Sex and the City

Spoiler Alert: this breakdown divulges information about the end of the film.

Sex and the City was a revolutionary TV show. Not because it showed women having lots of sex. That part was always unbelievable. Even young hip New York women don’t have that much sex with that many different partners or they’d be dead. No, Sex and the City was a big deal because it showed women as main characters in the story of their lives, not as the supporting girlfriend to the male hero. It showed women in the day-to-day business of work and love – the very fabric of human life – and it didn’t apologize for the fact that women craft their lives differently than men. If you don’t think that’s a big deal, try traveling the world as I did during the run of the show and hearing women from every conceivable nationality rave about this show.

Over the years the show went from Sex in the City to Relationships in the City, which was more believable but less fun. Especially when two of the women got themselves into relationships that were just plain dumb. Smart lawyer Miranda with Steve the bartender was painful to watch, and hear, since Steve’s how-dumb-can-I-talk voice was like nails on a chalkboard. And Charlotte’s marriage to the impotent mama’s boy was a clear case of theme driving plot into never-never land.

Now comes the movie and it is surprisingly effective. I say surprisingly because turning a TV show into a good movie is extremely difficult, with a very low success rate. There are a number of reasons for the success of Sex (and no, the sex is not one of them). But let me focus on two. The first is the character web on which the book and the show were originally built. Character web is a crucial structural element for any work of fiction, in whatever medium, but it’s especially important in TV. In the TV Drama Class I point out that mainstream Hollywood film emphasizes a single main character going after a single goal with a one-time plot that is usually highly intricate. TV, on the other hand, emphasizes a community of characters the audience wants to visit once a week, with plot being secondary and often predictable. Plot has grown more important on TV for “24” and “Lost”, but they are still the exception.

With character community being primary, how you set up the character oppositions for the leads of the show is crucial. The four women on Sex represent four unique approaches to how modern single women craft their work-love lives. There’s the driven professional woman, the narcissistic sexaholic, and the Princess who expects life to be a fairy tale. At the center of this mix is Carrie, a combination of all three who is the only truly well-rounded character of the four.

This highly-differentiated character web sets up a second major reason for the success of the Sex movie, the story weave. In the Advanced Screenwriting Class I talk about an advanced storytelling strategy called the branching structure. In multiple character stories, each character represents a branch. The trick is how you combine these branches without destroying all narrative drive. If you crosscut equally between many characters, the story has to track too many simultaneous actions and narrative drive disappears.

But because Carrie is the first among equals in the character web, the branching story weave here is more like a single trunk with three other branches extending off. Carrie’s story provides the strong spine that a mainstream Hollywood movie requires while the stories of the other women provide sub-plots, with each being a variation on the main line. Luckily Carrie has that one big event that can provide the spine of the movie, her pending wedding to Big. This event also focuses the theme of the film so that each of the four women can present a different approach to the question: how do women deal with the deeply-ingrained fairy tale image of being married to a man?

Unfortunately this event left me quite ambivalent. I too wanted the fairy tale ending; boys watch Disney movies too. But emotionally it wasn’t right. It wasn’t earned. Here is a guy who has “jilted” Carrie for the entire TV show, then does it again at the altar, and she takes him back one more time. The writer justifies it through the Miranda subplot with Steve (also fake), with the statement that “You’ve got to forgive.” Well, no, you don’t. If the guy keeps blowing you off and humiliating you time and again in the process, at some point it’s the mark of a mature person to say, “Get the hell out of my life.”

Of course, Carrie’s marriage to Big does set up the inevitable sequel to this blockbuster film. Anyone want to place bets on Big being faithful?

Son of Rambow

When you're making an indie film, you're always looking for ways to save money. And if you're smart the first and foremost place to do that is in the script.

One great strategy is to make a virtue of having no money - the old turn-lemons-into-lemonade trick. You know you can't compete with the big budget pictures on production values. So you come up with a story that relies on amateur video. This was the main technique used by sex, lies and videotape, generally considered the beginning of the modern indie film movement in the US. And it was used in The Blair Witch Project, one of the highest grossing indie films of all time. It's also used to great effect in Son of Rambow.

Of course, this strategy won't mean a thing if your story is not well structured. Ironically, script is even more important in indie filmmaking than in big budget movies, because the script is usually all you have going for you. And it doesn't cost any more to write a good one. Son of Rambow is a love story between two young friends, and writer Garth Jennings came up with a structure that not only carries a lot of comedy, it packs a surprising amount of emotional impact.

Like most good love stories, Son of Rambow is based on the fundamental opposition of the odd couple. Here a delinquent schemer and religious straight arrow team up to make a First Blood sequel where the son of Rambo tries to save his father. Matching the concept to the personal weakness and need of the leads, both boys are missing a father at home. The odd couple sets up the main opposition, but the similar need sets up the emotional payoff at the end.

But the key structural decision the writer made in this film has to do with the desire line. The normal desire in a love story is for the characters to want each other. But using the normal structure for these characters would have meant no plot and a sticky sentimental mess. Instead, these boys want to make a movie that will win a short film contest. Notice that this external goal allows the writer to sneak up on the audience, to tell a love story where the payoff is a complete surprise.

One of the big problems a lot of love stories have is lack of plot. That's also the case here. The desire, though effective at setting up the final punch, does flag a bit since it is essentially a stall. To increase the plot in the slow middle of the story, the writer adds outside opponents from each boy's family, along with the older kids at school. This character web is not altogether successful, especially the cool French boy that all the English kids worship. But it does complicate the making of the video enough to justify waiting so long to find out who wins the award.

In the Love Story Class, I talk a lot about how to transcend the form, by twisting the beats so the story pays its dues but also gives the audience something new. Writer Garth Jennings has come up with a unique love story structure through which to express the joys of friendship and the power of the imagination.

30 Rock

30 Rock just pulled off a big upset by winning the Emmy for best sitcom. No matter what you think of the result, this represents a stunning improvement over the show's initial start. Let's see why.

I wrote my previous breakdown of 30 Rock after watching their first episode, a big mistake for them and for me. In the first episode, show runner Liz ran all over the city looking for movie comedy star Tracy so he could head the cast of her Saturday Night Live-like show. Sitcoms require a large number of comic oppositions, which play off each other in rapid succession and which can generate comedy for at least 100 episodes. By taking the story out of the studio arena, the 30 Rock writers not only reduced the show to one (fairly weak) comic opposition, they gave the audience the wrong impression of what a typical 30 Rock experience would entail.

Subsequent episodes became much more focused in the studio, and that allowed the writers to generate different comic oppositions between regular characters at a much faster pace. That move alone was worth plenty. But the biggest improvement came from a season-long effort to sharpen the comic differences between characters. The opposition between Liz (played by Tina Fey) and Jack (played by Alec Baldwin) continued to be the primary one, but it improved dramatically. The Jack character is terrific, and Baldwin plays it brilliantly. But if he has no one to work off of, this character is wasted. So the writers sharpened Liz, making her more of a "machine" comic, undercutting the over-the-top "crazies" on the show. Fey also stepped up her game noticeably as a comic actor.

Keeping the stories more within the studio arena also allowed the writers to heighten the secondary comic oppositions. For example, "child" comic Kenneth - the innocent, idealistic and totally naïve page - became a perfect foil for both Tracy and Jack. This was tremendously valuable. Those of you who wish to create sitcoms or simply write a good one, notice that every time you create a new valid comic opposition like this, you get a magnified benefit: the primary opposition doesn't have to carry the whole load, you have more available story turns and the comic density of the show increases.

Another comic opposition that improved over the course of the season was the one between Liz and Jenna (played by Jane Krakowski). The episode that featured Jenna getting in trouble talking about the war in Iraq was one of the funniest of the season and showed that she still has a lot of potential in her oppositions, especially with Jack.

Now that the writers have found their groove, look for the show to focus even more on the in-studio oppositions. 30 Rock may not be the best comedy on television - in my opinion, The Office is a notch above it - but it's one of the funniest in a long time and it's getting better.

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2006

Sitcoms don't have the stature they had ten years ago, but they are still the second biggest form in television. What's crucial to understand about a sitcom is its success doesn't come from a list of good jokes. It comes from the original set up of the show, from what makes the jokes possible.

Again, there are a large number of structural elements required to set up a sitcom successfully, with one of the most important being the oppositions within the community. In sitcoms, that opposition is comedic, and each one must be an essential comedic opposition that never disappears over the course of entire show.

By this standard, 30 Rock is in trouble. There aren't enough essential oppositions and I don't see how the ones they do have are going to last. The first opposition is between Liz (played by Tina Fey) and Tracy (played by Tracy Morgan). This has an obvious visual opposition, but not a comedic one. Liz occasionally cracks wise, but as a character she is not funny. She is not pompous, nor does she go to the other extreme of deadpan (like a Bill Murray, for example) needed to make other characters funny. Tracy is mildly over-the-top, but in a limited, one-note way.

The one comedic opposition that does work, between Liz and Jack (played by Alec Baldwin), will be hard to sustain. Jack is the pompous corporate bastard who is both a narcissist and a creative idiot. Even the tame Liz will be able to cut him down to size, only to see him re-inflate within seconds. But how often can this corporate honcho appear on the set and create havoc?

The real ongoing comedic oppositions on a show about Saturday Night Live should be within the cast and crew. But so far these characters, like the cat wrangler and the pretty, do-nothing receptionist, are defined by a single comic note. They may have an occasional funny line but they are not comic pillars. They do not stand in essential comic opposition with any other fundamental comic character.

30 Rock does have two real strengths: a number of funny lines and no laugh track. But neither of these can overcome the weakness of bad comic opposition. I'll keep watching, for a while at least, and hope they prove me wrong.

If you are interested in writing sitcoms, or creating a successful one, you'll find all the techniques in the Sitcom Writing Class and the Sitcom Blockbuster add-on.

Mad Men

Mad Men is one of the best-written and most ambitious TV shows in some time. It is worth close study, not just for learning how to create a well-structured show but also how to write one that is truly original and potentially groundbreaking.

Story world, or arena, is one of the key structural elements in any TV drama (see the TV Drama Class for how to create this element, as well as the other essential structural elements of a successful show). It is where the story takes place and it usually exists within some specific arena that not only delineates a recognizable unit but also has a set of rules, activities and values that defines the characters.

One of the strengths of Mad Men is its story world. Instead of the usual arena of cops, lawyers, or doctors, Mad Men takes us into a Manhattan advertising agency in 1960. Besides being totally unique in TV, this story world is extremely detailed. And the detailing isn’t simply a matter of the set design, which is fabulous. It is written into every episode. The writers weave all manner of cultural icons of the late 50s-early 60s, including TV shows, ads, and fashion.

This has two great advantages. One is the pleasure of recognition. If you were a kid at that time, as I was, the show is a virtual time machine. And even if you weren’t, the authenticity and texture immerse you in the world and make you feel that “You are there!”

The other great advantage is that this past world tricks the audience into believing that this is how it really was back then. The first thing we notice when we see all of these details is how much the world has changed. Everybody smoked back then. The men were in charge and the women were all secretaries and housewives. That sets up the kicker. By first thinking how much we’ve changed, we then realize, with even more impact, all the ways we haven’t. This story, set in 1960, is really about today, or more exactly, the ways that human nature only puts on a new skin and the same fundamental challenges of creating a meaningful life must be faced by each of us, every moment of every day.

Another structural element that immediately jumps out at you if you want to create a TV show or write for one is the desire line. In Mad Men the desire that structures each episode is fairly nebulous, and that’s probably going to cut into the show’s popularity (I hope I’m wrong on this one). Desire is the main reason almost all TV shows are set in the cop, lawyer, and doctor arenas. These jobs give their shows a simple and repeatable desire line that tracks the episode every week. Catch the criminal. Win the case. Save the life. But of course this is extremely limiting. Most people don’t spend their daily lives solving crimes, prosecuting bad guys, and saving lives.

So while the desire line on this show may be more nebulous, it is far closer to what most Americans do in their daily lives. These Mad Men are in the business of selling, which, as Arthur Miller pointed out long ago, is the archetypal American action. But they aren’t selling a particular product. They’re selling desire, some image of the good life that, because it is a fabricated ideal, is always just out of reach.

Writer Matthew Weiner’s brilliant conception for this show is to connect the selling of desire to America to the personal and work lives of the ad men themselves. The ad men want the image of the good life in America that they are selling to be true, even if they intellectually make fun of the poor suckers out there who buy it. Main character Don Draper is handsome and talented, with a beautiful wife and two cute little kids. But he has some secrets he’s keeping – like a mistress in the city – and he feels a terrible void he has no idea how to shake. Draper is a master at manipulating desire and creating facades, so when he tries to live the promise for real, the “good life” falls apart in his hands.

We are in Far from Heaven and American Beauty territory here. And the second episode even had Draper give his own version of the Existentialist credo of Sartre and Camus that was seeping into pop culture during the late 50s (how’s that for a sweet detail on a TV show?). We’ll have to see whether Mad Men can extend beyond a few episodes without imploding. Besides the lack of a clean desire line, the subject of hollow suburban existence will make it extremely difficult for the writers to develop the show over the long term without beating a spiritually dead horse. In the meantime, I’m going to sit back and enjoy some great dramatic writing, and nowadays TV is the only place you’ll find it.

The Sopranos

For years I have been saying that the best drama writing is on television. Last week marked the end of the finest drama in TV history, The Sopranos. The talk has been all about how the last show ended. But the final scene was a miniature of the entire series. It was an anti-conclusion, just as the show was an anti-drama.

The Sopranos was great for all kinds of reasons. But those reasons are all aspects of a single technique: the grafting of genre with everyday reality. In structure terms, this is combining myth with drama. Genre is highly prescribed, with set story beats and audience expectations to match. Everyday reality grounds the genre, reverses the expectations, flattens the melodramatic moments of genre so the form actually hits harder.

Usually we see this technique in individual moments of a story. In The Godfather, after they assassinate the driver (filmed in extreme long shot), Clemenza says, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli." Then, at the end of the film, all the killers are calmly and professionally preparing to do their job, which just happens to be mass murder. In Pulp Fiction, two men discuss McDonald's vs. Burger King before we find out they are hit men who commit the most grisly murder.

What made The Sopranos different was that the entire TV series was built on this technique. Here's the premise: a ruthless mob boss has problems with his mother, his wife and his kids and sees a psychiatrist. A writer for the show recently said, "The mob genre is the bait and switch for this show." The mob genre let them write about "kings and queens at court," while the everyday reality showed the king frustrated by a wife and kids he can't control. He could slap his son around but he couldn't keep him from being a screw-up.

The TV medium, still so terribly under-rated, allowed the show's creator, David Chase, to extend this technique across the breadth of a Dickensian novel. A lesser writer would have taken pains to remind the audience who all these characters were. But Chase held to the technique. "I said, 'I'm going to tell stories without all this exposition.' It's what I'd seen in foreign films. Someone says something, or something happens, but it's not commented on-there's no arrows that point to it." Using his fundamental technique, he produced a highly structured, multi-character American epic that was grounded in hundreds of everyday moments.

So was I frustrated by the ending? You bet. But I was supposed to be. I realized that was the only way the show could have ended, by not ending. Some have argued that Tony really was whacked. The last scene was told largely from his perspective. If someone shot him in the head from behind, everything would simply go black.

But I think the open ending was all about the fundamental technique of the show. Every character and action in that diner was both everyday normal and full of dread. Tony had become a king trapped in a state of nature, death on all sides, and it could come from the littlest nobody. At any time. That's the life he has sown.

Farewell Sopranos, the king of drama. You were big drama and small drama; big story and small story. Most of all, you were professional writers at the top of their craft. Thank you.

Grey's Anatomy

TV drama is ascendant right now and Grey's Anatomy is at the top of the heap. It's worth taking a look at how this show works to get a clue about writing for a drama show and maybe even creating one of your own.

Grey's Anatomy is the best show about high school to come along in a while. The interns are the freshmen, "the Nazi" is a junior, Burke and McDreamy are seniors, and the Chief Surgeon is the principal. The fact that this is high school in a hospital only affects what the characters do for their class projects. Think bio class with human guinea pigs.

Besides being brilliant, this high concept premise for a TV show indicates that the show's creator, Shonda Rhimes, understood the first rule about TV: it's about a community of opponents. Sure we bring in guest characters every week. But the audience tunes in so it can live for a moment in this community, in this extended family. We watch the family members fight but we love them anyway and know that they love each other. They just have a hard time living together under the same roof (just like us).

High school has all the highs and lows of living in a community, but taken to the nth degree. As Charles Dickens, a notorious nerd, once remarked about his own high school, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." (He was also the first to write that line in the school yearbook.) By pushing high school into the adult world of the hospital, Rhimes lets the viewer relive that heightened state, at its best and its worst, without limiting the audience to actual high school students.

There are many elements that go into a well-constructed show. Let's look at one of the more important ones, setting up the oppositions.

One reason Grey's Anatomy is so popular is that it has very clear oppositions among the ongoing characters, and it has a lot of them. The first set of oppositions is between the "freshmen," the interns. There are three women and two men, and each is very different from the others. In fact they are so schematically different they border on cliché. But then high school is famous for the various groups with the simplistic labels. The two guys here aren't just two young doctors. One is the narcissistic ladies man who wants to be a plastic surgeon, while the other is such a pathetic hang-dog (he even looks like a St. Bernard) I keep waiting for the writers to hang a keg of whiskey around his neck. The women are just as extreme. That can make for some ludicrous scenes on occasion. But the important point is that in TV your characters have to begin recognizably different. You've got plenty of time to add texture to these people as the seasons progress. What you don't have is time to identify how your main characters oppose each other in fundamental ways.

Having five unique interns would be enough for most shows. But Grey's adds a second set of oppositions between the interns and the doctors. This is an opposition based on experience, on learning the craft of medicine. And that focuses primarily on how the doctors and the interns deal with their patients in life-and-death situations. The nice touch here is that while the doctors know best how to operate and deal with the patients, in love they are just as dumb as the freshmen. The basic concept here is that when love comes to town we are all in high school for the rest of our lives.

Which leads to the third set of oppositions. These doctors are involved in all kinds of twisted opposition in their love lives. They are led by the nominal main character of the show, Meredith, who is a revolutionary character for TV. Meredith is the first girl-next-door prom princess who loves sex (ie, she's a slut) and isn't ashamed of it. But it does cause her all sorts of complications, which the audience loves to watch. Meredith looks and sounds like a high school girl, and she's in over her head with the cutest senior in school. Who can resist that?

Using love as a major opposition is a two-edged sword on a TV show. It generates intense passion, which is great for drama and comedy. But it also forces the writers to constantly rip characters apart and put them into new relationships. The sense of farce and soap opera has already begun to take over the storylines.

Still this is a beautifully constructed TV show for the long haul. If you would like to write TV drama, or even create your own show, take a look at the TV Drama Class and the TV Drama Blockbuster add-on, where you can find out all the structural elements that make a hit.

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.

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.