![]() ![]() (It’s a beautiful pilot that I recommend watching even if it’s hard to take many structural lessons from it.)Īmazon’s Transparent is another pilot that doesn’t fit comfortably in the structure of most half-hour dramedies because each season is written as a five-hour movie. ![]() There are definitely some outliers, like FX’s Better Things, which is more of a stream of consciousness “slice of life” pilot, but even that episode has act breaks and still loosely follows the pattern of the other shows I studied, just in a quieter, more subtle way. But if you write about something that matters to you and set it in a world you find interesting, comparing its structure to this template might help you see what your story is missing or why it feels too slow or too rushed. I share this information not to give you a paint-by-numbers template because there are hundreds of TV series out there that take a paint-by-numbers approach to storytelling and most are instantly forgettable. I did a less in-depth version of this analysis for one-hour drama pilots here. I found that all the pilots I studied were structured in a very similar way 1, even across networks. The next step is writing the actual script, or punching up one you’ve already written.Īs promised, I analyzed the structure (length, act breaks, number of characters, and narrative arc) of a group of half-hour dramedy pilots. So now you know what makes a half-hour dramedy what it is and you know how to get to the core of what yours should be about.
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