Why Every TV Series Is Like Thanksgiving
Why Every TV Series Is Like Thanksgiving This week, we’re going to talk about Thanksgiving. We’re not just going to talk about turkeys and football, though. We’re going to talk about television. Everything you need to know about how to write a TV series you can learn at Thanksgiving. I’m going to encourage you just for a moment to think back to your very first Thanksgiving. Don’t think about the way it was supposed to be. Think about the way it was. Maybe your first Thanksgiving (or at least the first Thanksgiving you remember) was a wonderful experience filled with beauty and connection and laughter and love. Maybe the first Thanksgiving you remember was a terrifying experience filled with stress and anxiety and people misbehaving and family not getting along and tearing each other apart. If you’re like most people, your first Thanksgiving was probably a really complicated mixture of beauty and drama and pressure and tension and joy and laughter and love and all the things that go into family. (If you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, you can substitute any holiday that mattered to you where your family gathered together.) You probably realize that there are certain rituals that tend to happen in this genre of holiday. At Thanksgiving, you’re going to eat way too much food, you’re going to talk about tryptophan as if it was something that you just discovered for the first time. You’re probably going to retire to watch football (or if you’re not a football family, maybe you’re going to sit around and play board games or just chat). You’re going to eat dinner earlier than you’re used to. You’re going to cook more food than anybody should. You’re going to wake up at two in the morning and make a stuffing sandwich. Just like there are certain elements that tend to be part of almost everybody’s Thanksgiving, there are certain elements that tend to be part of every genre of TV show. If you’re writing an action TV series, there are going to be a bunch of action sequences. It’s just gonna happen. If you’re writing a drama series, there are going to be tears, there’s going to be pressure, and there are going to be hard decisions. If you’re writing a comedy series, there are going to be jokes. If you’re writing a thriller series, there are going to be thrills. If you’re writing a horror series, there is going to be blood and gore. If you’re writing an elevated horror series, there is going to be a spiritual transcendent level to it. There are certain kinds of plot elements that tend to happen in every series, just like there are certain plot elements that happen in every holiday. If you think back to your first Thanksgiving you’ll probably realize that in every Thanksgiving that followed, you either tried to replicate or change that first feeling that you had. That in some way you’ve either been chasing that feeling for every Thanksgiving of your life, or the longing for a different feeling… of what Thanksgiving could have been, or should have been, or one day could be. And you’ll start to realize that your first Thanksgiving is really just a pilot episode for every Thanksgiving that followed. That Thanksgiving is a series that keeps you coming back, year after year, for laughter, drama, tears, and connection. Thanksgiving is a series that keeps you coming back for a feeling— a feeling you either hope to one day experience or long to experience again. So what was it that gave you that feeling? That kept you coming back, no matter what happened, “episode” after “episode,” year after year? It was the same elements that make a successful engine of a TV Series…” If you think about it long enough,