Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet-2nd edition. Ross Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ or most normal. He is free to have as many substance abuse and legal problems as he chooses. In fact, in the world of rock and roll, the more messed up you are, the higher your profile.)

DRAWING ON REAL LIFE

      So where do characters come from? Do they just pop into your imagination randomly? Of course not. Creative inspiration, despite the mystery that often surrounds that concept, is usually quite methodical. “Inspiration” comes because you work at it. William Faulkner once said, “I only write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like it every day at 9 a.m.” A successful and prolific TV writer and producer once described the main job qualification of the writer as “butt in chair.”

      Your characters will come to you because you work at it — conscientiously, purposefully, by design. To begin with, you’ve got your premise. Let’s say it’s Seinfeld, where the premise is that a stand-up comic observes and comments on the small insanities of life, and he lives in the capital of insanity, New York City. That’s the roots of the world that series creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David began with. So their task, then, in developing that premise is to figure out who we surround Jerry with. Rather than randomly spitballing a few zany characters off the top of their heads, Seinfeld and David did something incredibly logical: They were writing about the world they knew, so they chose real-life characters they knew (or fictitious versions of them) to be the supporting players. Believe it or not, Kramer is actually based on a real person that Larry David knew in New York, Kenny Kramer. If you are so inclined, you can visit the real Kramer’s website, www.kennykramer.com, and take his personal tour of New York City. George is based on Larry David himself. Not each and every detail; George isn’t a writer. But emotionally, and in the neurotic way his mind functions (in other words, his essence or character), George is based on Larry David.

      Real life is always the richest resource for fiction. Not a stereotyped version of real life but keenly observed, specific details of real-life people. When Felicia Day developed the character landscape for The Guild, she didn’t have to just imagine a bunch of characters. She could draw on the types of people she knew among her World of Warcraft–playing friends and other online gaming acquaintances.

      Drawing on real life is what allows you to be specific rather than generic. Let’s say you wanted to create a boss character for a workplace series you were creating. TV series have had countless boss characters, and your temptation might be to merely imitate one of those. Bad idea. Your character would come off as exactly what it is: a pale imitation of somebody else’s character. If, instead, you drew on real life — your own boss (you have a day job, surely) — well, then you’ve got a much better chance of creating a real character, an individual that seems like a flesh and blood human being, rather than a cardboard cutout. And even if your own real-life boss doesn’t fit the bill, surely someone you know has a boss he’s described in brutal detail who would fit the bill. For instance, my brother-in-law once had a new boss come in on Day One and tell everyone that his goal was to make sure that by Christmas time, the competition’s children all had one less gift under the tree. Terrible, disgusting, repulsive boss. But great character — and memorable dialogue you’d never come up with on your own in a million years.

GROWING YOUR CHARACTERS

      The characters in your pilot are not intended to be a finished product. They are a work in progress. They must be, or you will have nowhere to go in future episodes and future seasons. For your series to continue to grow and thrive, your characters must do the same. Although much of this will be a voyage of discovery for you, and you will find ways for your characters to grow as you write and shoot more and more episodes and spend time with those characters, you should at least have some plans for how your characters will grow when you conceive your original series and character blueprint.

      Character growth in a television series can be a tricky thing. On one hand, the characters have to be consistent from week to week. Frasier must always be Frasier, from his first appearance in Season Three of Cheers right through to his last appearance in Season Eleven of his own series a full 20 years later. The same holds true for Codex, the Douche sisters, and Fiona Wallace, the inappropriate therapist and lead character in Lisa Kudrow’s wonderful online comedy Web Therapy. But consistent should not be confused with static. Consistent means the character’s core and essence — her attitudes and predominant ways of dealing with the world — remain the same. But the circumstances and challenges of her onscreen life must evolve. Otherwise, the series will become repetitive and stale.

      Think about the characters on the long-running network series Friends. Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey were recognizably the same characters from beginning to end. And yet their circumstances changed and evolved: new jobs, relationships, small increments of personal growth fueled by changes in the external circumstances around these characters.

      That’s how growth happens for series characters. Though they are essentially the same from episode to episode (consistent), they evolve in response to significant changes in their external world. This is why on network TV, as a series gets on in years, so many shows introduce new characters, new romances, or other major changes in the characters’ lives such as getting married or having children. It’s a way to keep the characters — and the series — from stagnating and losing the audience.

      So even though the main focus of your efforts (and this book) should be devoted to the pilot and the initial conceptualization of your series and characters, you should also have, in the back of your mind, at least some initial ideas about how the characters might grow or face new, life-changing challenges. Because web series are still in their infancy, there aren’t as many web series to cite as examples on this front. But take The Guild again, in its sixth season as I write this. Season Two saw the introduction of Wade, Codex’s hot, nongamer neighbor. The introduction of an outsider to the gamer-obsessed world of Codex — especially a hot guy and potential love interest — puts more pressure on her character. In the series pilot, Codex gets dumped by her therapist for failing to acknowledge her video addiction. This new character potentially reawakens that challenge — but in a more compelling way because it comes from a hot guy.

      One good way of thinking ahead about your characters’ potential growth is to think in terms of season-long arcs. Characters A and B will butt heads all season long during Season One, but friction turns to sexual heat and they tumble into bed at the end of the last episode of Season One. Now Season Two can begin with a whole new energy and set of problems for your characters.

      One note of caution on series growth: Don’t be tempted to jump the shark. The phrase “jump the shark” refers to the writers of a show using a preposterous gimmick in order to expand the boundaries of a character or the series. The origin of the phrase dates back to the series Happy Days. The Fonz, their breakout character, had performed minor miracles for five seasons, elbowing the dormant jukebox back to life and so on. But the “miracles” kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. So in attempt to make the Fonz ever more heroic, they did an episode where the Fonz, wearing a swimsuit and his trademark leather jacket as he waterskied, jumped over a confined shark tank to prove his bravery. It was, to say the least, a ridiculous scene. The show had crossed the line from playful fantasy to the utterly absurd and unbelievable. Despite this moment of weakness, the show remained hugely popular and lasted another 6 years. But the phrase “jump the shark” has come to mean the moment when a show becomes so gimmicky that the only humane thing to do is to cancel it and put the audience out of its misery. So yes, by all means, give your characters new challenges. Stretch them, grow them, make them deal with fresh and unexpected new curveballs. But do not jump the shark. Do not reach so far, in your desire to be fresh and new, that you catapult your series right out of its own reality.

       FOR TEACHERS

      As in the previous chapter, on premise, students can benefit from both analytical and creative assignments on СКАЧАТЬ