How NOT to Write a Sitcom

100 mistakes to avoid if you ever want to get produced

Marc Blake

• Publisher: A&C Black Academic and Professional
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781408130896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

The craft of sitcom is possibly the hardest of all screenwriting genres, demanding a complex set of skills. How NOT to Write a Sitcom is a troubleshooting guide aimed at both the novice and the practising sitcom writer. It illustrates and explains the many pitfalls in concept, characterisation, plotting and dramatic/comedic writing, which pepper the hundreds of scripts submitted every year. Each point is illustrated with an example of the error and each section contains practical suggestions and exercises for the writer to apply to their own writing. The book makes no assumption of the reader other than an interest in the form. It contains interviews with current producers as well as interviews with successful practioners of the craft. Marc Blake is a script consultant, writer and teacher of writing for sitcom. In this book he acts as a `script mechanic' for writers - stripping a sitcom down to its component parts, isolating the faults and fixing them. What script editors and producers are looking for are scripts that work. Naturally they want a genius in embryo, but above all they first want to see something that is roadworthy.

Nuts and bolts

6.
Scenes

“Show it don’t tell it. Let’s see the characters in action. Massive coincidences that resolve plots are annoying and insulting to the reader/viewer. You want to believe in these characters and situations.

M.M.

Sitcom is composed of enough scenes to tell the story. A scene, as Sid Field puts it so succinctly in his excellent book, Screenplay, is a ‘specific unit of action. The purpose of the scene is to move the story forwards’.

Novice writers always want to know how many scenes to include and as rough rule of thumb I suggest anywhere between eight and fifteen per episode. This is because a scene may consist of either a visual gag lasting no more than a page or an emotional battle spreading across ten.

Certain episodes of The Royle Family seem to be a single scene. As the family bicker and complain, the camera (situated in the very place their TV would be in the living room) sits mutely watching. People go in and out and we watch, appalled and fascinated by their behaviour. Look more carefully. You will see that there are cutaways, perhaps to a view of the hallway or kitchen as someone arrives at the front or back door. There are multiple scenes here and each one has its purpose.

A scene has a beginning, middle and end. At the beginning we must establish where we are, who is peopling the scene and where the action is going. The middle of the scene is when the protagonist engages with the issue at hand. The end of the scene is when they take some kind of action, thus thrusting us forwards into the next scene, which will show us the result of their actions. It is goal, conflict and disaster. The character wants something, they are prevented from getting it and it gets worse. A scene has to have an inner momentum generated by the characters. It cannot be static even when it appears so. In The Thick of It or The Office are seemingly full of normal people in a pseudo documentary, but this is not the case. Everything is going on under the surface. In one US Office episode the characters are trapped overnight while Scott goes out on the tiles. They try to sort out a way of getting free by befriending a black security guard. This is event. Things go wrong and things move forwards. The ending must make us want to watch the next scene and so on until the show ends with a resolution. A scene is a unit of action based around a character.

Your opening scene

INT. PATTY’S LIVING ROOM – NIGHT

Patty has all her best friends around for a party. She hands out canapés.

PATTY

Hey, John, you know Nigel and Reece, and of course you heard about Susie?

JOHN

No – what about Susie? Who is Susie?

PATTY

Your sister silly. Hey. What’s happening with you and Clarice?

JOHN

I think she’s my girlfriend although I can’t be sure. I was just introduced to Charlie and I’m not sure if he was a boy or a girl.

PATTY

Hey, Sam! This is John.

JOHN

What happened to Susie again? Should I be worried?

SAM

Hey, John. You one of the Fossborough Johns?

JOHN

I’m from Idaho.

SAM

Tom knows a great joke about Idaho, with the punch line going I da Ho, like Hooker, hahahahaha.

PATTY

Clarice. This is Hannibal and Bill. You’ll get on fine.

I think we can agree that the above is rubbish. We don’t know these people and there’s nothing going on. The opening scene is one of the hardest to write, especially if it is the pilot episode. The writer panics. How did they get here? What is the situation? I must put all of it in straightaway. If only I could have all the exposition sliding off into space like in Star Wars. Can I? Can I do that?

In the first scene you should never introduce the viewer to more than three people. When you meet more than three people at a party, you forget all of them unless they are wearing a low cut blouse or have a devastating air of money about them. Instead you go and hide in the kitchen and graze for food, which does you no good.

Most production companies advise writers not to send in a pilot script, but one a few episodes down the line. This is because pilot scripts are stuffed with exposition and ‘getting to know’ the characters – rather than telling a story. A good way to illuminate the protagonist is through opposition. In the vignette above there is confusion but no drama. If Patty and John are important to the show then make John truculent and demanding. Make Patty a cougar. Let us know within three lines that there is some kind of tension.

Another way to open is to have a minor character arrive with a message. This is the only function of the extra character and if you can make them mute then all the better (the TV company doesn’t have to pay them so much). They are delivering the plot. They aren’t involved in the story and their relationship to it is tangential. They are a messenger and that is all. Once they have delivered, the protagonist will react and then their foil will question or oppose the protagonist’s action.

This is, or at least gives rise to, the inciting incident, which must come within the first five pages of the script. There is precious little time to hang around. Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Simpsons tend to have a minor plotline up and running before the main event, but these are established shows. You have to intrigue us from page one. We have no time for anything irrelevant or for mere scene setting. Page one should introduce the plot idea so the protagonists can roll it around in their mouths, taste and savour it. The lead may register said plot and then go onto another tack, but they must have moved things forwards by the end of the scene.

An exception to opening with your lead is when the writer wants to get some comic mileage in building up just how horrible this monster is. There may be three or four minor characters talking about the new guy’s arrival and telling tales about their past exploits. It is telling rather than showing but it is excusable as in this way the audience gets a sense of fear and anticipation along with the cast. The plot must nonetheless start the moment that he arrives. Think of how Jack Donaghy is portrayed in 30Rock or of how the Hotel Inspector is built up in Fawlty Towers.

Long action paragraphs

Stan breathes deeply to prepare himself. He grips the side of the passenger door and starts to push. Olly guns the engine but nothing happens. Stan gets the car moving and jumps in. Olly tries the key again. Nothing. The car is rolling down the hill toward the jetty. Stan suggests that he put the brake on. Olly discovers the brake is not working. Stan remembers the problem he had earlier in the shop and realises that that patch of oil had more significance than he at first thought. Olly tries to get out of the speeding car but Stan stops him. Olly tries to clamber into the back of the car but Stan pulls him back by his belt. The jetty looms near.

The water looks cool and inviting. Olly begins to pray. Stan lights a cigarette.

This is a long action scene more suited to screenwriting. There is a lot of ‘business’ here and also internal elements that cannot be shown other than by flashback. There is no room for prose description in television writing. Action and location descriptions should be so simple that a child or an agent can understand them. Any embellishment upon the basic facts is to give us a vital piece of information. For example, that the telescope found on the dresser once belonged to Admiral Nelson (because it is going to be later revealed that someone puts soot on it and then someone puts it – ho ho – to their eye). Otherwise, keep it simple.

Also, you do not need to direct. This is the director’s job. ‘Angle on, close up on. He moves with THE CAMERA to …’ is just telling us that you went to a film school and therefore have to wait on even more tables to pay off your crippling student loan. If it is necessary to include a close up then use something short and characterful in the description. Let us imagine that a girl named Natalie notices that her friend Jane is wearing the necklace that Simon, her boyfriend, gave to her. You may put:

Close up. Jane’s necklace. As she fingers it, Natalie’s eyes bore into her.

When it comes to physical objects and rooms, it is the job of the set designer is to furnish the set and they will know what a living room looks like or even, God forbid, a student apartment. All you need are a few graceful touches.

INT. APARTMENT. NIGHT

A loser’s apartment – the kind a writer lives in.

There is no need to give instructions on how a person leaves a room, what they are wearing or how they are doing something. Just write an engaging argument between two people and leave the director to place them in the scene and the actors to do their business with the props and pipes etc. Your job is to make that scene work as a piece of rip-roaring comedy and that’s hard enough in itself without describing all the furniture that they are going to trip up over.

Show not tell – how to avoid exposition

VILLAIN

So, we meet again, but this time I think the advantage is mine.

HERO

Sorry, I don’t think we have been introduced.

VILLAIN

Oh. Good. Let me give you the tour of the evil headquarters before I kill you.

HERO

Splendid.

The nadir of bad writing is exposition (showing your working), and the only people allowed to do this are James Bond villains. They always seem to take the time to explain just how they set up the whole plan and how they are going to ‘feed Mr Bont to ze chelly feeesh’. Meantime, Mr Bond is loosening the ropes and preparing the tactical nuclear missile he has secreted in his underpants.

In film, theatre and television writing, you show the story. We judge by actions, which happen in the present tense. You are not a journalist. You are not reporting what happens, you are living the moment. You write as if the action were unfolding in front of you on screen. If you are used to writing prose you will have learnt that there is no telling. Try writing fast – leaving yourself no time to put in any description or to qualify anything.

Exposition is clumsy. Telling us the plot or back-story impedes the flow. Like a speed camera, exposition is an irritant that serves no useful purpose and slows you down so that you are likely to crash. It’s not important to know what led this pair to be living together and how they became trapped in their lives. It is enough to know that it simply is. Readers and viewers care little for what happened before. They like to feel that they are doing the work themselves and are not being spoon fed acres of gibberish. If your lead is a cynical man, then let him adopt that pose. We’ll pick up fast that he’s been wounded in love or by life or by failure because he’ll allude to it. It will be in his bones, his sense memory. If you want to show that someone broke his heart and busted his jaw, then have him react to someone inappropriately. As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Introduction – Welcome to the garage
• Acknowledgements
• Cast list
• Section One: Form and Format
• Section Two: Character and Plot
• Section Three: Nuts and Bolts
• Section Four: Selling the Script
• Conclusion
• Author details
• Websites
• Suggested reading
• Sitcoms and comedy drams cited
• Footnote
• Imprint