Television Scriptwriting Manuals - Text 1
Before the 1990s, the scriptwriting manuals on the market mostly explored film narrative and pushed writing for television to the side. Television was a rapidly-expanding medium and mass media whose narrative possibilities were in their infancy. In France at that time television programs had barely scratched the surface of their potential. They adapted great French-language novels or were variations on the comedy phenomena coming out of the United States.[1] At the same time, in Quebec the téléroman (“TV-novel”) had reached a state of paroxysm. This form, which straddles the serial novel and the American soap opera, ruled Quebec television, prompting scholars such as Michel Gosselin to take up their study. His work would become one of the rare manuals on the topic still to this day.
In the United States and France in the 1990s, scriptwriting manuals incorporated the television medium in their titles: Reading for a Living: How to be a Professional Story Analyst for Film and Television (Katahn, 1990), La pratique du scénario: cinéma, télévision, B.D. (Duc, 1992), etc. Nevertheless, these authors did not distinguish between writing for film and writing for television, even though major differences between the scriptwriting techniques specific to each exist.
At the turn of the century, manuals for scripting television series appeared in both France and the United States: Jean-Marie Roth’s L’écriture de scénario (1997); Jorgen Wolf and L.P. Ferrante’s La sitcom ou comment écrire une comédie de situation (2000); and Alex Epstein’s Crafty TV Writing: Thinking Inside the Box (2006). These manuals, rather than providing generic information on writing for television, specialized in focusing on genres, specifically the sitcom and, in France, the feuilleton, a variation on the soap opera.[2] They discuss several techniques specific to the medium and to the popular genres of the day. The first distinctions these volumes make concern the difference between dramatic structure and narrative structure. Dramatic structure draws on the three-act structure present in cinema, which draws in turn on the structure specific to theatre and theorized by Aristotle. Narrative structure, on the other hand, is distinct, especially in the case of comedy. This genre is built around two narrative acts: each develops over twelve-minute sequences which are themselves broken down into two or four scenes.[3] At that time, scriptwriting manuals were based on a format of weekly broadcast, which influenced the construction of the narrative. Today, with new modes of dissemination, scriptwriters must rethink the structure of their episode to adapt to these modes. A series broadcast weekly, a series available for streaming and a Web series are not scripted in the same manner. The acts in a television series shown on linear television develop in accordance with the commercial breaks; each act is made around these breaks. In addition, to hold the audience’s interest and not lose it to a competing broadcast on another network, scriptwriters must use techniques such as the cliffhanger, typical of the narrative structure of this kind of television. In the case of a television series disseminated on a video on demand platform such as Netflix or, in Quebec, ICI TOU.TV, the narrative structure can allow itself more freedom; here scriptwriters reserve the use of the cliffhanger for the end of the episode so that viewers remain in front of their screens. In the case of Web series, an additional time constraint exists: episodes have an average length of from eight to ten minutes. When conceiving a project for television one must therefore consider the format and the mode of dissemination.
The 2010s were a turning point for the publication of scriptwriting manuals in the United States. These guides featured charts and diagrams for planning the scripting of a television series. Such visuals functioned as guideposts for budding scriptwriters, providing them with character development structures, the development of a narrative arc in an episode, or narrative arcs throughout a season. These plans enabled budding scriptwriters to plan their project by helping to structure the narrative, but also by helping develop the characters and the world the scriptwriter wishes to create and put to use. This is the case of the volume by Pamela Douglas, Writing the TV Drama Series: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (2018).
