Stop World Building!
It's fun, but not as helpful to your sitcom as you'd think.
I’ve made another YouTube video, the second in the series of ten:
Is your sitcom just a bunch of funny people?
Bad news. That’s not enough. It’s funny. But it’s a panel game which finishes and everyone goes home.
A sitcom is not just funny people hanging out. And banter.
It’s a pressure cooker in which your characters are trapped.
If your sitcom characters can simply walk away from each other, eventually your audience will too.
You may think this doesn’t apply to you because you’ve built an entire WORLD.
People love talking about “worldbuilding”. Fantasy and sci-fi writers make maps, invent languages and have rules for their systems of magic. Fun times.
Stop it! You’re writing a sitcom!
It might actually be a form of avoidance, because you know something is missing in your show and you don’t know what it is.
It’s “what I call” the Precinct.
I’m going to give you THREE ways of thinking about the “situation” in your sitcom. Except I don’t really like the word ‘situation’. It sounds temporary. The location of a scene. No.
Your sitcom needs a PRECINCT.
Precinct
A precinct is not just a place where stuff happens.
It’s THE place where EVERYTHING happens.
Not because the writers lack imagination. Or even because the budget won’t stretch to more locations. Or that’s all you fit in a studio.
However it’s shot, whatever the budget, the sitcom writer knows that it’s the precinct that creates the pressure. Which creates comedy.
A sitcom precinct is the machine for generating repeated tension.
Like Cheers which ran for 11 seasons, giving us 275 episodes. It was set in a bar. In Boston. That was the precinct. So simple. And this is the first thing: Place.
1. Place
The precinct becomes the show’s home territory — the place we return to again and again. So choose wisely because you could be writing a hundred episodes in this place.
If you simply can’t imagine that, choose somewhere else! Or imagine harder!
But that doesn’t mean the place should be complicated. Keep it simple. Make life easy for yourself and the audience – and try to make the place recognisable: a coffee shop, a fitness centre, a fire station, a hospital, a school.
My BBC3 sitcom, Bluestone 42, was about a bomb disposal team. What do they do? Dispose of bombs in Afghanistan. Easy.
That’s why you’re never going to see a sitcom set on Wall Street or in an investment bank. Nobody has any idea what they’re doing.
Familiar, simple settings normally work best because the audience is not worried about the world. The world is built for you by reality.
And this place is the backdrop - the precinct - for the characters to interact and the pressure to build.
Keep it simple. And inviting. Is it place where we want to be? And return to every week? That means the person at home will pick up the remote and find their way to your place?
The really big sitcoms tend to have places that seem fun, or hospitable in some way. This is a comedy show, remember? We want to have a good time. We want to be at the Cheers bar, or in Central Perk in Manhattan, or the parish of Dibley, or on Craggy Island. That’s really does help.
Ironically, the audience should want to return to the precinct, even if the characters – like Father Ted – desperately want to escape it!
The place does not have to be cosy. What makes a precinct comforting is not comfort.
It’s familiarity.
A prison, war zone or haunted house can still become familiar and strangely comforting as long as we all know the rules:
And that’s the second P:
2. Protocol
The protocol is how the precinct works. Who’s in charge? What are the rules? What can you say and not say? What can you do and not do?
Again, a military show is easy. Who’s in charge? The Captain. Except when the Lieutenant Colonel is in the room. And so on. Hierarchies are part of the protocol.
You don’t need to build a world if your sitcom is set in a hospital which has doctors, nurses, consultants, managers and the janitors. The first episode of Scrubs doesn’t need to explain anything.
And we know what they’re all trying to do: stop people from dying. It also helps if it’s clear what success looks like. In Brooklyn 99, they have to arrest the bad guys.
Family and domestic settings can work too. You just need to be clear on the rules of the family and the household and, again, what success looks like. No-one did that better than Modern Family because they had the secret sauce. It’s our third P. Ready?
3. Pacts
Unwritten agreements between characters which means they cannot walk away from each other.
Family sitcoms rely on these unspoken assumptions and obligations. You have to be there on mother’s day, right? You’re watching Jonny on sports day, right? Or play in the band?
A sitcom precinct if full of these bonds and duties from which the characters cannot walk away. Dad will always be Dad and they just have to deal with it. Every time.
But you can have them in the work place – where they often function like a family with a dad-figure, a maternal character, an older sibling and a younger and a weird uncle.
You even get this in sitcoms in which the characters are literally trapped together because they’re on a spaceship, or locked in a prison. They’re still a family of sorts.
So think about your idea.
Think about your precinct. Ask these kinds of questions:
How are they a family?
What’s stopping your characters from walking away from each other?
Why do they keep coming back for more, thinking this time it will be different?
What are the bonds or obligations holding them characters together?
The Place, the protocol and the pacts are the precinct – which is the sitcom.
That’s where your characters interact and put each other under pressure which builds and escalate in each episodes as your character pursue their passions. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll get into that next time.
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