Merry Christmas from TVWriter™ Central
Merry Christmas from Larry Brody & Team TVWriter™
And from munchman too
Author: LB
A legendary figure in the television writing and production world with a career going back to the late ’60s, Larry Brody has written and produced hundreds of hours of American and worldwide television and is a consultant to production companies and networks in the U.S. and abroad .
Shows written or produced by Brody have won several awards including - yes, it's true - Emmys, Writers Guild Awards, and the Humanitas Award.
Larry Brody on Characterization
The TV Writer on TV Writing
by Larry Brody
When writing for television, the key to creating a successful series is populating it with characters the audience wants to come back and see again and again. This means that the characters – especially the leads – have to be, at the least, interesting, as well as realistic. I say “at the least” because over the years I’ve found that words like “quirky” and “weird” have described some of TV’s most popular heroes.
In the ’60s, for example, we had Ironside, the wheelchair-bound detective, running a team that could help him solve any crime and capture any crook. In the ’70s there was Wonder Woman, a woman who dominated every scene of the show, and pretty much every man in it as well. The ’80s gave us the A Team and the guys on MIAMI VICE. The ’90s brought the buddies of FRIENDS and SEINFELD to the fore. And the 2000s – well, I don’t know where to begin. Every successful show for the last decade and a half has featured characters far different from your standard neighbors next door.
Notice that I haven’t said that your leads need to be likeable. Once upon a time, network executives demanded likability, but characters like ALL IN THE FAMILY’S Archie Bunker (way back in the ’70s) and NYPD BLUE’s Andy Sippowitz (a ’90s icon) cracked the mold. And more recently the casts of THE SOPRANOS, CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, GAME OF THRONES, BREAKING BAD,and all the other cable network anti-heroes have totally shattered that misconception.
Larry Brody on Scene Construction
The TV Writer on TV Writing
by Larry Brody
Scenes are more than signposts on your way to the end of the screenplay road. They’re more than just moments in which story or character points are thrown out at the viewer or reader. A good scene in a screen or teleplay — and by good I mean EFFECTIVE in terms of getting the response you want — is a mini-film in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end.
Scenes need to be structured so that their intensity grows and then climaxes, like microcosms of your script. (And, I think it’s clear, sex too – but we’re not going there right now.)
This doesn’t mean that a scene should go on and on. far from it.
Larry Brody on Making Your Scenes Flow
The TV Writer on TV Writing
by Larry Brody
Over my years running various TV series I’ve been amazed at how many professional writers don’t understand the basics of good storytelling. In a nutshell, the trick to working out your plot is to always remember that the scenes must flow from and to each other in a progression that takes into account three different elements of audience appeal. As in, the scene progression must be logical, surprising, and climactic.
What this means is that everything that happens must grow out of what happened before. On one level, given the personalities of the characters and the situation they are in, each plot point must be inevitable. And on another level, these inevitable twists and turns mut be such that the reader or viewer could never have predicted them.
Sound paradoxical? Crazy? Let’s take a true crime example. The kind of thing that happens all too often in real life.
Larry Brody on Outlining and Writer’s Block
EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to the first in what we hope will be an ongoing weekly series of writing tips and tricks from our Beloved Leader, LB, AKA this guy.
The TV Writer on TV Writing
by Larry Brody
One of the big differences between beginning writers and old pros is that beginning writers are always telling me how much they love sitting down at the keyboard and winging their scripts, while the pros invariably stress the importance of having a good outline before they start writing.