Screenwriting Lessons from the Golden Age of TV

“This is the new golden age of television,” my friend Steve said, back when we were right in the middle of it. I debated him on that declaration, citing the 1950s as the only golden age of television that mattered: Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, et al.

But dang. It was hard to argue with his point when you looked at all the shows we had:

Homeland, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, True Blood, Californication, Dexter, Mad Men, Carnivale, Deadwood, Rome even…

…any one episode of those great cable series would clobber most entire series of shows that came before it, which, to be fair, were mostly bland, mostly insanely episodic, and mostly on the safe, highly-sanitized platform of network television.

But those shows weren’t just good; they were great. And there was a ton of them. I pitied the fool without HBO, basic cable, or at least a good BitTorrent client.

So as screenwriters, if we wanted in on that golden age of long-form storytelling – if we wanted to land a gig writing for those amazing shows, or for the next amazing show, or even for our own feature films, we had to understand what about the screenwriting made those shows work.

So what was so great about all those shows? Let’s dig in. First of all:

The Walking Dead isn’t about the zombies

AMC’s The Walking Dead, for those of you living in caves at the time, was about a zombie apocalypse. But wait, let me back up.

Because it wasn’t about a zombie apocalypse.

It was about a group of human survivors banding together and fighting to stay alive. Yes, fighting zombies, but more importantly: fighting themselves.

The zombies were never far, and always menacing, and always in huge numbers, but the real struggles were stuff like: Did my wife cheat on me? Do we need to become brutal to stay alive, or can we hang on to our humanity? Should I lock my zombie daughter in the barn in hopes of a cure?

Why The Walking Dead was such a huge success was because it placed real characters into a very unreal situation, and didn’t let the unreal situation become the star.

Homeland‘s villain(s) are people you can actually empathize with

(SPOILER ALERT)

On Showtime’s Homeland, the CIA was hunting a ruthless terrorist named Abu Nazir, who we lumped into the mix with our own 9/11 baggage: Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, etc. And it was a heady brew of baggage, if you were like me or anyone else who’d had their eyes open during that insane decade.

But where the series 24 often portrayed its heavy terrorists as one-sided monsters, Homeland‘s writers took a different tack with their villain, Al-Nassir, by giving him reasons for doing what he was doing.

Not rub-my-hands-evilly-and-threaten-to-destroy-the-world reasons like every other villain out there, but believable reasons; reasons we found ourselves understanding, if only a little.

But the greatest trick those writers pulled off?

Making us sympathize with arguably the true villain, Brody.

What started as a “Hey, look over here. This guy Abu Nazir’s the bad guy,” gradually turned into “Oh sh*t, Brody’s gonna go through with this,” transforming him into the main villain before our eyes while at the same time making us feel for Brody, despite his terrorist intentions.

And how did they do that?

(SPOILER ALERT)

By having Brody grow close to Abu Nazir’s son, then blowing the kid up in a US drone strike.

We liked that kid. We were pissed he got blowed up.

Therefore, we could understand, a little, why Brody was doing what he was doing.

The Sopranos characters go to Baja Fresh

HBO’s The Sopranos, which ended with much controversy and discussion over how things were left, was a case study in letting the screenplay utilize the long-form, series format so we could really get to know the characters and the space they occupied.

In a two-hour film, we’re lucky to understand just the bare bones of a strong protagonist: he wants X, because of Y, and he’s a good person because of Z.

But with 86 episodes over the course of six seasons, not only did you get to know the protagonist, you got to know him intimately, which, while quite common in comics, serials, and literature, was a very rare thing in filmed entertainment.

What’s more, The Sopranos kept it real.

And sometimes, or indeed most of the time, real is very slow, and often meandering from plotline to plotline.

The makers of the show certainly had the option of packing each of the 86 episodes with over-the-top mob violence, but they chose not to. Because the way they made us connect with Tony and the rest of the gang was by keeping them in our world.

And humans love a good story, but it has to be reachable.

“Hey, you want me to go get some Bah-Jah Frech?” Pauly Walnuts asked at some point. Give us the mob hits and you’ve got a show. Give us the mob hits and the Baja Fresh, and we were putty in their hands, because it was then our world, our real world, we were looking at. And we humans loved it more because we connected.

Boardwalk Empire’s boring 10-year-old vs. Al Capone

While it’s okay to meander like The Sopranos, sometimes you need to know when to wrap it up.

On HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) runs a 1920s prohibition racket, jam-packed with real-life characters such as Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano.

So why in the hell was I spending 10 minutes out of an episode watching Nucky’s adopted 10-year-old kid obsess over his pyromania? Or his estranged wife stealthily ordering diaphragms from her doctor pal?

Not all who wander are lost, but for all that Boardwalk Empire did right in taking advantage of the long-form storytelling paradigm, it went terribly wrong at times by focusing on pyro kids when it had such rich, awesome characters as the cutthroat bootlegger Chalky White and the self-asphyxiating psychopath gangster Gyp Rosetti.

When an audience watches your show, within the first one or two episodes, you’re extending your hand to them, in a deal.

You’re saying “Here’s what my show is about. Here are the core characters; here’s why you should be interested in them.”

In theater, and in filmed entertainment, there’s a dramatic concept called “using the space.” That is, taking advantage of the theater you’re in, or the location you’re at.

In long-form storytelling, the audience is entrusting you to use that space wisely. Meander if it helps your story connect with the audience, but meander too much from that initial handshake you made with your audience, and you’re sunk.

One show that put a lot of these lessons to the test, for better and for worse, was AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire.

Screenwriting Lessons from Halt and Catch Fire

If I were an executive over at AMC, I’d be a little nervous. What, with Mad Men and Breaking Bad all wrapping up, and to mention the producers of The Walking Dead talking about moving the show more towards a Cop Rock vibe and all. ( KEED)

It’s a general truism for we in the screenwriting class (or at least, true enough) that nervous suits with greenlight powers often make bad, bad decisions, badly, but I can personally assure you that AMC’s show Halt and Catch Fire wasn’t one of them. From a screenwriterly angle especially.

It’s set in the early 1980’s, and follows a handful of computer engineers, programmers, and salesmen, in their quest to release a game-changing personal computer before giants like IBM can snuff them out.

That sound I heard wasn’t my hard drive stuttering; it was my computer club kid heart skipping a beat.

I was 8 episodes in (and digging it. Mostly) so if you were gonna watch it, you might’ve wanted to skip my post below, as it was sure to contain a bunch of SPOILERS, or mildly spoiling elements.

If you were caught up with the show, slap a quarter on my Donkey Kong, and let me give you my two cents on where it went right, and where it went wrong, from a screenwriting angle.

First, the good stuff, AKA elements of the OS that were user-friendly, AKA the good screenwriting learned from the show:

Good screenwriters are good students and observers

First off, one of Halt’s many strengths was its incredibly accurate portrayal of that burgeoning PC era, no easy feat for any screenwriter of any era. The writers on that show? They had all the terminology right, all the dialogue, all the engineering. I could verify that, for what it’s worth. (A little after the show’s then-current episode took place, I was getting into my first Atari 800XL, and I can assure you, the lingo and the concerns facing the engineers on the show connected at a solid, glorious 300 baud.)

And it wasn’t just the tech they got right. They got the 80s right, (as well as they could with what was presumably a limited, first-season budget).

And I’m not talking about art direction; I’m talking about writing a Speak-and-Spell into the show, Cabbage Patch Kids, people referring to cell phones as “carphone thingies,” and attitudes towards women in the workplace (Mad Men showed it well, but who knew sexism continued into the 80’s!?) (Please read my sarcasm there.)

Further adding to the realistic backdrop of the show was its use of real companies, like IBM, Texas Instruments, Commodore, Microsoft, and names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the like.

The show’s writing simply nailed the era, and nailed that “early PC” space. Details, my writer pals. Details turn the written page, and so too the world.

Compelling characters make choices

Joe MacMillan, played by Lee Pace, is a character that sets the entire series in motion with a big, bold choice: He backs the company into a corner and plays them like a fiddle.

The next day, they have no choice but to ditch their entrenched, corporate ways and step forward into an unknown market.

Gordon Clark, played by Scoot McNairy the engineer he convinces to build the prototype, steps up to the plate, even having suffered his a big personal failure just a few years previous when he tried to build and market his own cutting-edge computer.

Cameron Howe, played by Mackenzie Davis, drops out of college to pursue the idea of building a computer that will revolutionize everything.

These three characters’ choices set the series in motion, and their subsequent choices were often equally as bold. While, yes, there were a few mealy-mouthed/domestic/who-cares? moments, for the most part, these characters were strong, because they chose.

And the series, like Mad Men, was strongest when it kept its characters in a tight orbit around the workplace.

The best characters need something from other characters As a result of their choices, these three are unified towards a single task, despite serious conflict between/amongst them.

Joe needs Cameron to write the software, but wants to keep her at a distance romantically. Cameron wants Joe romantically, but can’t articulate it in terms the cold, manipulative Joe can relate to, so ends up blustering/coding herself away from him, but they both ultimately seem to need each others’ company in an off-kilter way.

Gordon the engineer needs this project to succeed as a way to purge his failure demons from the previous project, and prove to his wife, kids, and wife’s family that he can put something beautiful and practical into the world.

And he needs Joe to shake open doors and grease the palms, but what’s great is, for the most part, he can’t stand the way he does it.

The three characters reside in a finely-crafted web of desire and dependence, which only heightens the conflict gives us three interesting peeps to track. And that comes in handy when any one of the characters goes off on a not-so-good screenwriting tangent (such as the ones described below).

Strong, smart female characters make strong, smart shows

Finally, Halt and Catch Fire didn’t shy away from the female contribution to the 1980’s nascent PC market, which was (and for a long time after remained) an infamously male-dominated, chauvinist space.

Gordon’s wife Donna Clark, played by Kerry Bishé, saved the day in a big way, several times over, with a deep and wide computer engineering skillset usually reserved in cinema for the faux-nerdy guy or the condescending male uber-genius with an ironic t-shirt draped over his rolls of fat, sucking on a 2-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper.

And of course Cameron herself was portrayed as a coding auteur; the best in her field, and a visionary, if perhaps not quite knowing how to articulate that vision.

Wow! Complex female characters who made choices and drove the action forward. The show was a must-watch for that reason alone.

And now, the bugs in the code. Not major, but could sure use some reprogramming. Here’s some cautionary screenwriting lessons learned from Halt and Catch Fire:

Backstories tend to be less entertaining than “front” stories

Woe is me. Joe, our Jobs/PT Barnum main character, has scars. Turns out, it’s because his mom pushed him off a roof when she was on drugs. Or encouraged him to fly. Or something. And now Dad works for IBM. And Dad got Joe a job at IBM, but Joe had some sort of crazed meltdown and smashed up a server room. Again with the “or something.”

And Cameron’s dad, get this, was killed in Vietnam, and she didn’t wanna talk about it.

A huge writing mistake: characters whose backstories seem more interesting than their frontstories.

At the time, I’d have bet five bucks that the next season (if there was one) would open with a flashback, showing Joe smash up that IBM server room a few years earlier.

But I honestly hoped they’d skip that entirely, because the story Joe was in at the time was so utterly amazing and fantastic and involving that there simply wouldn’t be time to show the backstory, which really didn’t matter anyway.

Bottom line: a cheap way of giving your character depth is to give them an ambiguous backstory and have them “Not wanna talk about it.” But seriously, who in real life ever brings up a painful backstory and doesn’t want to talk about it?

Characters tend to be more compelling when they don’t have a safety net

The stakes of nearly every Halt and Catch Fire script were pretty clear – the team needed to get the PC to market before the company ran out of money and the characters imploded from all the building conflict they’d been nurturing.

But when it came to the stakes of two of the main characters, there was a lot to be desired, and at the time I hoped they’d improve on that in the next season.

Take Joe MacMillan. He was the visionary sales guy greasing the palms and making all the right corporate moves. But while his exploits were super 80s and fun to watch, we were told and shown pretty early in the series that his estranged dad was a big muckety-muck at IBM, and was loaded.

Oh, and wanted desperately to be back in touch with his son.

That left us with the uncanny sense that if Joe failed, he’d, uh, got dad and IBM to fall back on. His dad even offered him a new position at IBM in one of the later episodes.

If Joe could fail and still land on his feet, those aren’t stakes.

Similarly, Gordon’s wife Donna was on the verge of leaving him. But when the darkest of the 8-bit shite hit the fan… aw shucks, she stood by her man.

Without more severe consequences, these characters’ travails often came of as first world problems, especially so when set against the backdrop of the nascent PC industry.

Watch out for dumb script notes from studio executives

And how ’bout these lines of code that could use debugging?

– Cameron stealing car keys and house keys over an insult reported by a kid, then breaking and entering into a house with a can of spray paint, bent on revenge?

– John leaning on his good ole boy connections to have Joe beat to a pulp by the local sheriff?

Me, I couldn’t help but think these were the results of some new, hack executive blood that AMC had recruited to shepherd the show. You could almost hear the hacky-poo-poo notes making the show’s writers cringe:

“Have John sic the sheriff on Joe and beat the crap out of him. Good for the trailer. They’ll Tweet about it and that’s what we need.

Oh, and show how edgy Cameron is by having her break into Gordon’s house with a can of spray paint. But she doesn’t use it. Aces!”

If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s don’t chase sexy notes in the name of sexing up your show! Or, (and I’m giving these folks the benefit of the doubt and assuming these Microsoft Windows blue-screen-of-death script moments weren’t the result of bad executive notes), at the very least don’t try to arbitrarily sex up your show.

If you want to sex it up, do it organically. Give us a set up for Joe’s amorous encounter with the bearded butler that lets us buy it more, rather than just going for a first season shockaroo for shockaroo’s sake.

Paint the need more clearly for John to have Joe beat up by the sheriff, rather than just ratcheting up the heat with the big boss, Cardiff, and then assuming we’ll make the connection.

Character relationships are better when they grow naturally

Don’t get me wrong. I loved the character of John Bosworth (played by Toby Huss) as the firebrand Texas gladhander from the old school, and I loved how he resisted, severely, the notion of shifting the business towards the PC market and the future, and then ended up growing to embrace it.

But one scene between him and Cameron and a couple of drinks (even with the hacking/embezzling/sacrifice development later) didn’t add up, for me, to Cameron making a stop at his house, let alone crying and hugging the sonofabitch on their way to Comdex.

The beauty of a TV series is its time. It’s not a two hour film, so you can take the time to build great characters. Granted, the show probably wasn’t given carte blanche and had to do a lot of heavy lifting, fast, in order to prove to the suits that it could find an audience.

But don’t forget: the reason we get hooked to these shows to begin with is not whether or not they get along, or not whether they can make us cry tears of joy (HBO’s The Newsroom excepted, as it was in its own bizarre category), but whether or not we find their relationship interesting.

All in all, I was digging that show, mostly. I remember thinking that if they could just make some of those clunky, Windows-esque bug fixes, I’d have bet my copy of Zork that the little show would find its way, Macintosh style, into screenwriters’ hearts.

A few years after Halt and Catch Fire wrapped, Netflix’s GLOW offered its own set of lessons.

Screenwriting Lessons From GLOW

Like all good shows, the Netflix show GLOW had a lot to teach tv writers (and screenwriters), aside from being a solid, fun series with a lot of heart. It was loosely based on the true-life 1980s wrestling tv phenomenon, The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling – a rogue’s gallery of fierce, colorful badgirls who put a unique female spin on the egregiously popular faux-but-fun sport of professional wrestling.

I binged the first season of GLOW one weekend and, despite a few hiccups, I couldn’t help but keep clicking on the next episode. Me fancying myself a writer, I took away some key writerly observations that I’d like to foist on you now.

Leave room for the actors to bring their own thing

Marc Maron – veteran stand-up comic, host of arguably one of the era’s most popular podcasts, WTF, and fellow LA eastsider – played Sam Sylvia, the low-budget director anointed to assemble the team of lady gladiators and bring the TV show to life.

If you’d ever seen IFC’s Maron, or tuned into Maron’s podcast, or caught one of his comedy specials, you’d immediately notice one key thing:

His persona and his comic identity were all about authenticity and intelligence. The bit, the scene, the conversation – he visibly did everything within his power to keep things believable, and keep the comedy coming from a real place – namely, his real-life anxiety, real-life pessimism, and his real-life self-perceived shortcomings as a human.

As a result, there were a slew of great moments in GLOW when Maron’s salty, self-destructive filmmaker-as-artist character absolutely smashed through stiff scripted scenes that could often feel like an Ikea table’s instruction manual.

That’s not to say GLOW’s writing was bad. It wasn’t. It’s just that Maron seemed to have an uncanny consistency, in nearly every episode of Maron, and now this new GLOW tv show, with keeping his head above the screenplay, and making his moments authentic, even when his co-stars Alison Brie (Mad Men) and Betty Gilpin (Nurse Jackie), who had oodles more acting chops, ran circles around him in a given scene.

The authenticity of Maron doing what he did in response was extremely fun to watch. I used to say that when I went to see a band: I wasn’t there for the studio album, I was there to see them fuck up. I was there to see the humanity. The seams, not the perfection. Marc Maron is/was those seams, personified.

The writers and directors of GLOW recognized what Maron brought, and they gave it space and let it do its thing. It’s not something you can write, necessarily, but it’s something to keep in mind when writing: leave room for a Marc Maron.

Leave room for casting. Leave room for the personalities coming aboard a project to inspire the character, or the show, beyond what you thought was possible.

GLOW gets the 1980s right, on page and on screen

Around that same time, I’d tuned in to Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here. Turned it off within 5 minutes because they didn’t nail the 1970s. Close, but no cigar.

And I’d finally given up on Halt and Catch Fire. They. Just. Couldn’t. Get the details of the 1980s right.

Stuff like that took away a lot. For me at least. I lived the 1980s. They didn’t have head-to-head online first-person shooter games in 1985. I’m sorry. They just didn’t.

GLOW, on the other hand, got almost everything right. From the look of the film grain, to the music cues, to the puffy shoulders and makeup, to the box of Corn Chex cereal on the fridge, straight from my childhood.

A lot of those shiny stars I’m affixing are the result of good, non-sleepy art direction, or, naturally, it could be the byproduct of producers and directors paying actual attention to the production design (or hiring a good production designer), but really, when you think about it, you kinda have to admit: it all starts with the writer.

If the writer isn’t concerned with getting the period right, with regards to characters, situations, places, and voice, why would a smart director or producer want to be a part of the project?

It’s hard to have 14 interesting characters on one 30-minute show

All of the ladies on the show turned in fun performances, and strutted and fretted with much heart. But whenever there was a stiff scene or a line that didn’t quite ring as true, I couldn’t help but think that the reason could be traced back to the show requiring a very specific type of actor to fill these roles:

Female actor with acting chops, of a specific age range, of a specific ethnicity in order to balance (quite appropriately, in my opinion) the color palette of the show, who could also, get this, wrestle. (Or at least be willing to train and take on a very physically-demanding role.)

None of these wonderful actors should be faulted for delivering an occasional stiff line (and in fact, none of my nitpicks took away from the show’s charm), but the takeaway for me was that when writing something as specific as a cast of female wrestlers, in a period piece, with a very specific set of demands (rightly so) on background and ethnicity, a writer simply needs to work harder to make each character’s lines more distinct and more memorable.

Too many times there were moments where the girls’ lines, frankly, seemed completely interchangeable. So much work was put into casting them uniquely, but not enough work, in my reckoning, was put into the page towards making them sound different from one another.

As a result, we were left with an overall feeling of that aforementioned charm, but we weren’t holding on to many memorable moments.

And that wasn’t simply good enough for a show helmed by women, starring mostly women, in what was at the time an increasingly tenuous period for women. Please don’t get me wrong. The cast and crew of GLOW shouldn’t be laden with the burden of being the torchbearers for all the diverse voices of women in film and tv. Not by a long shot. And in fact, the show did a great job undergirding the reality that women are strong and self-empowering (even while placed against the backdrop of Reagan’s America in 1985).

At the time, with Season 2 already announced, I had a request for the showrunners of the new GLOW tv show:

Use Carmen Wade’s (Britney Young) story with her family not approving of joining the show, Sheila The She-Wolf’s (Gayle Rankin) identity and space and trust issues, and Justine’s (Britt Baron) unique relationship with one of the other characters (Shh!) as the templates for how to approach Season 2.

Weave them into Ruth and Debby and Sam’s stories more. Go richer and deeper. The external stuff is easy and will always be there.

I get it though. It’s hard to devote page and screen time to 14+ characters in a 30-minute show. My longing for more performance and details and screen time with these great non-lead actors of GLOW isn’t so much a critique as much as it’s an admonition to writers:

If you’re writing interesting characters, sometimes leaving us wanting more isn’t the best way to do it. Sometimes giving us more is.

Not every lesson from that era came from antihero dramas or wrestling comedies, though. Some of the sharpest screenwriting lessons came from the least cynical show on television at the time: Downton Abbey.

Screenwriting lessons from Downton Abbey

If you were a cynical screenwriter, like me, it wasn’t merely recommended that you watch all 3 seasons (at the time) of PBS’ post-Edwardian period drama, Downton Abbey…

…it was utterly essential.

Especially in what felt, at the time, like an over-sexed, over-crimed, lowest-common-denominator TV viewing environment.

(This article doesn’t give away any plot points or spoilers, so don’t worry.)

Downton Abbey starts in the post-Edwardian era in rural England, (right around the time of the sinking of the Titanic) and follows the ups, downs, dinner suits, and soup spoons of an English aristocrat and his family, and the servants who work for them.

Sounds boring, right? A stiff shirt of a show. A fluffy, false tea party we’ve seen a million times in the form of Brideshead Revisited, Upstairs/Downstairs, or even films like Gosford Park, right?

Sure. To the cynical screenwriter.

It certainly looked to me, on the surface, like something I very, very much did not want to watch.

But remember that scene in James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989), where the character is submerged in that gooey purple oxygenated gel, and told to breathe it in, because it was the only thing that would allow them to breathe and to prevent their lungs from imploding at such deep sea depths?

And the guy was telling the character: trust me?

Well, trust me. That oxygenated gel was Downton Abbey.

Here are a few things screenwriters can learn from putting down their cynical goggles and picking up a typical Downton Abbey script.

Audiences occasionally need a break from cops, vampires, and reality shows

How many Ikea bowls full of pasta did you hurl at your tv screen each time a major network put out a new reality show about fat people crying?

Or a celebrity panel of judges scratching each other’s eyes out? Or another show about sexy ladycops who back-engineered homicides with their good looks, hip badges, and obligatory over-stylized flashbacks?

The average American, sure, is dumb. And there are a lot of us.

But believe it or not, at the time Downton came out, they were sick of all that crap. They just didn’t know it.

Like chubby dumb swine, they ate whatever the farmer threw in the trough, whether it was The Voice, or Honey Boo Boo, or another permutation of Honey, Which of These Three Fucking Houses Should We Buy?

Downton Abbey, at the time, was really the only show on tv in its genre.

And I don’t mean early-20th-century period piece. And I don’t mean long-form television. I mean it was the only show at the time (that I was aware of, at least) that was actually eschewing cynicism, while early every other show on the air embraced, if not embodied, cynicism.

And in a way, it was almost easy for Downton, because it’s hard to imagine a show so focused on the early 20th century, a period of great faith in new technologies, and the rise of the individual, amongst other huge social movements, without being drenched in earnestness and optimism.

Screenwriters: Downton Abbey made it okay to be earnest again. And there was an importance to that, I hear.

You don’t need to write Lawrence of Arabia to have scope

Around that time, I’d watched the most recent season, Season 3, and was surprised to see Downton Abbey, the main house/castle where everything takes place, from a few wider, more beautiful angles than I’d seen in previous seasons.

I suspected it was because the show’s funding had gone up in parallel with its amazing reception, but it made me realize:

I was way into the show long before those wider, sweeping shots of the castle and its surrounds; long before their wider, more well-funded(?) vistas and scenes.

I was still caught up in the scope of the show, and of its sweeping events – the Titanic, the Spanish Flu, the struggle for the Irish Free State, all of which helped frame and steer the show – without having to see all of that.

Because I saw it through the lens of Lord Grantham’s family, and through the lens of Mr. Carson the Butler, and Mrs. Padmore The Chef, and Daisy, and all the other servants.

See, what I realized was – there’s sand dunes shot in Cinemascope…

…but then there’s the view of world events through the eyes of interesting characters who may be far, far removed from the events themselves, but still feel what it’s like to live through the events, and can transmit that feeling to audience, sometimes far better than the sweeping vistas can.

Quick, happy resolutions are often exactly what the audience wants

Take a look at what was on TV at the time. Cable, network – it didn’t matter. Most of it, I think you’d have found, was pretty fantastical.

Fairy tales in a modern era, vampires, fat people working hard to get skinny, inner-city nobody becoming the next worldwide pop sensation…

All of them were rooted in some sort of fantasy.

And of course, that’s fine. That’s the business we’re in – entertainment. We all want to put on a show that makes people laugh, cry, run to the bathroom, whatever.

But Downton Abbey had a much different tack on the fantasy thing; on the wish-fulfillment thing.

Their plotlines and conflicts, while not about murder, greed, backstabbing, catfights, or any of the other sensationalist tropes that dominated television at the time, were able to wrap themselves up relatively quickly, and relatively neatly.

What’s that, you say?

Problems… That were solved relatively quickly?

Conflict… That was wrapped up… “neatly?”

A hallmark of Downton, without giving anything away, seemed to be: the lord of the house says “No, we can’t do that. It’s not proper.”

Then his family or outside forces work on him, and, being the gentle heart Lord Grantham was, he relents, and the problem gets wrapped up in an episode or two.

Artistically, cynically, I chafed at that. Initially.

“It’s not how life works!” “It’s lazy screenwriting!”

But after I took off my Che Guevara beanie, and my artists’ smock, I realized that what Downton was doing was actually far from lazy screenwriting.

It was actually genius because that sort of conflict writing was so counter to nearly every show in the marketplace at the time.

That is, I submit to you, gentle screenwriter, that at the core of Downton Abbey‘s success in reaching an audience lay foremost with its steering clear of sensationalist Pretty Little Liars/Melrose Place/CSI Miami tropes, and portraying a world where conflict could be quiet, but just as powerful.

But more than that – where conflict could be wrapped up quickly, and neatly.

What greater fantasy was there for average, working-class tv viewers than to see all their problems solved, quickly and neatly?

And all while wearing such starchy clothes.

The setting, the beauty, the simplicity of the era – all of those don’t hurt. But any dumbo with a copy of Final Draft can write setting and beauty and simplicity of an era.

It takes a master screenwriter to write quiet conflict, and a master producer to guess that audiences are ready for a good dose of it.

If you want to learn how to become a master screenwriter, as we all do – stop clenching your pearls and add this show to your must-watch list.

In closing

Looking back at that whole run of shows, what strikes me now isn’t any single trick or tactic, but how differently each of them got to the same place.

The Walking Dead and Homeland proved that stakes only matter when they’re rooted in real, flawed people, not in zombies or terror plots.

The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire showed that long-form storytelling can afford to breathe, but only if every meandering scene still earns its keep.

Halt and Catch Fire and GLOW were reminders that bold, needy characters and the actors who inhabit them can carry a show past its rougher patches, while a lazy backstory or an executive’s “sexy” note can just as easily sink one.

And Downton Abbey, the odd one out in that lineup, made the case that quiet, earnest, quickly-resolved conflict can hit just as hard as any cliffhanger, if you trust your characters enough to let it.

None of these shows were perfect, and a few of them didn’t stick the landing. But taken together, they were as good a screenwriting education as film school, maybe better, and it’s worth remembering what made them work now that the golden age they were part of has long since given way to whatever we’re calling this one.