Television Development Read online

  Television Development

  Development is a large and central part of the American TV industry, and yet the details of how it works – who makes development decisions and why, where ideas for new shows come from, even basics like the differences between what TV studios and TV networks do – remain elusive to many.

  In this book, lecturer and acclaimed television producer Bob Levy offers a detailed introduction to television development, the process by which the Hollywood TV industry creates new scripted series. Written both for students and industry professionals, Television Development serves as a comprehensive introduction to all facets of the development process: the terminology, timelines, personnel and industrial processes that take a new TV project from idea to pitch to script to pilot to series. In addition to describing these processes, Levy also examines creative strategies for successful development, and teaches readers how to apply these strategies to their own careers and speak the language of development across all forms of visual storytelling.

  Written by the renowned producer responsible for developing and executive producing Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, Television Development is an essential starting point for students, executives, agents, producers, directors and writers to learn how new series are created. Accompanying online material includes sample pitches, pilot scripts, and other development documents.

  Bob Levy has worked in television for more than 30 years and has been practicing development at the highest levels of the television industry for 25 years. He is best known for developing and executive producing the hit shows Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars. He also currently serves as a lecturer at UCLA, teaching TV development in the Producers Program of their graduate film school.

  Television Development

  How Hollywood Creates New TV Series

  Bob Levy

  First published 2019

  by Routledge

  52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  and by Routledge

  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

  © 2019 Bob Levy

  The right of Bob Levy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Levy, Bob (Producer), author.

  Title: Television development : how Hollywood creates new TV series / Bob Levy.

  Description: New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018047080| ISBN 9781138584228 (hardback) |ISBN 9781138584235 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429506147 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Television series--Production and direction--United States. Television--Production and direction--United States.

  Classification: LCC PN1992.8.S4 L48 2019 | DDC 791.4502/32--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047080

  ISBN: 978-1-138-58422-8 (hbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-138-58423-5 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-0-429-50614-7 (ebk)

  Visit the [eResources]: www.routledge.com/9781138584235

  To my students,

  who have taught me much

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Development and the Structure of the Hollywood TV Industry

  2 The Industrial Process of TV Development

  3 Format, Genre and Concept

  4 What Make Series Go: “Story Engines,” “Franchises” and “Series Drives”

  5 Concept Ideation, “Areas” and “Takes”

  6 Assessing the Marketplace

  7 Pitching New Pilots and Series

  8 Developing the Pilot Script

  9 Packaging and Politics: The Role of Agents in TV Development

  10 Other Development Strategies

  11 Case Study: The Tortuous Five-Year Development of One Hit Show

  12 The Culture of TV Development

  13 Preparing for Careers in TV Development

  14 Applying TV Development Strategies to Other Forms of Filmed Storytelling

  15 What’s Next? TV Development in the Age of Media Disruption

  Appendix: Glossary of TV Development Terminology

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Introduction

  When I moved to Los Angeles 30 years ago I arrived with little more than a vague Hollywood dream. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do; I only knew that I loved TV and movies and wanted to see if I could find a career in entertainment.

  I’d heard of “development,” but I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. I knew that people at movie studios and TV networks heard pitches and decided which ones to say yes and no to, and that people at those companies gave writers “notes,” which I understood were some kind of creative feedback, suggestions for changes to the scripts. But I didn’t know what kinds of notes they gave.

  Nearly five years after arriving in LA I stumbled my way into becoming a development executive at NBC (it’s a long story), and when I began the job I actually didn’t know much more about development than the little I knew when I first arrived. Suffice to say, I experienced a steep and painful learning curve. There were no books about TV development. There wasn’t much of an internet then, let alone websites, blogs and podcasts offering charts and lists and factoids about TV shows and movies in development. I learned how to do TV development on the job, and I was lucky to work with smart, talented and mostly patient people who unwittingly served as my film school.

  As a network development executive for the next six years I bought some bad pilots, I probably gave some terrible notes, and yet I learned and survived, riding the wave of NBC’s 1990s “Must-See TV” era (or, as I like to refer to it, the Last Great Network Heyday). After my run at NBC I stumbled into becoming a producer (also a long story), where I encountered another steep learning curve on the producing side of TV development. Again, I was lucky to work with extraordinarily smart and talented writers, directors, producers, actors, agents and executives with whom I developed and produced Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars (among other less successful TV shows and movies).

  Looking back, I’d estimate that it took me two to three years to learn how to be a network development executive and another five years to learn how to be a producer, a job I continue to keep learning more about 18 years later.

  My hope in writing this book is to provide readers with many of the basics of TV development and to spare them some of the pain of the steep learning curve I went through.

  Like many others, I arrived in LA steeped in a mythology of Hollywood that did not serve me well. Hollywood has been the world’s myth-maker for more than 100 years, and the most powerful of Hollywood’s myths is the myth of Hollywood itself: a land of glamour, romance and magic. Students of entertainment and aspiring Hollywood professionals must cut through the myth and focus their studies on the realities, the industrial processes that Hollywood actually employs. The first step in my own fumbling learning curve was disabusing myself of the myth and opening my eyes to the realities. A good place for students of television to begin is to learn how new series are
created.

  Readers with a healthy dose of skepticism might wonder if this book won’t be moot by the time they finish reading it, if the massive disruption we’re seeing in the TV business today isn’t changing the processes of development so quickly that a textbook can’t keep up with them. The distribution of TV is being disrupted, but the development of TV isn’t. With some notable exceptions (which I’ll point out throughout the book), most TV development is practiced the same way it has been practiced for decades. The fact that the people hired to oversee scripted series development at Facebook, Apple, Hulu and YouTube are Hollywood broadcast and cable TV development veterans is evidence of this reality.

  Development is a large and powerful part of the American TV industry, and yet the details of how it works – who makes development decisions and why, where ideas for new shows come from, even basics like the differences between what TV studios and TV networks do – remain elusive to many students of television.

  Television development starts with an idea that becomes a script and, when it’s successful, it becomes a series. The steps of that process haven’t changed very much since before I arrived in Hollywood. I’ve been lucky to absorb many of the lessons of Hollywood TV development over the last 25 years, I’ve had the privilege to query numerous industry colleagues about their experiences and perspective working on this book, and I’m excited to share what I’ve seen and learned with the next generation.

  This book is designed with several goals in mind. The first priority is to describe the processes, personnel, timelines and terminology of TV development, i.e., the facts of the TV development process. Second, I’ll try to provide some historical context. There are many excellent books and much serious scholarship on broadcasting history, and this book can’t hope to tell that story in nearly as much detail or with nearly as much academic rigor, but because so many of the basic concepts of TV development date back to the beginning of TV (and before), I’ll attempt to offer readers enough TV history to appreciate the context of those concepts. Much of TV development is about looking at what’s worked and figuring out how to reinvent it for a new audience. Much of “what’s worked” has deep roots in the 70-year history of TV. Third, the book will analyze some of the creative strategies of successful TV development. Why does some development work and some doesn’t? Why do some pitches sell and some don’t? Fourth, the book will describe the culture of the TV business in Hollywood. Every industry has a unique culture – the TV industry in Los Angeles is “unique,” to say the least. Understanding Hollywood’s culture and all its cues and conventions is essential to thriving in an industry as highly competitive as this one. Next, the book will offer practical career advice to people aspiring to work in TV development. The paths that lead to careers in Hollywood, especially careers in TV development, can appear veiled in secrecy, and I’ll try to demystify them. Lastly, I’ll look for ways in which lessons of Hollywood TV development can be applied outside Hollywood, in marketing, advertising, in the rapidly growing world of “non-Hollywood” entertainment and in other related fields.

  The myths of Hollywood are to be treasured, but if the 30 years I’ve spent here are any indication, the reality is pretty amazing too. The hope of this book is to pull back the curtain and reveal the actual processes Hollywood uses to develop new TV shows. They might not be especially glamorous, but they’re as fun, exciting and often as creatively satisfying as the best of Hollywood’s myths.

  Bob Levy

  Los Angeles

  1

  Development and the Structure of the Hollywood TV Industry

  The word “development” means different things in different industries and in different contexts. In the Hollywood entertainment industry the term refers to one thing: the process of creating new movies and TV series.

  Every TV series you’ve ever seen has gone through some kind of development process. Every writer, producer and aspiring network mogul who dreams of creating her own hit show will – if she’s lucky – navigate her way through the tortuous development process.

  Development is the process of originating and improving scripted material to serve as a blueprint for a TV pilot, series or feature film. It’s primarily about creating that blueprint, a process that hones an idea, expands the idea into dramatic script form, improves – that is to say, “develops” – that script, and ultimately presents a company that has greenlight money and power (typically the company that paid for its development) with a detailed and polished blueprint to use to consider deepening its financial investment by putting the project into actual production. If the company’s senior managers greenlight the project, the script they approved serves as the blueprint that an army of artists, craftspeople, technicians, managers, laborers and assistants follow to make a pilot, series or movie.

  Development is the key that unlocks the door to making Hollywood dreams come true.

  Nothing in Hollywood is cheap, but, relative to the costs of production, development is inexpensive. Developing a script requires only a small handful of people for one thing, rather than an army. The TV network and movie studio chiefs who greenlight shows and movies want polished templates to evaluate before committing extraordinary amounts of money to hire the army and produce a TV series or feature film. Networks and studios employ small teams of people, “development executives,” to oversee the development of TV pilot and movie scripts, and who typically follow a standardized process for developing those scripts.

  In the movie business development doesn’t include production. The development phase of a movie ends when the production phase begins. (Production, of course, is preceded by pre-production or “prep,” which is considered part of the production phase, not the development phase.) Movie development, therefore, is a strictly two-dimensional process. It doesn’t involve lights, cameras, locations or actors. It focuses on ideas and words on paper (or computer screens).

  Television development, on the other hand, does involve production because in television the development phase often includes the production of a pilot episode, the test episode that’s typically produced to determine if the much greater expense of ordering a series is worthwhile. Once a project is ordered to series the development phase is over.

  Most projects in television development never make it to pilot, though. At the legacy broadcast networks the ratio is about 10:1. Only about 10% of pilot scripts get ordered to production. The success rate for development at Hollywood movie studios is comparable. Most movie scripts never get made. Like most pilot scripts, they die in development. Graham Yost, creator and Executive Producer of Justified, calls this “the Pyramid of Death.”1 Another way of saying this is that the stuff we see, the movies and series that get produced and distributed, is the tip of the Hollywood iceberg. For the people in Hollywood who work with ideas and scripts, development is the rest of the iceberg.

  Expanding the Definition of Development

  While TV development does include the production of pilots, the great bulk of development is about working with “material,” ideas, pitches, story treatments, scripts, series bibles and the intellectual property (“IP,” i.e., books, plays, comic books) that a lot of TV is based on. Production is a “dirty fingernail” part of the entertainment industry: it takes place on soundstages, backlots and locations. It involves physical crafts like cinematography, sound recording and acting. It usually involves extremely long hours that vary from day to day and often a fair amount of physical discomfort (production on location is usually too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry). Development, on the other hand, is more of an “office job,” one that’s conducted in the business-casual environment of comfortable, temperature-controlled offices in LA during business hours (which typically run from around 10am to 7pm, and often begin after a business breakfast, include a break for a business lunch and are followed by a business drinks meeting and/or business dinner).

  When we think of Hollywood most of us tend to think of production. We have a pretty good idea of what d
irectors and actors and writers do, and we see their names in movie and TV show credits. But development is a huge part of the Hollywood entertainment business and employs thousands of workers whose names most of us never hear.

  The first definition of development we offered above involved creating the blueprint – the movie or TV pilot script. A second definition of development is: the process of identifying commercial ideas and concepts and assembling the creative elements that turn those ideas into finished filmed entertainment.

  What makes a good idea for a TV show or movie and who gets to decide? Identifying commercial ideas for movies and TV shows is an important part of development, and it’s one of the responsibilities of development executives. When people walk into TV networks and pitch their ideas for new shows, network development executives get to decide if they think it’s a good (or commercial) idea or not. Karey Burke, the President of ABC Entertainment, defines the qualities of a good TV development executive:

  Curiosity. Being a good listener. Loving television. Being a student of it. Loving writing, and being a student of writing. Understanding collaboration. Understanding you’re not the writer. Being able to lift somebody else up. Figuring out how to get the best work out of them, and then trying to guide that.2

  We’ll talk later in this chapter and throughout this book about exactly who development executives are and what informs their decisions and their tastes.

  In addition to identifying great commercial ideas, another facet of development is figuring out the right creative elements that turn ideas into finished movie and TV pilot scripts. What do I mean by the “creative elements” of development? The first and most fundamental creative element of any development is the idea itself. An idea for a TV show or movie can be an original idea that springs from the mind of a screenwriter or a producer or other development participant, or it can come from existing IP like a book, play, comic book, video game, podcast or Twitter feed (yes, CBS developed and aired a series in 2010 called $#*! My Dad Says based on a Twitter feed).