Hints, tips and economy
As promised, here are some thoughts culled from the guest sessions at our recent workshop week. The message from three very different writers was essentially the same - pursue emotional truth.
Paul Mendelson, when planning an episode of May to December, always began by asking - what's the emotional issue, rather than - wouldn't it be funny if? They were serious ideas which could have been drama, but were treated in a comic way.
With My Hero, he kept a box of ideas about what could happen to each character in relation to another character.
A pilot, he said, should contain the DNA of a series. Everything has to be in it. In sitcom, there may be a series arc, but characters don't change.
A relationship has ramifications on other people, so a show about a man and a woman could involve her family and his family, her colleagues and his colleagues, her friends and his friends, providing a pool of characters on which to draw. Characters generate stories, and a rich group of characters can sustain many episodes.
Hugo Blick advises: Wherever the pressure is, go elsewhere. So when Men Behaving Badly was all-conquering, Hugo came up with Marion and Geoff, about a man who just wanted slippers and a home to go to, but was locked in his own bubble.
Also, he said,don't second guess what commissioners might want. Write something where you feel 'If I die and haven't expressed that, I'll be really disappointed'. And be sure in it's construction that you're saying something that hasn't been said before. Don't ape what has inspired you.
Most of Susan Nickson's work conforms to a structure that is generally applicable - three stories per episode with three beats (introduction, development and conclusion) in each. She generally creates two big stories and a small one, so in an episode of 2 Pints there might be a sex story, a relationships story, and a silly story.
When you're writing something, if you're not feeling it, then it's not working, she believes. Writers should feel the emotions their characters are going through.
College aside, I've just been spending some time with an MA student working on a dissertation which asks if sitcom is dead. He is going to conclude that it isn't, but there is no doubt that the form is evolving and will have to continue to evolve.
All broadcasters are under financial pressure, and sitcom is not a cheap thing to make. While it's possible to try and shoot more minutes per day of a single camera show, audience sitcom has unvarying requirements - a studio, sets and, of course, an audience, which makes cost savings hard to achieve.
With both audience and single camera comedy, there is a keen demand for more affordable shows, and affordable means fewer characters, more recurring locations in single camera shows(which might be built in a studio rather than shooting on location), and a reliance on regular sets with no 'guest' sets in audience sitcom.
For writers aspiring to write sitcom, thinking economically would seem a sensible way to go. Laurence Marks has often said that the great sitcoms could be played in front of a black curtain, by which he meant that good situation comedy is all about character, and that character is more important than the physical 'sit'.
That was the cheery message that colleagues from CÖ÷²¥´óÐã, the drama department and I relayed to the Sharps writers yesterday, and it's one I'm cheering you up with now.
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