Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet-2nd edition. Ross Brown
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details of real-life people. When Felicia Day developed the character landscape for The Guild, she didn’t have to just imagine a bunch of characters. She could draw on the types of people she knew among her World of Warcraft–playing friends and other online gaming acquaintances.
Drawing on real life is what allows you to be specific rather than generic. Let’s say you wanted to create a boss character for a workplace series you were creating. TV series have had countless boss characters, and your temptation might be to merely imitate one of those. Bad idea. Your character would come off as exactly what it is: a pale imitation of somebody else’s character. If, instead, you drew on real life — your own boss (you have a day job, surely) — well, then you’ve got a much better chance of creating a real character, an individual that seems like a flesh and blood human being, rather than a cardboard cutout. And even if your own real-life boss doesn’t fit the bill, surely someone you know has a boss he’s described in brutal detail who would fit the bill. For instance, my brother-in-law once had a new boss come in on Day One and tell everyone that his goal was to make sure that by Christmas time, the competition’s children all had one less gift under the tree. Terrible, disgusting, repulsive boss. But great character — and memorable dialogue you’d never come up with on your own in a million years.
GROWING YOUR CHARACTERS
The characters in your pilot are not intended to be a finished product. They are a work in progress. They must be, or you will have nowhere to go in future episodes and future seasons. For your series to continue to grow and thrive, your characters must do the same. Although much of this will be a voyage of discovery for you, and you will find ways for your characters to grow as you write and shoot more and more episodes and spend time with those characters, you should at least have some plans for how your characters will grow when you conceive your original series and character blueprint.
Character growth in a television series can be a tricky thing. On one hand, the characters have to be consistent from week to week. Frasier must always be Frasier, from his first appearance in Season Three of Cheers right through to his last appearance in Season Eleven of his own series a full 20 years later. The same holds true for Codex, the Douche sisters, and Fiona Wallace, the inappropriate therapist and lead character in Lisa Kudrow’s wonderful online comedy Web Therapy. But consistent should not be confused with static. Consistent means the character’s core and essence — her attitudes and predominant ways of dealing with the world — remain the same. But the circumstances and challenges of her onscreen life must evolve. Otherwise, the series will become repetitive and stale.
Think about the characters on the long-running network series Friends. Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey were recognizably the same characters from beginning to end. And yet their circumstances changed and evolved: new jobs, relationships, small increments of personal growth fueled by changes in the external circumstances around these characters.
That’s how growth happens for series characters. Though they are essentially the same from episode to episode (consistent), they evolve in response to significant changes in their external world. This is why on network TV, as a series gets on in years, so many shows introduce new characters, new romances, or other major changes in the characters’ lives such as getting married or having children. It’s a way to keep the characters — and the series — from stagnating and losing the audience.
So even though the main focus of your efforts (and this book) should be devoted to the pilot and the initial conceptualization of your series and characters, you should also have, in the back of your mind, at least some initial ideas about how the characters might grow or face new, life-changing challenges. Because web series are still in their infancy, there aren’t as many web series to cite as examples on this front. But take The Guild again, in its sixth season as I write this. Season Two saw the introduction of Wade, Codex’s hot, nongamer neighbor. The introduction of an outsider to the gamer-obsessed world of Codex — especially a hot guy and potential love interest — puts more pressure on her character. In the series pilot, Codex gets dumped by her therapist for failing to acknowledge her video addiction. This new character potentially reawakens that challenge — but in a more compelling way because it comes from a hot guy.
One good way of thinking ahead about your characters’ potential growth is to think in terms of season-long arcs. Characters A and B will butt heads all season long during Season One, but friction turns to sexual heat and they tumble into bed at the end of the last episode of Season One. Now Season Two can begin with a whole new energy and set of problems for your characters.
One note of caution on series growth: Don’t be tempted to jump the shark. The phrase “jump the shark” refers to the writers of a show using a preposterous gimmick in order to expand the boundaries of a character or the series. The origin of the phrase dates back to the series Happy Days. The Fonz, their breakout character, had performed minor miracles for five seasons, elbowing the dormant jukebox back to life and so on. But the “miracles” kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. So in attempt to make the Fonz ever more heroic, they did an episode where the Fonz, wearing a swimsuit and his trademark leather jacket as he waterskied, jumped over a confined shark tank to prove his bravery. It was, to say the least, a ridiculous scene. The show had crossed the line from playful fantasy to the utterly absurd and unbelievable. Despite this moment of weakness, the show remained hugely popular and lasted another 6 years. But the phrase “jump the shark” has come to mean the moment when a show becomes so gimmicky that the only humane thing to do is to cancel it and put the audience out of its misery. So yes, by all means, give your characters new challenges. Stretch them, grow them, make them deal with fresh and unexpected new curveballs. But do not jump the shark. Do not reach so far, in your desire to be fresh and new, that you catapult your series right out of its own reality.
FOR TEACHERS
As in the previous chapter, on premise, students can benefit from both analytical and creative assignments on character.
For the analytical, have the students examine a current web series and dissect its characters and character landscape. They need to do more than merely summarize externals. They must identify the internal essence of each character and then define how these characters create conflict and story potential by virtue of their conflicting or complementary character traits.
The same depth of thinking should transfer over to their creative presentation of the characters in their proposed series. They must define not just each character’s individual qualities but also how they work together — how each one plays off the other to create a rich and useful character landscape for the series. What type of story possibilities will there be between Characters A and B? Character A and Character C? What about when B and D are together: What dynamics will that present?
4 CREATING THE WORLD OF YOUR SERIES
When you create a television series, you are not just coming up with a premise and a bunch of characters to populate that premise. You are creating an entire world, a coherent universe with its own rules, reality, and gravity. That reality can be whatever you want it to be. It can be relatively ordinary, like our own, America in the 21st century. Or it can be something entirely of your own making, an undiscovered planet with its own unique and bizarre reality. This bizarre reality can even be right here, hidden in plain sight in the contemporary United States of America. Take the movie Men in Black, for instance, set in modern-day New York City but with a less than commonly accepted reality to its world, namely that aliens live among us and there is a government agency that patrols and monitors these beings. Or you can speculate what reality might be like in the future, as the digital series H+ does when it posits a future where we all have Internet access implanted directly into our brains. The “reality” and rules of the world you create for your series can be whatever you want. But — and this is a really big but, and I’m talking humongous megabooty — that reality must be consistent and true to itself at all times.
LAYING OUT THE RULES
The rules of your series world can be plain and simple (e.g., it’s