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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

3 Screenwriting lessons from Coupling

3 Screenwriting lessons from Coupling

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.

Today, we take a look at one of the greatest British sitcom, Coupling.
You might know the series from its infamously aborted American adaptation, but just like pretty much anything, the original by Steven Moffat is vastly superior to its remake.
Though similar to Friends, the show ends up being quite different from it, both in its length (four seasons of six 30-minute episodes), and subject matter (sex is omnipresent for one).


Lesson 1: Context is key

Coupling is built around the relationship of six friends, but more than that, the peripeteia stem from their adventures outside the group.
Some jokes on the show might seem easy, or downright idiotic, but the truth is there are “no jokes per se” as Steven Moffat puts it. The humour comes from the context.
This ties back to the true essence of sitcom, or rather situation comedy.
Most of the memorable scenes of Coupling are exactly what makes the genre so appealing: comedy through situation, double-entendres, and other qui pro quo (not to be confused with quid pro quo). There are no punchlines or zingers on the show, it’s all about what the audience knows vs. the characters. This allows you, the writer, to play with two key aspects of TV series: character points of view and audience expectations.
Qui pro quo are classic and traditional, but they works extremely well when done right.

Lesson 2: “Traditional” format doesn’t necessarily mean “traditional” content

Bold and ballsy are not incompatible with the classic multi-camera format. Sometimes, you shouldn’t be afraid of avoiding the cookie-cutter and go where no show has gone before.
Multi-camera might seem at first constrictive but it might actually end up being the complete opposite. Moffat understood perfectly that the format was going to have to evolve, and he used this as an advantage.
Coupling thrived with its innovative use of storytelling. Rarely (if ever) has a sitcom so successfully utilized such a wide variety of non-linear techniques.
The main episodes that spring to mind are The Girl with Two Breasts, Split , The End of the Line, and Nine and a Half Minutes.
Don’t get fooled by the titles.
The Girl with Two Breasts played with the qui pro quo to a new extreme by introducing a foreign language. Almost half of the episode was in Hebrew, with most notably a crucial exchange between an Israeli woman and one of the main characters. The tour de force employed in the series was to show the same exact scene once more, only this time with the Israeli woman speaking in English and the other character in gibberish (ergo from her point of view).
Though the idea of showing back-to-back the same scene may seem almost ridiculous, the gutsy (and well executed) move actually paid off and proved extremely popular.
From that moment on, each season had at least one “epic” episode, as Moffat called them.
The second in the list is Split. As the name implies, it used throughout the entire episode a continuous split-screen (to showcase the split between the two main characters).
As always, the episode was filmed in front of a live audience, which means that, thanks to the multi-camera format, they had to shoot the two sides simultaneously on two different sets. Hilarity ensues.
Once again, this is a truly awesome use of what has since become more of a gimmick (I’m looking at you 24).
The End of the Line and Nine and a Half Minutes use the perspectives of different characters by showing different angles and POVs. What is great is how the various scenes intersect with one another, providing each time additional information regarding what came before (or will come after).

Lesson 3: Don’t forget continuity

Sitcom and serialized storytelling might seem antinomic, but in truth, even the most rudimentary comedy will have some form of continuity: relationships.
If anything, television is the land of characters, and especially in sitcoms you need to embrace that.
Somewhat like Arrested Development (though less pronounced), Coupling had numerous references to past episodes and small details. Beyond that though, the relationships between the characters evolved organically and clues regarding what was to come were disseminated throughout the show.
It wasn’t a surprise then when a Season Two episode “flashbacked” all the way to the Pilot to provide additional perspective on a certain relationship.
Don’t be afraid in your script to leave some questions/relationships open, even if it’s a comedy. After all, a pilot needs to set up the world. You don’t necessarily have to enter a super-serialized form of storytelling (especially for a sitcom), but don’t necessarily presume your audience is made out of amnesiacs. Even Friends had arcs.

What to take from the show

The audience has expectations that need to be managed, characters have points of view that must be thought out, and situations have perspectives that can (and should) be manipulated.