On Dec 28th, the Chicago Tribune printed a story about people attending a new UCLA class, the purpose of which is to instruct students on how to successfully pitch a TV show. They are taught how to present their idea, to best advantage, in six minutes.
Even as I started reading the article, I thought the basic idea sort of weird. Back in the ’80s, the idea of ‘pitching’ a movie—i.e., an attempt to sell an often big budget movie idea to a studio executive via a short presentation—entered the public lexicon. The pitch was tied into the idea of the ‘high concept’ movie, which was a film whose plotline could be summed up in one sentence: “A covert, elite army unit encounters an alien ‘hunter’ during a jungle mission.”
The thing is, the term most associated with TV shows is the ‘bible,’ not the pitch. A bible is a often lengthy document describing in some detail the program’s premise, the characters, projected story arcs and plot lines for the first set of episodes, etc. The reason is obvious. A movie generally runs maybe an hour and a half to two hours, and is a self-contained unit. It’s story driven, because a film by its basic nature has a beginning, a middle and end.
(I realize I’m talking in broad strokes here, so please don’t bother trying to trip me up with specific counter-examples. Discussion of these general statements is, of course, encouraged.)
A TV show, in contrast, is on-going. By its nature, it’s defined not by a story, but by its characters, setting, etc. It’s not that you can’t sum up a lot of successful shows in a sentence, because you can. “An innocent man, convicted of his wife’s murder, escapes and travels the country seeking to find the real killer, all the while be doggedly pursued by a police detective obsessed with catching him.” On the other hand, lots of unsuccessful shows can also be so summed up. “A professor who can change into a variety of animals uses his powers to fight crime.”
Even so, much more than movies, TV programs are largely successful based the writing, rather than the plot concept. The last several years have seen three of the best shows the medium has ever known. The Shield is a cop show, Battlestar Galatica a sci-fi series, and Deadwood a Western. In none of these three cases is a central plotline the factor that makes the program so distinctive.
What raises each of these programs above nearly all of the literally thousands of similar shows of the past is the writing. Direction and particularly casting are also vital, but now more than ever, good writing attracts good actors and directors. Movies are generally considered the work of their director, while TV shows are increasingly regarded as the work of a writer-creator(s).
There’s also the fact that there are no original stories, ultimately, which again emphasizes the importance of execution. One student’s idea proposed who is about “a ladies’ man who runs a business to help less successful guys win the girls of their dreams.” The student, we’re informed, registered his idea with the Writer’s Guide. Hopefully he saved time by submitting the following: “A TV show that rips off that Will Smith movie Hitch.” (Not that the idea was particularly original there, either.)
An ‘original’ plot is all but impossible anyway. The film Outward Bound, made back in 1930, and adapted from an earlier stage play, concerns a group of people who mysteriously find themselves on a crewless ocean liner, and discover a possibly supernatural solution to their situation. Doesn’t ring any bells? Let’s try combining it with the plot of the 1969 network TV show The New People, which involved an airliner crashing on a remote and mysterious island, forcing the passengers to band together as they attempt to survive. (The latter was a horror program, as the survivors were mostly hippies who seek to forge a new and groovier society.)
My point isn’t to knock the Hitch guy’s derivative idea, though. It’s that the idea is only the very, very beginning of what could be a successful show. Without even addressing how good the writing and cast would be, how about some other questions. What would the show’s tone be like? Dramatic? Comedic? Comedic / Dramatic? Wry, hip comedic? Broadly comedic? Wackily comedic? Is the show’s idea of romance sweet? Ironic? Satirical? What about the characters? Is the ladies’ man a preening egomaniac? A well-meaning dofus? Idealistic? Is he a one-man operation, or does he have an office staff of supporting characters? If the latter, who are these people? What is their function in the show? And so on.
Meanwhile, the article ends by spotlighting the pitch of another student: “Kristiansen took a breath and launched into her idea: a corrupt prosecutor, faced with his own mortality, decides to reopen his past cases and seek justice for those he had wronged.” In other words, in the math of your archetypical movie pitch it’s ‘Cold Case meets Shark meets My Name is Earl.’
Again, though, I’m not really interested so much in the plot concept, as in what sort of show it would be, texture-wise. Here, though, we get an answer, as she continues her pitch by describing the scene where the prosecutor learns he has cancer. This is a direct quote from the article:
He leans up against the wall outside the hospital, unable to walk, near tears. Finally someone stops and asks him if he needs help,” [Kristentian] said. It turns out to be a homeless beggar the attorney had dismissed earlier. Kristiansen’s voice broke and her eyes welled up.
“Sorry,” she said with a little laugh. “It’s such a powerful scene.”
My first thought upon reading this was, needless to say, less than kind-hearted. Then it hit me: Maybe somebody so susceptible to the raw, clunky power of such an outrageously cheesy cliché is exactly the sort who is most likely to be successful in television.
For what it’s worth, this is probably less true now than it would have been ten years ago. But who knows? In a few years Kristiansen might be having the last laugh in her fabulously luxurious Hollywood mansion.
