The Leverage Binge Watch: A Table of Contents

Cherry Saturday 11-19-2016 Thinking About Story Teams: Part One:...

The Leverage Binge Watch: A Table of Contents

If you want to know how to build a story community that’s also a team, the gold standard is Leverage.

Leverage Watch Logo

This binge watch began in February of 2014, but it was disorganized since I was going week by week. In 2016, after the blog was hacked and I had to go back into every post and reformat, I decided to look at the series as a whole, and at this binge watch as a way to look at the elements of fiction writing through the focus of community. For example, I’ve written a lot about conflict, but how does a community handle internal conflict? How does it work together or fall apart against external conflict? And how are the stakes raised and the conflict complicated because instead of one protagonist in conflict, you have five?

That means I have to go back through all of the posts, tweaking and in some cases flat out rewriting them, while adding new posts to cover the gaps in the general craft content. My plan is to make this series of posts a coherent whole, a textbook on writing community as a companion to a great television series. Every episode is not a winner, but the community never fails each other or its viewers, and in the end, Leverage delivers a great long-form story about the best family of morality-challenged misfits ever put on screen.

That means that Leverage posts are going to pop up randomly during the next year until I’ve made the series of posts a coherent whole. Here’s the TENTATIVE plan of topics:

COMMUNITY:

Creating a Community (1-1)

Internal Conflict Within the Community (1-10)

External Conflict and Its Impact on Community (1-12, 1-13)

Rebooting the Community (2-1)

Community as Competence Porn (2-14, 2-15)

Romance and Community (4-15)

Characterizing Community Through a Common Theme

Evolving Community (5-9, 5-10)

CHARACTER:

Point of View (3-11)

External/Internal Conflict (2-11)

Goals, Motivations, and Stakes (5-4)

Integrating a Single Character Subplot (1-11)

Completing Long Form Character Arc (5-8)

Foils and Doppelgangers (2-7)

Gender and Community

STRUCTURE:

Linear Structure (3-1)

Patterned Structure (3-11)

Turning Points (3-16)

Reversals

Integrating Back Story (3-3)

Endings (4-17, 4-18)

Schmuckbait and Chaos (5-15)

And here’s the TENTATIVE plan of episodes analyzed in the order they should have been aired:

SEASON ONE

1-1 “The Nigerian Job” by John Rogers & Chris Downey: Creating a Community

1-10 “The 12 Step Job” by Amy Berg & Chris Downey: Internal Conflict Within the Community

1-11 “The Juror #6 Job” by Rebecca Kirsch, Integrating a Single Character Subplot

1-12 and 1-13 “The First and Second David Jobs” by Chris Downey & John Rogers: External Conflict and Its Impact on Community

SEASON TWO:

2-1 The Beantown Bailout Job by John Rogers: Rebooting the Community

2-7 “The Two Live Crew Job” by Amy Berg & John Rogers: Foils and Doppelgangers

2-11 “The Bottle Job” by Christine Boylan: External/Internal Conflict

2-14 “The Three Strikes Job” and 2-15 “The Maltese Falcon Job”: Community and Competence Porn

SEASON THREE