Television Development

How Hollywood Creates New TV Series

Bob Levy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429013430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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.

A companion website for the book is available here: https://www.tvboblevy.com/

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 directors 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).

The second essential creative element of all development is a writer, a screenwriter. The goal of development is to create and perfect a script. A screenwriter is necessary to transform the idea into dramatic, narrative form, into a script. An idea and a screenwriter are the two basic, essential creative elements of all development.

Warren Littlefield, the Executive Producer of Fargo and The Handmaid’s Tale, defines the TV producer’s fundamental job as “recognizing and protecting vision.”³ The producer identifies a writer with a unique vision for turning a great idea into a series and then helps protect that vision throughout the life of the project. Littlefield’s definition could just as well be applied to the entire process of development.

Additional creative elements of TV development could include a producer, a director and potentially a star. (I’ll explain in a moment why I say “star” rather than “actor.”) Most TV development these days includes producers in addition to writers. It was more common in earlier periods of TV development for projects to include only an idea and a screenwriter, but, more and more often today, producers participate in the development process.

Directors become very important participants in the TV development process once a pilot script is greenlighted to pilot production, but directors in TV don’t commonly participate in script development. For one thing, they’re usually too busy directing episodes or other pilots. Sometimes, however, the most successful, powerful and sought-after TV directors do participate in development. They may have ideas or IP that are personally important to them that they want to shepherd through the development process, or they may have their own production company that develops multiple pilot projects for them to potentially direct. In these cases the director is actually acting as a producer, and he or she may earn an Executive Producer credit along with a Director credit.

Like directors, actors usually only enter TV development once a project has been greenlighted to pilot production, when the casting process commences. Actors are typically reluctant to commit themselves to TV pilots until they can read a finished script and see the character they’re considering playing printed in black and white, and until the director they’re going to be working with has been hired. Most actors enter TV pilots via an extraordinarily competitive process involving multiple rounds of auditions to win a role in a TV pilot, and they consider themselves fortunate to land the job. But the most sought-after actors, the biggest stars who are interested in acting in TV series, can command deals from TV networks that guarantee them big upfront money and, in some cases, the opportunity to have a TV pilot specifically tailored for them. In some cases, a star may tentatively commit to a project at the outset of its development and earn a Producer or Executive Producer credit along with the starring acting role. The star then effectively works as a producer throughout the development phase, often with fulltime producer partners, helping to identify other creative elements and working with the rest of the team to focus and improve the material.

The list of creative elements that are part of TV development can include a director and an actor, but most pilot projects have only an idea and a screenwriter and possibly a producer. There’s another element that’s essential to all Hollywood development – although it’s not really a “creative” element – money. Someone’s got to pay the writer to write the pilot script. The writers that TV networks want to write pilots for them are the most talented and sought-after professional writers, and the most sought-after writers don’t come cheap. In TV development the networks and studios pay the writer to write the pilot script. When people go into a TV network and pitch an idea for a TV show, what the network is actually deciding in most cases is whether to pay the writer to write a pilot script version of that idea. They’re not only paying for the idea that’s being pitched (and if it’s based on IP, they’ll need to pay to license the IP – more on that later), fundamentally they’re paying the screenwriter to write a pilot script. For most TV development, networks and studios together pay anywhere from $50,000 to $750,000 for a writer to write one 35–60-page pilot script. That’s what the network is typically committing to when it “buys” a pitch.

In some cases a writer may write the pilot script on her own before approaching a network, rather than pitch her idea and ask the network to pay her to write it. This is called “spec’ing” a pilot script and the end product is referred to as a “spec pilot script” because it’s based on the speculative effort of the writer. If the spec pilot script is great, though, and networks want to develop it, a network will still have to pay the writer for the finished script, and the script will then enter into the network development process. In most cases the network will likely ask the writer to make changes to the script (the network will “develop” the script further) and will be hands-on during the pilot production phase of the project’s development. In some cases a spec pilot script may result in a “straight-to-series” order, bypassing pilot production. Whether the writer pitches her pilot or specs it and sells it to a network, the development of that script costs money that the network and studio pay.

Interestingly, producers don’t get paid for development. Producers get paid when and if the development phase is successful and the project moves forward to pilot and/or series production. The producer then earns “producing fees.” In the feature film business producers are paid a nominal amount for development, typically $25,000, to develop a feature film script. In TV, producers are paid zero for development. They work hard for months or years without any compensation in the hope that the project will get made and they’ll be compensated for their efforts. The writer is paid handsomely to write the pilot script, but his producing partner works beside him on nothing more than hope and prayer.⁴

The process of assembling the various creative elements of development is known as “packaging.” Putting projects together, marrying an idea with a writer, potentially partnering them with a producer, possibly adding a director and/or a star, figuring out which are the right elements to put together, the right members of the team to marry to the right ideas, is called packaging. The multiple creative elements of a development project are sometimes referred to as “a package.” Producers sometimes put the pieces of a TV development package together. Development executives at networks sometimes put the pieces of a package together. Talent agents sometimes put packages together, usually consisting of their agencies’ various clients. For example, an agent might package a book his agency represents (by dint of representing the author) with a screenwriter the agency represents and possibly add a producer the agency represents for good measure.

Packaging is one of the fundamental arts of development. The goal is to marry creative elements that harmonize, that work together and off each other to make the best possible version of the project. Packaging the wrong creative element can sink a project.

To review: Identifying a great idea and packaging the right creative elements to translate that idea to pilot script form are the first two and most basic activities of TV development. The package can consist of the idea and one person, the screenwriter, or several people.

In the next chapter we’re going to walk through the specific steps of developing a typical pilot script from idea to pitch to script to pilot to series, but before we dive into the details of that process there are a handful of important preambles, a few basic concepts about how the TV industry works today that are essential to understand.

Preamble #1: The Corporate Structure of the TV Industry

In the Hollywood movie business there is one fundamental corporate entity: the movie studio. In the TV business, on the other hand, there are two basic corporate entities: the TV network and the TV studio. Understanding the distinction between what TV networks and TV studios do is essential to understanding the American TV business and essential to understanding how TV development works.⁵

Most of us are familiar with the names of the companies that have long ruled Hollywood, the great old American movie studios like Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures and others. If I’m a screenwriter with an idea for a Hollywood movie, I can get in my car and drive to one of these movie studios, let’s say Warner Bros., which sits on a large studio lot in Burbank, and pitch my movie (I’m making this sound like an effortless and easy thing to do for illustration’s sake, but a pitch meeting is by invitation only and not easy to come by. We’ll discuss later who gets these invitations in the TV business).

I sit down in the office of a Warner Bros. movie exec and pitch my idea. If she buys my idea, she puts it into development at the studio, then I write the movie script with her input, and when the script is finished she presents the script to her boss, the President of Production of Warner Bros. Pictures who decides whether or not to greenlight my movie to production. If the studio’s production president greenlights the movie, then Warner Bros. makes the movie. Executives of the studio oversee physical production. I might shoot some of the movie in Warner Bros.’ soundstages or on one of the faux-facade streets of the Warner Bros. backlot. The studio then oversees post-production of my movie, and possibly makes use of the studio’s edit rooms and scoring stages on their lot. Once the movie is done, the film is turned over to the studio’s marketing and distribution departments, executives of which have consulted on the project from greenlight through production and post-production. Once the Warner Bros. distribution department gets the DCP (digital cinema package) of my movie into the hands of exhibitors, the movie theatre chains, Warner Bros. is finally done with the many steps involved in making my movie.

In reality, most movie studios today involve financial and distribution partners, but the writers and producers typically deal only with executives from one corporate entity, most often the movie studio.

In TV, by contrast, there are typically two corporate entities involved in this series of steps, the TV studio and the TV network.

Most of us are more familiar with TV networks than TV studios, so let’s look at networks first. By “network” I’m referring to any of the nearly 50 channels that distribute high quality, ...