This blog says “cinema” in the title, which famously refers to movies. While I hate to veer off brand in only my second substack issue, I have had TV on the brain lately.
I watch television all the time, so I should know something about it. But whenever I wonder if I should take a crack at a TV pilot script, I gulp audibly and try to instead think of something else as quickly as possible. Statistically speaking though, the overwhelming majority of screenwriting that actually occurs is for television, so I do need to figure something out.
This post is me trying to reverse engineer how great TV is written on a season level. I am going to start by saying some very obvious things, and hopefully build up to less obvious things.
What is Television?
Martin Scorsese won’t like that I’m saying this, but I’ll begin with the premise that there is no FUNDAMENTAL difference between film and TV. They are both made of the same stuff — filmed narrative.
The practical difference is the amount of filmed narrative.
Traditional three act film structure is a product of the typical runtime of movies, which itself is a product of initially: the capacity of film reels, and persistently: the length of time we can reasonably sit in a movie theater. This specific 1.5-3hr length lends itself to one main character movement with clearly delineated changes at roughly set points along that runtime.
There’s no limit to how long a TV show can go. Unless we’re talking about a one-off special, the total amount of filmed narrative is always a lot longer than a movie. This opens the medium up to different structural schemas on a season or even multi-season scale.
The one constraint TV does have is episode format, the two most common being the one hour drama and the half-hour comedy. Streaming has made the exact runtimes within the formats more flexible (you can have a two-hour Stranger Things finale, for example), but they’re still roughly adhered to. What I am interested in is how those chunks of runtime are actually used to build a season-long narrative.
Questions
When I watched the last episode of Severance, I screamed at the TV multiple times, to the probable concern of my neighbors. When I watched the last episode of Derry Girls, I cried in an airport. Safe to say these shows both “worked” for me. So my two big questions are:
How does Severance Season 1 use the medium to BUILD PLOT TENSION?
How does Derry Girls Season 3 use the medium to CONVEY THEME?
Since I am finding these breakdowns are kind of lengthy (sorry), I’ll cover Severance in this post and Derry Girls in a subsequent one.
Spoilers! Please watch Severance.
Severance: A One-Hour Serialized Drama
I didn’t like the first two episodes of Apple TV’s Severance, to the point of rage-drafting a negative review in my head. I didn’t think the show’s split memory conceit was a very cogent allegory for actual labor abuse. I was also vaguely butthurt by the show’s vilification of Modern office design, one of my semi-problematic aesthetic faves.
What Severance IS NOT was distracting me from what Severance IS. It is not a particularly deep show in terms of social commentary. It is not “mind-bending” or “galaxy-brained” (sorry to all of the show’s promotional material). The sci-fi elements are not particularly complex or compelling by themselves.
Severance is just a really good thriller. Allegory aside, the split memory mechanism is the fulcrum of a dead simple but highly effective plot engine.
I want to try to break down Severance’s plot design and figure out why it’s so great at creating tension. To define that concept for the purposes of this discussion:
Narrative tension is the viewer’s state of not knowing what will happen next, but being very invested in the outcome, i.e. Holy shit what’s about to happen???
Plot/Character
The “which is more important, plot or character” question has been debated by writers and critics for literally millennia. Even Aristotle, who was kind of the most prolific blogger of Greek antiquity, had a take on it — he was a big plot-first characters-second guy.
Sorry to Aristotle, but the rough consensus now is that in the ideal case, the character’s journey of change will directly cause the events of the plot. Those events in turn will shape the character’s ultimate endpoint. So you can’t really say that one is more important than the other — they should be tightly interlocked.
For a character to generate plot, they need motivation to act. Some screenwriting teachers will say that well-written characters are all trapped in some way, either by their life circumstances, or mentally, or physically, or emotionally. Their initial motivation is to escape their trap. Usually their initial strategies for escaping will not work, and they will need to change.
Severance has two main characters who are trapped in very different ways, and uses the space of a television season to fully develop both of them. Most thrillers involve an element of investigation as part of the plot. We want to find out what’s going on along with the characters. What Severance achieves with its dual protagonists is essentially two character-driven investigation plots, one from the inside and one from the outside of Lumon, its mysterious evil corporation.
I think this is Severance’s secret sauce. The two lines of investigation are plot levers (term I made up) that allow the writers to crank the tension in a way that you couldn’t do with just one main character, or one central investigation plot.
Let’s look at how this is set up in the pilot.
The Pilot
Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up locked in an empty conference room with no idea of how she got there. A series of questions asked via intercom confirm that she has no memory of the outside world. Mark (Adam Scott), the person on the other end of the intercom, opens the door.
Cut to a few hours prior. Mark is outside, in his parked car, crying. He enters the headquarters of Lumon, a company that does… we don’t know what. When he goes up the elevator to a “severed floor”, he loses all memory of his outside life, essentially becoming a clone of himself for the duration of his workday. His outside self has no knowledge of what goes on inside, either. I’ll refer to the two versions of Mark as “inside Mark” and “outside Mark”.
Mark works in the Macrodata Refinement department along with fellow severed employees Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry). Their ostensible job, sorting numbers by their perceived emotional charge, is certainly weird but not really important to the story. Their department is supervised by an outwardly friendly corporate goon named Milchik (Tramell Tillman), who reports to the outwardly terrifying manager, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette).
Mark’s task for the day is to onboard a new employee, which is Helly. Helly doesn’t want to be there, and tries to escape. We learn that she was hired to fill out the team after the sudden departure of Petey (Yul Vazquez), who was Mark’s best friend at the job.
Helly
Helly’s entrapment is literal, and her desire for freedom is straightforward. She is in a strange place against her will, and she wants to get out. We don’t need any information on her backstory or inner life to understand this.
Importantly, we get the sense that Helly’s resistance in this situation is an anomaly. She has zero patience for the placating corporate patter that has apparently worked on other severed “trainees” inside Lumon. She’s funny and perceptive. We want her to get out of there, really bad. Thanks in large part to Britt Lower’s extremely good performance, we have instant investment in Helly, which is one half of the tension equation.
Helly is allowed to leave the severed floor, but the outside version of herself goes right back inside. She is shown a video of outside Helly consenting to her entrapment. This is the big mystery element of her plot line, and of the entire show — why is Helly’s outside self working against her?
Mark
Meanwhile, outside Mark is experiencing a different kind of entrapment. His wife has recently died. When he’s not at his job, which is effectively an eight-hour blackout, he drinks and watches TV in his Lumon-subsidized apartment, unable to cope with his loss.
Mark has a dark but goofy sense of humor and a warm relationship with his sister Devon (Jen Tullock), even tolerating her incredibly weird husband (Michael Chernus). These traits are crucial to our investment in him even though he’s as passive as Helly is active.
At a dinner party that his sister drags him to, we get a sense of what severance does for Mark. When one of the guests describes it by saying “that version of you is trapped there,” Mark gets defensive without being able to articulate why he disagrees. He can’t admit that severance is a sort of a semi-suicide — it allows him to skip half of his unhappy life.
And the end of the pilot, Petey finds outside Mark. To this version of Mark, he’s a perfect stranger. But Petey has somehow disabled his severance procedure, giving him access to both his inside and outside memories. He confronts Mark with the possibility that his severed job may be, well, fucked up.
Mark is unwilling to believe this. What Petey is saying is a threat to his only relief from his personal hell.
To summarize these character setups: Helly is trapped physically, Mark is trapped emotionally. Helly’s hell (haha) is Mark’s escape. Mark’s hell is where Helly is trying to escape to.
The Episodes
While many serialized shows maintain some level of delineation between their episodes in terms of plot content or even theme, Severance is pretty much a continuum across its nine episodes. I didn’t start my analysis with this assumption, but as I break it down I see Severance as an open-ended mega movie.
I can identify three groupings of episodes. Along with the pilot, these groupings can roughly map to three-act film structure in the following way:
Pilot (Act 1): Setup of the main characters and their entrapment.
Episodes 2-4 (first half of Act 2): The characters’ entrapments deepen. Their initial strategies to escape do not work, which will force them to change.
Episodes 5-7 (second half of Act 2): After a turning point, the characters take action based on how they are changing.
Episodes 8-9 (Act 3): A major action is planned and executed. Payoffs and reveals result from this.
Episodes 2-4: Entrapment
The first set of episodes add detail to both the inside and outside worlds, develop the entrapment of the two main characters further, and introduce complications and obstacles to both of their situations.
In these episodes we see a stark contrast between Mark’s passivity and Helly’s action. Helly is intrinsically motivated. Both versions of Mark needs to be pushed — on the outside by Petey, and on the inside by Helly. In a movie, you’d have to get him to act quickly to get the second act going in under thirty minutes, but a TV show affords the space to create a realistic buildup to him acting on the information he’s receiving.
Much of the office plot is driven by Helly’s inventive but somewhat boneheaded attempts to escape. Inside Mark works against this, trying to get her to instead acclimate to the situation. He does so partially to help her, but more importantly to defend the idea that being in a severed job is good. Even when he finds a contraband map of the office drawn by Petey, he’s resistant to taking any action, instead repeating corporate policy as if he believes it.
Helly pushes back against inside Mark’s attitude, pointing out his betrayal of the one thing that actually mattered to him, his friendship with Petey:
Helly: “You’re more loyal to this place than to your friend”
Mark: “I’m loyal to how it felt around here before you showed up.”
Mark wants everything to go back to normal. He resents that Helly is pushing him to change.
Despite Mark’s best efforts, Helly is caught and punished for her escape attempts. The punishment is the psychological torture that Petey warned outside Mark about — the employee is forced to apologize for their crimes until a machine registers that they genuinely mean it. This is the worst thing that we could imagine happening to Helly. We are invested in her because of her ability to resist, and this punishment is specifically designed to break that down.
Meanwhile, Mark’s passivity is being challenged on the outside as well. When Petey dies as a result of his partial brain re-integration, Mark is drawn to the funeral, unable to completely squelch his curiosity. There he is confronted by Petey’s daughter, who summarizes his problem with a clarity that he lacks in himself:
“You ever think maybe the best way to deal with the situation in your life isn’t to shut your brain off half the time?”
On the inside, the final blow in the assault on Helly’s spirit comes not from her abusive Lumon bosses but from her outside self. When her by-the-books “resignation request” is finally processed, she’s shown a video of outside Helly denying both the request and her humanity.
“I am a person, you are not.”
Her outside self will never let her out. This is the ultimate entrapment, which leads to an ultimate act of desperation.
Helly attempts to kill herself. She is stopped by Mark. This is a turning point on a character level for both of them, and I would argue the structural midpoint for the entire season. Helly realizes that she can’t solve her problem alone, and inside Mark realizes that something is deeply wrong that requires his action.
Episodes 5-7: Changes
In these episodes, the characters change in ways that allow them to fight back against their entrapments. This leads to escalation in opposition. The combating forces set in motion generate suspense-filled moments, which I’ve been terming oh shit moments, because that’s what I said when they happened.
Helly’s suicide attempt causes Mark to finally understand the depth of Lumon’s corruption and its affect on those he cares about. While he’s been the head of the Macrodata Refinement department since the pilot, inside Mark becomes an actual leader.
This change in Mark pulls Helly out of her deep despair following her outer self’s message. Her memories began when she woke up on that table — she has functionally never experienced another person caring about her. Her attempts to escape on her own have failed. She must open herself up to allowing others to help her, and to helping them as well.
Changes occur in more minor characters as well:
Irving meets a man from Optics and Design named Burt (Christopher Walken, that’s all the description you need), sparking an interdepartmental Romeo and Juliet story. This emotional cataclysm will cause Irving to question his religious devotion to the Lumon. Burt’s “retirement,” which is essentially a death, brings him to the terminal point of his arc:
“Let’s burn this place to the ground”.
Dylan, who has less respect for the institution but still lives within its constructed reality, comes to understand along with Irving that Lumon uses a system of mythology and rumors to pit him against fellow employees in other departments. Importantly, Milchik uses a mechanism called the “overtime contingency” to access Dylan’s inside mind outside of work, in the process accidentally revealing to Dylan that he has a son. Dylan physically fights Milichik when he is denied any further knowledge of his outside family.
The inside group is becoming aligned towards a goal — to find out what the company is actually doing and who they are on the outside. As a result, the opposing forces escalate to work against them.
Cobel is a particularly well-designed counter to the protagonists — she works on the severed floor but is herself unsevered. Outside of Lumon, she keeps tabs on Mark by posing as his next door neighbor. This positioning gives her the ability to throw obstacles in the way of both the internal and external investigation plots.
On the inside, Cobel orders the team to be surveilled by Miss Casey, the severed floor’s “wellness counselor”. Security is tightened to work against interdepartmental communication, and Mark is sent to the “break room” for the usual psychological torture.
On the outside, Cobel impersonates a lactation expert in order to gain access to Mark’s sister, who has just had a baby. Oh shit. This is a devious incursion — the sister is Mark’s main emotional support system and the only person he trusts completely, and now she’s liable to be compromised because outside Mark has no idea that Cobel is inside Mark’s boss.
Episode seven gives us an important moment that the show’s high-level design promises — the point where the inside and outside investigation plots intersect.
Outside Mark seeks out the woman who re-integrated Petey’s memory, Reghabi (Karen Aldridge). Finding Reghabi leads to a confrontation with Graner, the Lumon security goon tasked with eliminating her. Oh shit. Reghabi kills Graner, allowing Mark to bring his high-access key card into work. This transfers both information and access to inside Mark and Helly. Again, this event is directly caused by Mark overcoming his passivity. Character → plot.
Outside Mark then has a bit of a drunken breakdown, sabotaging his new relationship with his sister’s doula Alexa (Nikki M. James). In the aftermath of this outburst, Mark re-assembles a photo of his late wife that he had torn up. We recognize the woman in the photo — it’s Miss Casey, the wellness councilor from inside Lumon. Mark’s wife isn’t dead. Oh shit.
This is a purely informational payoff in the sense that it’s not earned by a particular character action — the show could have simply shown us this photo at any point. If used less judiciously, this reveal could have come off as cheap or obvious, but I sure didn’t see it coming (I screamed). It also has an important function — it instantly raises the stakes of Mark’s story. Will he find out that his wife is in fact alive? Will they reunite? This re-upping of investment cranks the tension going into what is basically our third act.
Episodes 8-9: Payoffs
These episodes are all about action, payoffs, and reveals. We’re sprinting towards the answer to our big question — will Mark and Helly be free, or not? But because this is a TV show and we can always have more story, we might not get as definitive an answer as we would with a movie.
Using Graner’s access card along with Dylan’s recent experience, the team is able to put together a plan: Dylan will stay late and trigger the overtime contingency in the security office, which will allow the inside versions Helly, Mark and Irving to become conscious outside of work. Once this happens, they will all attempt to make contact with a trusted person and tell them what happens inside of Lumon.
There are two major outcomes on the line. One is the biggest mystery of the season: who is outside Helly? The other is if outside Mark will be able to find his sister without Cobel stopping him. Cobel is at this point pretty unhinged, so we know she’s capable of doing any kind of damage. This is classic GSO (goals, stakes, obstacles). The goals are clear, the stakes are high, the obstacles are scary. We just gotta play it out. The playing out of this situation constitutes the third act of the mega-movie that is Severance.
We also have a built in time constraint. Because triggering the overtime contingency requires flipping two switches on opposite sides a control panel, (usually a two-man job) Dylan has to physically strain to keep it on. This gives the sequence urgency on a scene level, and fills something as simple as someone being pedantic at a party with tension.
At the moment of the switch, Mark is at his brother in law’s and sister’s house party. Having no context for who anyone is, has to figure out who outside Mark trusts while hiding the fact that he is inside Mark from Cobel.
Cut to Helly. She’s Helena Eagan, the daughter of the Lumon CEO. She’s about to give a speech at a political gala promoting the severance procedure, which she has voluntarily undertaken for publicity purposes. Oh shit.
I don’t remember how much of an actual surprise this reveal was. If it’s obvious, it’s obvious because it makes perfect sense. I don’t think any other explanation would have worked here. It’s also important that this reveal is completely earned by Helly’s and Mark’s actions. A worse version of the show might have just given us this information arbitrarily at the midpoint, or even the end of the pilot.
Inside Mark is able to find his sister and tell her about Lumon. She processes this information in a very normal way, which given the time constraints is not nearly fast enough. Cobel puts together that Mark is inside Mark. She contacts Milchik, telling him to go to the security office and stop Dylan. Knowing that Helly is likely also unsevered, she heads to the Lumon gala. Now we’re really in a race against the clock.
Helly is about to give her scheduled speech. She has to decide whether or not to tell the truth and denounce Lumon. Cobel finds her at this decision point and attempts to dissuade her, telling her that her friends will suffer for it.
Back at his sister’s house, inside Mark finds the picture of his wife.
“She’s alive”
Helly decides.
“Everything they’ve been telling you is a lie”
Finally, Milchik is able to stop Dylan. The overtime contingency switches off.
Credits roll. We’ve been given two majorly satisfying payoffs, but we’re still dying to know what’s going to happen next. How will Helly’s statement be received? Will Mark be able to rescue his wife? What the hell is Lumon actually doing?
With this absolute club banger of a finale, the writers have basically guaranteed themselves a second season. A second season that will have Alia Shawkat in it!
Takeaways
A great way to create compelling TV is to have multiple character arcs driving plot action and affecting each other. Bonus points if these characters are trapped in very different or even opposite ways.
Investment is important. This doesn’t mean making every character uniformly likable (Helly is much more likable than Mark), but you have to make the viewer care about what’s going to happen to the characters.
Mysteries are good, but the answer needs to matter. Ideally, the answer to any mystery will be revealed by character action. Curiosity is good, but motivated curiosity is better.
Keyboard
One last note. I was so obsessed with the vintage Data General terminals featured in the Lumon office that I built myself a replica of the keyboard.
No regrets, praise Kier.