You can read all about conceiving, writing and selling your spec pilot in my new book, Writing the Pilot, currently available through Amazon.com for the Kindle and Barnesandnoble.com for the Nook, soon in the rest of the known universe…

Last time we talked about writiing a spec pilot in a genre that’s currently working on the networks. The downside of that, of course, is that you’re trying to stand out in a crowded field. It’s easy to get ignored that way.

So let’s look at the next category: Genres that aren’t working, but networks keep trying.

You might ask yourself why networks keep programming shows in genres that fail time after time. Usually the answer is lost in the distant past. Or, more specifically, the answer is Lost in the not so distant past.

What usually happens here is that someone created a show that became a monster hit, but so far nobody’s been able to duplicate it.

If you look at network schedules for the last couple of years, for example, you’ll see a long string of heavily serialized science fiction or fantasy epics: The Event, Life on Mars, Flash Forward, V, Heroes and on and on. What you’ll almost never see is the second season of these shows. (True, Heroes did keep gasping along for years, but that series actually had a successful first year, and NBC had absolutely nothing to replace it with…) But no matter how many of them failed, the networks kept developing them.

The reason they existed in the first place was because Lost was such an enormous international hit.  The reason networks kept trying to duplicate that success after so many failures was because no one really understood what made Lost so huge. Was it the eternally evolving mystery? The big puzzle? The serialized storyline? The promise of a big revelation around every corner? The skillful blending of reality and fantasy? It’s like trying to understand why, for instance, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became the book everyone across the world suddenly had to read instead of any number of other violent thrillers. Who can know?

So every time one of these series premiered to enormous numbers – and most of them did very well in their opening episodes – and then nosedived, programmers could tell there was still a huge market for this kind of show. They simply hadn’t figured out how to tap it.

So where does that leave you?

In a great position – as long as you’ve got something that looks like it has the right answers. Because executives have already proven that they don’t, and they’re looking for someone who does.

Risks? Plenty. There’s going to be a point where the industry throws up its collective hands and decides that the big hit they’re trying to duplicate is unique and unduplicatable. And when that happens, your script will feel like a relic from a time that no one wants to remember… and believe me, they won’t be interested in the reminder.

A script in a standard genre has to be great if it’s going to get you anywhere. A script in a genre that’s not working has to be better than that. It’s got to excite your readers enough that they’re willing to ignore their awareness that this kind of show always fails. It’s got to be so good it actually makes them brave. If you can pull it off, you’ve got the kind of sample that will open doors all over town, that people will be talking about. But that target is really tiny, and if you miss by the smallest amount, you’ve got pretty much nothing…

Next time we’ll talk about the other two categories.

You can read all about conceiving, writing and selling your spec pilot in my new book, Writing the Pilot, currently available through Amazon.com for the Kindle and Barnesandnoble.com for the Nook, soon in the rest of the known universe…

We left off last time wondering how to choose what kind of spec pilot to write. It’s a big question, because this script is going to eat up a big chunk of your life – there are so many specs you’re going to be able to write. So you want this one to do you some real good – to be bought and shot, ideally, or at least to show studio and network executives and agents that you are a writer they all need to be in business with.

So the big question remains: Of all the ideas you have, which one is going to grab these people?

Or, to narrow it down a little bit, which genre is going to show you off the best?

Because TV is a medium of genres. There’s no room for anything that’s unclassifiable, the way there is in fiction. Cop show, courtroom drama, family dramedy, procedural, sci fi, doctor show; just about every series starts with the genre and grows from there. You’ve got to pick your slot and make your stand.

Over the next few posts, we’ll talk about individual genres. But now I want to take a broader look at the four types of genres.

I’m not talking about the Big Four TV genres here – cops, docs, lawyers and “quality.” I mean something a little more practical: the levels of popularity of any given genre. And here are the three:

Genres that are currently succeeding.

Genres that aren’t working, but networks keep trying.

Genres that don’t work anymore.

Genres nobody cares about.

Let’s start with the first category: Genres that are currently succeeding. This includes the Big Four mentioned above, which are the meat and potatoes of network programming. The rise of some new hit will lead to a brief imbalance between them, but they will always dominate the airwaves. (You might think it’s strange to list “quality” as a genre, but in TV drama it always has been – that’s the well-intention, serious show that draws a smaller audience, but one that’s almost exclusively made up of the educated, affluent viewers that advertisers will pay a premium for. Think of any Zwick/Herskovitz show, for example.)

Outside of the Big Four, genres wax and wane into this category. Police procedurals – a separate genre from the standard, character-based cop shows – dominated the networks for most of the last decade. Vampire shows have been growing for years. Right now high school shows and/or performance musicals look to be a growth industry as long as Glee stays huge.

You’re always safe choosing from this category, because if a genre is working across several shows, networks will want more of them. And even if no one wants to buy your series, the script itself should serve as a strong writing sample for the ones they do buy.

The downside, of course, is that there are already a lot of these shows out there, and there are going to be a lot more in development. How do you come up with a new take on a doctor drama when so many aspects of the field are already covered by other projects? Granted, true originality is not something networks always demand – or maybe you don’t remember that series whose pitch could only have been “It’s House. but instead of a diagnostician, he’s a brain surgeon!” – but you’re looking for a way to stand out. When you’ve got networks coming to you asking for yet another iteration of everything they’re already programming, you can stop worrying about originality. Until then, you need to find a way to leap off the slush pile.

Next time:  Genres that aren’t working, but networks keep trying.

I’m delighted to announce that Writing the Pilot is now available as a Nook e-book exclusively at Barnesandnoble.com.

Terrence Winter, creator and executive producer of HBO’s magnificent Boardwalk Empire (and no slouch back when he was only an executive producer of The Sopranos) raves about Writing the Pilot:

Everything you wanted to know — and things you didn’t even know to  ask — about writing a successful TV pilot.  Before you type FADE IN, back away from the computer and read this terrific book!

When you adapt another writer’s work, you never know how they’re going to feel about the final result. And when Lee Goldberg and I turned Aimee and David Thurlo’s Ella Clah into a pilot for CBS, we were really nervous about what they’d think of the changes we had to make to change a series of novels into a TV series.  It’s something we didn’t really talk too much about at the time, but that gets a lot of space in the book, as I go through all the steps that went into creating that specific pilot.

That’s one reason I was so pleased at their reaction to Writing the Pilot:

Richard Walter, head of UCLA’s screenwriting program and probably the most important screenwriting teacher in the world, raves about Writing the Pilot:

“Here is a sometimes touching, often hilarious, always insightful book on writing that is enormously useful not only to writers of TV pilots but also novelists, poets, and all souls who traffic in creative expression. In a voice that is at once lighthearted and serious, and perpetually engaging, William Rabkin reveals the rules to follow and also those to break. He tackles both the artistic issues regarding story, character, dialogue and more, and provides a road map for navigating the occasionally murky–sometimes perilous–waters of TV writing.”

 

Now that the world has changed and networks are actually buying and shooting spec pilots, the decision of what to write is suddenly much more important. Back when you could only hope that your new script would show off your genius and lead to a staff job on CSI, there was no reason not to go ahead with your dramedy about the Trappist monk who is accidentally assigned to a Buddhist monastery where hijinks ensue.

But now that there’s a chance something you write on spec might actually make it as a series – and make you millions – maybe it’s worth taking a few minutes to contemplate a concept that could actually make it to air.

Not that this is an exact science, of course.  Every year the networks themselves commission dozens of pilots they think will make it to air, and most of them are never seen after their one disastrous screening.

But there are some things you can do to raise your odds. And the most important is choosing the right kind of project.

So how do you know what that is?

Well, before you can answer the question of what to write, you need to know what writer you want to be. If you want to spend your career wrestling with moral issues in the context of serious human relationships – oh, let’s just say it: you want to be Matt Weiner –  you’ve got to come up with a script that shows you understand how to do this in a compelling and captivating way. Sorry, but that mystery series about the circus ringmaster who solves crimes with the help of a troop of clowns isn’t going to get you where you want to be. And if you’d rather spend your days plotting out brilliant locked-room mysteries, the nighttime soap about transgendered teenagers is probably not the right approach for you.

People like to say “write what you know.” In TV, it’s “write who you want to be.”

I can hear your objections already. You don’t want to limit yourself to one kind of script. A great writer can do anything. Why do you have to decide now?

Because if you don’t decide who you are, somebody else is going to do it for you.

You may think it’s ridiculous that one script is going to define your identity to the entire industry. But it will.

Part of that is to help you. Your agent and manager are going to need to have a plan in order to sell you. They need to be able to say “He’s the next Terrence Winter” or “She’s just like a young Anthony Zuiker.” That’s a fifteen-second phone call, and at the end the studio or network executive will be able to decide whether or not to read you. If your people have to say “This script is like Jonathan Franzen’s early work filtered through Anthony Bourdain’s vision, but with a stronger understanding of human behavior and a really cool mystery,” the exec is going to be flipping through the take-out menus before the call is done.  And no one’s going to be reading anything you’ve written.

And if you or your representatives don’t take charge of defining yourself through your script choices, I guarantee that the industry will. You are the script that’s circulating. You’re “the guy who wrote the buddy comedy mystery about the police dog who teams up with a cat.” You’re “the gal who did that thing about vampires fighting zombies.” You’re “the kid with the family drama set in war-torn Srebrenica.”

When you send your next script out, that tag is going to stick to it. So if it’s the same type of show as the last one, readers will get a stronger idea of who you are – or at least who you’re presenting yourself to be. If it’s completely different – if you’ve gone from the dog/cat show to the Srebrenica series – the best you can hope for is that you have to start introducing yourself all over again. The worst is that whoever is reading you spends ten pages trying to understand why your newest light mystery begins with the brutal torture, rape and murder of an adorable Bosnian girl, and then tosses it away in confusion.

So when you’re planning the spec pilot, the question that comes before “what do I want to write?” has to be “who do I want to be?”