DC407 – WED – Week 1

Happy Monday!

Today was the first class of the Spring quarter here at DePaul. I started off with DC407, which is Writing the Episodic Drama. It is taught by Jose Soto. He is in charge of the TV Incubator Project so I have worked with him before. I love his insights into what is happening in TV. I learned a little more about his background today. He was an actor as a child and worked in production for many years before deciding to write. He has been teaching for 21 years at various places in Mexico and the US. He has been full time at DePaul for 3 years.

The first class is always just the intro, but it looks like this one is going to be ramping up pretty quickly. We will be writing an original pilot for a drama series by the end of the class. We have to have a Pitch Brief for the show that by this Friday, and then we will pitch to the class for feedback next Monday. It is a quick turnaround, but I am thinking that this quarter is going to be full of projects, so I might as well get used to it.

I sometimes find that I am able to get more done when I have more to do. It is sometimes easy to procrastinate when I have a lot of time to do things. In addition to this class and the second half of the Feature Writing class, I will be working on some web series of my own and maybe doing some student work. I just went in for an interview for a job today and will hopefully hear back from them by the end of the week. It might be crazy to keep adding things, but I feel like I can handle it.

So in class, after introductions, we talked about what makes a good pilot. A few of the things that were mentioned:

• Makes you want to watch the series.
• Makes you give a shit about the characters. (TV is about characters not about plot)
• You have to give enough to give the audience something to come back for.
• Introduce your characters. The protagonist and sometimes the antagonist.

Then we talked a little about what makes good characters. Seems like there are a lot of Lovable Monsters out there – Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, House of Cards, House.

After break we watched the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. This was Aaron Sorkin’s next project after The West Wing. I loved it when it aired, but it sadly only made it one season. It debuted the same year as 30 Rock so it was hard to have both of them with similar plots. I would have liked to have seen where it would have gone. I think that I’d like to get back and watch the season again sometime.

https://youtu.be/vahmSjnpXgg

Homework is writing a Pitch Brief for a show that we want to write. This is a single page that describes the show, the characters, and the structure of the series. It is a sales guide for pitching a show, so it is best to use it to entice someone into wanting to hear more about the show. I like to think about it like a resume. It has to do enough to get you in the door to get an interview. No idea what I am going to write about, but I’ve been doing a little brainstorming the last week and plan on doing some more tomorrow. Hope to have something picked tomorrow and then write it up on Wednesday.

The other assignment is to write a pilot analysis of a show that is similar to the one that we want to write. Pretty straightforward assignment. Talk about the structure and characters and such. The one thing that Prof. Soto mentioned was to look for the twist that makes it different. Why is this show different than other shows that came before it? Not sure which one I will do for this. I need to get my idea first I guess.