Part II: The Pitfalls of Plotting TV Shows...Buffy, etc..(see Parts I & II below)

[shadowkat]

[> Part II: The Pitfalls of Plotting Television Shows -- s'kat, 10:01:02 08/23/03 Sat

Part II. The Pitfalls of Plotting Television Shows

So how much of BTVS is truly plotted way ahead of time? How much of any Television show arc is plotted ahead of time?

Alarmingly little, believe it or not. I know that's hard to believe when you watch shows like BTVS - but that's b/c the show is done that well. All tv shows are done in this manner. Very very few can be tightly plotted ahead of time and even those? Get screwed. This where the opportunities/limitations of the medium come into play.

Plays and movies - are one self-contained two to three hour drama or comedy, cast well ahead of rehearsals, the play script or movie script may be written by one or more people. In some cases plays and movies are re-written for the cast. But the main thing is that the story is generally plotted in advance. They usually have a complete outline and sketches of each character. The actors meet to discuss the script and scenes. Cast/Actors do affect movies and plays but not quite in the same way they do TV. (19) Fans? Almost zero effect on what happens - just on whether it makes any money and lives to see another day. Although preview audiences can affect these mediums to an extent, they rarely come into play until after the entire thing is done. (20) We usually don't get some fan group or network producer screaming at the creator to change the story after chapter one of a book or act one of the play has aired or been published, usually the whole thing is published or aired at once - there's no changing it in mid-stream. Not so with TV - which is more akin to a work in progress - each chapter airing as the writer begins writing the next. (21)

TV - the difference between a television series and a book or movie or play is simply the fact it is an on-going series with new episodes once a week with no more than a month or two in between during a seasonal arc and three - five months between seasons.

A book that is an on-going serial - is dependent on just the writer continuing it. A movie? On actors, director, writer, producer, distributor, crew continuing - but, it is usually self-contained enough that if someone doesn't want to come back, they can handle it. Example: Halle Berry doesn't want to do X-Men 3, fine, just write the next movie without Halle Berry in it. Doesn't really hurt the franchise. You might even be able to recast her if you want. Or you can stop the franchise...and the fans are satisfied, story self-contained. Example: Amber Benson doesn't want to do Buffy S7 because she hates the script or isn't being paid enough or feels it would hurt the fans, oops big problem, we wrote this whole Willow story arc around her, dang it. Have to change the arc and gut that whole story. In fact the arc may have been considered way before they killed her.(22)

On top of this - we have the problem that the series is on network television not cable and not a movie - this means advertisers, this means censors, this means the network on your ass, and this means ratings. With a movie - it's box office, but you don't have to worry about advertisers or censors or those pesky ratings or fans doing mail-ins for the next episode. You don't have to worry about someone throwing a hissy fit because Spike isn't wearing his leather jacket. (23) In a movie or book - it's done. In TV? You can be forced to change it to accommodate others.

Then there's the whole money factor - each episode of BTVS costs approximately 2.3 million dollars. (24) A third of that goes to the cast, (25) the rest to writers, special effects, crew etc. Movie budgets can be increased as filming goes. TV? Nope. That budget is set in stone during the contract phase. So say you want to hire Amber Benson to do S7 of BTVs and Amber has raised her asking price? You can't do it. You also can't hire this other person you have your eye on. You're stuck. You can't make new deals with the contracted actors, producers, or ask them to lower their price like in a film - their salaries are written in stone. In a movie? You can do all this negotiating. TV - not after you did the initial stuff.

So you have this budget written-in-stone and a cast written-in-stone. No, wait they aren't. Seth Green took off in S4 and he had a contract. Lindsey Crouse also took off. Amber didn't sign a new contract after S6. Emma Caulfield announced she's done after Season 7. And the star, Sarah Michelle Gellar? She's not sure she'll sign for another year. Joss Whedon? He's sick of Btvs, wants to do something new after S7 (26) ...but hey you can continue without him, just not the cast. In a movie - they'd have replaced Whedon, Seth Green and Lindsey Crouse probably would have taken off, filming would stop, or they'd be recast and they'd re-film the scenes, or they'd wait for them to return or they'd sue them. In TV not so easy. Books? You're the writer, you're god, not a problem. And if you decide to call it quits? No one sees the book. Only person who hurts a book by calling it quits is the writer - and you can always hire a new writer - if s/he doesn't own the rights to the characters and story.

So you're a TV writer, you've plotted out your arc - five years complete. But wait, the lead? The network brass doesn't like him. He's not charismatic enough. No chemistry. Too stiff. They want a name to carry it. Or you're cancelled. Dang. Got to do a little re-writing here. (This is what happened to the creator of Bablyon 5).

Or you've decided to do that series - with the vampire with the soul, a half-demon companion and the cheerful cheerleader, only one problem the actor you wanted for the half-demon? He's in jail. So you find another actor. But whoops he has a substance abuse problem...so you re-write and bring in someone new. (This happened to Angel The Series in Season 1).

You can't plot out your entire story ahead of time. Too many movable parts - too many things can go wrong. You have to make it flexible. There is no way Whedon and his writers would have been able to plot all of S7 - they had too many uncertainties. If it had been a book or a movie? No problem. But not a TV series with 22 episodes on a struggling network with financial problems. UPN had major problems last year - they lost money on Buffy just as the WB had before them, the only difference is UPN was paying more and was at the bottom of the network ratings game.(27)

So if you think BTVS was plotted way ahead time? Hate to burst your bubble, but nope. What they did do, was build off of previous episodes. (28)They took elements from Restless and built stories from those elements and themes, so that it appears to the audience that the show was plotted to some extent in advance. Whedon and Fury and others have admitted in assorted interviews that they took elements from S5 and S6 and took the characters emotional arcs from there. (29)They did not figure out S7 or S6 prior to writing S5. Whedon didn't know what he was going to do with Buffy past S5, prior to The Gift. He figured it out after The Gift.
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19 See James Marsters Interview in SFX Aug. 2003 edition, specifically on the play to screen edition of Venetian Heat; Anthony Stewart Head's IGN Interview
20 See Adventures in The Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell, both by William Goldman
21See David Fury Interview on City of Angel website; Joss Whedon Interview with IGN; Tim Minear Interview in SFX December Edition - 2002: the scene where Angel attacks Darla sexually was changed by network brass, as was the scene where Kate pukes in Epiphany.
22 Joss Whedon IGN Interview; Amber Benson Q&A at Moonlight Rising
23 See Tampa Vulkon Q&A with James Marsters at www.morethanspike.com , where Marsters mentions WB freaked over the fact that Fox sold Spike's leather jacket on Ebay. Also fan speculation on www.atpobtvs.com discussion board - archives, that the jacket came back due to network complaints.
24Consoli, John "Moonves to Creatives: Days of Big, Fat Paychecks Are Over" JULY 15, 2001, http://www.mediaweek.com/mediaweek/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1541956;
" Ironically, it was UPN, which Moonves now oversees since both UPN and CBS are under the Viacom umbrella, that prior to Moonves assuming oversight over it, paid more than $2 million per episode to acquire the rights to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, when the WB refused to pick it up for that price." ; See also: Francis, Rob, "News - 23rd April : Buffy Wrestles With Her Future", http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/buffy/news/archive/archive35.shtml: "According to the American press, UPN has agreed to a two-year, 44 episode deal for the series, reportedly paying US$ 2.3 million per episode."
25In articles archived on www.slayage.com in fall 2002, Sarah Michelle Gellar was reported to be pulling in a paycheck of $735,000 per episode, in a recent article in the Dublin Times, Alyson Hannigan admitted to be pulling in $200,000 per episode for Season 6-7.
26See assorted Joss Whedon interviews including IGFN Interview with Joss Whedon in June 2003; salon.com's exit interview with Joss Whedon; NyTimes Interview with Joss Whedon and interviews archived on www.slayer.com and whedonesque.com.
27 See Consoli, John "Moonves to Creatives: Days of Big, Fat Paychecks Are Over" JULY 15, 2001, http://www.mediaweek.com/mediaweek/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1541956 "UPN has lost a sizable amount of money on Buffy, about $1 million per episode by some industry estimates..."; See also: Battaglio, Stephen, "Buffy's Studio Shows Its Fangs", May 14, 2001, http://www.crashdown.com/news/2219.shtml : "The two sides never even got close to a deal. The WB, which lost $ 50 million last year, stopped bidding at $ 1.8 million an episode. (At that amount, insiders say, the network would lose $ 200,000 per show.) Fox wanted $ 2.3 million--and got it from UPN. The network, which is desperate for a hit beyond WWF wrestling and Star Trek spinoffs, bought two seasons' worth of Buffy for more than $ 100 million."
28 Interview with Marti Noxon, CBC 2003: ". So a lot of times people who see this as a grand design, an opera about good and evil. It's just really a slowly evolving thing, and sometimes form follows function." Q&A with Joss Whedon at the Paley Festival, March 30, 2001: "Very specifically in terms of huge -- arcing these things out as far in advance as we can. Some of them are fortuitous acts and as we look back and say, 'Oh you know we had this and it will connect this with this and that.' Eventually, and some of them come from disasters. For example, one that we did on Buffy, 'Lovers Walk,' the episode where Spike came back and Drusilla had left him. Juliet was shooting a movie and they were gonna come back together. They were Spike and Dru and we couldn't get her and we said, 'Well, what if they broke up?' So eventually, as I've said before, the story's telling us what's going to happen. There a symbiosis between what we're doing and what the story's doing to the point where when we come up with something, even if it surprises us we look back and go, "Wow, we've been building towards that and we didn't even know it.' The Xander and Cordelia romance -- a long time on Buffy. The intensity of their arguments had been increasing and increasing and we had not thought about giving them a romance. When we looked back and it was like we had been trying to do it from the second episode. So it really just takes on a life of its own and some of it's planned, some of it isn't. Some of it comes from the trouble but it's like riding the rapids. And we keep going and it all seems to fall together . . . sometimes."
29IGN Interview with Joss Whedon; Jane Espenson Interview with Hercules http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=15587; Sound of The Fury : Interview with David Fury, http://www.cityofangel.com/behindTh...bts3/fury2.html; Drew Goddard Interview with Succubus Club.