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Posts published in September 2011

This is odd for so many reasons (Emmys 2011)

First off, I can’t believe this is already my fourth Emmy review on this site.
I’d like to thank — Oh, who am I kidding. I made myself.

Anyways, on to business.

I’ve gotta admit, this was a pretty good year for the Emmys.
Jane Lynch was a great host, and it started off fairly well with her opening number.
It did drag on a bit but, overall, it was a nice time (I’m still a fan of last year’s Born To Run though).
One thing I did note about the stage was the huge FOX logo at the top of the gigantic video tower.
We get it, we’re on FOX. The Simon Cowell network.

The big awkward running gag of the night (you’ve gotta have one of those) was the Emmytones. Or, as I call it, the “why the fuck am I doing this” choir, composed of such talented actors as Joel McHale and Zach Levi.
Forced smiles coupled with bad timing meant one bad musical number after another.
LL Cool J’s surprise guest song towards the end of the night only reinforced the contrast between a “cool” number and…that.

As expected, we were treated with funny presenters mixed with more, shall we say, somber ones.
It started pretty well with the two Jimmys (Fallon and Kimmel) boxing it out.
The first part of the night was, as Jane Lynch called it, the Modern Family Awards.
Beyond the fact that it was a clean sweep for the show, I actually did not expect Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell to win. They did deserve the awards though.
Ricky Gervais’ pre-recorded message was way too tame to be funny. I know it was supposed to be the joke but, still, too on the nose. Here’s to hoping he’ll be back in some capacity live on another award show.
Another annoying thing about the night was the overbearing announcer/voice-over guy making pretty crappy jokes about each winner as they walked onto the stage. They definitely need to cut that gag out next time around.

I honestly thought there would be an upset in the comedy writing department with Louis C.K. winning. After all, the show is widely loved in LaLaLand.
And if not a Louie episode, then at least the final Steve Carell/The Office one.
So, yes, this was another Modern Family Emmy I didn’t really anticipate.
Same comment for ‘best actor’ where I really thought Steve Carell’s final year would be recognized.
Charlie Sheen’s speech was beyond awkward. Was he being serious or ironic? It all sounded so hollow and strange. I can understand Jim Parsons being creeped out.

At this point in the post I have to take a moment and acknowledge the great dramatic presentation that was the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series category.
All the nominated actresses going up on stage ‘impromptu’-style was great.
Yay for McCarthy. I’m not a big Mike & Molly fan though I’m seeing this victory as a recognition of McCarthy’s past work (Gilmore Girls!). And Bridesmaids certainly didn’t hurt.

The best moment of the night was undoubtedly the great Office comedy bit with fellow characters/actors popping in and out of the short. The biggest laughs were had with Jesse Pinkman giving Creed some meth. Brilliant.


I also cannot help but be amused by Cee-Lo’s chair malfunction.

Moving on the the Reality/Variety category, I have to say that Top Chef: All-Stars was a shoe-in for the Emmy, not Amazing Race (for what feels like a decade of wins).
Speaking of gazillion victories, The Daily Show once again took the top prize. I can’t complain, although I’m still waiting on The Colbert Report to get the Emmy.

We then got blasted with a Lonely Island medley (sorta).
Look, I enjoy the occasional skit as much as the next guy, but doing a live remake of the Michael Bolton song was unoriginal to say the least.
It was a nice touch to have (I think) Ed Helms, Maya Rudolph and John Stamos in the set as well, but overall, a fairly weak (albeit crazy) skit.

And this brings me to the ‘best drama writer’ category.
Holy smokes.
Huge surprise (in my mind) with Jason Katims’ oh-so-deserved victory for the series finale of Friday Night Lights.
Finally some recognition!
Now, I’m still a season behind, but I’m super stoked about this win.
Ditto for Kyle Chandler’s Emmy prize.
Those are upsets I enjoy seeing.
Martin Scorsese winning best director was one of the most obvious awards of the night (save for the finale two).
On the other side of the coin, Peter Dinklage won!


It might not have seemed like the role of a lifetime but it sure feels like it now.
Game of Thrones is currently the number one talked-about show in every writers room so it might not be as surprising as it seems.

Following last year’s debacle, the ‘In Memoriam’ segment was anticipated (for lack of a more politically-correct description).
What we got this time around was a music clip promoting a Canadian boys band singing a terrible version of Hallelujah.
Better luck next season, right?

And now about the final awards.
Clearly no surprise there for Downtown Abbey which holds the BS record for “most acclaimed series in the world“.
I haven’t got much else to add about Mad Men‘s victory.
And as for Modern Family winning. Well. It’s the new 30 Rock.

Screenwriting lessons from Six Feet Under – Part Two

Screenwriting lessons from Six Feet Under – Part Two

A key part of writing for television is watching television. And learning from it.
Screenwriting lessons from tackles series past and present, analyzing them through the prism of screenwriting.

Click here for Part One

[Since I’ll be talking about Six Feet Under as a whole (including the series finale), I highly recommend you watch all five seasons of series before reading this post — it’s worth it.]


Lesson 5: Play with expectations

Looking at its structure objectively, you can’t deny that Six Feet Under was a formulaic show. Every episode started with a death, and the audience expected that.
All of this was subverted several times during the course of the series. You thought someone was dying a horrible death when, ultimately, it was someone else entirely. One episode opened with a man about to light his stove with a match and being distracted by a phone call. You expect him to die in a gas explosion, yet the death ends up being a mad-man gunning down the call center at the other end of the line. A season finale had a Kroehner employee playing golf with his boss. The audience arguably was rooting for the character’s death (given his antagonistic presence on the show), but an innocent bystander was the victim of the episode. The show also turned the whole concept on its head in its final episode, by opening with a birth instead of a death.
All of that is to say that, as formulaic as a show can be, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do the same thing over and over again. Formula isn’t a prison; it is merely a delimited playground.

Lesson 6: Have something to say

Six Feet Under was a very intense show dealing with a wide array of sensitive issues, most of the time in the rawest form possible. They didn’t sugarcoat the real world.
More importantly, each episode had its own theme that resonated with the various characters. Most of the times, this was launched by the opening death. No story was random; it had a reason to be on the show besides “stuff happens.” It always told something about the characters and the world. A young homosexual is murdered. David is forced to confront his own sexuality and relationship with his mother.
We talked earlier about different character point of views, but each episode also needs to say and show something different from the previous one. If your episodes are clones of each other by telling the same story over and over again, you might as well put on reruns.

Lesson 7: It’s okay to think ahead

Despite all the somewhat hackneyed “live in the moment” stuff I said in Part One, a show needs to have some kind of plan, or rather arc(s). And I’m not talking about a smoke monster.
Six Feet Under had under its hood multiple arcs layered and mixed into each other. The show was as much about the characters as what happened to them.
In season two, Brenda befriends a prostitute and starts having, let’s just say, a sexual awakening. Although at the time it may have seemed to be somewhat gratuitous, it was (and is) in fact a key part of the Brenda/Nate dynamic that unfolds in the given season. The prostitute storyline is set up early on, while Nate and Brenda are not yet married. Later on, when they do get hitched, all of this comes to bite Brenda in the ass, and the couple calls it quits. In this small example, Brenda had at the very least two arcs going on within her relationship with Nate beyond “the relationship.” I could enumerate many more arcs within it — Billy, her parents, etc. — however you get the point: nobody goes through one thing at a time.
This is not Inception, but, as you can see, shows (and life) tend to be “arcs within arcs”. All the more reasons not to get lost in your own world and actually think of the future a bit. Your stories themselves will likely improve (badly plotted arcs tend to stick out like sore thumbs by either going nowhere or ending in a tailspin).

Lesson 8: Stay with the emotions

Like we’ve seen before, there needs to be an emotional connection between the audience and the show. Six Feet Under pushed that to a new level by oftentimes “staying with the emotions.” It might seem contradictory from the famous advice of “quitting a scene at its height”, however sometimes it’s worth sticking with a central A story all the way through.
In one of the most intense episodes of the series, David is taken hostage by a psychopath. Although the episode starts like any other (A/B/C/D stories mixed), midway through, the focus shifts entirely towards David’s nightmarish situation. Not only is over half the episode devoted to that storyline, but, more importantly, once the situation heightens (i.e. when you understand midway through the episode that the other guy is a psycho), the episode grabs you and doesn’t let you go until its final seconds. Clearly the writer wanted the viewer to be put into David’s shoes. “Staying with the emotions” (in this case overwhelmingly negative ones), is one way to heighten both the tension and importance of the episode (anything can happen).
Viewers are now used to a fairly quick back-and-forth between scenes, so when you disrupt that dynamic and devote several pages back-to-back to a single storyline, you’re making a point.

What to take from the show (Part Two)

Stories need to be both relevant and interesting, but more than that they need to be engaging to the audience. Whether by intensifying its importance or managing expectations, the attention and structure given to a storyline is potentially as important as the plot itself.

Screenwriting lessons from Six Feet Under – Part One

Screenwriting lessons from Six Feet Under – Part One

A key part of writing for television is watching television. And learning from it.
Screenwriting lessons from tackles series past and present, analyzing them through the prism of screenwriting.

Ten years ago, one of the greatest American series debuted on television: Six Feet Under.
Concluding in 2005 with one of the best finales in TV history, the show broke new ground with its emotional and riveting stories. The series dealt with many day-to-day issues, including family, sexuality, relationships, and of course life & death. These are some of the lessons learned from this amazing character drama.

[Since I’ll be talking about Six Feet Under as a whole (including the series finale), I highly recommend you watch all five seasons of series before reading this post — it’s worth it.]


Lesson 1: Life is a prism

Never will your neighbor, your friend or even your brother think the same thing as you since each person has a different life experience. This translates directly into the way you, and your characters, view the world.
Different characters have different viewpoints, and the money in character relationships is where characters are trying to convince each other to change their mind.
When we meet them, Nate and David couldn’t be more different in their views of the family business. The former tried to escape this world as soon as he can, the latter abandoned his lawyer dream to be a mortician. During the life of the series, Nate is, despite himself, transforming into his father while David searches for his own identity. Both disagree on what death and the business is/should be, but they’re still brothers at the end of the day.
Beyond characters, the “prism” aspect of life also directly translates into the story. Each episode of the show centered on a different death, and more importantly how the funeral home dealt with it (and how it resonated through them).
When a grieving widow confides in Rico that she barely remembers her (now dead) ex-husband, Rico (and the audience with him) immediately think of his own fragile marriage on the brink of a divorce, slowly being erased from his family.
We’re all humans and therefore see the world in our version, our own “first-person POV.” It is vital that you represent that kind of polarizing diversity in your characters since no one is a clone of another person. Note that diversity and polarizing viewpoints do not mean a Manichean black/white division of your world.

Lesson 2: Less is more

If there is one thing Six Feet Under does better than any other show on television (besides Breaking Bad), it is to play up the silence. The “moments in between” are the moments of the show (arguably another big difference between film and TV in general). Continuous action is not needed to hold continuous interest from the audience (you don’t see a car explosion every episode, let alone every act).
It can be good to have an explosive monologue you build up to where a character pours out all of his/her emotions, but how often does that happen in real life? People rarely say more than a few words at a time, and most of life happens without words.
In one of the finest scene from the series finale, Ruth calls Maggie to get closure on her son’s death, asking her if he was happy in his last moments. The crux of the exchange doesn’t come with Maggie’s answer but by Ruth’s gasp for air, more indicative of her relief than anything else. Sure, a lot of it is due to the actor’s performance, but it also means the writer trusted his writing enough to write less. He knew it was the best option instead of doing a tedious/on-the-nose remark.
The old expression still holds true: Silence is golden.

Lesson 3: It’s about what is happening, not why

In other (canned) words: “it’s about the journey.”
Don’t get me wrong, you need to have reasons for putting X character in Z position, and you should be able to track your story’s progress plus ram up the tension at the end of your third act. Yet, a show isn’t a logical math problem with a solution. There should be some kind of reason for your madness, but all of this is for you, the writer, not the viewer. Your audience isn’t made up of robots analyzing and deconstructing beat by beat your show to determine why you put this and that there (at least not subconsciously). A show needs to not only live and breathe but more importantly be emotionally engaging.
So what does that have to do with “what is happening”?
Well, when you’re in the world, you (almost) never ask yourself “why is this happening?!” (unless you’re in Lost or a philosopher).
Your characters can question the “what” and do a spiritual search to get answers to “why” (after all, that’s the central question around life/religion itself), but unless you want to alienate your audience, it is never a good idea to remove any shred of mystery and actually answer the mysterious question.
Why do you think the Six Feet Under series finale is not only considered the pinnacle of the show but one of the best finales ever? The characters’ lives are (literally) concluded, but everything in between is left open-ended. We were only privileged to a slice of their lives, part of their journey. You cared about the characters and you lived with them. The show offered the perfect amount of closure.
Think of it this way: Life doesn’t have a point, it is the point.

Lesson 4: Unknown is better than known

Continuing on the “less is more” philosophy, no one is omniscient, which means you know next to nothing besides your limited point of view (no offense).
This directly translated on screen in the show with Lisa’s terrible, unknown, fate.
For the second half of the third season, Lisa, Nate’s wife, goes missing. Little by little, Nate worries and pretty much goes insane not knowing what happened to his wife. All of this builds up to somewhat of a closure to the arc that won’t happen until a season later. I say “somewhat of a closure” since even then, it isn’t really a closure. Just like in life, you don’t know what really happened to Lisa, simply the consequences (i.e. death).
Dread is a powerful emotion oftentimes ignored. Fear of the unknown is also a great motivator for people to take action (no one wants to see a hero wallow in self-pity).

What to take from the show (Part One)

Before mythology or adventures, a show needs to be about people true to life. No one is one-dimensional and no two people share the same exact limited point of views. Treat your characters as such.

Click here for Part Two