Yesterday I taught my first class at York.  I’m teaching the fourth year television writing course which focuses on the writing of a spec in the first term and an original pilot in the second term.  Along the way, I’ll touch on story editing, the trends in television formats, how to analyze an existing series for the purpose of writing a spec and the life of a working writer; the market, how story rooms work and so on.

The students will read lots of scripts, watch lots of tv, story edit each others work and they’ll write.

For the first exercise we watched an episode of 30 Rock (twice) and then dissected it.  We looked at the story lines, broke them into beats, talked about the act breaks, dissected the runners and so on.  30 Rock makes a fantastic first show to analyze because it’s very well structured, the stories take huge leaps (opening beat is Tracey taking care of Kenneth’s bird and by the act break, Tracey and Jenna are convinced that Kenneth is a serial killer!) and the stakes and character plans are clearly stated.

After that we did a little writing exercise.  The class divided into groups of 3 or 4 and chose a TV series everyone in the group is familiar with.  Then they constructed a scene for the series based around the idea that one of the characters is called for jury duty.  It was quite fantastic to see the variation in the way this little piece of an idea was used by the groups in a variety of series: Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Dexter, Arrested Development, Buffy…

Next week I will be at the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds and Bobby Theodore is taking over the class to cover half hour vs hour long structure. He’ll be showing a Modern Family and a Friday Night Lights (two series I’m really sorry to be missing).  I’ve asked the class to read scripts for those series in advance of the class.