Breaking Bad

I had no interest in watching Breaking Bad when it first began its run. Yet another story about the drug trade sounded boring and unpleasant to me. But after AMC ran a Breaking Bad marathon this summer, I finally gave it a shot. I found I’d been missing one of the best dramas in the history of television.

To understand why a TV show or movie works, you have to start by identifying the story challenges the author faced at the beginning of the writing process. First, show creator Vince Gilligan had to overcome the same audience expectation I had, which is that this was going to be another boring, predictable story about druggies. A second challenge was one all TV writers must solve: extendability. Instead of a two-hour movie plot, Gilligan would have to come up with a huge number of plot beats, over multiple seasons, derived from the business of selling drugs.

This challenge would become even harder when Gilligan decided to use an average guy to drive the story. This wasn’t going to be Miami Vice on the border of Mexico. So what’s the story?

Gilligan’s grand solution to these challenges came when he realized how to do a crime story that uses the unique power of TV. The crime genre, unlike the detective form, is often told from the POV of the criminal. Gilligan’s great insight was that, with TV, he now had an entire season to show what it means and feels like to be a criminal.

American television, like Hollywood film, puts tremendous emphasis on a high concept premise to set the story apart from everything else on the market. Gilligan has said, “What was interesting to me was a straight arrow character (Walt) who decides to make a radical change in his life and goes from being a protagonist to an antagonist.” His initial pitch to Sony was, “I want to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface over the life of the series.”

That’s a brilliant premise, and one that included in its single line how this story idea could support a long-running series. Notice Breaking Bad is the mirror opposite of The Sopranos. The Sopranos is about a mob king who kills by day but sees a psychiatrist and has trouble with his family at night. Breaking Bad is a high school teacher by day who becomes a drug lord at night. Both play with the contrast of sensational crime vs. the common everyday to generate a skewed but fascinating reality.

The choice of which genre to use for your story idea is just as important in TV as it is in film. The Detective story is by far the most popular genre in TV, not just in America but worldwide. Crime, with a few notable exceptions, is not nearly so hot. But notice how the Crime form in TV allows writers to do things they could not do with Detective. Because Crime is from the point of view of the criminal, we feel what it’s like for this average man to see and do progressively more terrible things, to watch while a man is beaten to death, to face certain death at the hands of a drug boss, even to kill a man in cold blood. As they say on the show: “The cost of doing business.”

And with TV Crime you can show how becoming a criminal affects that person’s most intimate relationships. Over the course of Breaking Bad we see in minutely calibrated detail how Walt’s lies and criminal actions drive his wife away and destroy the family he is trying to save.

In all of my genre classes I talk about the importance of not simply hitting the basic story beats of your form, but of transcending them, so that the story is original. This is just as essential for success in TV as it is in film. And this is one of the key strategies Gilligan uses on his show.

All transcendent Crime stories deal with moral accounting over a lifetime. The focus is not on a single crime, but rather on how the criminal’s actions tally up on a lifetime board where some final settlement must be made. Transcendent crime storylines detail the playing out of karma. (For all the story beats of Crime, as well as how to transcend the form, take a look at the Detective, Crime and Thriller Class.)

The premier movie artists of transcendent Crime are the Coen brothers, in films like Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. What’s unique about Gilligan is his ability to adapt transcendent crime to the TV medium, by having the crime come out of the hero’s sickness and buried hubris, and by showing that the nastiest war of the show is within the family.

Like the Coen brothers, Gilligan also plays with the black comedy elements that so often come with transcendent Crime. This was especially true in the early episodes of the first season when Walt and his partner, Jesse, are comically incompetent at this new business of crime. But we also saw it in the opening episode of season 5, essentially a comedy caper where the guys rig up some high-powered batteries to knock out an incriminating computer in the police station.

Of course the linchpin in Gilligan’s story strategy is his extremely complex and contradictory hero, Walt. Walt begins as a brilliant but nebbishy normal guy, a character grounded in a reality that every viewer recognizes. He is an everyman, pushed around his whole life and trapped in a job that is beneath his talents. Then he learns he has cancer. This bombshell makes him take stock and take control of his life.

For a transcendent Crime show, this is a brilliant stroke. Notice that by starting Walt as a normal and moral person, Gilligan prevents the viewer from mentally shoving the hero into the crime or gangster ghetto. Crime isn’t something those “other” people do. Crime is the crucible where everyman Walt must face a series of moral tests. And the decisions he makes, the methods he uses, lead him down a path to hell.

It’s a path filled with contradictions. Walt starts to become hooked on the intellectual game of it all. On the plus side, he starts to become assertive, his own man, even as he faces death by cancer or by murder. But then Walt comes to feel that he is an artist, a master chef. The hubris that was buried deep inside him long ago starts to bubble to the surface, until finally in season 5, Walt is a full-blown Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

As so often happens with a well-drawn character, the seed for Walt’s flowering as a complex and contradictory character lies in his ghost, the event from the past still haunting him in the present. In the first few episodes of season 1, Walt hints at the fact that he was screwed out of a wildly successful chemical business. Now he teaches chemistry to high school students. But deep down he believes he is a genius and deserves to be a rich businessman, too. When all the original rational reasons for making and selling drugs are long gone, it is this pride and resentment that will guarantee Walt’s eventual death.

The single biggest challenge for any show runner and writing staff is how to sequence the episodes. In other words, how do you segment and sequence the plot over an entire season? By watching all the episodes of this show in such a short period of time, I had a clear window into how exceptional the story build is in Breaking Bad.

Again, much of the credit for this has to go to Gilligan’s original conception and structure of the show. By starting Walt as a moral everyman, Gilligan is able to sequence the plot based on the hero’s moral challenges. Each episode tracks both an escalation of trouble for Walt and a moral decision that is more complicated than the one that came before.

This escalating moral sequence is hung on the premise line of the show: from Mr. Chips to Scarface, from protagonist to antagonist. Notice this gives a natural endpoint for the series. As Walt goes to greater extremes to reach his obsession, his rationales become emptier, and he finally runs out of options. As Gilligan says, “Breaking Bad is not engineered to last indefinitely. It is engineered to end at a certain time and place. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure what that time and place is.”

This focus has been a tremendous benefit to the show, allowing it to build not just within each season but from first season to last. But the cost is starting to be felt. Breaking Bad has shown us the making of a master criminal, but now that he's here, he’s not as much fun to watch. It’s not just that he’s become extremely unlikable, especially to his wife, Skylar. He’s not as compelling. With so much hubris, it’s obvious what is going to happen to him. So the plot has suffered as the final season moves toward its inexorable end. The only question for me is: who will kill him. My bet was on Jesse. But as Walt has become more monstrous to his wife, I now believe that Skylar will have the opportunity to prevent his death, but won’t.

If you’re interested in writing for television, you must study this show. In my TV Drama Class, I go into great detail about all the elements that go into a great TV script, from tight structural weave to lean, powerful dialogue. You’ll find those same elements in any episode of Breaking Bad.

If you’re a screenwriter or novelist, study this show for mastery of story. Because no matter what medium you work in, it’s all about being the best storyteller you can be.

Mad Men

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the episode.


As head writer on a show that has been on hiatus for 17 months, Matthew Weiner faced a huge story challenge in the opening two-hour episode. And it’s not yet clear whether he solved it or not.


The vast majority of TV shows have a tremendous advantage when it comes to creating narrative drive, in that they have clear, achievable desire lines. Cops solve crimes, lawyers win cases, doctors cure diseases. Desire, the hero’s goal in the story, is the object of measure in any TV episode.


But one of the main reasons Mad Men catapulted above all other TV shows when it first appeared is that it wasn’t constructed around a lead character with a clearly achievable goal every week.
Don Draper is an ad man, and his goal from one episode to another is never the same. Instead of repeating the same story every week, Mad Men could make every episode totally new, its own work of art, through a complex story weave of multiple characters with ever-changing goals.


This is great for story and character complexity. But it wreaks havoc on narrative drive. Instead of a single, propulsive force, a Mad Men episode is a crosscut among ten or more storylines, all happening simultaneously. The more you crosscut, the more you move sideways, and the less narrative drive you have. Result: you lose huge chunks of your potential audience.


Matthew Weiner has been more than willing to make that bargain in the past. But now he has to write a two-hour opening episode for an audience that hasn’t seen the show for 17 months. He doesn’t have the benefit of a single clear desire line to kick-start the massive story engine. And he is hemmed in by certain events that have happened to his characters at the end of the last season. Don is engaged. Joanie is pregnant, by agency partner Roger Sterling. Don’s ex, Betty, is married to someone else and never comes to the office where all the action is. And the actress who plays Betty is pregnant, so she can’t be in the opening episode anyway.


What all this means is that Weiner essentially has to do two hours of crosscutting to re-establish the various weaknesses and problems of his huge cast. He begins with Don already married to his new wife. That’s probably a good idea, because there wasn’t much he was going to get out of stringing that engagement along. But until now Mad Men was built on the contrast between Don selling the American Dream at work while living an unpleasant, and occasionally nightmarish lie at home. At least in this first episode, Don is relatively happy at home and a no-show at work. So the narrative must be carried by others. The problem is who.


Joanie is stuck at home with her new-born. This highlights the contrast that she and Peggy have always represented on the show of talented women who are held back by their gender. But as long as she is paralyzed at home by her problem, she can’t provide a driving desire for the episode. She finally takes action when she brings her baby to work, and the episode immediately catches fire with two excellent scenes. In the first the various women in the office take turns holding the baby, with Peggy wanting nothing to do with it. Then she has a nice bonding moment with financial partner Lane Pryce, who assures her that the office is falling apart without her. But this comes fairly late in the episode.


Peggy doesn’t have much to do here except feel frustrated coming up with a winning ad for beans. That leaves Pete, a pushy little whiner who is even more obnoxious than usual in this episode. He battles Roger for a bigger office that befits the success he has achieved in bringing clients to a firm that is having serious money problems.


Given the immense challenge Weiner faced in coming up with this first episode, we should probably be amazed that it was as good as it was. Now that he has taken care of all the set-up work for this season, he may be able to take the show in some exciting new directions as Mad Men takes on 1966. But for writers who love the craft, this episode points up lesson #1 in television: it all starts with desire.

Downton Abbey

The latest example of the coming of age of the television medium is Downton Abbey. In the old days of TV, each episode of a show was a self-contained story. The problem was introduced in the opening scene and solved 44 minutes later. By the end of the season, the audience had seen 22-24 versions of essentially the same story.

Notice this guaranteed that the TV medium as a whole could be nothing more than a factory of generic story product. Then Steven Bochco showed everyone that the real potential of the medium came not from a single episode but from an entire season. Instead of being film’s tag-along little brother, TV could tell its stories on a canvas ten times the size of a feature film.

In story terms, this meant, above all, interweaving multiple story lines over many episodes. No longer confined to a 44-minute straightjacket, the writer could get at a deeper truth by using film’s unique crosscutting ability to compare and contrast storylines.

Set in an English country house (more exactly a castle), beginning in 1912, Downton Abbey takes this multiple storyline approach to the extreme, so far having tracked the stories of 33 different characters. The question arises: what techniques does writer Julian Fellowes use to take this multiple storyline show to the highest levels of the TV form? I’d like to focus on two above all: story world and character web.

Story world is one of the main structural elements in a good story, consisting of the society, the minor characters, the natural settings, the social settings and the technology of the time. Downton Abbey has one of the most detailed story worlds in television or film, and all of these details have been chosen and created by the writer.

The first key choice Fellowes made in the story world had to do with placing the characters in pre-World War I England. This allowed Fellowes to work in the fabulous TV genre of historical epic (Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire). The Crawley family will stand for all of England at a time when England was about to undergo some of the most radical changes in its storied history. In the Anatomy of Story Masterclass (called The Great Screenwriting Class on CD), I talk a lot about the advanced story world technique of placing the characters between two social, or historical, stages, when society undergoes a relatively sudden shift. This highlights the forces of change acting upon the characters, so the audience focuses on how they adapt to these forces, and whether they do so in time to avoid their own destruction.

Fellowes uses another advanced story world technique by focusing not just on a family, but on a system, with highly defined roles, hierarchy, set of rules and values. Just as the American epic, The Godfather, depicts a family that is part of a mafia system, Downton Abbey’s family and servants are part of the British class system. This rigid system organizes and divides people in two fundamental ways, by wealth-power-status and by gender.

While any system is trouble for the characters trapped within it, it is tremendously useful for the writer. It gives Fellowes an almost unlimited number of permutations for conflict, which means he can not only run these oppositions as long as he wants to write the series, but can also make each individual episode extremely dense with conflict scenes.

Notice a system also gives the writer an extra level of depth for every character in the story. Even the most powerful character in the hierarchy, aristocratic father Robert Crawley, is enslaved in some way by the rules, values and expectations on which the system is built. And the least powerful character in the hierarchy, scullery maid Daisy, becomes heroic in her efforts to better herself against tremendous systemic forces and in her determination to do right by the dying soldier who loves her.

Over the course of the series, Fellowes has combined these two techniques – the changing social stage and the enslaving system – to give him the overall story path that each character will play out. World War I was a huge fulcrum for change in England, and even a network as old and powerful as the British class and gender system must bow to its awesome force. In simple story terms, the characters move toward equality; the rich and the men lose some of their power, while the poor and the women gain in power. The magnificent castle becomes a place for soldiers to recuperate, the aristocratic daughters act as nurses, one marries a mechanic, and the rich father can do nothing but accept it.

Closely connected to the story world is a technique I call “character web” (again for full details on this important technique see The Anatomy of Story Masterclass). Character web has to do with how all the characters in a story are connected to one another, which both helps to define and distinguish each of the characters and makes this story, with these characters, unique from every other story. Another advantage to placing the story within a social system is that it makes it easier for the writer to come up with a unique character web. The characters are all part of the same system, but they are distinguished by being in power – upstairs – or being out of power – downstairs, being male or female, by what role they play in the family and in the house, and so on.

On top of these basic distinctions, the writer can then add structural differences and subtleties. Here Fellowes borrows heavily from a fairy tale technique, refined by Jane Austen, which is the three sisters. The eldest and most beautiful, Mary, carries the main love storyline with the cousin who will inherit the house. Edith is the plain and resentful second sister unable to find a proper mate. And Sybil is the youngest who attacks the system by marrying the mechanic.

Of course, many stories have been set within the English class system. So the writer has to come up with a way to distinguish this character web from all the others. Fellowes uses a number of techniques to do so, but the most interesting one for me is how he depicts the upstairs characters. In the vast majority of British class stories, especially those written in the last hundred years, writers have depicted the aristocrats negatively, as the enslavers of those who work for them or those unlucky enough to be born poor.

And with good reason. While upper class characters aren’t at fault for being born into an aristocratic family, they do run a system that makes it virtually impossible for the vast majority of citizens to achieve anything close to their true potential in life. The history of American storytelling is defined largely by the principle of the individual creating, and often recreating, himself (for example, Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby). By contrast, the central hallmark of English storytelling has been a fixed self, determined almost totally by whether the individual inherits or fails to inherit the family fortune.

But that’s not how the upper class is defined in Downton Abbey. Yes, the entire plot is generated from the fact that a total stranger and distant cousin inherits the vast family fortune which then radically alters and jeopardizes the future of the three aristocratic daughters. But the aristocrats in this story are not evil, or even bad. Quite the contrary, the enormously wealthy head of the family, Robert, is probably the most positively portrayed character in the entire web. When the Titanic disaster shifts the inheritance to cousin Matthew, Robert could fight it with his powerful connections, and probably win. But he refuses to do so because it would be illegal and worse immoral.

All the aristocrats have their personal flaws, as all well-written characters do, but they are essentially good and decent people. Far more surprising though is that Fellowes depicts their exercise of power in a positive light. The simple rationale is that they are providing stable, paying jobs along with a good home for people who otherwise would have nothing.

Similarly, Fellowes doesn’t portray the servants as freedom fighters going up against the powerful in a terribly unjust system, but as children happy to play their roles in the larger family and thus intensely loyal to their masters. The benefit of this approach is that the characters are surprising and the overall character web is distinct from most other depictions of the British class system.

But the cost is immense. While I love following the beautifully woven trials and tribulations of this loving extended family, I occasionally feel like I’m watching a British Gone with the Wind. Sure, the blacks are all slaves in that world, but Tara is such a bustling happy place, run with love by that benevolent dictator with a heart of gold, Gerald O’Hara. No wonder that even the lowliest black character finds living out his role in the plantation family so comforting. Isn’t it a shame the Civil War came along and destroyed such a beautiful world?

You can’t have it both ways. Just because you show decent aristocrats doesn’t mean their exercise of privilege and power isn’t terribly destructive. Just because you show poor or uneducated people happy in their roles doesn’t mean that they aren’t enslaved and possibly forfeiting a much deeper happiness and fulfillment in their lives.

Fellowes depiction of the system as essentially beneficial is the greatest flaw in the construction of Downton Abbey, and is what in my mind prevents it from reaching the top echelon of works of art in this amazing medium of television. But we’re talking about extremely rarified air here. Anyone who wants to create their own series, or who just loves television, would be wise to study this show to see the techniques of a master writer.

Lost - The Final Season

The last season of Lost is upon us, and it gives writers of every medium an opportunity to watch masters of the craft push the television medium to places it has never gone. Lost is the first example of video game story structure transposed to TV, and the results have revolutionized the medium.

The old model of television involved the stand-alone episode, best exemplified in a crime or detective show. A murder was committed at the beginning of the episode, and then the cop uncovered the criminal and brought him to justice by the end. The next week a new crime was committed and solved. So plot was limited to what could be unraveled in 45 minutes.

With shows like Hill Street Blues and ER, the technique of the serial was added to TV. The cops, lawyers or doctors now had ongoing personal problems that extended over many episodes while retaining the stand-alone elements where a crime or medical emergency was solved by the end of the episode.

The creators of Lost had a big realization: the TV medium has not been used to its full potential, especially in the area of plot. So they shifted their focus from the single episode to the entire season. If you multiply 45 minutes per week by the 24 weeks of a network season, you have a story that is 9 times the length of a movie!

That’s Dickens’ territory. But the model the Lost creators used to construct this mega-canvas was not the 19th century novel, because that doesn’t take advantage of the crosscutting power of film and TV. Instead they cross-pollinated TV structure with video game structure, potentially the most plot intensive of all story forms. This meant three things above all:

1. the huge importance of the story world
2. an almost infinite number of characters
3. tremendous plot, because you can keep going deeper into the same world and find more reveals.

Like all multi-main character stories, the storytelling in Lost is all about juxtaposition and story weave. In the first three seasons, the writers were funneling out, adding layers and layers of plot, increasing the story’s scope by increasing the number of characters. But by the end of the third season the writers had reached the limit of plot: first, there were so many characters that they seemed like pawns and not people, and second, plot came to feel like a huge stall where further complications were just pointless.

That’s why, in the last two seasons, the writers have been funneling down, concentrating on the six “survivors” as well as John, Jack and Ben. This speeded up the plot by giving the many strands a convergent point, and switched the emphasis from the puzzle of plot to the emotional satisfaction of character.

In the first four seasons, the conflict focused on characters in space. Last season Lost shifted to conflict in time. In other words, time travel. Time travel is always a fun plot device. But what does it really mean? The ultimate thematic point of time travel is to compress into one view a character’s moral failings vs. the final moral judgment against him or her. Through the crosscut, the viewer can suddenly see in one view a single character’s life span, and the choices that make all the difference in the quality of a human life.

Sure enough, in the middle of season five, we saw a series of episodes in which each of the main characters had their own show. Instead of strictly plot reveals for a mass of characters within the world, time travel allowed the writers to create strong emotional character payoffs for each of the nine major characters. At the same time the plot reveals for the entire show continued to come over the course of the whole season, which satisfied the plot cravings of the die-hard viewer.

If last season was about time travel, this season the writers are using the story technique of alternative history, contrasting actions on the island with an alternative present for each of the major characters back in the real world. The purpose of the alternative history technique is the same as it is for time travel. Both contrast the moral choices that caused these characters to come to the island in the first place. Each episode gives a character a chance at two paths, the island that tests their great flaw and real life where each person can finally make things right.

Besides being a lot of fun to watch, Lost gives writers a chance to see some of the best storytellers in the world, in the middle of their creative process, working the craft and pushing the magnificent medium of television. I’ve been saying for years that the best writers in America are working in TV. Even if you’ve never watched this show, you owe yourself the pleasure of seeing what great writing can do before Lost is gone forever.

Life

Life is a 1-hour drama that has been trying to break through after a strike-shortened season last year. I hope it does because it adds a number of fun twists to the police procedural that is the staple of American TV drama.

In the TV Drama Class, I go into all of the structural elements that must be present to construct a successful show. One of these has to do with the genre. Like film, TV requires that you take an existing popular genre or combination of genres and give it a unique twist. Life is a mix of detective, crime and buddy picture, and that’s a pretty strong combination. Yes, we’ve seen cop shows with partners many times before (for example, Law and Order SVU), but they aren’t using the buddy picture techniques. A buddy picture is a kind of action comedy in which the buddies form some kind of odd couple. The buddies love each other in a platonic way, but they act like a married couple, with constant lighthearted bickering.

In Life, the odd couple is Charlie Crews, a cop who was framed for a multiple murder-robbery and sent to jail before gaining his freedom and returning to the force along with $50,000,000 in “We’re sorry” money. He’s gained a Zen sensibility during his twelve years behind bars. And that drives his partner nuts. She’s Dani Reese, a practical, by-the-book cop who also just happens to be drop-dead gorgeous, like any number of other drop-dead gorgeous cops in Hollywood crime shows (for example, Law and Order SVU). Just once I’d love it if a character on one of these shows would ask our investigator if she realizes she’s beautiful enough to be an actress.

The two lead characters play well off each other, and I believe one of the reasons this show hasn’t done better is that the writers have not played this element up even further. One reason might be that the Reese character lacks detail. For a buddy picture to work the buddies must be equal. The writers have given Crews tremendous detail, to such a degree that he is clearly the hero of the show. This imbalance is a big mistake. William Goldman once told me that when they were shooting the early scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Butch has to fight Harvey for leadership of the gang, director George Roy Hill kept Sundance on his horse to visually increase Sundance’s stature relative to Butch. We forget that before the movie came out, Robert Redford was a nobody and Paul Newman was Paul Newman.

This may be why Life’s writers retooled the show this season by giving Reese and Crews a new boss, Captain Tidwell, with whom Reese could get romantically involved. Donal Logue, who plays the boss, is a funny actor and a welcome addition to the show. But while the move has boosted Reese’s importance a bit, the relationship between her and the boss is completely unbelievable. Hopefully the writers will strengthen this line, while also highlighting the more important buddy relationship between Reese and Crews.

Another structural element that determines a successful TV drama is the weave of the desire line. In other words, what gets accomplished in each episode and how are the episode’s goals intercut? Life uses a technique found in most cop shows of combining two main goals, one short-term and one long-term. The short-term goal is to solve the crime of that episode. The long-term goal is Crews’s determination to find the cops who framed him for the murder-robbery. The individual investigations all have a quirky quality that sets them apart from the standard crimes we see on most procedurals. For example, in a recent episode, Crews and Reese had to solve the murder of a mall Santa they find five minutes before the department store opens for holiday rush on Black Friday. They realize too late that the horde of hungry shoppers is going to trample their crime scene, and then discover that the shoppers have apparently taken Santa’s body as well.

The long-term investigation is more problematic. The conspiracy behind the murder-robbery and Crews’ frame-up is full of juicy possibilities, including one suspect who is Reese’s father. The brilliant Zen cop who sits in his mansion trying to unravel the conspiracy that took twelve years of his life is, besides being very un-Zen, great stuff. Which is why it’s been frustrating that the writers have done relatively little with it. I suspect that’s because they realize that once Crews figures out who did it, this line is over. The show’s creator has painted himself into a bit of a corner here. This concept is central to the premise of the show, and probably a good part of the reason Life got on the air in the first place. But it’s a big dead end when it comes to the extendability of the show.

Still, the writers must deal with this line. Giving it one or two scenes a show doesn’t work. Ignoring the line only makes it seem half-baked and unrelated to the main investigation in each episode. If the writers can expand this conspiracy from a single event in the past where Crews was framed to an ongoing, present-day corruption in the LAPD, this buddy picture of a Zen mind-master and his pragmatic, beautiful partner will turn into the hottest show on TV.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Studio 60 has not been the big hit everyone at NBC hoped it would be. And it's taken more than a few shots, mostly from insiders who say that it's not an authentic view of a sketch comedy show. Why? Because it's not funny. And they're right; it's not funny. That could be because creator and writer Aaron Sorkin can't write funny. Or more likely it's because the show's not a comedy. It's a drama about working in a corporation, a corporation that just happens to be in the business of making culture.

Sometimes Sorkin gets too cute in his writing, typically from updating a classic story beat. He always does the beat well, but it's still a recognizable beat. And I get the feeling that he is writing so much so fast that for long stretches he just puts it on automatic and lets his considerable knowledge of story carry him along.

To see one of the reasons why Studio 60 may be having trouble with audiences, let's look at a technique that is crucial to a TV drama: the episodic desire line. In other words, what is accomplished in each episode? In a classic cop show, it's solving the crime. In a courtroom drama, it's winning the case. In a doctor show, it's saving the patient. On Studio 60 it's … Well, we know what it isn't. It's not putting on a 90-minute comedy show. So what is it?

The desire line in each episode is what gives the story its shape, and is one of the key elements of a show's DNA. You can create a show in which the desire line extends over many episodes, but you will have more difficulty holding a mass audience. So many shows provide at least one desire line that is accomplished by the end of the episode, and extend the others. Aaron Sorkin doesn't do that on Studio 60. It's not a bad thing. It's just not popular. Regardless of Studio 60's essential structure, there is a lot to like and learn from by watching it.

For example, we see a great technique in the second part of a two-part episode in which Harriet gets an award. It's the technique I call the "dialogue of equals." Good conflict dialogue should be a heavyweight fight. Punch/counter-punch. One throws a hammer blow. The other comes right back with a hammer blow of his own. Not only does each line have dramatic power, the scene builds in the sequence of the blows (lines), ending in a knockout punch.

To create a building punch/counter-punch, you have to have two equals, by which I mean two characters with an equal ability to verbally attack. If one is too strong, he or she will get in the most blows and the scene will not build. In the concluding episode of the two-parter, Matt and Harriet go at each other with ferocity. Matt is the obviously more aggressive and nastier of the two. But Harriet does not shrink back and ends up having the more powerful blows, including the lethal knockout punch.

24

One of the best shows on television this season has been 24. The high concept of the show is that the season of 24 shows tracks 24 hours in the life of CIA agent Jack Bauer.

What this means structurally is that 24 is almost totally a plot-based show. The creators aren't just using the ticking clock technique to speed the story as it nears the end. They have to fill real time, and real time is boring. That means they have to rely heavily on cross-cut storytelling in which we cut between a number of story lines happening simultaneously.

Cross-cut storytelling allows you a number of plot advantages. First, you increase suspense by showing two lines racing to the same point. For example, will the hero save the girl tied to the railroad tracks before the train runs her over?

Second, the cross-cut allows you to remove any action that is boring. Instead of watching someone drive somewhere or even have a conversation (heaven forbid), we can jump from crisis point to crisis point, so long as we have enough story lines going at once.

But notice that puts tremendous pressure on the writers. They have to not only create a number of story lines that are believably happening at one time, they have to weave them together so that each helps build the other and both the episode and the season have a dramatic line.

That's really hard. One of the pleasures for me watching the show was seeing how the writers accomplished these feats of plot with such success. Plotting is the most under-estimated of the major storytelling skills, so watching these writers perform their high wire act over 24 hours of tv time was pretty amazing.

But as they say in basketball, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. When your show is built almost entirely on plot, you lack the character definition to make some of your plot tricks believable. And when that happens, the plot mechanics immediately become obvious and audience scorn is severe.

To the writers' credit, this didn't happen often. However, I laughed out loud when they used the old amnesia trick for Jack's wife.

The most grievous example of the false plot trick occurred on the biggest plot twist of the season. In the second to last episode, the writers revealed the identity of the hero's opponent-ally. Because there had been virtually no character work during the series, and because there had been no clues woven in earlier, this reveal not only felt false, it seemed like a betrayal of the audience.

Revealing the hidden opponent is a common problem, not just with plot-based stories but, more specifically, with detective stories. Detective writers are so worried that the audience will guess the big reveal of the killer early, they often give no clues at all. But as the master, Agatha Christie, once said, that's cheating. The audience should be totally surprised, but also be able to think back through the story and realize the information was there all along.

Ironically, what saved the writers of 24 is the fact that their big reveal happened at the end of the second to last show. By that point, the only people who were watching were real fans who had already forgiven lesser plot grievances.

What will be interesting to see is how the writers of this show overcome another weakness inherent to plot-based shows, the second season blues. When you put all your eggs in the plot basket of the first season, the audience feels they have had the experience. For example, when Laura Palmer's killer was revealed at the end of Twin Peaks' first season, no one felt they needed to come back the next year.

Now that I've seen Jack Bauer's worst nightmare, I don't think I want to see a different one that's almost as bad.

The West Wing

Aaron Sorkin's story-telling is not about character or plot. It's about running themes through dialogue. He crafts his stories on a three- or four-part crosscut, which allows him to touch on often arcane subjects of governance without boring the audience stiff. But the stories are really an excuse to lay down long tracks of dialogue which inevitably build to an inspiring monologue on the larger thematic issue.

This kind of story-telling requires a talent in dialogue and theme, which is an unusual combination for a writer. And it is not a combination that the popular entertainment industry normally values. Which makes the presence and success of West Wing in mainstream American tv especially pleasurable.

This combination of dialogue and theme also highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of this show. The dialogue is often poetic and dense. So the language of this president and his court is language fit for a modern king. Poetic dialogue largely disappeared after Huck Finn. Dialogue became vernacular, because that was the talk of the common man. Placing his story in the office of the President allows Sorkin to push the dialogue back up the poetic scale.

But there is a price, even in this rarified atmosphere. This language often doesn't sound like real talk. Everyone seems to be an expert in every area of modern knowledge. Everyone speaks the same glib banter. And we know we will have to sit through a monologue which reminds us, yet again, how magnificent American democracy is. The President, who usually delivers these inspiring monologues, is the perfect father, strong but caring, intelligent but full of love. Which makes the President the most difficult to stomach of any character in the show.

Sorkin also has the annoying habit of spoiling the moment. He'll write a nice piece of dialogue and then push it into the fake or the sappy.

For example, in one episode the President is addressing some radio talk show hosts when he spots a Laura Schlessinger-like woman sitting amongst the crowd. Sorkin gives the President a brilliant monologue in which he shows how foolish it is to take some of the commandments in the Bible literally. Then Sorkin has the President, while still staring at the chastised woman, tell one of his aides,"That's how I beat him," referring to a conservative he defeated in a past election. In a second the President goes from enlightened teacher to smug bully.