Hello and welcome to sitcom geeks, the podcast about all things sitcom, but mostly about creating and writing them. I'm Dave Cohen and I'm James Carey and this is Katie Story. Hello. Katie is our producer and comedy adjudicator.
Now she's going to interrupt us at various points. I think as we discuss specific issues to do with sitcom writing, we've talked about asking what your sitcom's about, what it's really about. We talk about larger-than-life characters, characters who are essentially monsters and odd couples. Today we're going to be talking about writing pilot episodes.
So you've got your characters, your plots, you've got lots of jokes and lots of ideas. How do you decide which pilot episode to write? James, how do you decide? There are lots of schools of thought on this and I think we'll cover them as the podcast unfolds, he says, grandly.
In general, your pilot episode should be showing exactly what your show is and my overall note really, if I can beg the listener to do one thing, is to not bore us with backstory, especially not bore us with characters, we will never see again. So I think in general newbies tend to make the mistake of backstory explaining everything, explaining everything, explaining everything and actually you really don't need anywhere near as much setups you think you do. You don't want to show your character where your characters have been, you want to set up where your characters are trying to go. So I think a forward-looking pilot as much as possible.
I think I don't know if I mentioned this before but I had to read 30 opening five minutes of sitcoms a couple of years ago and talk to all the people who'd written them. It was interesting that lots of the people I spoke to, I had some thoughts about the various characters and the scenes. A lot of people said, well that character's not one of the main characters, that's just a scene that I wrote. A number of times it made me think, well you really have to set up who is your character and what's the story about?
We have to get that from day one, we have to get it from scene one. Just one thought I had before you come and talk about the specific episodes. I just think it's probably worth trying to develop two pilots, not actually write them but actually develop two pilot stories. So the important thing is if you're writing two pilot episodes is you're concentrating on what's happening to your main character and that's going to stop you from thinking too much about but what the audience don't know where he's from or what age he is or why he's here and what he really wants but you will start to get that.
Well in this episode the character wants X, in the next episode the character wants the same X but he wants it in a different way and so you're kind of already moving away aren't you from the backstory. And gradually one of those, one of these stories will get you more excited so that's quite fun as well. You're actually competing with yourself to write the episode that you really want to write. So that's just a little bit up if I said give a head of you're talking about the things that you need in your pilot.
And I think we underestimate how quickly you can set up a character and how in very broad terms you can say exactly who a character is almost immediately. You can tell an awful lot on television at least not because it works so well with radio with what they are wearing. So the first time you see them what are they doing? What are they wearing?
Where are they? And how are they reacting to a situation? So I can't quite remember how Bluestone before two started but at the center of it is somebody who was used to bomb disposal. He is not frightened by it.
So one way of starting could have been him casually lighting up cigarette before doing the long walk down towards bomb and that tells you okay this is a show about bomb disposal. This guy's doing the long walk and he's pretty relaxed about the whole thing. He probably thinks quite a lot of himself and he's immediately set up an awful lot. In no dialogue, purely by vision you set up an awful lot.
The uniform helps as well. Uniform definitely helps but everyone wears a uniform of some sort. So you want to make all of those things work as hard as possible for you so at the moment you see them they're not doing something boring or every day that everyone does it's something that only they would do in only the way that they would do it and therefore you have a quick handle on who this sort of person is. I know you often give the example of the vicar of dibbly don't you?
That's right yeah the vicar doesn't we want her backstory we have no idea. She simply arrives and oh my goodness it's a woman vicar very soon after women because we're allowed by the church of England and very quickly you sort of got the sense of you know of who this sort of character is. You can do an awful lot very very quickly but what given that you obviously do have to get a certain amount of information out certainly in every episode in your first series only because we probably watch more pilots than any other people. By we I mean the subsets of comedy writers and wannabe writers which are several hundred mainly but but in order to get the millions that you want to watch your sitcom you probably won't get them at the start of episode one they'll kind of drift in halfway through episode three won't they?
So they kind of need to drop into any episode don't they and know what's happening. Yeah although sometimes the first episode gets all the presents that people watch it and then they don't come back to episode four or whatever they don't really remember because they weren't really paying that much attention. I have to say I don't see the critical of the work of others there's on TV at the moment but the first scene in car share made me jump up and down because you have a man getting lost with a sat-nav and that told me nothing about the central character. After two minutes of him getting cross with a sat-nav and driving around I knew nothing about the character.
I didn't know that it was obviously a car-based show and blah blah blah but I felt that was a wasted opportunity. So obviously you know Peter Kay is a horribly unsuccessful comedian and would do well to listen to what someone who's never heard of would say but I thought that was an example of like oh that's that's a surprising choice to make because although it is a good way to start with some familiar jokes which is sat-nav's are a nuisance and you can get lost with them. I would like to have seen him establish the character more clearly personally. There are schools of thought on pilots.
How much information? If you have to put any information in the tool that isn't necessarily just the jokes about the character and how much exposition, how can you do what's the best way? Well there are a variety of options and in the old days I would say of BBC comedy you have often a whole episode of set-up and for example the good life Martin Bryce, now that's everything circles. Tom Good from the good life.
Same characters, same characters. Tom Good turns 40 and has a bit of mid-life crisis. One is a piece of just a cog in a wheel. A cog in a machine.
That's right. Yeah he goes to an office and never see again and they decide to turn up their garden pen to become. Then that was a long way of doing it. Another show from the same sort of area is Turnemannaborn where Audrey Fawkes-Hauleton attends her husband's funeral and loses her enormous house.
Now what's good about those sorts of episodes is you do have an exciting event or story to tell in them so she loses her house to this property to this Robert Maxwell type character. I would say that the BBC had the luxury of doing that because in the case of the Manoborn I think they commissioned eight episodes straight off and so there were only three channels at the time and the nation would darn well watch what the BBC said and so they had this quite set-up episode of To the Manoborn which was perfectly watchable I'm sure and did a very good job. I don't think you get to do that anymore and I think you are regularly put under reasonable pressure to get on with it and I think there are good reasons for that because as we've sort of hinted at before establishing characters and settings that you will never see again I think is really wasted time and also those things often mean if you're a studio sitcom you might end up shooting stuff on location which is not ideal you want as much to take place in the studio as possible and also you're creating an episode which is going to be unlike all future episodes and I think you really need to give a strong sense of what's going to happen every week if you are going to give weeks of your life to writing a pilot episode in order to get that show on to the television I would strongly urge you to make it as representative as possible to the sort of thing that's going to happen every week rather than the extraordinary episode where the once in a lifetime thing happens that sets up your show you think you don't think it's a good idea to have a character who's not a recurring answer in a pilot. Yeah I would avoid them at Oracle Cost.
Having said that Mike McShane was in the first few scenes of Bluestone 4-2 and we did that because we knew we were going to shoot him in the head because we wanted to show that as a show it was like Jaws basically film Jaws a child is eaten by a shark at the start and what that tells you is this shark will kill you does not care and you are going to be frightened of this shark so what we were trying to do in Bluestone is this is a war zone you can take your helmet off and act in a heuristic way you will die and so we wanted to show that we weren't you know this isn't an enough hot mum this isn't Bill Co this is war this is mash this is mash we're trying to set ourselves in that territory so if you do have a character you're never going to see again make them work extremely hard for you and do something to help the show it was a memorable moment I certainly say that it was not what I was expecting so we had a lot of fun with that and I think it worked for us in that situation sometimes you do have a there are some sitcoms over there I mean the story it can be this it's kind of the same story isn't it every week so I mean there's one that springs to mind one that springs to mind is my name is Earl yes which I think is a great what they did in their first episode is they did a quick set up and then they did a mini episode so I think that is sort of the only option if you want to show backstory is what they do brilliantly is they have early key small-time thief wins a lottery ticket and is hit by a car four minutes in and then he watches the ticket blow away and he goes to hospital here's about karma that's six minutes in from a TV interview sort of thing and then he resolves to make up for all the bad things he's done on the rights list and so about seven and a half minutes in his quest is stated that karma stuff is clearly going to kill me unless I make up for everything on that list and so 30 seconds later he picks one of four lives number 64 picks on Kenny James and we've now got 26 minutes for a little mini episode which is a 60 minute version of what would regularly be a 22 minutes so I think that's a really smart way of if you really have to show set up you just compressed it into seven minutes and bang you're off to the right side I do remember that I really remember that opening and in fact I think about hitchhikers going to the galaxy when I first heard that on the radio and just that amazing idea that well we're we're just getting really your planet because you know the plans have been up for years you know what's the problem with this you know you're gonna complain maybe 65 millennia you know whatever it was yeah yeah just not everybody felt like what's captured by that was absolutely brilliant it's almost for me the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy almost can never ever quite capture the total beauty of that moment of describing how how irrelevant what tiny pathetic creatures we are in this entire cosmos how totally irrelevably are we're our planet is going to be blown away and then it is I mean that's going to be one of the great sort of how to start your your sitcom blow up the earth I mean that's it's got your card top that really isn't it and then every other version of course it's so there's the movie and of course and that's like the most fantastic opening 10 minutes of the movie and there's the sitcom version and it's the most fantastic opening five minutes of a sitcom and the books as well of course and so it is definitely when you've got a way of setting up your story like that well you've got to use it my name as well is does this that very yeah especially if you want a really high concept like that you that's one way of doing it another option I would say for a pilot is the newcomer very common way which we did with bluestone actually because we although we shot one newcomer in the head and the other newcomer was Mary the new parry who's a little bit of a game changer for Nick and so there's an element of he can go around and say what everyone's names are and in one sense Mary in particular is the most normal of everybody on that base because she's not been completely inured to the brutalities of being a soldier in the way they talk to each other and swear each other up and all that kind of stuff so there's a good uh first step to the porridge is that god per is new to prison whereas Fletcher's been moved to slave prison and is able to sort of teach him through talking through um ever creasing circles Martin Brides walks in and Paul is in the kitchen Paul is the newcomer and you know nothing will ever be the same again in Miranda Gary has returned you know that's that's kind of the big the big news at the start of that so one says he's not a newcomer but his arrival changes things and I can't remember whether she's just opened her shop or not but we didn't make a particularly big deal of the shop can you remember Katie? Yeah it was relatively recent and I think her mother was still dealing with the fact that her daughter ran an inconsequential gift shop um of no great uh significant right so um the newcomer is and then so you can combine you know the quick setup with the newcomer so I would say yes minister possibly does that where he's just arrived and they sort of reboot it almost with yes Prime Minister yeah they talk him through what the Prime Minister do but I think they've already got all the characters so yeah yeah yeah um the character has ever is the stronger the characters are then the easier to make the business. Absolutely the less the less introduction they need because they they do everything um straight away there are two other options really just to work through before we reflect on this blizzard of lists the opening titles can be made to work really hard on you and explain everything that the audience needs to know so in veep I mean you probably know what a veep is anyway vice president but in 15 seconds everything you need to know you've got some graph going up yeah oh she's gonna be president graph going down oh no she's gonna be vice president it's that kind of it's sort of it's very British in many ways it's not surprising that there's a British team behind that show because it is a comedy of disappointment and then you know we sort of all know that the veep is a sort of a non-job and you don't really need any more setup than that because the White House is already in our heads everything's already there yeah the other way you can do one of the great opening sequences of all time has to be the Fresh Prince of Bel Air which which for me was inspired by I remember the Beverly Hillbillies when I looked and that that that did the same thing it had the sort of the song about the name J Paul Mow I mean you know I can remember all that is black balls yes they used to show that on channel 4 when I was growing up either black and white original versions and I you know that that that was a great such a great intro to a show it just did um it did all the work and I can't remember I really cannot remember anything about the show I do know that I used to watch it a lot but all I can remember is the opening titles yeah and the same with the Fresh Prince of Bel Air you know it's just exactly the same you're going to stay with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air yeah you too can remember and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air today it's with my friend Fred Alpier and it always goes through but also unbreakable can you show it that I've been titles using it yeah not yet no no it just tells the whole story in um it's into the neighbor who saw these women coming out of his cult's basement and it turned it's like a viral you know the YouTube yeah so far the news although you know the pilot episode which I watched thanks to having Netflix now that was that that was a good 10-15 minutes of that story in the pilot wasn't it it's quite a long uh how they kind of get to where they yeah but then I do think in the subsequent episodes you're there by the time by the time you have the first day of the titles that I was on and bang into it and you sort of get that with the first episode is where he tries to leave and then he discovers they all need him to keep you know subsequent episodes this is a story about a family who lost everything and the sound he needs to keep them together the soap was another good one remember the soap for the americans I remember the theme team I guess I remember the theme to do every TV break my bad watch so that's really and that's kind of uh and it was funny because the more it developed the more the joke was yes and this is and Bla Bla said uh who's who's married to him who's aren't going to fail with her or he's doing that and they're all and they're all and there's a kind of photo show family they're all done for family shop and they all stop beating each other up during the shot so that that's that that does that as well as it was quite it wasn't quite thank you setting up a show but aloe hello went through a phase it might have been when they did 24 in a row 24 episodes in 24 weeks where Renee Arthwa I would sit and talk to camera about what had happened the week before because it was sort of this ongoing saga preposterous kind of proportions um so uh and all you know I think we underestimate how hard a theme tune and opening title sequence could work for you and then the the ball's the easiest thing of all really is to have your entire show in the title of the show and I mean my family will do that's all right that sort of tells you that there isn't that much of a concept there really um my parents aliens which was a kid's show but that again tells you what you need to know I mean even stuff like you know dinner ladies it's about dinner ladies there's not that much else to know I mean keeping up appearances things like that which just sort of give you a sense of what they're my wife next door that's a really a table 70s right my mother the car is always referring by american writers the worst sitcom of all time um you wear this one Katie no it is I think it's often held up as the worst sitcom ever I think it ran for about four five episodes before it was cancelled it was a story about someone about about a guy whose mother died and her and her spirit entered into a car hit their car which then talked to him through the car yes it's great yeah they broadcast it they made they wrote it they made it they broadcast it um there's a sort of a reference to it in an episode of the Simpsons where grandpa Simpson dies in some you know imagined events he doesn't obviously die and then his spirit entered a grandfather clock or something like that so it's sort of constantly kicked in popular culture in america for being the worst sitcom of all time well makes me think now you're mentioning titles and as the subject matter so haunt me yes a man is haunted by a ghost who's jewish yes so haunted yeah exactly that was uh oh remember that shaving I quite enjoyed it was that that wasn't that that wasn't that that wasn't that that wasn't that that's not a poor Mendelssohn show I think yeah um yeah it was a pretty high concept in zeros wasn't it that's great so it's great idea just the idea it's a sort of thing like my my family my personal my personal your actual family actual family so so um so in one sense it's worth and I think there are for therefore what we're trying to show is there are so many ways to show what your show is without having to tell the audience on the nose who everyone is where they came from where they went to school what their favorite color is all that kind of stuff doesn't matter you want to show where they're going and any high concept that you need to explain like with Kimmy Schmidt you can you can do an episode on it but actually you can wrap it up fairly quickly it was a one-off but I think they wanted to be serious was Eddie Azar's sitcom called Cows which had a really funny opening titles about how the channel got the vote because I think it was the funniest thing in the show they had the sort of grainy footage that was like the suffragette movement or something and how the cows managed to you know improve their conditions by voting and they you know cows could talk on that kind of stuff but it was very sure actually and it got the show up and running very quickly um but um you sort of get the idea very quickly from the title from how the show looks so the game kind of a backstory is is almost always a horrible mistake it's worth it's worth watching a few pilots isn't it there are some pilots and particularly some of the classic American pilots are they just they really are with hindsight you can watch these shows and just go wow they've got everything that came in the next hundred two hundred and fifty episodes of that sitcom is in that pilot and the one I mean I think of Frazier as the sort of classic one cheers you you poor maker archer and always makes people watch the opening episode of cheers which you will probably find on youtube somewhere and that is a fantastic set of episodes it does have elements of back story to it but the whole thing is going forward you you find out that Sam alone you used to be is a ladies man used to be a baseball pitcher for a team and now he runs a bar and you know there's diana all that kind of stuff I think it is and it's also does it in two scenes the whole episode is only two three four scenes quite a lot of their episodes are only really see if you're really being pussing about it I watched a whole lot of episodes last year and I'm thinking oh hang on what time of day is this now because you've just given the impression that there was afternoon and as some people come back from the opera yeah what the opera in the afternoon is that you know I mean is that kind of thing that I think it might as well as the same as the matinee so yeah but then yeah because Frazier is great because that's obviously he's a character that was known anyway so it starts with a bit of an advantage but even then the way that the character is set up is in a completely new setting and it's beautifully done the opening scene is where he's his radio microphone yes I'm listening and somebody someone phones him and talks about the problem of dealing with changes and then he delivers this two minute monologue about how his whole life has changed and he talks about he basically sets up the whole story gets all the back the story out the way all the exposition and it's and it's a little bit of cables in there quite moving and it's quite sad and quite funny some good jokes and then it finishes and at the end of it he says to the guy one of the guys called John where are you and cuts a ros and the booth and she says we cut to the adverts 30 seconds ago yeah otherwise it's such a set up and sets up but the punch line to that scene is he's doing this and he's crappet it yeah that's kind of so much of what you need to know about Frasier and yeah he's also so self-obsessed he wasn't listening and they cut to commercials and he didn't really you know he didn't really there are so that joke works on so many levels in so many ways that really does set up the show so beautifully the other show talked to Andrew Ellard a great knowledgeable man about Zincom and how they work he will actually work about the first seven lines of friends or the first scene of friends it essentially contains the entire series and all future series in those first few lines where every single character their first line is absolutely bang on starts with Chandler doesn't it telling a explaining a dream I think I can't remember I don't know it's a telephone rings but it's his penis is his telephone and it rings at his mother yeah he picks up his penis at his mother talking and and then he doesn't obvious sort of funny joke away from that and then we meet Joey and we meet all the characters in Central Perk yeah and they're all talking about their lines we meet five of the characters and then get to every every line is a joke about their characters and the characters that we know about them Phoebe is mad Joey is cool ladies man ladies man Ross is he's a geek morbid he told his yeah and and then three minutes and Rachel walks in in full or bridal gear and you know just that's a great that's a fantastic visual gag yeah we'll talk about visual games at some point I'm sure and you know that that's set it all up here she is Rachel she's come to New York and that's so much of what it's about and it's all there they're saying the opening two three minutes yeah and the and therefore I think what we're sort of saying is to round things off a little bit is that you every single line has to count every single moment has to be showing who the characters are and what the show is and so therefore you need and will come on to this a future episode you need tons and tons and tons of storyline ideas and set up ideas and ideas that show what your show is going to be and so Richard and I have been writing a pilot script show and we just churn through dozens and dozens and dozens of ideas many of which we thought oh that would make a really good episode but it's not a first episode oh that would be really good but there's too much actually takes place outside of the main sets that would be a really good episode there's an outside in it we don't want that would be good that would be good but it just feels a bit me what's a bit stronger for a first episode that really you know we went through must have been 70 80 ideas long and short ideas and eventually we hit on stuff which we thought yeah that is exactly showing what all of the main relationships are within the show and in a way that makes it like a ball relatable and all that kind of business and and the only way to be in that position is just to have tons and tons and tons of ideas which relates your characters and we'll talk about that actually we'll make that one of our next podcast will be how do you generate ideas? Definitely an episode yeah so just just in conclusion then pilots make sure you've got lots and lots of ideas as you say try and keep that backstory to an absolute minimum if you've got to use the backstory find a funny clever way of doing it so it's fast as possible so that you can use your backstory to launch your characters forward as far and as fast as possible and watch watch pilot episodes of shows that you like cheers friends, friends, friends, their, porridge, ever-increasing circles, vape, whatever and watch watch and learn yeah that's a great idea okay well I think that covers doing your pilot episodes for now so any comments or questions please get in touch with us you can email us and the email address is sitcomgeeks at gmail.com that's a sitcomgeeks at gmail.com and for more sitcom thoughts from us you can follow the original sitcomgeek himself which is James he's got an excellent blog called sitcomgeek.com which is Google sitcomgeek yeah okay and James is gathering a lot of these thoughts into an excellent simply published book what's the book called?
I can't remember isn't it how to write that sitcom? I'm not writing that sitcom. I'm not writing that sitcom. So remember when the Hollywood writer purchased how to write that sitcom by James Kerry you heard about it first here on sitcomgeeks the worst movie in the world based on how to write a sitcom book you didn't like my mother the car you all love writing that sitcom starring Tom Hanks yes the narrator yeah so James you're on Twitter aren't you at sitcomgeek?
That's coming at co-in Dave that's me and you can read my blog as well Dave Kerry dot org or get my book how to be average successful at comedy which I have personally read and is excellent. The show was produced by Katie Katie Story thank you very much for that thank you to Rushforth Media for hosting the recording of this podcast until next time goodbye