Television Development by Bob Levy

Author:Bob Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Section 6: Arc of First Season/Arc of Series

The next section of the pitch is the Arc of the First Season and/or the Arc of the Series. An “arc,” as we know, is a story told over multiple episodes or multiple seasons. The Blair-and-Chuck romance was a story arc in Gossip Girl. That arc had many ups and downs and lasted several seasons. There were shorter romantic story arcs in Gossip Girl too, like the romantic arc between Dan Humphrey and his teacher Rachel Carr that lasted three episodes in Season 2. Both of these are romantic story arcs. Walter White’s conflict with Gus Fring was a story arc that lasted two and a half seasons on Breaking Bad.

Television series are designed to last several seasons. Seasons (which are defined by the number of episodes the network chooses to program during a given year) are frequently shaped by season-long story arcs. The primary story arc of Season 1 of Game of Thrones focused on Eddard Stark, the character played by Sean Bean. Eddard Stark’s Season 1 arc followed him as he investigated who killed the previous “hand” of the king of Westeros (as in “right-hand man”) and followed Stark trying to protect his family in a dangerous world.

(Needless to point out, a series like Game of Thrones offers many story arcs that intertwine within episodes and play out concurrently. The Eddard Stark/who-killed-the-hand arc was one of many story arcs of Season 1.)

Writers may have plans for story arcs for several seasons of their series, but the network development executives listening to the pitch want to hear primarily about the arc of the first season of the series (if one exists) and whether or not there is an overall arc to the series as a whole. The overall series arc of Breaking Bad was pitched by creator Vince Gilligan as “Walter White goes from Mr. Chips to Scarface.”3 In other words, Gilligan suggested his series would track the transformation of its lead character from a friendly, kind-hearted teacher to a completely amoral criminal mastermind. That’s how Gilligan pitched the overall arc of the entire Breaking Bad series, and that’s exactly what he spent the next seven seasons of the show dramatizing. He had a clear game plan from the outset of his series, and he ultimately delivered exactly what his pitch promised.

Many shows don’t have season arcs or series arcs at all. Many procedural shows like cop shows or medical shows focus on the “case of the week” rather than stories that continue beyond one episode. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation lasted 14 seasons and offered very few story arcs. Each episode of the show (there were 337 of them) introduced a new case, a new murder mystery that it solved by the end of each episode. The creator of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation didn’t pitch Season 1 arcs or series arcs because they weren’t part of the design of his series.

Today, however, most American shows do arc out stories over the course of multiple episodes.

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