Comedy pilot structure how to#
Comedy pilot structure full#
Comedy pilot structure series#

Of course, it’s much less about the number of characters you have and more about how you differentiate those characters and how you make use of them. I read a lot of pilots and some of them feel too thin because there aren’t enough characters to create conflicts between, while others feel overwhelming because there are too many characters to keep straight in your mind. I don’t mean that prescriptively, but if something about your script feels off, that’s a place to look if your script differs wildly from this very common template. So your pilot would feel similar to a produced pilot if it was 5 acts (possibly including a teaser and/or tag), divided into 14-15 scenes of about 1.5-2 pages each (on average). I assume the higher page count is because comedies have historically had more quick back and forth dialogue which means more line breaks on the page in a short period of screen time. Note that at least one of the major TV writing contests requires half-hour pilots to be at least 25 pages. These pilots were all 21-27 minutes long (most were 21-22 minutes), but one minute doesn’t always equal one page. Across those acts, the episodes were divided into 11-16 scenes, usually in the 14-15 range. The half-hour dramedy pilots I studied all had 4 or 5 acts (usually 5), including any teaser or tag that might be included.

Comedy pilot structure full#

I would not recommend attempting this unless, like Jill Soloway, you already have a full season order from a streaming network. So it does have a formal structure, it’s just not TV structure. 2 The first episode is really just the first half of Act 1 leading up to the inciting incident. (It’s a beautiful pilot that I recommend watching even if it’s hard to take many structural lessons from it.)Īmazon’s Transparent is another pilot that doesn’t fit comfortably in the structure of most half-hour dramedies because each season is written as a five-hour movie. There are definitely some outliers, like FX’s Better Things, which is more of a stream of consciousness “slice of life” pilot, but even that episode has act breaks and still loosely follows the pattern of the other shows I studied, just in a quieter, more subtle way. But if you write about something that matters to you and set it in a world you find interesting, comparing its structure to this template might help you see what your story is missing or why it feels too slow or too rushed.

Comedy pilot structure series#

I share this information not to give you a paint-by-numbers template because there are hundreds of TV series out there that take a paint-by-numbers approach to storytelling and most are instantly forgettable. I did a less in-depth version of this analysis for one-hour drama pilots here. I found that all the pilots I studied were structured in a very similar way 1, even across networks. The next step is writing the actual script, or punching up one you’ve already written.Īs promised, I analyzed the structure (length, act breaks, number of characters, and narrative arc) of a group of half-hour dramedy pilots.

Comedy pilot structure how to#

So now you know what makes a half-hour dramedy what it is and you know how to get to the core of what yours should be about.