Brad isn't clever. 30 minutes. Unfiltered. Every day. Rinse. Repeat.

I find myself in a bit of an additional challenge now: my deadline is June 1st for the teleplay and it’s April 2nd. I’ve got to write this thing FAST. Well, ideally I’d like to get a functional draft going so I can revise it several times and replace dead scenes with better ones in time to make my deadline. First, I’ve got to have a good premise. I thought for a month about one that seemed flawless, but it was largely conditional on a certain holiday, and I feel like it’s a bit gimmicky. What if someone reads the script way out of season? It won’t help at all. In fact, it will probably hurt.

So, now I’m finding myself scrambling to write here for 30 minutes as well as gather data and start narrowing down my options. I want to create a list of about 100 items that could be covered in my script. From there, I will narrow it down to one to two key items and keep the rest prioritized as backup. It’s a weird feeling do a bunch of research about the universe my spec script is set in. It’s real world research, but for the purpose of parody and exaggeration.

I want to find something that I can cover well AND inject personal experience. It seems like many people find a way to package their best personal experiences and translate them into a great moment on a TV show.

In other news, I’m plowing through episodes of Friday Night Lights with my roommate. The first season is INCREDIBLY good thus far, but I’ve heard season two is quite poor. It’s a strange feeling, watching a television show. When I get hooked, I want to pump a constant stream of episodes into my life on a daily basis. I almost want to gorge on the episodes and become intensely familiar with the universe at a rate that’s typically faster than intended. This is the standard “Why watch one episode of Show X a week that’s filled with commercials when I can just see the entire season in a row later on?” argument.

I love the overwhelming feeling of starting a long series with several seasons. Six seasons of Six Feet Under intimidated me when I realized each one was close to sixty minutes long. I could only afford to watch one or two a night while I was a junior in college, and only if I didn’t have a lot going on then. That show definitely led to my Netflix subscription getting throttled down a bit. I would grow impatient enough to learn to go rent one disk at my local video store while requesting the next one on Netflix. I was able to feed my habit and finish the show within a few months. It was a wonderful show, and like all great television shows, left me profoundly sad after I finished the body of work.

I watched The Wire in a similar fashion, but I had just finished school, so I had significantly more time on my hands. After a while, it hits that there’s simply no new surprises waiting for you in the universe of that show. There’s nowhere left for those characters to go, nothing new for them to say. You’ve seen it all as it was intended, and while you’re eternally grateful for the opportunity, you can’t help but wish more was waiting for you.

Improv shows definitely happen the same way. The best advice I’ve heard on editing scenes in a show is “it’s better to end scenes too soon than too late.” If you could graph out the average scene on a 2D plane, where the X axis is time in seconds and the Y is quality, the graph would probably resemble a triangle—the scene climbs in quality at first with a slope of about one. There are some bumps along the way, but it keeps building steam until it hits the absolute funniest moment. No matter how good the rest of the scene is, it’s no longer as good as that best moment. It often decreases in quality as time progresses. I’d argue that the best place to hit the edit is right before that apex. You may miss a phenomenal moment or two, but if you do it right, you leave the audience wanting more. You never leave them with a feeling like the scene went too long. You just wipe the slate clean while things are still getting good and try to repeat that pattern.

It might be better if you could constantly edit at those apexes, but I think that’s the “white whale” of improv. Good improvisers can see that a scene is great and know that the scene doesn’t have much room left to climb, but only the best improvisers can consistently see the exact moment to edit a scene. Hell, they still have problems with it, I’m willing to bet. It’s like the Price is Right - you want to come the closest to that moment as possible without going over. Going over is bad.

I am supposed to be wide awake right now, but I’m starting to grow tired. It’s not even 9:00 yet. I need to find more caffeine apparently.

Good TV shows have an advantage over improvised shows in that each scene can be meticulously dissected and reconstructed. Rather than guessing where to edit a scene, you can go line by line and find the exact right point to pull the trigger. It’s a very focused and calculated edit. Improvisers fly by the seat of their pants using good intuition and experience. Writers use good experience and careful planning and revision to find that moment. They’d be reckless and/or lazy to do otherwise.

One other thing struck me last night after my troupe’s first show in our April run downtown. At a bar post-show, one of the guys who watched us mentioned how he was unsure about the show Rescue Me on FX. The guy who brought this up grew up in New York, and the show follows New York firefighters. Apparently, since the show is on FX and not Fox, the show can get away with more cursing. However, the show can’t get away with all cursing, so the firefighters are forced to say the same types of phrases over and over again when cursing. Explained to me, “it’s obvious the writers REALLY want these guys to drop f bombs all over the place, but they can’t, so they substitute words in that don’t make a whole lot of sense contextually. It’s as if the guys keep saying, “Shit you, you mothershitter.””

It’s a strange choice. On one hand, FX should explore their additional freedom gained from being a basic cable channel and not a prime network. On the other, you can’t force things that clearly lie outside of your boundaries. It’s distracting and makes the characters seem a little less genuine and believable. Would a bunch of men living together in a house working a high-risk job curse a lot? Most likely. Would they curse in a strange fashion that seems counterintuitive or weird? Probably not.

Food for thought.