The last time I spoke with Jon, like every time I speak with him, his experience shone, highlighting real-life screenwriting concerns that I’ve neglected or to which, until now, I’ve remained oblivious. I still tend to think about writing a TV episode like it’s a short film, and, while that mindset helps in thinking about story and character, it’s not quite an appropriate outlook for the television. There are formatting differences in TV, driven by the way it’s packaged and delivered to consumers, that separate it from film. These differences inform the way a writer must structure an episode and, ultimately, conceive a plot. To give one example, the last time I talked to Jon, I read him a beat sheet for the pilot episode I’m writing. “Okay,” he said after I made it through a few beats. “Where do the commercials go? What about the title sequence?”
Though I was used to writing in three acts for features and short films, hour-long TV is different. A teaser and four acts is standard, though five-act and even six-act shows are growing in popularity. (Here acts refer to the spaces between commercials, not designated parts of the story like the traditional three acts.) Keeping, in my case, four-act structure in mind forced me to shuffle my beats a little bit. Jon reminded me that each scene must propel the story into the next, especially the scenes preceding commercials. “You have to give the viewer a reason to come back after the break.” I know, as a TV viewer, I’ve dumped shows that failed to impress me, switching to another channel during commercial. Perhaps I need to tap into that viewing experience to really better understand my writing process.