you are dealing with or a brother you have to take care of because he won’t grow up—and you think you can fly. That to me was what was interesting. You take this world with problems that we can all relate to and you add a layer of an extraordinary calling and it is in that conflict of how to live your life while having a calling is, I think, the stuff of great drama. The whole idea of Heroes was based on that idea of how you take ordinary people—the guy you went to high school with or the person you see at the laundromat when you take your shirts in to be cleaned—how do you take those people and layer on top of it a kind of mystical calling to do something great. Inside of that is also a postmodern view that we are not going to find the answers to the big questions of our world in the normal institutions that we’ve always put our faith in—it’s going to come from a grass roots, ground up solution—from an ordinary person who has something extraordinary to say. When you look at the way technology is working now, it’s coming from two guys in a garage who come up with something or it’s an Arab Spring—it’s people taking to the streets or the Occupy movement. As for Jake, I was much less interested in where he placed on the level of Autism, but in the idea that someone who has this extraordinary ability is one of the most disenfranchised people on the planet. He’s small, he’s meek, he can’t speak. He’s perceived as being severely on the spectrum of Autism. He is the least likely candidate and the most disenfranchised person on the planet. And yet, inside this person is this most extraordinary human being…

NL: … who just might end up saving the world.