Daily Archives: June 19, 2016

How to make a really good sitcom

Posted on by
Reply

(Yes, this is schoolwork. Wonderful, glorious schoolwork. )

The sitcom has been around since the golden era of radio, and yet, as an art form, it’s never gotten much respect. People look down at it as one of the lowest forms of television, despite the fact that over the years, sitcoms have consistently been some of the view audience’s favorite shows, and the shows that touch them the most deeply on a personal level.

And whenever there is a cultural juggernaut like Friends or Cheers, pundits scratch their heads and wonder what makes this particular sitcom different from all the others. In this essay, I will attempt to answer that question with what I believe to be the secrets of making a really good sitcom.

The first and most important ingredient is the characters. People might watch an episode for the premise, but they come back for the characters. The characters need to be founded, understandable stereotypes that either already exist or are easily conveyed with casting, costume, and action. Ideally the viewer should be able to get the basic idea of the character just by looking at them. And while this might seem limiting, there are actually a lot more stereotypes to choose from than most people think. When you bring up sitcom stereotypes, people will think of ones like Short Tempered Boss, Wacky Neighbor, Unrealistically Hot Mom, and so on. But what about the Know It All At Work? Or the Funny (that’s funny, not “funny”) Uncle? Or the Nerdy Kid? How about the Chick Who Has No Idea How Hot She Is? Or the Aging Swingers? Or even that old standby, the Snobby British Couple?

Any writer sufficiently literate in the genre could come up with dozens more. And remember, these are only the foundations of the characters, not their totality. A starting point rather than the finish line. Once you have chosen your stereotype, you can then add the details that make your Sleazy Lawyer different from all the others.

Most importantly, the characters have to be likable. That doesn’t mean they have to be a bunch of cookie-cutter Mouseketeers, though. A fairly wide variety of characters can be likable as long as the writers understand that even the less-nice characters have to operate within certain moral boundaries.

Which brings me to the next key ingredient, which is heart. Think of this as the editorial voice of the show. The show itself must be gentle, caring, and warm. No matter how outrageous or edgy a show is, it has to have a moral center that defines the line between edgy and too far, and that demonstrates that the show cares about the characters as much as it wants the audience to care about them.

Only then will the show engender the kind of trust in the audience that lets people really connect with the show on an emotional level, and make them lifelong fans who watch the show not just to be entertained but to spend time with the characters they love.

Once you have those fundamentals down, then you can worry about making it all funny. People will watch a show with likable, warm characters and mediocre jokes long before they will watch a show with loathsome, cold characters and very funny jokes. Wit is very important, of course. People tune in to sitcoms to laugh, after all.

But if they can’t stand the characters or the show seems callous and cruel, they will not tune in for long.

Once you know you can write funny jokes for warm and likable characters, then you can worry about petty details like the premise. People, mostly Hollywood (or rather, Burbank) types, like to think that premise is the key to a good sitcom because they like to thing that the whole thing can be reduced to formula, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The massively successful sitcoms of the past owed very little of their success to their premises. all had very simple, easy to understand premises that sound ridiculous when stated, like “a suburban family” or “the people who work in this particular office” or “what goes on in this bar”. Nothing fancy, nothing splashy, nothing that makes you sit up and say “By jove, that’s a show I want to see!”.

In fact, being premise-heavy can doom a show. Having your show be about an alien or a kid who’s a robot or a bunch of astronauts severely limits the kinds of stories you can tell while automatically making the situation (and quite likely, the characters) less relatable. That’s a very big barrier to have to overcome in terms of connecting with your audience. You are basically betting that you are so good at the other aspects of sitcom writing that it will overcome that barrier, and that’s just stacking the deck against yourself.

The only important thing about the premise of your sitcom (besides whether it gets the pilot made) is whether it is open-ended or closed. Ideally, it should be open-ended enough to allow for a steady stream of colorful and memorable characters who can deliver the kind of comedy that won’t make sense coming from one of your regular characters. This keeps the show fresh while both allowing the writers the freedom to do nearly any sort of humour they like while also giving you the chance to incorporate very funny character actors and actresses who would not be suited for inclusion as a regular character but who shine like diamonds in a limited role.

If you are lucky, through this process you will develop a small number of recurring characters that can appear once or twice a season and give the fans something to wonder about. Will my favorite recurring character be in this episode?

Therefore, premises like “life in a bar” or “what happens with this squad of detectives” are to be favored over relatively closed ones like “this suburban family”.

Obviously, no essay of this sort could hope to be exhaustive. There are so many other aspects of making a successful sitcom that they could probably fill a whole series of books.

But I think if you have good characters that people like being around, a warm and gentle heart, reasonably funny writing, and a premise that doesn’t get in the way, you will do just fine.

That’s Real Incredible People

Posted on by
Reply

So tonight’s work involves watching and analyzing The Incredibles. I’m halfway through it.

And you know, it’s really good. I had seen it once before, not that long after it came out in 2004, and I remember rating it on the positive side of meh. But the me of twelve years ago must have been looking for something it was never going to be, because the me of now is quite spellbound.

Of course, it helps that it’s on a big TV screen with great color. That makes everything better. But mostly, I am far more hooked in to Bob’s (AKA Mister Incredible’s) journey. Somehow I can really identify with the struggle between what you are, by logic and reason and sensibility, supposed to be doing, and what your unique power is calling you to do. I don’t blame Bob for not being happy living a normal life when he knows that there are people out there suffering and dying that he could have saved if he just had the balls to tell the government to go to hell and go back to being a superhero.

For those who have not seen the movie, the plot goes basically like this : In a world with lots of superheroes and supervillains, a series of very expensive lawsuits against superheroes (but it’s the government who ends up paying for some reason) has caused the government to pass a law banning all superheroing forever.

Which is a bit of a plot hole, because one would think that with the superheroes gone, the supervillains would take over. I mean, supervillains already operate outside of the law and face a lot of prison time if caught doing what they do, so it’s not like they are going to care about yet another law they are breaking. And we all know that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with superpowers is a good guy with superpowers.

Yes, just like they say in the gun control debate. Only in this case, it’s actually true.

So either the world of The Incredibles is a world with superheroes and no supervillains (unlikely) or it really should be a dystopian future where supervillains run rampant and the whole world is a Somalia type anarchy ruled by warlords with superpowers.

But instead, the world is just like ours. Fast forward fifteen years and Bob has a horrible, humiliating job as the person who is supposed to be denying claims to people trying to actually get the money their evil insurance company owes them (those greedy bastards!), but he’s actually too softhearted and tells them how to use legal loopholes to get what they are legally owed. This really pisses off his tiny angry boss, voiced wonderfully by Wallace Shawn.

I will stop myself there before this becomes an entire plot synopsis instead of a blog entry. Suffice it to say he gets drawn back into superhero work, despite his ex-superheroine wife not wanting him to risk their “normal” lives with their two superpowered kids.

And I know what it’s like to know you are exceptional and that making it impossible for you to live a “normal” life. Admittedly, my superpowers are a lot more modest that nigh-invulnerability or having a super-stretchy body like a superhero. They have a lot more to do with being crazy smart and creative to boot.

Nevetheless, I have always identified with people who are too powerful on a personal level for their own good. I have known I was exceptionally bright since way before I ever went to school. I learned how to read when I wasn’t quite three years old, for crying out loud. And that made me stand out from the my fellow students and made it hard for me to relate to them, a problem I still have to this day.

But like I have said many a time before, I could have gone the traditional route of becoming an apple-polishing prig who embraced the usual brand of intellectual elitism, misanthropy, and arrogance that turns so many of the best and the brightest into Ayn Rand libertarians these days.

Thank goodness most of them grow up and get the fuck over it. Oh yeah, it’s your specialness that people hate, not your atrocious personality.

But something in me resisted that, and still does to this day. It just seems like such an ugly and isolating route. And I am, deep down in my soul, a humanist, and you can’t be a humanist and a misanthrope at the same time, no matter how hard people try to do it.

The statements “I hate people” and “I love humanity” are not logically compatible. Besides, isn’t blaming all of humanity for the actions of a few the theoretical maximum of prejudice and bigotry? There is no large subset of humanity than humanity itself. That’s not even a subset any more. That’s the set itself!

And these days, I am actually someplace where I can learn to use my superpowers to make a freaking living. I guess that makes VFS my equivalent of Xavier’s School For Gifted Youths, though I ain’t no youth any more, except in life experience.

Any way you look at it, though, writing for television is not a normal life. So I will have dodged that bullet. I could never have been happy with something that clipped my wings too much anyhow. I have thought how it would be nice to have a job as a cashier at a bookstore or the like. Some small job that is well within my skills at customer service that could get me a minimum wage income and give me something to do with my time.

But now I wonder if maybe I would have gotten restless in a job like that and either ended up self-sabotaging or taking up some very self-destructive habit to deal with how unhappy I was, like drugs or alcohol or high risk sex.

I’m too queer and too big of a duck to be happy in a cage. On land, I am awkward to the point of ridiculousness.

But let me soar…. and I am fucking majestic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.