I wrote TV shows with my screenwriting group for fifteen years. We also planned and plotted a few movie scripts over the years but never actually wrote them. For two reasons: First of all, we almost always had a highly demanding TV project that paid the bills. Writing a TV show was financially more rewarding since it meant regular income (as long as the show didn’t get canceled).
Secondly, writing a movie script always felt like a much more significant undertaking. Yes, a movie involves much less writing compared to season-long TV series, especially in Turkey, where TV episodes are longer than feature films. Still, a movie is supposed to be more dense and intense. It should ask big questions and be worth everyone’s time. People should leave the movie theatre high on emotions. If they shrug and say, “so what,” it’s a disaster. Our TV shows, on the other hand, were expected to be light and entertaining. Even if we had an intense central conflict, in the end, we were writing our stories for people who wanted to relax after a hard day at work.
Now, I don’t believe that TV is inferior to movies. Today's TV shows provide us with some of the best examples of storytelling. Yet, the level of guilty pleasure is much higher with TV shows. It is much easier to watch a few episodes of a TV show than a movie. Why is this?
Less investment, more reward
Each new story is a gamble of our (the audience’s) time and attention. When we watch a movie, we spend the first half over the setup and world-building for the story. Of course, the beginning is still entertaining, yet it requires more work from us. We have to make many decisions: Will we be able to suspend our disbelief in your story’s world? Will we like your characters and enjoy spending time with them? Will we root for them and care about their goals? Will we get curious about the ending?
For a movie, all this investment goes into one film. We decide at the end of the film if our investment has been worth it. And that’s it.
For TV shows, the investment/reward ratio is much lower. When we watch the first episode, we invest and decide if the show was worth our time. And if we determine that we enjoyed your show, the later episodes will be a hundred percent reward. We already know the characters and like them; we know and care about their goal, we are familiar with the world, and now we can purely enjoy the story.
TV characters don’t change
I recently read Eric Bork’s blog post “TV characters don’t change.” At first, it didn’t sit right with me since I wholeheartedly believe that story means change.
Every book I read about storytelling says that characters must go through some kind of transformation. My own experience in TV writing is about creating characters with lots of room to grow and change. If our characters didn’t need changing, how could we even generate conflict and drama?
However, when I finished reading the article, it made sense. Bork doesn’t say TV characters don’t need changing; he says they don't change. Because
THE SERIES IS BUILT ON A SET OF PROBLEMS AND CONFLICTS THAT CAN NEVER REALLY END, OR THE SERIES WOULD END.
When I thought that way, a few things instantly made sense.
Watching a movie is a more profound experience because we witness a complete character arc. The character goes through so much in the duration of one movie that we end up exhausted. But for a TV episode, we don’t want a character to change because we need that juicy conflict as long as the show goes on (and the show must go on)!
We planned character transformations that never happened!
I remember designing a few intense, tear-jerker scenes that demonstrate how our characters would change after trials and tribulations for some of our projects. They would finally understand how wrong and unfair they have been. They would change their ways, learn and grow before our eyes.
Those scenes were always meant for “one of the later episodes,” and for some reason, we had to move those cards further and further away until we realized we had to throw them out altogether.
Why? Because we needed that character’s flaw!
I explained in this article why we need a central character flaw because that’s what generates the story.
The conflicts of the story must come from the flaw of the character, not external circumstances. Protagonists must make mistakes. Otherwise, they will be victims, not real protagonists who drive the stories.
Characters do need the change, but they don’t change
Change is hard; we all know that. We all want to change, but it takes a lot of effort to do that. TV characters have the same problem.
Better Call Saul is about how the small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill turns into drug cartel attorney Saul Goodman we know from Breaking Bad. Warning: there are a few spoilers about the show ahead.
The premise sounds like it is a story of his transformation, right? Wrong, because this story is not really about how he changes. On the contrary, it’s about how he can’t change. Jimmy used to be a low-life con-man named “Slippin’ Jimmy” before his brother Chuck gave him a job in the mailroom of his law company.
Now he has a law degree; he doesn’t want to be Slipping Jimmy anymore; he wants to be a respectable lawyer with dignity. But he can’t help it. He can’t be an honest, ethical lawyer, no matter how hard he tries.
Is he an evil man? On the contrary, we see how Jimmy values human life and has a sense of justice more than anyone from the beginning. He is the opposite of his brother Chuck who values law but not necessarily fairness.
We witness that if Jimmy just sat tight, stopped lying and taking shortcuts, life would be much easier for him; he would keep his high-paying job, be respected and loved by his clients, etc. But this doesn’t work for him. He has to get “justice” in his own way. And he will never be an honest man. Not in a million years, as we saw him in Breaking Bad.
How about Breaking Bad? Isn’t it about “breaking bad”?
According to Eric Bork:
…it’s true that Walter White changes somewhat in that he amasses more power and becomes more evil over the course of the series. Which was always Vince Gilligan’s plan. But here’s what doesn’t change, from episode to episode: he’s always cooking meth, pursuing a criminal lifestyle, and having to dodge lethal competitors as well as law enforcement. He doesn’t change his mind about that. The nature of his problems don’t really change, nor does his response to them. He’s just going to fight his way through this, episode after episode. The slow arc toward evil doesn’t really change any of that. The mechanisms that drive the show stay the same.
Final thoughts
Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are tragedies because the main characters have it worse and worse, and there is no happy ending for them.
In her book Nutshell Technique, Jill Chamberlain says that a tragedy is a story with a sad ending in Aristotelian terms. In tragedies, the main characters lose because of their inability to change and get over their central flaw.
When we say “TV characters never change,” it sounds like all TV shows are tragedies! Could that be one reason we end up hating TV show endings?
I originally published this article on The Writing Cooperative, Medium.com in 2021.