Although this class is over, the blog still gets a good bit of traffic through Google searches. With that in mind, I wanted to mention two new books on TV writing that may be useful for folks who are thinking about questions of television writing that I discussed in this class and on the blog.
Pamela Douglas' "Writing the TV Drama Series" has recently been updated and released in a third edition. I found her chapter "How a Classic TV Script is Crafted" particularly relevant to a series of posts on this blog about character goals in each episode and each beat of the episode. Douglas reprints excerpts of two NYPD Blue scripts and analysizes the script beat by beat to isolate the various dramatic elements in each beat, discusses the interweaving of A, B & C stories, and the intersection of long character arcs with the "case of the week" elements of the series.
William Rabkin's "Writing the Pilot" makes an important set of distinctions between a pilot that sets a story in motion, and a pilot that sets up a series theme and set of conflicts that can generate the large number of stories required by a long-running television series. With a series like Mad Men that does not have "case of the week" element, theme becomes even more important as a "story engine".
Although both of these books are written as screenwriting guides, they are not aimed at novice screenwriters, making them all the more valuable to us in an academic setting as we try to understand how the choices writers make, the techniques that they use, and the system they work in impact the final product that we see on the screen.
