How to Write a TV Pilot, pt. 2: Character
In the first part of this series, I talked a lot about matching the right character(s) to your premise. While a lot of the fun of watching (and writing) television comes from a well-drawn ensemble cast of characters, in your pilot you’ll want to put the most focus on your protagonist.
Your protagonist
Most people recognize that word from high school English class as the main character of a story. This is true. But your protagonist is not the person who the events of the story happen to. The protagonist must actively cause the events of the story to occur and be motivated to achieve their goals.
The protagonist must actively cause the events of the story to occur and be motivated to achieve their goals.
If your premise is that your show takes place in a haunted bakery, let’s say your protagonist is the newest owner of the bakery. Spitballing further, it’s always been her dream to open her own bakery and go into business for herself. She wants to prove to everyone that she can do this on her own. But now she’s got all these ghosts to deal with, messing everything up.
So in one paragraph, you have an entire TV series. What’s the show? Haunted Bakery. What’s the premise? A lady opens up a bakery, but the building is haunted with ghosts. Who’s the protagonist? The lady who opens up the bakery. What does she want? To own and operate a successful bakery. What’s the obstacle she must overcome to achieve her goals? Ghosts.
Without her motivation and the obstacle obstructing her from achieving her goals, you don’t have a show. Even if she is being haunted and that is happening to her, each story must involve her actively setting out to do something specific and then the ghosts getting in her way and preventing her from achieving it. The stories can’t be about the ghosts doing spooky stuff to her and then she reacts. What makes her the protagonist is that she is active in setting out to achieve her goals and that she has agency. Everything that happens in the show is because your protagonist made a choice to pursue a particular goal.
Everything that happens in the show is because your protagonist made a choice to pursue a particular goal.
Your protagonist’s goals
Your protagonist must be the one who drives the story forward. And they do that by pursuing their goals. Now, in the case of Haunted Bakery, her overall goal is to run a successful, ghost-free bakery — as I mentioned earlier. That’s going to carry the show forward from episode to episode and season to season because that goal is inherent in the premise. But each episode will be driven forward individually by whatever she wants to accomplish in that particular instance.
Each episode’s plot must have its genesis in something your protagonist (usually — often times a supporting cast member will get the main story, but that’s not something you’ll have to worry about in your pilot episode) wants to accomplish. And it’s even better if that relates to their overall goal. In Haunted Bakery, it makes sense that most of the show’s stories will have to do with the main character’s desire to get her bakery running. She has a big corporate order to fill that could result in repeat business but the ghosts hide the bagels. She’s crafting a beautiful wedding cake but the ghosts hide the frosting. These are individual stories about specific events that would happen in a haunted bakery but also further your main character’s overall journey.
The natural character story in the pilot episode of Haunted Bakery involves the main character trying to open the bakery, discovering that it is haunted, and successfully opening despite the ghosts doing ghost things to stop her. What this basic framework does is establishes your main character, the central conflict of the show, and what the main character’s primary motivation is. All of this together introduces to the audience what your show is going to be like from now on. They know what generally to expect from Haunted Bakery because it’s all in the pilot. You can’t introduce aliens in episode two because you established the reality in episode one.
What about the rest of your characters?
Go watch the Cheers pilot. Right now. And then come back. Cheers’s pilot is often referred to one the great pilots of all time. For good reason. And I’ll keep referring back to it in future parts. It’s still on Netflix, I think. But right now, I want to talk about how it establishes character.
Cheers quickly establishes its world and its protagonist. Sam Malone is a recovering alcoholic and an ex-ballplayer. We see very quickly that he’s a good, honest guy who cares about his bar, about the people who work for him, and about his customers. He’s also a bit of a ladies man and a hound dog, but he’s not a creep and he’s not taking advantage of anyone. Throughout the whole episode — through plot points, jokes, and the way other people react to him — we keep learning things about Sam. The whole pilot is focused like a laser beam in that way. Characters like Norm, Coach, Carla, and Cliff get their individual moments of introduction, but they’re really not fleshed out like Sam is. Because at this point, they don’t need to be. We get few beats with Cliff Clavin being a blowhard know-it-all and now we get his character. As soon as Carla stomps in, complaining and tossing out zingers, we know what we need to know about Carla at this point.
The other character that gets a lot of service in the pilot is Diane, who is the second lead, or deuteragonist (but this is not really a term that gets used often), of the show. A lot of shows have two leads like Cheers does. Sometimes the two leads are equal in importance of story, but Cheers errs more towards Sam than Diane. In Cheers, and in most other shows with two leads, their relationship is the show’s central conflict. So the pilot services Sam and it services Diane because for the rest of the season — and for a good part of the show’s duration — their relationship fuels the overarching plot as well as the individual episodic stories.
Even in their first interaction, they get into a comedic bit with each other that establishes their relationship to come. One of Sam’s lovers calls for him when Diane answers the phone. Sam tries to mime an excuse for Diane to tell the woman, but Diane’s had enough and refuses to play along. In this very first interaction, the show uses comedy to give us information about these characters, set up their relationship, and showcase their obvious chemistry. Merely from this small amount of time spent on these characters, the audience understands the central conflict and the central dynamic of Cheers.
Sam wants to run a successful bar, but he also wants to be with Diane. Diane takes the job at Cheers because she quickly falls in love with the people who populate it (even though she gives a bullshit answer about studying working class people) and also because her attraction to Sam is undeniable. And like I said in the first part of this series, the show pairs them together because they are opposites. And the chemistry and conflict they have is based on that fact. The show is about two people who want to be together, but refuse to admit it. And then the show spends the rest of the season (and series) putting more and more obstacles in their way.
Not many situation comedies have anthropomorphic antagonists (individuals standing in the way of your protagonist from achieving their goals) as part of the cast. Usually the conflict comes from an external source or from an ultimately resolvable disagreement between two members of the cast. But going back to Haunted Bakery, the ghosts are the antagonists. Most of the show’s conflict will come from the ghosts opposing the baker.
So along with the main character, in your pilot, the ghosts would get special service over other characters. An antagonist must have an equal and opposing goals to your protagonist. The baker’s goal is to open a successful bakery, the ghosts’ goal is to scare the baker away and put her out of business. What are their motivations? Who are they? These and other questions must at least be addressed, if not answered, in the pilot.
All supporting characters will be defined by their relationship to the protagonist. Choosing characters will be based on how effectively they help or hinder moving the protagonist’s story along.
The rest of your cast of characters depends on how you would like to fill out your show. Is there a friend who never sees the ghosts and thinks the protagonist is crazy? A landlord who knows the ghosts personally? A significant other? Regular customer? These are all considerations you must make, but each supporting character must exist based on their relationship to the protagonist. Since in Haunted Bakery, we have a clearly defined protagonist, all other characters will be defined by their relationship to her. Choosing characters will be based on how effectively they help or hinder moving the protagonist’s story along.
What if you have more than one main character?
Even in most ensemble shows, you will have one or two lead characters. In Arrested Development, it’s Michael Bluth. In The Office, it’s Michael Scott. With Friends, it’s a little bit murkier, but if you watch the Friends pilot, the most service is given to Ross and Rachel and their will-they-won’t-they story is introduced right there up front. Even though the stories get distributed fairly equally throughout the cast as the show goes on, Ross and Rachel are the de facto protagonists of Friends. Especially for purposes of the pilot, so that might be a choice you have to make if you’re writing an ensemble show like Friends.
If you’re writing a show like Modern Family, where multiple interlocking storylines are inherent in the premise, then it plays out a bit differently. If you have multiple protagonists, you will have to give each of them their own separate plot line. The same principles apply to a story with a single protagonist, but you will have to do it multiple times with fewer pages. It becomes way more of a balancing act because you have to do the same amount of work with less space to do it and for as many characters as you consider a protagonist.
