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Great Episode Ideas

What makes a good episode?

A good episode delivers the goods on the show’s template. It provides all the elements in the show’s template (hook, attractive fantasy, core characters, etc.) that people are tuning in for. If it’s an episode of a series where there is always a moral issue at stake, there’s a moral issue at stake. If it’s for a show where there’s supposed to be a karate fight, there’s a karate fight.

A good episode has an emotional heart. We have to care about what’s going to happen, and the story has to move us.

Unless the show is entirely episodic, a good episode also moves the characters’ individual stories forward and develops the season story lines. (A great spec script, obviously, won’t do this, because it exists outside the season time line, but then, a great spec is not entirely the same as a great episode.)

A great episode gives us fresh insight into the characters and, maybe, ourselves. A great episode also leaves the viewer wanting to watch the next episode as soon as possible.

The Springboard

In the beginning is the springboard: simply a promising story in a nutshell.

Aunt Bee gets a chance to do a nightly cooking show, but she’s guilty that there’s no one to cook for Andy and Opie. So they concoct an imaginary housekeeper and cook for themselves. Too bad they can’t cook! (The Andy Griffith Show, “The Mayberry Chef”)

When Krusty the Clown is busted for robbing the Kwik-E-Mart, Bart has to prove that Krusty was framed by Sideshow Bob. (The Simpsons, “Krusty Gets Busted”)

Scooby Doo and his friends investigate a dude ranch haunted by a 150-year-old ghost. They discover the ghost is really the dude ranch’s assistant, who’s trying to scare away guests so he can buy the ranch cheap. (Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, “Mine Your Own Business”)

Bobby steals his mother’s stash and gets caught with it, but Jack takes the heat. (Jack and Bobby, “Better Days”)

When the new city commissioner tries to run a freeway through the Addams Family’s house, Gomez has to find a way to stop it. (The Addams Family, “Progress and the Addams Family”)

Mulder and Scully investigate a series of “locked room” killings. They discover the killer is a mutant who can squeeze through impossibly tight spots. (The X-Files, “Squeeze”)

When Dawson and Joey finally spend a night together, everything’s perfect…until Dawson gets a call from an old girlfriend. (Dawson’s Creek, “The Song Remains the Same”)

When Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunny-dale, a vengeance demon makes her wish come true, with nightmarish consequences (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “The Wish”)

A springboard, by the way, is not exactly the same thing as the episode’s “logline,” the one-liner that appears in the channel listings in the paper or in TV Guide, though they can look similar. A logline is all sizzle: “When Caleb makes a shocking announcement, the revelation rocks the Cohen family, right in the middle of their Chrismukkah celebration.” The springboard gives away the mystery: “When Ryan invites Lindsay over to Chrismukkah, Sandy convinces Caleb to reveal that Lindsay’s his daughter—how will the Cohen family take the news?” Likewise, the springboards give away the mutant in The X-Files, the fake ghost, and Sideshow Bob’s guilt.

A good story, in TV or any other medium, has these basic elements:

1. A compelling central character
2. with a goal, a problem, or an opportunity
3. who faces obstacles and/or an antagonist.
4. If he succeeds, he and/or the world wins something he didn’t have before (stakes), and/or
5. if he fails, he and/or the world is worse off than if he hadn’t tried (jeopardy).

A springboard should contain these elements, either implicitly or explicitly.

Your central character will be one of the show’s core cast. All of them should be compelling.

The goal, problem, or opportunity may be implicit. On NYPD Blue, Andy Sipowicz’s lifelong goal is to be a good cop and protect the innocent from evil by putting scum behind bars. Each crime he investigates gives him an opportunity to do that. On Dawson’s Creek, Dawson’s goal is to find romantic happiness; spending the night with Joey has given him an opportunity to do it. Or, it may be explicit. On Buffy, Cordelia’s wish turns Sunnydale into a realm of nightmare, creating a problem for everyone.

In an externally driven show, there’s usually an antagonist—the serial killer in “Squeeze,” the dude ranch’s assistant in “Mine Your Own Business.” In an internally driven show, the core cast themselves are often each other’s antagonists. When Dawson gets a call from an old girlfriend, Joey becomes his antagonist (sometimes called an “intimate opponent,” if you want to get fancy about it) because she doesn’t trust him; or, from Joey’s point of view, Dawson’s old girlfriend becomes an obstacle to her relationship with Dawson. Aunt Bee’s guilt over abandoning the family kitchen is an obstacle to keeping her cooking show. In The Amazing Race, the other competitors are antagonists; time, distance, and difficulty are obstacles.

Your protagonist, or his world, should have something to gain (the stakes). Aunt Bee’s having a cooking show is at stake in “The Mayberry Chef.” Dawson’s romantic relationship with Joey is at stake in “The Song Remains the Same.” On NYPD Blue, the stakes are subtler: Andy’s reputation as a good cop, and his satisfaction at putting scum behind bars.

Your protagonist, or his world, should be in jeopardy. The Addams Family’s house is in jeopardy in “Progress and the Addams Family.” The mutant’s future victims are in jeopardy in “Squeeze.” Dawson’s friendship with Joey is in jeopardy in “The Song Remains the Same” (that’s the danger in dating your best friend). All of Sunnydale is in jeopardy in “The Wish.”

All of these elements add up to a story whose outcome we care about.

In television, jeopardy is probably more common than stakes. That’s because the world doesn’t change much on a TV show—if it did, you’d break the consistency of the show. While a poor guy in a movie can win a million dollars and end up rich, if that happens on TV, your show about a poor guy is now about a rich guy, which changes the entire dynamic. When Diane Chambers finally gets a break as a writer on Cheers, she’s no longer a wannabe writer, she’s a real one—and she’s off the show.

When a character actually wins something big, the show has to deal with the consequences. Roseanne did win the lottery on Roseanne, and the show lost its grounding in trailer-trash reality. When Dave finally slept with Maddy on Moonlighting, the show lost its romantic tension.

(When the air goes out of a show, it’s said to have “jumped the shark.” The phrase was invented by a website—naturally, www.jumptheshark.com—for the Happy Days episode in which Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis, after which, some feel, the show never recovered its credibility.)

It’s easier to put something at risk that the characters already have. Then they can win—succeed in keeping it—without changing the setup of the show.

Jeopardy is endless. Cop shows, for example, regularly deal with people who break the rules and hurt people. Their victims are in jeopardy. The cops reestablish the normal world by arresting and convicting them. Medical shows are about people who are sick or wounded; the doctors are just trying to make them healthy again.

The jeopardy or stakes may be implicit, but they must be clear. We have to have something to root for or root against. That’s what draws us into the story.

What Makes a Great Springboard?

A great story springboard perfectly fulfills the show’s template. It uses the show’s central conflict to tell a new story or deepen an old one.

In a properly constructed show, the main character wants something he’s never going to get—not while the show’s still running. On Friends, Ross wants Rachel to think he’s cool; Rachel wants Ross to respect her. On I Love Lucy, Lucy wants Ricky to be impressed with her. On post–Shelley Long Cheers, Sammy wants to sleep with Rebecca. On The Sopranos, Tony Soprano wants peace within his family. On Bewitched, Samantha wants to avoid using witchcraft because her powers unnerve Darrin.

Every episode of The Apprentice is about who’ll win the job. How the competitors struggle to stay in the game—by cooperating or sabotaging one another—is the essence of each episode.

How the characters struggle to get what they want is the essence of any show. In a great episode, the central conflict takes the characters into new story territory. It gives them new wounds, creating new reasons to separate them from what they want. Or it takes them deeper into old territory, making their old wounds deeper, intensifying the old reason they can’t have what they want.

A great story idea challenges your characters. Characters are defined by their strengths and weaknesses. A great episode challenges a character’s weakness or strength—it forces a character to overcome or at least face one of his flaws, or turns one of his virtues into a risk factor.

Weaknesses:

Sam Malone is definitely not an intellectual. So when Diane teases Sam about the dumb women he dates, Sam tries to prove her wrong by dating someone smart. (Cheers, “Sam’s Women”)

Grissom’s going deaf. So when Grissom investigates the murder of a man who’s been pushed off a building, his increasing deafness pushes him off the case. (CSI, “High and Low”)

Buffy never wanted to be the Slayer. So when she wakes up in an asylum and the doctors tell her that her being the Slayer and everything that’s happened on the series are part of a massive hallucination she has to fight, she desperately wants to believe them. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Normal Again”)

Clark Kent is vulnerable to kryptonite. So when he gets a class ring set with red kryptonite, he loses his morals. (Smallville, “Red”)

Josh is shy with women. So what’s he going to do when he’s dating two of them? (Naked Josh, “The More the Merrier”)

Edith Piaf used to say, “Use your faults; use your defects. They will make you a star.” It’s our flaws that make us distinct. But our strengths, too, make us distinct.

Strengths:

Jed Bartlet is intensely moral. But when a Qumari minister turns out to have been plotting terrorism in the United States, he has to order him killed in a secret assassination. (The West Wing, “We Killed Yamamoto”)

Sandy Cohen is a devoted family man—and a liberal lawyer. So when an old lover shows up, on the run from the law, he feels he has to protect his family by keeping her reappearance a secret. What happens when Kirsten finds out? (The O.C., “The Accomplice” and “The Second Chance”)

When Clark Kent’s friend Pete loses a race, he asks Clark to use his superpowers to help him win—but the only real winners will be the thugs that run the race. (Smallville, “Velocity”)

Mal is more decent than he’d like to admit. So what will he do when a shipment he’s been hired to steal turns out to be badly needed medicine for a community suffering from disease? (Firefly, “The Train Job”)

Andy Brown moved to Everwood to protect his kids from the big city. But when his son gets a girl pregnant, Andy is concerned that the knowledge will wreck his son’s life. Will he tell the truth? Or try to protect his son from the consequences of his actions? (Everwood, “The Day Is Done”)

When nebbishy returnee Carl Morrissey discovers he has super-strength and super-speed, he decides to clean up his favorite park and chase out the muggers who hang out there. But is he invulnerable, too? (The 4400, “The New and Improved Carl Morrissey”)

Or as the proverb says, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

In all of these cases, it’s the character’s strength or weakness that causes the situation to be a problem. A less moral president than Jed Bartlet wouldn’t blink an eye about assassinating a terrorist. A smarter, more intellectual man than Sam Malone (say, Frasier Crane!) wouldn’t have any trouble finding smart women to date. It’s the flaw or the strength that makes it a story. (If Hamlet were in Othello’s shoes, and vice versa, neither play would happen. Clever Hamlet would spot Iago’s treachery in a moment, and decisive Othello would kill the usurper the moment he got back from Wittenberg.)

Everyone has the virtue of their vices and the vices of their virtues. An episode in which an articulate character talks himself into trouble, or a brave character puts his friends in danger, is always worth a shot.

Another way of looking at the same thing is that a character is defined by what he tends to do, and by what he would never do willingly. Challenging those aspects of his personality is always promising story territory. If there’s something your character would never do, then putting him in a situation where doing exactly that is apparently his only way out, is a good way of creating a convincing story.

A great story springboard uses the show’s template to do something another show can’t do. You want your audience to watch your show and not some other show, don’t you? A great episode tells a story no other show can tell:

In Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “A Perfect Mate,” Captain Picard falls for an “empathic metamorph,” a woman who changes her personality to suit whatever man she’s with. But she’s a diplomatic gift from one planet’s ruler to another, intended to help stop a war—so Picard can’t have her. The science-fiction premise allows the show to illuminate how ordinary women are expected to change their personalities to suit their men, without getting preachy about it.

On the Punk’d pilot, Ashton Kutcher’s gang show up at *NSYNC star Justin Timberlake’s house and pretend they’re repossessors looking for the $900,000 in back taxes he supposedly owes. Where else do you get to see stars made fools of on TV? Intentionally, I mean.

On Charlie Jade, “Truth(s),” the series’ impressionistic use of flashbacks pays off when 01 Boxer tells Charlie three versions of the truth about himself…no one of which is completely a lie. On another show, the flashbacks might be too jarring.

On The West Wing, “25,” the president’s daughter has been kidnapped, and because he feels he can no longer make clear decisions, he must decide whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment and turn over power to the other party. No other show tells stories about the highest levels of the American republic.

Every episode of The Amazing Race takes its couples to places we haven’t seen before and makes them jump through hoops we haven’t seen before. No other show mixes travelogue with competition in quite the same way.

Any way your show’s template is distinctive should give you a way to make an episode that belongs only to that show, and not to any other. It’s your job to figure out what is most refreshing and distinctive about the show when you come up with springboards for it.

 

In rare cases, an episode can play against the show’s template. Stung by criticism that his whole show was based on witty banter—which was indeed part of the joy of watching Buffy—showrunner Joss Whedon wrote an episode, “Hush,” in which all the people of Sunnydale lose their voices. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine broke the mold with “Far Beyond the Stars,” in which the core cast actors are science-fiction writers in the 1950s, and Avery Brooks plays Benny Russell, a science-fiction writer imagining a space station called Deep Space Nine in the distant future where, impossibly, a black man could be captain. Moonlighting won an Emmy with “Atomic Shakespeare,” in which the cast reenacted a wild version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with Bruce Willis playing Petruchio and Cybill Shepherd playing Katharina. (The latter two episodes worked rather nicely because the characters’ personalities remained the same; only their identities changed.)

These kinds of episodes are rare, obviously, because if you play against the template too often, the template ceases to exist. Your audience won’t know what to expect, and they’ll get confused. When they get confused, they get disappointed. You remember what happens when they get disappointed, right?

If you’re writing a freelance script, you probably want to forget about playing against the show’s template. You can play against the template in a spec script, because you’re trying to stand out from the crowd. But it’s far, far riskier than simply trying to nail the template. Not only do you have to know the show backwards and forwards, you’re depending on your reader to know the show backwards and forwards too, so they can appreciate your genius. In fact, you’re depending on the story editor or network exec who’s reading your script to allow the possibility that you’re a genius, rather than just assuming that you don’t know the template, and moving on to the next spec in her tottering stack.

If you’re writing on staff, you are welcome to propose a template-breaking show to the showrunner. If your idea is clever enough, maybe he’ll even write it himself…and make a note to keep you around.

How to Come Up with Great Springboards

How do you come up with great springboards?

Writers are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” They shrug off this question as if it’s ridiculous. “Filene’s Basement,” they say, or “I have a small golden bird that sings to me in my sleep.”

Novelists can get away with waiting for inspiration, if their mortgage isn’t crippling. TV writers know that inspiration is not dependable enough when you’ve got a new script due every Friday. So, they have tools they can use when inspiration is stuck like a Maserati in a mudslide.

Keep a Story File. Many writers keep extensive ones. Any time a story idea comes to you, write it down. It will come in handy, if not on one show, then on another. James Nadler told me about a story he’d originated for Big Wolf on Campus. They rejected it. He wrote another version of it for The Zack Files, but the story was killed. He wrote yet another version—same concept, different characters, different situation—for Seriously Weird. That one got on the air.

If story ideas don’t regularly occur to you, you may not be getting enough input. Read newspapers. Read thought-provoking nonfiction, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, or Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Reading indiscriminately is often better than reading discriminately, because ideas are more likely to come to you when you’re reading outside of your usual interests—there’s room for your brain to breathe. (If this sounds like an excuse to procrastinate…then it’s worth the price of this book, isn’t it?)

Steal from What Is Going on Around You. A few years back, for example, researchers defrosted some victims of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that killed more people than World War I. They’d been buried in permafrost; the researchers wanted to see what was so particularly virulent about that flu strain. It was in the science sections of all the major papers. How can you pitch that as an ER episode? As a CSI? As an X-Files?

For Medium, Melinda Hsu regularly turns to books about unsolved murders and crime websites like Court TV’s (www.courttv.com). She’s looking for an inspiringly lurid crime. From there it’s a matter of finding something that gives Alison, the heroine, a stake in the crime.

For Judging Amy, Paul Guyot consulted “real-life stories of the juvenile justice system, not necessarily just for the courtroom cases on the show, but, for instance, we’d hear or read about a particular story and then decide on interesting or dramatic ways that it might affect the characters’ personal lives.”

And Jordan Craig, writing the brilliant cartoon The Untalkative Bunny: “The mean emu was taken from real life. My wife was reading the paper—an emu had escaped from a zoo—it pecked someone—so we wanted to put it into the show.”

Steal from Your Own Life. What’s the weirdest, most stressful thing that’s happened to you lately? Ever? What’s bugging you right now? How could you rework that as an episode springboard? Marc Abrams (The Bernie Mac Show):

Try to pull a spec script from something that happened to you or a friend. That automatically invests you emotionally in the story, so you write it from a truer place.1

Chris Abbott (Magnum, P.I.):

See the world. Because if all you’re doing is watching TV and movies, you just recycle old ideas. And if you actually have a life, you can write about things that are actually happening.

Steal from the Audience’s Life. If you know you’re writing for a teen audience, stories about first love, zits, and even gender confusion (if you can get it past the censor) might work. You don’t have to be writing for a show whose bread and butter are teen and tween stories, either. Even on Star Trek: Enterprise or Desperate Housewives, there’s a “zit” story, if you can just figure out what it is.

Likewise, if you’re writing for an adult audience, they’re worried about promotions, respect at work, balancing work and home, their kids and their parents. What’s the “respect at work” story for Lost? On the surface it’s a show about people stranded on a desert island. But deeper down it’s a show about people who’ve got unfinished business in their lives. Respect at work might be central to someone’s unfinished business. Or, the story territory might be respect in the work they’re now all involved in—staying alive.

Steal from Literature. Paul Guyot (Judging Amy):

If the muse is out to lunch, then the tools I personally fall back on are other writers. People who originally inspired me to write. Maybe I’ll flip through a book by Graham Greene or John Steinbeck, or a screenplay by Robert Benton or David Chase, or any of a number of other greats, depending on just what type of inspiration I’m searching for.

However, it’s not a good idea to steal from the same genre of literature. Don’t use a crime story for a crime drama unless you can afford to buy the screen rights for the story. It’s not fair to the writer, and the odds are the story’s been optioned by someone else, which may get you in trouble.

 

If you’re not feeling inspired by the newspaper, the audience, or your own life, you can extract springboards from the show bible. As suggested above, a great episode challenges a core character’s fears and weaknesses. So use that principle to generate ideas: What would your lead most hate to do? Okay, force him to do it. How does he deal? If your lead loves a girl, force him to be mean to her. If he’s shy, force him to be exhibitionistic. If he’s inarticulate, force him to lead a crowd. (By “force,” I mean, of course, “give him a valid motivation he’d find it hard to resist.”)

Put your lead through situations that are particularly awful for him or her because of the kind of person he or she is. Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Charmed, Lost):

You just can’t go wrong torturing your lead…. A lot of the time, series leads are glorified and nobody pokes fun of them. When you’ve got a character like Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation, he wasn’t the most interesting character until they figured out that they could use him as a straight man and poke fun at him all the time. They could have him [drink] prune juice and it would be funny. You could turn Prue [on Charmed] into a man and there’d be laughs galore.2

Challenge Your Character’s Strengths. If your character is especially good at something, that can get him or her into trouble that no one else can.

In one of Melinda Hsu’s Medium episodes, psychic Alison Dubois had to choose whether or not to get a murderer arrested—knowing that this murderer is a pilot who will save a plane full of people from crashing if he’s not arrested. It’s a hell of a moral quandary—and one only a psychic would ever have to deal with. Likewise, Sabrina’s magical powers regularly get her into trouble on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, as when she casts a spell to make a hip-hop diva easier to interview, and winds up switching bodies with her (Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, “Shift Happens”).

Tempt Your Core Cast with Their Goals. Give a core cast member the chance to get what she’s always wanted. Now deny it.

Give Dave a chance to sleep with Maddy—something he’s done makes her feel romantic about him. Now give him an obstacle we wouldn’t have expected—just as Dave is about to get himself invited to bed, he discovers that Maddy is mourning a death in her family, and he’d be taking advantage of her momentary weakness. Give Ross a chance to earn Rachel’s respect. Give Lucy Ricardo a chance to really impress Ricky.

 

Fresh Opportunity + Fresh Obstacle = Fresh Story.

 

A familiar conflict in new packaging—that’s practically a definition of a good television springboard.

Come Up with a Great Act Two or Three Out. I’ll explain about act outs shortly, but in essence, find a really nasty jam to put the hero in. Then work backward to figure out how the hero got there, and work forward to see what he does about it. In Firefly’s “War Stories,” the act three out is that Mal, the show’s central character, is dead. Dead, you see? How did he get dead? How does he get out of being dead?

Find a Great Ending and Work Backward from There. Another Firefly episode starts with its ending—Mal stranded naked in the desert, thinking “That went well…”—and then flashes back to “72 hours earlier…”

Consider Silly Ideas. When you’re brainstorming springboards in the writing room, writers will toss out ridiculous and/or obscene story ideas to let off steam. Some of these contain the seed for a good idea. Studio execs are fond of saying, “Here’s the bad version.” It sometimes sounds fatuous, but don’t be afraid to throw out a bad idea and then tinker with it to see if there is a good version of it.

Steal Plot Elements. From old books, movies, and even TV shows. Leila Basen (Mental Block, Emily of the New Moon, Neverending Story): “I look at TV Tome [www.tv.com] and see what the episode’s about. Once you’ve filtered that through your brain, it’s not going to be the same story anymore.” Chris Abbott, too:

I almost hate to say it but I’ll always go back to classic novels or classic movies. Read a lot, watch a lot—it’s important to watch TV to learn the craft. But also go to plays, go to movies, go to opera…. You can always go back to Shakespeare. What is the element of conflict, what is the area of conflict and what is the hero’s flaw, what does he need to learn? Take basic concepts. Don’t take the plot, otherwise you’re just coloring in the lines. And some people call it plagiarizing…. [Laughing] We used to call it “homage.”

This is not the same as stealing the entire plot of another TV show. See below.

What Makes a Bad Story Idea

What sort of springboards should you rule out? In increasing order of awfulness, here are some no-nos:

Episodes That Could Be Done Equally Well on Any of a Dozen Other Shows. A series is only as distinctive as the stories it tells. Every story should answer the question, Why are we watching this show? Larry David, talking about Seinfeld: “We were very determined to try and do ideas that not only had not been done before but that no one else could do.”3

In their book Successful TV Writing, veteran showrunners Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin talk about the first few episodes of Baywatch. They had a hostage drama, they had characters coming out of their core cast’s past, they had a crime story—none of which particularly required a show about lifeguards. Then they came up with the idea of two characters being trapped in the back of an armored car at the bottom of the bay. Not the most sophisticated idea, but at least it could only be done on Baywatch.

Once creator Aaron Sorkin left West Wing, the show began running episodes with story lines like “Leo has a heart attack” and “At Donna’s bedside while she recuperates from surgery, Colin questions Josh about his personal relationship with Donna.” Any show’s cast can have health problems, right? So any time you’ve got two characters suffering from health problems in the same season, you’ve run out of inspiration.

Any cop show can spotlight a murder, but on a CSI show the solution has to hinge on a clever forensics investigation. A CSI episode that relies on one of the investigators tricking a suspect into blowing his story, Columbo-style, or a crazy hunch, is a weak CSI episode.

If you’re pitching a springboard for a science-fiction series, the story should be one that revolves around a science-fictional element—some scientific fact or technology we don’t have in our own time. A Babylon 5 episode that is nothing more than glorified workplace politics that happens to take place on a space station is a bad B5 episode.

Like all rules, this one, too, can be broken when you know what you’re doing. In Joss Whedon’s famous Buffy episode “The Body,” Buffy’s mom dies—for no supernatural reason at all. Any drama show can have a character drop dead. But how Buffy and her friends deal with this intrusion of ordinary death into their world, when they deal with extraordinary death every night, makes the show exceptional—reminding us how supernatural, ultimately, death is. Buffy duking it out with a vampire in the hospital morgue seems almost an afterthought.

When a show itself is less distinctive, having a story line that can’t be on any other show may not be entirely possible. Many Homicide springboards could be NYPD Blue springboards. To the greatest degree possible, you need to find the twist that makes that springboard as particular to the show as possible. It can depend on the world the show lives in—New York, for example, was hit on 9/11, Baltimore wasn’t. It can depend on the show’s particular core cast and their flaws. NYPD Blue centers on a detective who’s a recovering alcoholic, Homicide doesn’t. It can simply depend on the “rules of engagement” a show has. NYPD Blue’s cops regularly browbeat confessions out of their suspect, Homicide’s don’t.

Worse than an episode that could be on another show is an episode that has been on another show, unless you’ve got a new twist.

Crafty TV Writing: What makes a bad spec?

Tom Chehak: Any story I did ten years ago.

Stealing Entire Plots from Other TV Shows. Yes, you can sometimes find a twist that justifies the steal. But c’mon, come up with something fresh. A stolen story line tells the reader that you have no imagination.

If this means you have to watch a lot of television to know what’s been done, well, you should be watching a lot of television. In the writing room it’s easy to spot a “used” springboard. There are three to eight writers there, plus a couple of assistants. If it’s been on the air, someone’s probably seen it. If you’re writing on your own, though, you’ll have to know or guess whether a plotline is something that’s been done to death, or it’s something new. Your guess is probably pretty good, though.

For example, if your plot is that a core character’s brother shows up, and he’s still trouble, you can guess it’s been done on dozens of shows. (Sorry, Josh Schwartz.) Someone’s old girlfriend showing up: ditto. (Sorry, Josh Schwartz.) Unless you’ve got a brand-new twist or perspective, try to come up with something fresher. On Northern Exposure, someone’s brother showed up—and he was black.

Whereas, say, when you’ve got a story line like, “President Ford comes to town and Eric and his friends plan to streak at the rally,” you can feel fairly safe that it hasn’t been overdone (That ’70s Show, “Streaking”). In other words, you probably know when you have a tired old story springboard that’s been done. If you’re still not sure, ask your friends. One nice thing about writing for TV is that everyone watches TV, and everyone feels comfortable talking about it.

Sometimes when you’re staffing a show, the network will kill a script at the last minute, and everybody has to come up with a new story now. In that situation you may have to fall back on story ideas that aren’t truly distinctive. To be honest, at that point you’re all probably frantically thinking of episode ideas from other shows that you can poach and ways you can twist them so you can live with yourself afterward. As a rule of thumb, even in extremis, don’t poach anything from this or last season. Steal from at least three or four years ago. And be aware that if you’re stealing from Rebecca (or other classic movies or TV), some people in the audience are going to be thinking, “They’re not going to do Rebecca, are they?”^*

Remember, the audience may not remember exactly where they saw that story line before, but they know you stole it. It’s just too forced and threadbare, and doesn’t look like life. It looks like other TV. And at least one of your fellow writers will know where you saw it, and mock you in public.

If you’re pitching a freelance script, a used story line will just irritate the story editors. The reason they’re hiring freelancers in the first place is to bring new ideas.

If you’re speccing a script, you really have no excuse. If you think it might have been on television anywhere, any time, come up with something more original. You should give yourself a solid week to come up with a truly kickass springboard. If you can’t come up with something original in a week, you’re in the wrong business.

An Episode with No Emotional Heart. People watch television to be caught up in a story emotionally, whether it’s to laugh, cry, wince, or be scared for a character’s sake. A good episode takes the audience through an experience that moves them. To move the audience, the protagonist has to be moved by what he or she is going through; if he doesn’t care, we won’t, either. Anthony Zuiker (CSI):

There needs to be an emotional connection to the story that you want to tell; you can’t just hide the ball cleverly. In our best episodes, characters have emotional attachments to something in the case, like the murder of a child or something that resonates from their own experience.4

This coming from the creator of one of the coldest, most cerebral dramas on the air, whose central character keeps bugs for pets. Yet we know that Grissom cares deeply about finding out the truth, and we care about the victims of the lurid crimes he’s investigating. To make us care, make sure the character cares.

Betray a Character. This one’s really bad. We watch television to see characters we care about go through their lives. The more we watch the show, the more they seem like real people to us. We get to know their quirks, their fears, their hopes, and their past. They become part of our extended family. If you get these characters wrong, the audience (or the reader) is going to be mad at you. They’re going to feel as if you’ve lied about a member of their family.

Homer Simpson can get into virtually any sort of foolishness, but he’d never commit adultery; he’s not really sexual at all. Tony Soprano does cheat on his wife, but he’d never rat to the feds. Gil Grissom doesn’t let emotion sway his mind from the facts. Andy Sipowicz would never take a bribe. Superman would never let someone die to save his own life. If you have a character violate the core of his personality, the audience will feel it doesn’t know the character anymore. They will stop watching the show.

Simply failing to get the characters right makes a bad episode, but getting them positively wrong is a killer.

An Episode That Resolves a Central Conflict of the Show. This is the most dangerous thing you can do on TV. Once a central conflict is resolved in a show, further episodes may be crippled. In Moonlighting, Dave and Maddy fought like cats and dogs; their sexual tension drove the show. Many viewers felt the show died when Dave and Maddy finally gave in to their sexual tension and slept with each other.

A spec script or freelance pitch that resolves the central conflict of the show will earn immediate, permanent rejection. Of the writer. Whoever’s reading it will be appalled: “What are you thinking?”

Sometimes a show’s central conflict wears out its welcome over time. The X-Files was a show about a skeptic and a believer chasing after an elaborate government conspiracy to hide evidence of alien infiltration. But the hints had to add up to something sooner or later; and the more the audience knew, the more the show began to go from enigmatic to preposterous. Either showrunner Chris Carter and his staff couldn’t figure out how to retool the show, or they were tired of writing it after seven seasons, so they pulled the plug.

Likewise, in the first few seasons of Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw kept looking for love. The central question of the show is announced in the pilot: Is romance dead? But as the show went on, creator Darren Star faced a choice. Either allow Carrie Bradshaw to find true romance on her terms—which would have killed the show’s central conflict—or have Carrie keep finding fault with it—which eventually made it look as if she didn’t really want it. (Not to mention that a thirty-three-year-old single girl going to parties every night is a hot chiquita, but a forty-year-old single woman—or man—going to parties every night is kinda pathetic.) For a show to last more than seven years, its central conflict may have to evolve.

A show may resolve its central conflict if everyone agrees that the show is “not working” and it needs to be retooled. Then the showrunner will write the episode that retools the show himself (after strenuous consultation with the network), and this episode will create a new central conflict to take over from the old one.

Mixing and Matching

For most shows, you’ll need more than one great springboard.

Back in the Jurassic, shows told only one story per episode. Lucy had one harebrained scheme per episode on I Love Lucy. Crockett and Tubbs dealt with one case per episode on Miami Vice. These days, most shows tell multiple stories. Friends typically told three stories. Sex and the City told four.

The most prominent story in an episode—starring the lead character if there is one—is called the A story. The lesser stories are called B and C stories. A B story is still a substantial story; a C story is slight. Writers might say that an episode with a big story and two inconsequential secondary stories has an “A story and two C stories.” An episode with two fairly substantial stories of about equal prominence might be said to have “two B stories.” A series of moments or gags that connect but don’t really add up to a proper story—some delivery guys who keep trying to deliver a crate of jelly beans at the most inconvenient possible times—is called a runner.

On staff, you typically plot the A stories out much further into the future than the B and C stories, which get moved around from episode to episode for all sorts of real-world reasons.

If your show is a sitcom, all your stories will be comic. But if it’s a drama, you may want to vary their style. If your A story is action-filled, the B story might want to be thoughtful. If your A story is serious, your B story may want to be comic. If your A story is restricted to one or two locations, you may want a B story that jumps from place to place, so the whole episode doesn’t feel claustrophobic. That way you can vary the pitch, pace, and rhythm of the episode by cutting between different kinds of stories.

Be careful, though. If your A story is too serious, a really goofy B story may seem inappropriate. You can’t really team up a wrenching tale of childhood abuse with a clever story about an odd but weird ice-cream truck guy. (At least, not on American broadcast TV.) But then, if your story is so deep you can’t team it up with anything lighter, maybe you should ease up, eh?

Themed Shows

On some shows, all the stories in an episode are related by a theme—a different one for each episode. Some shows make the theme explicit. For example, in Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw types out the episode’s question on her computer screen somewhere in the story. Other shows may be less obvious, and ask the audience to figure out what the episode’s theme is.

If you pay attention, you may notice that many nonthemed shows also like to have themed episodes from time to time. The British show Coupling often joins its stories by a theme. In “The Man with Two Legs,” Jeff tells a stupid lie that gets him in trouble; so does Sally. In “The Melty Man Cometh,” everyone is looking for reassurance. Another show might have an episode in which various different core cast members are dealing with their exes, or an episode in which all embarrass themselves in different kinds of situations, or one where all the stories are about parental loss in different ways.

What’s neat about a themed show is it can show different perspectives on the same story: one character tries to make up with his or her ex and fails, the other tries differently and succeeds. If juxtaposing the two story lines says something more about the theme, it’s worth doing. If you’re just making the same point twice, it may be no more than stunt plotting.