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.
TV PILOT BEAT SHEET 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.
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.
TV PILOT BEAT SHEET 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.
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