Film Courage: What are the different structures for television?
Pamela Douglas, Author/Professor of Screenwriting: Television usually exists as half hours, hours and limited series. Within that there’s some flexibility. The half hour form which used to be limited to sitcoms and really isn’t anymore, really only runs 20-22 minutes, it’s very short. But how is that divided? Well some people used to say the comedy structure was three beats up, three beats down with a whoops in the middle. I don’t think that holds any more. There are comedies that are in three-act structure standard, three-act structure, they’re comedies that are in four-act structure, there are comedies that are what the heck is going on here? They can all work because they’re propelled by the characters and the kind of material and the kind of humor, if there is humor. Half hours are also not only comedy, more half hours or dramedy now or what you might call as simply half hour dramas and that’s different. If you look at something like Atlanta which is not bound by legacy structure that it has to fit within a half hour plus ads which brings it down to like a 20-minute show, you might have a 40-minute episode and HBO is perfectly happy to have that happen. Coming away from comedy (which is not my specialty) hours depend on where you look. An hour might be more than an hour on HBO or might be a full hour and even a little more on HBO or Netflix or even Amazon. It might be much less than, on legacy television it’s 40-some odd minutes because they’re allowing for the commercials so it varies. Then the limited series are all different, if you look at something like Ava DuVernay’s When You See Us that’s six hours…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – WRITING THE TV DRAMA SERIES: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV
CONNECT WITH PAMELA DOUGLAS
BIO:
Pamela Douglas is an award-winning writer with numerous credits in television drama. The Fourth Edition of her book Writing the TV Drama Series (2018) has been adopted by network mentoring programs, and foreign language editions have been published in Germany, Italy, China, Spain and used around the globe. She is also author of the 2015 book The Future of Television: Your Guide to Creating TV in the New World. She has been honored with the prestigious Humanitas Prize for “Between Mother and Daughter” (CBS), an original drama. Multiple Emmy and Writers Guild nominations and awards from American Women in Radio and Television went to other dramas she wrote. She was a creator of the PBS series Ghostwriter, Story Editor of the Emmy-winning CBS series, Frank’s Place and wrote for A Year in the Life, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. She has also been a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, west. At the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts she is a professor in the screenwriting division where she specializes in television.
Advertisement – contains affiliate links
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
More affiliates:
More affiliates:
Camera we use for interviews – https://buff.ly/3rWqrra
Sound we use for interviews – https://amzn.to/2tbFlM9
Writers, try Final Draft free for 30-days – https://ow.ly/Gz4w30rDSKt
Other books on Amazon that Film Courage recommends – https://buff.ly/3o0oE5o
