Sunday, February 06, 2005

[TV] 3 Things to know

At the heart of your show are three things:
The Emotion you want to produce.
Your Central Character.
The Main Relationship.

Know these three things.
It’ll focus the series design.

And be aware - the answers will change.

Look at Friends.
The producers thought Monica was the central character –until they shot the 1st episode. Then it became an ensemble with – at various times Rachel, Chandler and Joey at the heart.

The main relationship? Starts as Ross and Rachel, moves to Joey and Chandler, then to Chandler-Monica before settling back on Ross and Rachel (with Joey as occasional third wheel).


The emotion, however, never changes. Friends support each other through the process of growing up. The show wants to make you feel comfortable.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

mundens here.

Just thought I'd say, the whole "character cannot be defined until it hits play" thing is a common occurrence for me.

The number of times I have come up with a character concept only to have the character play completely differently in it's first episode makes me think that in a TV show it would be absolutely essential tohave actors or readers try to play through the first draft episdode before _anything_ is fixed.

My experience is all in roleplaying (with some stage work), but roleplaying and TV are coming together more and more, RPG's like Unisystem taking over TV Series construction, "Reality" TV Shows like "Living the dream" picking up the concept of actors playing roles without a script.

hix said...

"Roleplaying and TV are coming together more and more, RPG's like Unisystem taking over TV Series construction"
... Yeah, and check out PrimeTime Adventures as well, which I should be running a game of in the next couple of months.

I've had the same experience in role-playing, but when it comes to TV the biggest shift in "I have to completely change my original idea" has to be plotting out a 20 episode romance between the lovable loser and the hard-as-nails newcomer only to find that the way the 2 actors played their characters meant there was absolutely no chemistry between them.

Cue panicked rewrite of the last third of the season.