Writing the Pilot: Creating the Series

by William Rabkin

I recently had the opportunity to speak to an executive at one of the major cable networks, and he said that their approach to hearing pitches had changed radically over the last few years. Back when he started, a writer would come in and essentially pitch the pilot. There would be some discussion about where the series would go in the broadest terms, and of course the obligatory “What’s your season five premiere?” question. But if the conflicts and characters were well established in the pilot pitch, these questions were often more of a formality. Now, however, the network was looking for more – a real sense of what the actual series would look like. A strong, clear vision for the arc of the first season, and well-developed ideas for where subsequent years would go.

But there’s a downside as well. Because a series is not just an ongoing story broken up into chapters. It’s a set of episodes, each of which necessarily bears similarities and differences to every other episode. As we binge watch, it’s so easy to lose track of where one episode begins and another ends; we’re focused pretty exclusively on that most important question of all storytelling – then what happens? I like to think of myself as a fairly sophisticated viewer, but that just means that when I tear through a season of Jessica Jones I’m vaguely aware that I’m not paying attention to episodic structure. The narrative drive is too strong to allow myself to be pulled out to see how it’s achieved.

The collection of everything that defines an episode of a series is the franchise. Here are a few elements it contains: The characters. The setting. The types of stories that are told. The style of dialogue. The way people interact. The storytelling style. The central conflict.

what your franchise really is – the organizing principle behind your series, the thing that defines whether a story belongs in the show or not. And that organizing principle is made up of three elements: Concept. Conflict. Theme. Oh, wait. Did I say three elements? Actually, there’s a fourth. But I want to hold off on that until we look at these first three.

A television series cannot be about a vague concept like “love.” It’s got to be about a specific argument. It’s: How much evil can a good man do in the pursuit of doing good before he actually becomes the evil he’s fighting?

Or sometimes we’ll embed that argument in a statement rather than a question:

It’s about a man whose job it is to sell America on the idea that consumerism leads to happiness while fighting the knowledge...

Again, theme is your pilot’s and your series’ organizing principle; it tells you what fits into your show and what doesn’t. Let’s say you’re working on The Walking Dead, and you’ve come up with an idea for a story – I don’t know, it’s Rick’s birthday, and some of the other survivors decide to throw him a surprise party, but when he overhears their whispered planning discussions, he thinks they’re plotting to kill him. How do you know if this story works for the series or not? In this case, you probably have a pretty good idea when the showrunner throws you out of the writers’ room and tells you never to come back … but as a general principle, you check it against the show’s theme. In this case, the theme constantly asks if survival or civilization defines humanity. Is it enough to do whatever it takes to stay alive, or are we required to help others and build a community? So now we understand – the birthday cake idea doesn’t work. We can move on to something better. Hey, what if Rick has an evil double … When you have your theme, when you know what your series is about, you’re halfway to knowing what an episode looks like.

what we’re looking for here is a specific interpersonal conflict that will allow us to explore the opposition of our theme in story after story. Because even though the themes I listed above are more specific than the one-word examples we started with, they are still abstractions, and TV doesn’t handle abstract concepts too well.

Remember that when J.J. Abrams was offered Lost by an executive at ABC, it was because the network wanted a show about castaways from an airplane crash marooned on a desert island. The theme and the actual conflicts that propelled the episodes came later – but before the writing, I can guarantee that.

series demands a protagonist who is a participant. You need your lead to be in the middle of conflicts, not on the sidelines watching.

A friend of mine who used to work in HR once told me it takes an average of seven repetitions before we actually absorb a new piece of information. So with your permission, I’m going to repeat that last sentence: Every episode feels like it’s moving a story forward, but it’s really just repeating a pattern that was set in the pilot.

Breaking Bad is the story of a man who is desperate to assert his impact on the world. He failed in his first attempt long before the series begins – he split with his college partners, who went on to become billionaires from his initial work. He’s never going to let that happen again. He is the smartest man around, and he’s going to prove it. But Walt is also a newcomer to the world of drug dealing. A newcomer who believes he is smarter than everyone around him. And it’s this belief that drives almost everything that happens in the series. Walt decides that the only way to provide for his family is to manufacture meth – which he can do better than anyone in the business, because he’s the smartest man in town. And he’s right – the meth he and Jesse cook is infinitely purer than anything the market has seen. But now there’s an unexpected problem – Jesse doesn’t know how to sell as much meth as they’re going to produce. Solution – they’ll hook up with a pair of dealers. Except that the dealers, while not as smart as Walt, are more violent and more evil, and they will either kill Walt and Jesse or enslave them. Walt’s solution – to pretend to work for them, and use the meth operation to kill them both. Which has now elevated Walt’s level of evil from meth manufacturer to murderer. So the pattern set in the pilot is this: Walt has a problem. His solution works, but puts him in direct conflict with people more evil than him. Walt comes up wit...

And some of it is a matter of not overwhelming your audience – when they watch your pilot, you want them focused on the core of your franchise. This is what’s going to hook them. If that core is cluttered up with too many distractions, it’s hard to see what the show is going to be about on its basic level, and a confused audience is not going to be rushing back to find out what happens next when they’re not sure how much of what they’ve just seen is actually germane to the series.

Beyond that, though, a series needs room to grow. It’s the rare set of concept, conflict and theme that is so perfectly balanced that it can immediately sustain 100 stories without evolving from the pilot episode. And if there is nothing in episode 35 that wasn’t already fully explored in episode one, why would anyone bother with the 33 in between?

Stephens College Low Residency MFA in Television and Screenwriting,

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