Top Tips for Emerging TV Writers: Dissecting Pilots for Success (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Probably the top three things an emerging television writer should do if they want to write a pilot and they want it to be good, get your hands on some pilot scripts. Find the shows that you loved their pilot and you thought, man, if only I could have written something like this. Get your hands on those pilot scripts. They're easy to find now. Read them and then watch the pilots again and then read the scripts again and then really just start to dissect the pilots. What was the structure? How did they work? How many acts did they use? What were the page counts of each act? Why? If it's a comedy, how many jokes did they have? You know, every last aspect of those things is important. How did they introduce the characters? So, dissect the scripts, dissect the pilots, one. Two, then go watch some pilots that really didn't work. That you thought, I mean, for you, they didn't work. You thought they were terrible. If you go watch some pilots that you really, really hated, you will see very different things and you will learn a bunch of stuff about what does not work. I think it's absolutely essential, actually, to pick a show, a show that you love, a show that you think is good, and dissect the crap out of it, frankly. Take a show you love. For me, I did The West Wing. I am obsessed with Aaron Sorkin. I think Aaron Sorkin's a genius, truly. And I took The West Wing from the pilot through, I think, season three, and I dissected the heck out of that show for myself to really understand, A, what good storytelling was, B, what good structure was, and just understanding how he used language and how he used structure and how he built characters. It was really an education for me, to the point where I could pretty much do an entire episode. I could say all the words of an entire episode because I liked it so much. And while I'm bummed now because I can't watch that show and just watch it anymore, I can say that it was an excellent way for me to learn so much about television at a time in which I was trying to figure it out for myself. Probably one of the things I learned by watching The West Wing was the need to be original in my use of dialogue, the need to not copy anybody, the need to not be simple in my use of dialogue. And I also got the freedom to let my characters be intelligent, which I really thought was great. It was one of those things where you watch something and you think, like, oh, in everything else I've ever seen, there seems to be a slight dumbing down. And Aaron felt like he was making everyone a little bit smarter than the audience. And that was a very freeing thing to see because letting your characters be the smartest people in the room is a relief in a lot of ways. There are things that you can learn just by watching that are not about copying how something's done, but just by understanding how something's done or discovering that sometimes it's really effective to have an episode where things are really quiet. You know, it's just about watching and seeing what makes something good and then understanding that those, maybe they're breaking a rule or maybe those are some rules to think about, and then understanding what makes something not good. It's helpful. © transcript Emily Beynon