How to Create a TV Show, Part 13: Master the Weave

If you thought movie structure was overly complex, dogmatic and bizarre, then just wait until you get a look at TV.  Let’s gets some vocabulary out of the way: Most shows have some combination of the following:

• A story (10 beats for drama/ 6 beats for comedy)
• B story (6 beats for drama/ 4 beats for comedy)
• C story (4 beats for drama/ 3 beats for comedy)
• Runner (a humorous series of dialogue call-backs that runs throughout the above)
• Cold Open (a beat before the opening credits.  Maybe a stand-alone joke, or a flashforward, or foreshadowing, or the beginning of the problem, or sometimes this is just a full-on 15 minute first act) 
• Tag (a last beat right before, during or after the end credits, sometimes a stand-alone joke, or fallout, or “what we learned”, or foreshadowing a future episode…)

Once you’ve got all these separate storylines sketched in, then the really hard work can begin: the weave.  How do you jump from storyline to storyline?  How do you parcel out scenes so that every Act pushes each storyline forward?  Which storylines provide the “Act Outs” (the last scenes before the commercials, which have shocking reversals or cliffhangers)? How can you arrange the various timelines so that they stretch over the same period of time, allowing you to intercut seamlessly?

This is all much harder than it looks, and you don’t realize that until you see the occasional show where they screw it up.  For instance: I remember a dreadful “Will and Grace” episode where the intercutting made no sense: In the “A” story, Will gradually realized over the course of several weeks that his new boss Gene Wilder was crazy.  This was intercut back-and-forth with the “B” story, in which Grace, Jack and Karen spent one night in a limo parked on the street. So lazy. 

But wait, it gets harder: you also have to allow for these storylines to interact.  In a truly great weave, they eventually unite and climax at the same moment, but at the very least, you have to consider how these sets of events would affect each other. 

I know it’s heretical to say anything critical about “The Wire” but there are several episodes in the third season where the two storylines seem to totally contradict each other.  In one storyline, the new police chief introduces a legalization project that virtually eliminates the city’s violent drug crimes.  In the other storyline, Avon gets out of jail and ignites a violent drug war.  So which is it?  Did one set of writers not know what the other set of writers were doing? 

Yet another consideration when doing your weave: How thematically similar will A, B and C storylines be?  If they have nothing in common, the episode might feel random and meaningless.  If they’re too on-the-nose similar, then viewers will roll their eyes and groan.  In too many “Modern Family” episodes, they ladle on the voice-over at the end to hit us over the head with the thematic similarities. 

If you want to see it all done masterfully, on the other hand, watch the recent “Mad Men” episode which intercut four different storylines over the course of one night that all had the same jumping off point: news reports of Richard Speck’s murder of eight student nurses.  We saw four very different ways that characters can deal with their fears of becoming victims and/or victimizers, effortlessly interwoven so that they all reached devastating conclusions the following morning.   Now that’s great TV.

Well folks, this was going to be the last one, but then I saw a new pilot and I kept shouting at the TV about stuff it was forgetting to do, so we have a few more coming...