Crafty TV Writing by Alex Epstein

Author:Alex Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2006-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Take the established personality of the characters and put them into a situation that will make them as uncomfortable as hell. Don’t put Will Truman [of Will & Grace] into a gay lawyers association dinner. Put him into a monster truck rally.

The less cartoonish the characters are, the more you shade into comic drama. Comedy is about the laughs: if a scene doesn’t get laughs, it fails. Drama is about what it’s like to be the characters, and the awkward, embarrassing situations in comic drama are there to give us insight into them. Not all scenes have to be funny, so long as most of them are.

The essence of any comic character is that she is a little ridiculous. We cannot completely sympathize with her. The moment we start really worrying about him, he stops being a fully comic character. That’s why in a sitcom the peripheral characters are more purely comic; the lead characters are less ridiculous and more believable. We need to care about the leads.

As a show stays on the air, we sometimes start caring about the core cast so much that a comedy series starts to morph into a show that is part soap and part comedy. The more we cared about Ross and Rachel in Friends as the seasons progressed, the more the show became part romantic comedy (where we wanted the lovers to end up together) and the less it was a straight-out comedy. The same thing happened to Frasier and to Niles on Frasier. On Seinfeld, though, the writers never went too deep with the characters, and so we could continue to laugh at them throughout the run of the series. The Simpsons never stop being ridiculous, so The Simpsons has managed to stay purely funny for over a decade.

Likewise, comic characters can’t become aware of how ridiculous they are. The moment comic characters get perspective on themselves, the comedy stops. Characters may be painfully aware of their own shortcomings—neurotic characters often cherish their neuroses—but they can’t put it together and laugh or cry at how pathetic they are. Then we’d have to have sympathy for them.

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