Why It’s Okay to Have Completely Unoriginal Ideas
Building a career in TV takes many things. Talent. Grit. Luck. Oh, and completely fresh, totally original ideas.
It wasn’t too long ago that a TV writer’s job was mostly mimicry. Writers wrote spec scripts for existing shows to demonstrate their chops for a particular show’s tone and voice. This made sense because when you’re on staff that’s essentially your job: echoing and enhancing the voice of the showrunner.
But to get hired on a TV show nowadays, a writer needs a completely original TV pilot. There’s many reasons for this, from the fact that nobody watches all the same shows anymore to the sad reality that you can’t sell or develop a spec script.
This trend overlooks the fact that writing original ideas that actually work and are funny is super hard! Professional writers who have decades of experience routinely try and fail to do exactly this every year. If you’re just starting out, it can feel impossible.
Original or Bust
When I began writing TV pilots, I put tremendous pressure on myself to come up with completely original ideas. If my premise had even a whiff of being done already, I’d abandoned it. Over the years, I’ve killed countless ideas because I didn’t want my work to be perceived as unoriginal.
