The BIG Question Every Sitcom Writer Must Ask
And why My New Sitcom Isn’t Really About a Bakery
I’ve created a sitcom called Early Risers. It’s about a family bakery in a small town somewhere in England.
Except it’s not really about a bakery. How could it be? Who cares about a small family bakery – except the small family that runs it?
When creating sitcoms, we need to be asking the deeper question: what’s it really about?
Right now, I don’t quite know, although I do know what I don’t want it to be about. The bakery is not a giant metaphor for something. This is not a show about the ‘death of the high street’ or societal changes. This is a show about family – and what happens after a key member of that family passes away.
So why not just make this a sitcom about family? Good question.
Firstly, we should be pragmatic. The BBC, who are most likely to broadcast this kind of sitcom, already has two sitcoms that are ‘just families’.
Secondly, it’s often a good idea to have a precinct in which the family can express themselves. We want to see those relationships play out in an interesting arena.
Why a Bakery?
The benefit of a bakery is that it is very easy to understand. We’ve all walked into a high street bakery when we felt like a change from Greggs. (We’re mostly rooting for this family business to succeed, even though we like the fact that Greggs is cheap.)
The job of a baker is not hard to understand. Get up at 4am. Go to work. Bake the goods. Sell the goods. Go home. As we see the stories unfold, we’re not wondering what’s a good or bad outcome. If the meat pies still contain frozen meat, that’s bad. If the croissants are crispy and golden, that’s good. If they sell everything they bake, that’s a good day. If they have lots of suspicious-looking pasties leftover, that’s bad.
Why Bomb Disposal?
This is one of the reasons why Richard Hurst and I chose a Bomb Disposal Squad for our BBC3 sitcom, Bluestone 42. The job of bomb disposal is easy to understand. Someone needs to defuse a bomb. If it detonates, that’s bad. If it doesn’t, that’s good. If they are attacked by the Taliban, that’s bad. If they repel the attack, that’s good.
Also, if you’re British, you’ve been used to the idea of ‘the long walk’ since the 1970s when the situation in Northern Ireland ramped up and bombs began appearing on the mainland. This was reinforced when the show came out by the recent release of the movie The Hurt Locker, a popular and hilariously unrealistic film about bomb disposal.
Back to Baking
Right now, baking is huge and has been since The Great British Bake Off took Britain by storm. Baking isn’t exactly hot, but it’s a thing. And it’s something that I’m interested in, even though I tend to cook rather than bake. When it comes down to it, you do need to be interested in your precinct. You don’t need to be an expert or have personal experience. You don’t need to ‘write what you know’.
But you do need one thing: curiosity. Richard and I knew nothing about bomb disposal when we started out on Bluestone 42, but we did a lot of research and consulted military advisers so it is pretty realistic.
For that reason, I personally wouldn’t want to set a sitcom in a grooming parlour – for pets or people. That’s not a world that interests me, excites me, or makes me want to find out about it. So it’s a bad idea to set a show there.
Two other reasons for this bakery setting:
The first reason is that it’s low stakes. That sounds perverse since we want high stakes, don’t we? We do. But we want the stakes to be emotional, not financial. Bakeries sell low-priced items. Even a bad batch of something isn’t really a disaster. In a high-stakes workplace, like bomb disposal, you can become distracted by making the story all about the events and jeopardy – rather than the characters. A sitcom has to be about the characters, not the precinct: the shops, the bombs, the money, or the butties.
The second reason is that any workplace like a bakery will require a mixture of skills: baking, business, customer relationships, dealing with complaints. Our characters are each going to be good and bad at different things.
Going back to Bluestone 42 one last time, we knew that a bomb squad would need more than an ammunition technician, but also a number 2 (Towerblock), someone on comms (Bird), and protection in the form of regular squaddies (Simon, Mac and Rocket).
In this bakery, one person is the baker of bread, and another, his sister, is the one who makes special occasion cakes. So they have different roles (or rolls… geddit?) within the one place that also speaks to their respective characters. The bread-making brother is down to earth and no-nonsense. The cakemaker is all about the celebration, appearance, drama, and approval. But we’ll get into those characters next time. In the process, we should discover what this sitcom is ‘really about’.
Finally, be aware that Early Risers is not a serious proposition for pitching to producers. I’ve created Early Risers to explore the business of how to write a sitcom – and I’m speaking about it at the Big Comedy Conference on Saturday 6th December.
In the wake of that, there’ll be plenty of posts to come on how I would go about developing this show and then how to go about coming up with plots and writing a pilot script. If that sounds like a good idea, subscribe. It’s free:
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