Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd edition. Pamela Douglas
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that suggest hundreds of stories from a show’s premise.
WHAT’S NEW?
Adventurous cable programming, new markets, and new delivery options have spurred growth and change in television, and provide fresh opportunities for writers. Examples from current shows and re-interpreted franchises demonstrate some of the possibilities.
SPOTLIGHT ON WRITING “DRAMEDY”
The best thing I can say about the term “dramedy,” which conflates the words drama and comedy, is that it’s better than the alternate: “coma,” although that might actually be a closer fit considering how unconsciously the label is applied to nearly everything on television.
The techniques of balancing serious subjects and humor go back as long as humans have told stories. I can imagine a cave person sitting before a fire relaying how Moog-The-Brave chased a rabbit around a tree until he fell down dizzy; I see the wise storyteller waiting artfully for the laugh from his audience, exactly before the reveal that while Moog was on the ground, the rabbit turned back, leapt for his neck and killed him. Humor set up the listeners to be shocked by the serious turn. Shakespeare was pretty good at that, I hear — creating a comic foil immediately before the most tragic scenes. All the great Shakespearean tragedies have some comedy. But do you really want to belittle them with the label “dramedy”?
The effort to define types of stories began with ancient Greek philosophers, who divided literature into tragedy, which ended with the death or destruction of a hero, while comedy focused on ordinary people and ended with their success. In later centuries the division was simplified into tragedy describing plays where people died at the end, and comedy where they didn’t. The word “drama” referred to all the action in the middle, funny or not.
Then came commercial American television with a need for promotional categories. By the 1960s, the system was codified by the networks: half-hours were situation comedies (“sitcoms”), and hours were dramas. The sitcoms usually had a live audience or laugh track so no one could miss the point that it was funny. Hours were unfunny genres dealing with police or doctors or western gunfighters, and later serialized soap operas. Even today, if you visit a network headquarters — and also many production companies and even talent agencies — you will see the architecture split. Often one side of the reception desk leads to the comedy offices with their own executives and staffs, and the other side are the drama people. You might pitch to the Vice President for Drama Development or the Vice President for Comedy Development, but not both.
Problem is, it doesn’t make sense any more, and hasn’t for a long time. The best half-hour comedies have emotional storylines and sometimes comment sharply on contemporary issues. Very few are filmed before live audiences, and no one would be caught with a 1970s type of laugh track. Meanwhile, both the Emmy Awards and the Writers Guild place various dramas in the comedy category even though they are an hour long because they are so light or because their intentions are comedic. It’s a slippery slope on both sides.
The idea of half-hours having to be funny has been ingrained in the public even if creators want to stretch. As a young writer in the late 1980s, I was on the staff of Frank’s Place, a half-hour in which the showrunner wanted to handle serious subjects. It was set in a funeral parlor in New Orleans and had a predominantly African-American cast (rare then and now) who dealt with stories that involved mortality, ethnicity, class distinctions, and regionalism. From the outset, it wasn’t going to fly.
The creator, gifted writer-producer Hugh Wilson, had a comedy background with success on the hilarious WKRP In Cincinnati and the Police Academy movies. How dare he attempt drama, the critics thought. And then there was the audience, who wrote letters — yes, actual letters because it was the 20th century — telling us the show wasn’t funny enough. Well, the episode when the old man died wasn’t intended to be funny. Heartbreaking, insightful, amazing, suspenseful, whatever, but it wasn’t supposed to be funny. Finally, the battle was lost. The series became a half-hour comedy. I’m not a comedy writer, and I was long gone before it ended. But to me it was an education in expectations.
So we’re free of all that in the 21st century, right? Uhhhh… well, currently there’s Nurse Jackie, Hung, United States of Tara, The Big C, Weeds, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Entourage, and previously Sex and the City among half-hours that are borderline comedy/dramas. Looking at the hours, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Glee, and previously Ugly Betty, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, and Gilmore Girls are among hour shows considered comedies by the TV Academy and Guilds. Very little on either list is laugh-out-loud funny.
Generally the attributes of “dramedies” are these: continuity of character and storylines, including serialized episodes, depth of backstories, and development of dramatic arcs, as opposed to the setup/joke paradigm where laughs are expected at specified intervals. “Dramedies” may be light, but if they have laughs at all, they would be of a wry or ironic sort. As to why they are not pure dramas, on the other hand, the characters might be less deep — closer to caricatures — and might tend to zaniness, as in Weeds or The Big C, or focus on clever or jokey dialogue quips, as in Gilmore Girls.
So what? Parsing these definitions matters to you because you are entering a field where the boundaries are dissolving. A term like “dramedy” makes a show harder to write because it causes you to think of all shows flowing into an amorphous funny/serious heap. It helps to have something to hold onto — benchmarks in history and in previous shows and in expectations.
If you are writing the hour drama series, you will find yourself bringing some comedy to the table some of the time, especially in episodes where you’re building to tragedy. If you are writing something that intends to be funny, you must have a strong hold on the underlying dramatic elements. No one can get away with joke-to-joke writing in any form longer than three-minute webisodes. And outside of children’s adventures, no one can get away with unrelieved “dramatic” action that lacks a perspective of humor at times. In writing today’s TV drama series, you have to do it all. Hey, Shakespeare did okay.
GUEST SPEAKER: DAVID ISAACS
David Isaacs has multiple Emmy nominations for his writing on shows ranging from M*A*S*H to Mad Men. Having written a full spectrum of sitcoms before arriving at a drama series, I asked for his wisdom on the difference.
Pamela Douglas: What is it that makes something a comedy? What makes something a drama?
David Isaacs: Not to be glib, but the easy definition would be comedy is more situational. We’re watching the moment-to-moment foibles of regular folks as they stumble through their lives. Comedies tend to be structured around an identifiable premise like Everybody Loves Raymond, which is about a guy who is trying to strike a balance between the family he grew up in and the family his marriage has created. We laugh at that because we see ourselves in it — that’s my family or somebody’s family we know. That’s traditional.
The comedies we have now tend to be ironic, or snarky, such as 30 Rock or The Office, which poke fun at an institution. So it’s looking for the vulnerability of people and how we all laugh at each other’s mistakes and pain from a distance.
Drama, to me anyway, deals with human conflict on a much deeper level. Life, death, illness, malice, personal and family dysfunction. The stakes are profound. It’s no wonder that most of our filmed drama revolves around police work, hospitals, and the judicial system. They deal in humanity.
PD: Yet we can point to shows that have both, some that are a half-hour long and are awfully dramatic and hours that aren’t weighty.
DI: I think that has a great deal to do with the proliferation of networks. There’s just more room to experiment and cross over. USA Network has a whole set of series, Burn Notice and Royal Pains, for example, that are tongue-in-cheek dramas. On ABC, Desperate