The Worst Possible Plot for your Pilot
Field Notes from a Sitcom Writer #6
8pm – 9.30pm UK Time on Monday 20th July UK on Zoom
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The First Day At Work Problem
I was never taught English grammar. It wasn’t trendy back in the 1980s. I only understand English grammar because I learned Latin. We didn’t even learn grammar in French. For some reason, Mr Hunter started with the perfect tense. He didn’t teach us about auxiliary verbs or past participles. He just gave us words as building blocks in order to make complete sentences. I can still remember saying the sentence “Hier, à neuf heures, j’ai acheté une bouteille de vin rouge.”
That means that yesterday, at nine o’clock in the morning, I bought a bottle of red wine. I was seven. This didn’t strike me as a very useful sentence. Firstly, seven-year-olds don’t like wine, and certainly not red wine. It’s too sour. Moreover, they cannot buy wine. Even in France in the early 1980s.
Moods and Voices
Latin was where I really understood grammar and learnt about tenses, conjugations, declensions, moods and voice. Voice refers to whether a verb is active or passive. When the active voice is used, the subject is doing something. They are taking action. When the passive voice is used, the subject is having something done to them. They are not taking action. They are reacting.
The passive voice is a great way of depersonalising something, or shifting the blame. It’s why politicians never say, “I made a mistake”. They say, “mistakes were made”. This becomes funny once you notice it.
But the passive voice is not funny in sitcoms. Passivity is sitcom kryptonite. Your characters have to be active. Not passive. Your characters must take action, rather than reacting to events.
This is a really common mistake, especially in sitcom pilots. In 2022, I read over three thousand pages of sitcom scripts for a competition in which I was involved (there were 887 scripts in all). Many of these scripts contained the protagonist on their ‘first day at work’. This is a disaster. Why? Because your protagonist is going to be passive.
So let’s say you’re writing a sitcom set in a forensic lab. Perhaps you have a bright-eyed bushy-tailed newly qualified DNA analyst arriving on his first day at work. Let’s call him Olly. He’s nervously standing around outside giving himself a pep talk before stepping into his new job. Or, worse, we start with a ringing alarm on a bedside table, and Olly is floundering around getting ready for his first day, spilling breakfast on his only clean shirt. Ironing a clean one. Then his car won’t start. And he’s late on his first day. Disaster!
Your Sitcom is Going Wrong
You can be lulled into thinking this is strong comedy. After all, comedy requires disaster, panic and chaos. And that’s what we’ve seen so far. Spilt breakfast. Car won’t start. Calamity!
Yes. Kind of. The first book I read on comedy was called Writing Comedy by Ronald Wolfe who wrote The Rag Tradeand On the Buses. He said the key question to ask at every point in your sitcom is this: what goes wrong?
Or perhaps Olly’s car starts, because you’ve realised getting out the RAC is really going to slow things down and make your script too long, but now he’s late. So he drives too fast and jumps a red light. Maybe he gets pulled over and is given a ticket. He arrives at work sweaty and stressed. More calamity! Hilarious! Right?
You might even have managed all this very efficiently, without dialogue. It might be a jump-cut sequence like you get in an Edgar Wright movie. You might be very proud of the fact you’ve obeyed one of those rules that floats around the writing world that doesn’t apply quite as much as you think: “show not tell”.
(Sidenote: In sitcoms, your characters do need to say funny things. People don’t like reading action lines. But they do like reading dialogue. So have them say lots of funny things rather than just do them, especially at this stage of the process when all you have is a script).
So, let’s say it’s page 5 (of 30) and Olly is standing at the door of the forensic lab, ready for his first day. He’s panting. He’s nervous. But then something else goes wrong. He’s got the wrong door. It’s now page 6 before Olly meets the boss, Peter who is terribly nice and understanding. Or maybe he meets Ruth, the de facto office manager, who is worried that she gave Olly the wrong directions, or the wrong start day. There’s an awkward conversation and, say, Peter shows Olly around.
Olly then meets Adrian, the paranoid toxicologist, who is suspicious of a newcomer and asks some odd questions about his background. Adrian is chatting to Nina, the legal liaison lady who is rather smooth but gives nothing away; Leah, the fingerprint expert, gives a big-hearted welcome and says she has brought in a cake to celebrate his first day. Blake, the digital forensics specialist, barely looks up from his nine screens.
Finally, Olly is introduced to his line manager, Sarah, the experienced brainbox who is the senior DNA analyst. She greets Olly, referring to him as the ‘Junior DNA analyst’. This clearly bothers him. He doesn’t like being called ‘Junior’. It’s humiliating. He questions it but Sarah doesn’t see the problem. Peter tries to smooth things over and finally something is happening. We’re finding out what Olly is like. He’s all about status. Now we’re getting somewhere.
How nicknames can help
In the development process, I gave Olly the nickname ‘CV’, because the only things that matter to him are the achievements he can put on his CV. He’s young and ambitious, not because he wants to catch killers with his analysis of DNA. He’s also not trying to advance the field of forensic science for its own sake, even though he’s doing a PhD. He’s doing a PhD and working in forensic science because he wants to be someone.
You didn’t know that, did you? How could you? Olly’s been on his first day at work. He’s been passive. Things have been happening to him. He spilt his breakfast. His car wouldn’t start. He got the wrong building. He was introduced to people. We have no sense of what drives him. He’s not a maniac so he’s being polite to everyone on his first day. In that sense, he’s being forced to act out of character, so we’re getting a false impression of Olly. By page 15, he is well established as the least funny character in the show. And yet, it appears that the whole show is about him because we are seeing the lab through his eyes.
The person reading this script is probably only going to read the first ten pages. By page ten, there’s been no real discernible plot beyond ‘first day at work’. So it’s going to be tossed onto the reject pile. And that’s that.
Pilot Problems
‘The first day at work’ plot always seems like a neat and efficient way of introducing the characters, explaining their roles and the world to the audience, doesn’t it?
But it’s not funny, not least because all of the other characters appear more interesting than the protagonist.
You may have written it like this because you’ve watched a lot of classic movies in which the first act establishes normality. We see the hero in their world before the inciting incident. This doesn’t happen too much any more because of our woeful attention spans, so directors are under pressure to start with action scenes.
But a lot of films, written to be shown in the cinema, have that ten-minute luxury of having characters drive home from work, get home, toss keys in a bowl, see their kids, eat dinner and, in general, not do very much, because we know that something awful is about to happen. The hero is going to go on a journey. And this is Act 1.
You don’t have that luxury in sitcoms, not least because sitcoms are not three act stories. They are one act stories. And that one act is act 2. It’s the middle bit. We’ll get onto that another time.
For now, let’s learn the lessons from dramas, movies, novels and sitcoms. We find out about the hero by seeing them being active. That means going forward and making choices. Quite often their actions are at odds with what they say. Actions speak louder than words. By a man’s works shall ye know him. Olly needs to take action on Page 1.
So we’ll dig into Olly next time.
Oh, and I had a lovely time in Truro, by the way. Packed church. Great fun. Big laughs. All good.
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