Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet-2nd edition. Ross Brown
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It’s no accident that CBS and ABC paid Carroll O’Connor and Henry Winkler record sums to continue playing Archie and the Fonz year after year. The networks knew that without those characters (and the actors playing those characters), the audience would tune out.
Even with shows like The Simpsons and Law & Order, ensembles with many characters and either brilliant humor or riveting story lines, the characters drive the popularity and long-term audience appeal of the shows. People love The Simpsons because of the great characters, both the main ones like Bart and Homer and the peripheral ones like Apu or Krusty the Klown. And as for the Law & Order franchise, I suspect the audience chooses which particular series to watch (Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, or the original) based on which set of characters they like rather than what sort of crimes are dealt with.
The importance of character cannot be overstated. There have been zillions of medical shows, cop shows, and family sitcoms on television over the years. But the shows that succeeded — and that continue to bring audiences back to watch them even 50 years later in reruns worldwide — are the ones where the characters made a powerful and lasting impression on the audience. You might say that it’s just a function of the actor and his or her popularity, but you would be wrong. Bill Cosby has had several TV series, but only when he played Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, beleaguered but affable father of five, did he achieve megastar status. Same thing for Mary Tyler Moore. Even today, more than 30 years after the series’ final installment, most people remember her fondly as Mary Richards. But almost no one remembers her, fondly or otherwise, as Annie McGuire (the title character of her 1988 ABC series that disappeared faster than the fifth runner-up on American Idol).
Yes, you need great actors, and we’ll talk quite a bit about how to find them in Chapter Nine. But actors need great characters in order to do great work. And audiences need great characters in order to return to a series episode after episode. Here’s Blake Snyder, in his screenwriting book Save the Cat!, explaining the overriding importance of character, or who your story is about:
The “who” is our way in. We, the audience, zero in on and project onto the “who” whether it’s an epic motion picture or a commercial for Tide detergent. The “who” gives us someone to identify with … because it’s easier to communicate an idea when someone is standing there experiencing it for us. And whether we’re watching Lawrence of Arabia as Lawrence tries to figure out how to attack Acaba … or a Tylenol commercial in which a busy Soccer Mom wonders when her headache will go away, the principle of involving us in the story is the same.
Characters, especially your main character, are what compel people to come back to your little video party week after week. And Snyder is quite right: It matters not whether we’re talking about Die Hard or an Old Spice commercial. The characters, John McClane in Die Hard and The Man Your Man Could Smell Like in the Old Spice ads, are what bring the audience back for installment after installment.
Think of your main character as the host of your party — or, more accurately, your series of parties. He greets the guests at the door, sets the tone for the experience. The audience’s decision about whether to return for the next installment of your particular party is based largely on how they feel about the host. Is he someone they want to hang out with again and again? Or is he a tiresome bore who makes them say, “Screw the free guacamole, we’re outta here!”
CHARACTER ESSENTIALS
Okay, you get it. You need to have great characters. But what makes for a great character? Broad strokes? Fine details? Larger-than-life traits? Probably all the above. But I think a good place to start is by saying that all truly great characters have to resonate with us. That is, they must strike us as real — not ordinary or trite but familiar in a way that makes us say, “That’s just like my boss” or “I knew a guy in high school just like that.”
For all of Archie Bunker’s flaws, he rings true to us. We’ve all got a blowhard uncle like Archie. Or a neighbor. Or maybe even a small, unappealing part of ourselves. Norman Lear, who developed All in the Family for American television (it was based on a British show called Till Death Us Do Part) once called Archie Bunker “basically a horse’s ass.” But Lear also remarked that Archie was “the bigger-than-life epitome of something that’s in all of us, like it or not.” In other words, the character resonates.
Because of their much shorter episode length, web series cannot create characters in as much depth as a 30- or 60-minute network TV show or a 2-hour feature film, but the principles of character are no less relevant. The characters in your short-form series, especially the main character, must resonate with the audience. Take The Guild as an example. Microsoft bought the show for its Xbox online channel because it knows the channel’s natural audience — online game fanatics — will instantly relate to The Guild’s characters, a bunch of online game fanatics. The audience gets the show’s characters, like Codex and Zaboo. They know their world and understand their video-obsessed behavior and gamer lingo. And because they know (and like) these people, they want to attend their party — the episodes of The Guild — time after time, season after season.
Does this mean the only people who can enjoy The Guild are online gaming addicts? Absolutely not, any more than the only people who enjoy All in the Family are bigots and fools. For a character to resonate, or be relatable, he doesn’t have to be “just like you.” He only has to be recognizable, meaning he might be like you, or he might be like someone you know or have somehow encountered in your life.
The next essential element of all great series characters is that we can instantly imagine those characters in dozens of juicy situations — juicy in either a comedic or a dramatic way, depending on the tone of the series. Let’s return to the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld once again. Great character for an episode or two — fabulous guest star or peripheral character. Terrific spice but not a good main ingredient. As hilarious and memorable as the Soup Nazi was for that classic episode, he’s not a good choice for a regular, every-week series character and definitely NOT the lead character you can base an entire series around. Where do you take the Soup Nazi other than his restaurant to get stories? What other situations can you put him in? I suppose you could send him on a date, or meet his family — maybe there’s a Soup Nazi Sr. or Grandma Soup Nazi, and we not only see where the Soup Nazi came from but gain a measure of sympathy for him as an improved version of his predecessors. But when you boil it down, every episode becomes nothing more than repetition after repetition of the same basic gag: “You, no second date, two months!”
For a series regular, a character you see in every episode of a series, to be truly useful that character must have depth and dimension. In other words, he or she must be a human character, not a two-dimensional caricature. If Archie Bunker had merely been a malaprop-spouting bigot, All in the Family would never have lasted as long as it did. It would have been a one-joke pony. But Archie was a multidimensional human being, a man born and raised in one time railing against the rapidly changing world around him. A man stuck in one time fighting against change stimulates dozens of situations and ideas. A mere bigot? Not so many.
The third vital element of all good series characters is specifics. The devil is always in the details. If I say “car,” you probably get a picture in your head, but it’s blurry and out of focus until I get more specific. For instance, if I say “sports car” or “SUV,” the picture in your head is sharper and a lot more specific. Better still would be “red Ferrari” or “black Hummer.” Now we know precisely what we’re talking about, and we have a much clearer sense of the “character” we’re talking about than we did when we simply said “car.”
Specifics are what make a character. If I ask you who your main character is, and you say, “She’s a waitress,” you really haven’t told me much, and you certainly haven’t sketched any details that make me want to watch a series about “a waitress.” You need more specifics. Waitress at an elite eatery in New York City or a greasy spoon in Buttscratch, Oklahoma? Is she 22 or 52? Is this Madison Kemp’s first day at TGI