Interview (Written): Dan Fogelman
Conversation with the creator and showrunner of This Is Us.
Conversation with the creator and showrunner of This Is Us.
A Hollywood Reporter interview with Dan Fogelman whose writing credits include Cars, Bolt, Crazy Stupid Love, Guilt Trip, Last Vegas, and the hit NBC series This Is Us. Here are two interesting comments relevant for screenwriters [emphasis added].
Earlier this season you discussed this year’s special episodes, like the golf episode and this one. Are you planning to play more with episode structure in the second half of the season?
A little bit. You know what we’ve been doing? To get really in the weeds with it, we’ve been serializing our past stories a little bit more than we used to. So when you think about it, an old Jack and Rebecca story with the little kids was kind of a one off — like young Randall, young Kevin, young Kate have a complete episode, but not a plot line that continues for two or three episodes. The kids are getting older and they’re so talented and they’ve grown into such fine little actors that now we can do what we do in our present-day storylines, which is actually have a storyline start with Randall’s teacher at school and continue it over two or three episodes, whereas in the first three seasons of the show the kids were just too young to really do that the same way.
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With all these streaming services launching in the next six months, is part of you thinking about making something for one of those platforms?
I’ve been doing this since I was 25 years old and I’ve been blessed enough to get a lot of stuff made — movies, TV shows — and some work, a few of them have made it to, like, really working, and a few have made it to kind of working, a few didn’t work by whatever metrics — but I’ve made a lot of stuff. And I think I’m at a point in my life where I appreciate what a lot of the big behemoths do. But I have young writers on my staff right now who I think have something to say, and I would like to help champion them getting made what they want to make right now. Is that a lot or a little I don’t know, but I’m not really chasing that. I do think this quantity grab that’s happening right now, after a bunch of new things launch I do think there’ll be a reckoning where people need to get back to a model that used to exist where — we talk about it all the time. If you’re making a new show right now, how on Earth are you going to cut through the clutter? And there’s no real answer for that. I would never have expected our show to be one. Who would have thought Stranger Things or Handmaid’s Tale [would]? So there’s no map to it other than somebody really dug in.
You may have noticed a few trends in episodic TV series over the last decade or so. One is the writers playing around with narrative structure. For example, the emergence of the spotlight episode in which the storyline focuses on a single character. We saw this a lot in Lost and notably in series like The Leftovers, even limited series like The Haunting of Hill House. Similarly in This Is Us, the writers have been “serializing” stories over the course of multiple episodes. For writers working on original TV pilot scripts, this is something to consider in developing the characters and story world. Ask yourself: While your Protagonist may have complexity and depth, do your other lead characters as well? Do they have enough backstory elements and psychological dimensions that you could feature them in a spotlight episode or serialized storyline?
The second point is also relevant for when developing and writing an original TV pilot script. You have to ask this question: If you’re making a new show right now, how on Earth are you going to cut through the clutter? Indeed, as Fogelman suggests, there is no real answer, however, that shouldn’t stop us from pushing ourselves to find the most compelling, interesting, and eye-catching series concepts and — critically — lead characters. Characters which beckon us into their lives episode after episode to learn more about them and how they will cope with unfolding situations and challenges. The two TV series Fogelman mentions — Stranger Things and The Handmaid’s Tale — both have strong series concepts (actually I would consider them both high concepts), but it’s their characters which keep viewers emotionally engaged in the series.
Here is a trailer for Season 4 of This Is Us:
For the rest of the Fogelman interview, go here.