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3 CREATING COMPELLING CHARACTERS

Your title may be the tempting appetizer that lures viewers into sampling your series, but your characters are the primary ingredient that keeps them coming back for meal after meal. Quick, name some of the most memorable network TV series of all time. Here’s my off-the-top-of-my-head list:

I Love Lucy

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

All in the Family

Happy Days

The Simpsons

Law & Order

The first two have the main character’s name right in the title of the show. Why? Because that character is the main reason people watched the series week after week. In fact, people usually referred to these two landmark series simply by the character’s name, as in “Did you see the Lucy where she works in the chocolate factory?”

What about the next two? No character names in those titles. Still, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say All in the Family? Archie Bunker, of course. Yes, the series had brilliant writing and embraced groundbreaking, provocative subject matter like impotence, menopause, and racism. But it was the phenomenal popularity of Archie Bunker (and Edith, the Meathead, and Archie’s “little girl,” Gloria) that was the primary driver of the series’ long-lasting popularity.

Same goes for Happy Days, the nostalgic half-hour comedy about suburban middle-class life in the 1950s. Ask anyone to say the first thing that comes to mind when you mention the show Happy Days, I’d lay odds that 95 out of 100 people would instantly say it’s the Fonz, and then 80 of those 95 would pretend to comb back their ducktail hairstyle and say, “Ayyyyy!” just like the Fonz. Ironically, the Fonz wasn’t supposed to be the star of Happy Days. In the pilot, he was a minor character who had half a dozen lines. But the audience loved the Fonz, as played by Henry Winkler, and the Fonz launched Happy Days to the top of the ratings heap. How powerful a character was the Fonz? In the months after the show aired an episode where he got a library card for the first time, over a million kids nationwide went to their local library and signed up for their first library card — so they could be just like the Fonz. That’s a powerful character.

It’s no accident that CBS and ABC paid Carroll O’Connor and Henry Winkler record sums to continue playing Archie and the Fonz year after year. The networks knew that without those characters (and the actors playing those characters), the audience would tune out.

Even with shows like The Simpsons and Law & Order, ensembles with many characters and either brilliant humor or riveting story lines, the characters drive the popularity and long-term audience appeal of the shows. People love The Simpsons because of the great characters, both the main ones like Bart and Homer and the peripheral ones like Apu or Krusty the Klown. And as for the Law & Order franchise, I suspect the audience chooses which particular series to watch (Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, or the original) based on which set of characters they like rather than what sort of crimes are dealt with.

The importance of character cannot be overstated. There have been zillions of medical shows, cop shows, and family sitcoms on television over the years. But the shows that succeeded — and that continue to bring audiences back to watch them even 50 years later in reruns worldwide — are the ones where the characters made a powerful and lasting impression on the audience. You might say that it’s just a function of the actor and his or her popularity, but you would be wrong. Bill Cosby has had several TV series, but only when he played Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, beleaguered but affable father of five, did he achieve megastar status. Same thing for Mary Tyler Moore. Even today, more than 30 years after the series’ final installment, most people remember her fondly as Mary Richards. But almost no one remembers her, fondly or otherwise, as Annie McGuire (the title character of her 1988 ABC series that disappeared faster than the fifth runner-up on American Idol).

Yes, you need great actors, and we’ll talk quite a bit about how to find them in Chapter Nine. But actors need great characters in order to do great work. And audiences need great characters in order to return to a series episode after episode. Here’s Blake Snyder, in his screenwriting book Save the Cat!, explaining the overriding importance of character, or who your story is about:

The “who” is our way in. We, the audience, zero in on and project onto the “who” whether it’s an epic motion picture or a commercial for Tide detergent. The “who” gives us someone to identify with … because it’s easier to communicate an idea when someone is standing there experiencing it for us. And whether we’re watching Lawrence of Arabia as Lawrence tries to figure out how to attack Acaba … or a Tylenol commercial in which a busy Soccer Mom wonders when her headache will go away, the principle of involving us in the story is the same.

Characters, especially your main character, are what compel people to come back to your little video party week after week. And Snyder is quite right: It matters not whether we’re talking about Die Hard or an Old Spice commercial. The characters, John McClane in Die Hard and The Man Your Man Could Smell Like in the Old Spice ads, are what bring the audience back for installment after installment.

Think of your main character as the host of your party — or, more accurately, your series of parties. He greets the guests at the door, sets the tone for the experience. The audience’s decision about whether to return for the next installment of your particular party is based largely on how they feel about the host. Is he someone they want to hang out with again and again? Or is he a tiresome bore who makes them say, “Screw the free guacamole, we’re outta here!”

CHARACTER ESSENTIALS

Okay, you get it. You need to have great characters. But what makes for a great character? Broad strokes? Fine details? Larger-than-life traits? Probably all the above. But I think a good place to start is by saying that all truly great characters have to resonate with us. That is, they must strike us as real — not ordinary or trite but familiar in a way that makes us say, “That’s just like my boss” or “I knew a guy in high school just like that.”

For all of Archie Bunker’s flaws, he rings true to us. We’ve all got a blowhard uncle like Archie. Or a neighbor. Or maybe even a small, unappealing part of ourselves. Norman Lear, who developed All in the Family for American television (it was based on a British show called Till Death Us Do Part) once called Archie Bunker “basically a horse’s ass.” But Lear also remarked that Archie was “the bigger-than-life epitome of something that’s in all of us, like it or not.” In other words, the character resonates.

Because of their much shorter episode length, web series cannot create characters in as much depth as a 30- or 60-minute network TV show or a 2-hour feature film, but the principles of character are no less relevant. The characters in your short-form series, especially the main character, must resonate with the audience. Take The Guild as an example. Microsoft bought the show for its Xbox online channel because it knows the channel’s natural audience — online game fanatics — will instantly relate to The Guild’s characters, a bunch of online game fanatics. The audience gets the show’s characters, like Codex and Zaboo. They know their world and understand their video-obsessed behavior and gamer lingo. And because they know (and like) these people, they want to attend their party — the episodes of The Guild — time after time, season after season.

Does this mean the only people who can enjoy The Guild are online gaming addicts? Absolutely not, any more than the only people who enjoy All in the Family are bigots and fools. For a character to resonate, or be relatable, he doesn’t have to be “just like you.” He only has to be recognizable, meaning he might be like you, or he might be like someone you know or have somehow encountered in your life.

The next essential element of all great series characters is that we can instantly imagine those characters in dozens of juicy situations — juicy in either a comedic or a dramatic way, depending on the tone of the series. Let’s return to the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld once again. Great character for an episode or two — fabulous guest star or peripheral character. Terrific spice but not a good main ingredient. As hilarious and memorable as the Soup Nazi was for that classic episode, he’s not a good choice for a regular, every-week series character and definitely NOT the lead character you can base an entire series around. Where do you take the Soup Nazi other than his restaurant to get stories? What other situations can you put him in? I suppose you could send him on a date, or meet his family — maybe there’s a Soup Nazi Sr. or Grandma Soup Nazi, and we not only see where the Soup Nazi came from but gain a measure of sympathy for him as an improved version of his predecessors. But when you boil it down, every episode becomes nothing more than repetition after repetition of the same basic gag: “You, no second date, two months!”

For a series regular, a character you see in every episode of a series, to be truly useful that character must have depth and dimension. In other words, he or she must be a human character, not a two-dimensional caricature. If Archie Bunker had merely been a malaprop-spouting bigot, All in the Family would never have lasted as long as it did. It would have been a one-joke pony. But Archie was a multidimensional human being, a man born and raised in one time railing against the rapidly changing world around him. A man stuck in one time fighting against change stimulates dozens of situations and ideas. A mere bigot? Not so many.

The third vital element of all good series characters is specifics. The devil is always in the details. If I say “car,” you probably get a picture in your head, but it’s blurry and out of focus until I get more specific. For instance, if I say “sports car” or “SUV,” the picture in your head is sharper and a lot more specific. Better still would be “red Ferrari” or “black Hummer.” Now we know precisely what we’re talking about, and we have a much clearer sense of the “character” we’re talking about than we did when we simply said “car.”

Specifics are what make a character. If I ask you who your main character is, and you say, “She’s a waitress,” you really haven’t told me much, and you certainly haven’t sketched any details that make me want to watch a series about “a waitress.” You need more specifics. Waitress at an elite eatery in New York City or a greasy spoon in Buttscratch, Oklahoma? Is she 22 or 52? Is this Madison Kemp’s first day at TGI Friday’s, a job she only plans to keep until she sells the novel (or Internet video series) she’s been working on since high school? Or does today mark 30 years at the Buttscratch Eat ’n Gas for Nadine, and the chef celebrates the occasion by putting a candle in a sausage patty and leading the regulars in a hearty chorus of “Happy Anniversary”? They’re both waitresses, but Madison and Nadine are two entirely different characters, which means the stories you tell about them, and how they react and behave in the situations those stories present, will be vastly different. It’s all about the details.

In The Guild, all the characters are online gaming freaks. But aside from that shared video addiction, they are all distinct individuals. Here is a partial character breakdown for The Guild from its Wikipedia page:

Knights of Good

Codex (real name Cyd Sherman) is the Priest. Codex is shy and non-confrontational, tending to panic under stress. Outside the game she is a concert violinist (and former child prodigy), unemployed after setting fire to her boyfriend’s cello. She is an addicted gamer who tries at first to control the time she spends online but fails. For this reason, her therapist drops her. At the beginning of the series she is quite reclusive, with no real-life friends; she is often self-conscious and awkward around men. Codex is portrayed by creator Felicia Day.

Zaboo (real name Sujan Balakrishnan Goldberg) is the Warlock. Zaboo describes himself as a “HinJew,” having a Hindu mother and Jewish father. He shows great skill with computers; for example, his stalking of Codex included obtaining (presumably through the Internet) the floor plan of her apartment and all her past residences. His obsessive attitude toward Codex reflects his mother’s smothering. When talking, Zaboo often uses “-’d” after some key word or expression, self-commenting on what he just said (e.g., “bladder’d,” “testosterone’d”). While Zaboo doesn’t appear to have a profession, he admits having attended college for 4 years (to which his mother drove him every day). Zaboo is portrayed by Sandeep Parikh, Indian American writer, director, actor, and producer of comedy and founder of Effinfunny.

Bladezz (real name Simon Kemplar) is the Rogue. He is a high school student who spends most of his time outside school in his mom’s garage playing the game. He is rude to the other male guild members, and he hits on the female guild members and makes lewd sexual jokes and comments. He is worried about being sent to military school, and to save up for college his mom forced him into modeling; he uses the name “Finn Smulders” to keep it a secret from everyone. In Seasons Four and Five, he becomes an Internet meme. Bladezz is by nature a rogue and tends to sneak around, betraying, lying, stealing, and causing mayhem. Bladezz is portrayed by Vincent Caso.

Vork (real name Herman Holden) is the guild leader and Warrior. He enjoys managing the guild and budgeting, and he believes only in rules and logic. He lives frugally (and illegally) on his late grandfather’s Social Security checks and is a certified notary public. When he became guild leader he “cut the fats of life,” including electric power; he steals his senile neighbor’s Wi-Fi (and shed) and keeps his food cold by buying ice with food stamps. In the penultimate episode of Season Three he reveals that he can speak fluent Korean; in Season Four, he speaks Hindi to Zaboo’s mother and claims to know all languages. Vork comes to believe that shared hatred of him is what keeps the guild together. In Season Four, his desire to own a guild hall leads him to manipulate an in-game exchange market, nearly causing him to be banned from the game. Vork is portrayed by Jeff Lewis, an accomplished character actor and comedian.

Clara (real name Clara Beane) is the Frost Mage. Clara is a stay-at-home wife and mother, college partier, and ex-cheerleader. Her three children are all young, with the youngest still breastfeeding, and she is shown to be an irresponsible mother; though proud of her children, she tends to put gaming before her family and sometimes tries to mix the two, such as by recruiting her husband, “Mr. Wiggly,” to the guild. She uses her real name as her avatar name because her kids saw her old name, “Mominatrix.” She comes off as ditzy, scatterbrained, and eccentric, with occasional bursts of insight. In the fifth season she proves herself to be a capable mother when she stops Zaboo from going mad with power and lack of sleep. Clara is portrayed by Robin Thorsen.

Tinkerballa (real name April Lou) is the Ranger. Tink distances herself from the guild, trying not to let them know anything about her personal life; she even keeps her real name a secret from her fellow guildies, introducing herself as Tinkerballa. Her real name isn’t revealed until the fifth season. In reality, Tink is adopted and has two sisters. She also has been lying to her parents about being a pre-med student, when she has actually switched courses for a degree in costume design. She is shown to have a huge video game addiction, always having an alternate game in hand when not playing the guild’s game, even when raiding. She is cold and manipulative, and she uses men to get what she wants, including Bladezz, who deletes Tink’s character to avenge himself after she uses him. Following this, and Vork’s refusal to punish Bladezz, she leaves the Knights of Good and joins the Axis of Anarchy but later finds them too “douchey” even for her (she even says that she went on a date with Fawkes to join). She rejoins the Knights of Good during an in-game showdown with the Axis of Anarchy when they call her “Tainterballa,” and she allows her avatar to be killed off intentionally to give Codex a shot at victory for the guild. Tink is revealed to be possibly the most social of the group, although she is incredibly grounded in the online world. In Season Five, Codex reunites Tink with her family at the gaming con. Tink is portrayed by Amy Okuda.

Granted, this wealth of details was developed over six seasons of episodes. But the fundamentals of each character were there from Season One on. When you create your characters, be as specific as you can. BUT — and this is absolutely crucial — you must also make sure that the specifics you lay out about your character are relevant and telling, that they reveal important things about who your character is on the inside. A laundry list of random details about someone is useless unless those details reveal something significant about who that character is, how she might behave or react to the world around her. Saying your main character Susie’s least favorite color is blue and she has a pet parrot are specifics, but they’re not terribly revealing or important. They don’t tell us much about Susie or the kind of person she is. However, if Susie hates blue, the parrot is blue, and the parrot used to belong to her hypercritical mother who loved blue, and now the parrot mocks and criticizes Susie’s every move just like mom used to do, that’s significant.

CHARACTERIZATION

Character is something internal — the essence of who a person is. So how do you take this internal thing — a person’s essence — and communicate that essence to your audience? Through characterization.

Characterization is simply the techniques by which you communicate internal character to us. It is the externalization or dramatization of the internal. And there’s great news, boys and girls. When you get right down to it, there are really only three ways for you to convey or reveal who the characters in your series are: what they say (dialogue), what they do (action), and the environment they create, like their clothes, car, job, and living situation.

Forget about writing for the moment and think about real life. When you meet someone new, how do you decide what kind of person they are? By taking careful note of exactly the details stated earlier. Each of us is kind of like The Terminator, with an involuntary mental computer that constantly processes data about the world and people around us. You walk into a Starbucks and spot a woman at a nearby table. The computer kicks in: She’s in her 30s, dressed in designer casual clothes, texting on her iPhone with one hand while she alternately sips a chai latte and shares her oat bran muffin with a toddler girl named Chloe in a stroller. Two cars are parked out front: a nearly new Toyota hybrid SUV and a mud-caked 40-year-old VW van with flowers painted on it. Which car is hers? You can make a pretty good guess because you already know — or think you know — her “character.” You know who she is and how she thinks, and you can probably predict what kind of car she’d buy.

You walk out of Starbucks, and on the sidewalk out front is a guy in his early sixties, long graying hair and a beard, playing a beat-up old guitar with a peace sign painted on it. He’s singing songs like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction.” Based on these clues, your mental computer says, “Hippie refugee from the 1960s.” Now you have a pretty good idea who owns the VW van. And you probably can make all kinds of other character assessments. Republican or Democrat? Neither — probably Green Party. Or maybe he didn’t vote at all because that’s how The Man controls you, man, and we’ve all got to fight the power.

In a sense, the process of creating your characters is an inversion of the process you use to figure out who people are in the real world. As a writer, you will first decide who you want your characters to be, then your task is finding the ways to communicate that “who” to your audience. Let’s return to the 60Frames web series Be a Celebutante. The main characters are two rich, spoiled, less than intelligent party sluts whose only interests are money, self-indulgence, and hooking up — and helping you learn how to live the same charmed and fulfilling lifestyle. The pilot, which runs all of 95 seconds, is chock-full of character clues. Two hotties in bathing suits and fur shawls lounge by a private pool (environment). They introduce themselves as “the Douche (pronounced “doo-shay”) sisters, heiresses to the douche fortune” (dialogue). They are drinking and dispensing smug advice on how to make extra money (action). Dannah and Danielle’s ideas include:

DANNAH

If you really want to rake in the dough…

DANIELLE

Or make money…

DANNAH

You should “accidentally” make a sex tape.

CUT TO FOOTAGE OF THE DOUCHE SISTERS IN BED WITH A MAN, CLEARLY AWARE OF THE CREW AS THEY “ACCIDENTALLY” MAKE A SEX TAPE.

DANNAH

Yeah, when our “accidental” sex tape “accidentally” leaked onto the Internet, we “accidentally” made five million dollars.

DANIELLE

Oopsies…

You get the idea. Everything your characters say, do, wear, drive, eat, or come in contact with should tell us something about who they are as a person. Once the audience picks up on who they are (and hopefully finds them amusing or interesting enough to follow around for 6 or 12 or 100 episodes), the audience also begins to anticipate the juicy situations you might put them in.

YOUR OVERALL CHARACTER LANDSCAPE

Characters do not exist in a vacuum. They exist to serve the overall premise, and they exist in concert with each other. It’s not enough for each individual character to be cool or interesting in his own right. They must work together, as a team, with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Each character should serve a specific function within your series, and that function should be unique. You wouldn’t want a rock band with five lead singers but no drummer or bass player. Instead of Hootie & the Blowfish, you’d end up with Hootie, Hootie, Hootie, Hootie, & Hootie. Even Hootie’s mom wouldn’t want to see that act. The premise is band. The characters must form a complete team or group, one with stars and supporting players.

I think of this overall character composition as the character landscape. Your series landscape needs balance and variety. Each character should cover a different “instrument,” a distinct function or sound within your overall composition. Take The Guild once again. Yes, they are all online gaming freaks. But aside from that, they are different types of people: a mom so addicted to video games that she virtually ignores her three young children (Clara); a young woman so afraid of revealing any real details about her personal life that when asked what she does for a living, she gives the plot line to Ugly Betty (Tinkerballa); and even, starting in Season Two, Codex’s hottie neighbor who has absolutely no interest in video games at all (Wade). Characters with distinct differences are crucial to the success of your series because character differences are what lead to conflict, the essence of all comedy and drama and, therefore, the life-giving reservoir of stories for your pilot and your series.

LEADING CHARACTERS VS. SUPPORTING CHARACTERS

All series have both. As stated before, no good group can be composed of all Hooties (leading character) or all Blowfish (supporting characters). But why is Hootie (or Mick Jagger or Bono) the leading character? What makes him more important? Surprisingly, the answer is pretty much the same for both music video and series television. Your lead character is the center of gravity for your group.

In a music video, the camera focuses on the lead singer more than anyone else. And when the camera isn’t on the main character, what we see is seen mostly through his eyes. In a television series, we experience most of the action through the lead character’s eyes. In Gaytown, the lead character is the straight person who is desperately trying to avoid detection and persecution. We follow the action of Gaytown from his POV, as opposed to, say, the perspective of a morals cop trying to track down the “perverted heterosexuals.” We experience the world of The Guild primarily through the eyes of Codex. In Seinfeld, Jerry is the lead character, the primary prism through which the story is filtered.

So what makes these characters leads as opposed to supporting players? What makes these characters capable of anchoring a series? For one, as quirky and troubled as Jerry and Codex are, they are, from most of the audience’s perspective, the most “normal” person in the universe of the series. Yes, Jerry on Seinfeld is a neurotic mess. But compared to George or Elaine or Kramer he’s a rock. Same goes for Codex. She’s so warped even her therapist abandons her. But compared to Zaboo or Tinkerballa, she’s a solid citizen. So one job description of your leading or main character might be “sane person in an insane world.” (Note: The rock band analogy breaks down here. There is no rule that says the lead singer of a rock band must be the sanest or most normal. He is free to have as many substance abuse and legal problems as he chooses. In fact, in the world of rock and roll, the more messed up you are, the higher your profile.)

DRAWING ON REAL LIFE

So where do characters come from? Do they just pop into your imagination randomly? Of course not. Creative inspiration, despite the mystery that often surrounds that concept, is usually quite methodical. “Inspiration” comes because you work at it. William Faulkner once said, “I only write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like it every day at 9 a.m.” A successful and prolific TV writer and producer once described the main job qualification of the writer as “butt in chair.”

Your characters will come to you because you work at it — conscientiously, purposefully, by design. To begin with, you’ve got your premise. Let’s say it’s Seinfeld, where the premise is that a stand-up comic observes and comments on the small insanities of life, and he lives in the capital of insanity, New York City. That’s the roots of the world that series creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David began with. So their task, then, in developing that premise is to figure out who we surround Jerry with. Rather than randomly spitballing a few zany characters off the top of their heads, Seinfeld and David did something incredibly logical: They were writing about the world they knew, so they chose real-life characters they knew (or fictitious versions of them) to be the supporting players. Believe it or not, Kramer is actually based on a real person that Larry David knew in New York, Kenny Kramer. If you are so inclined, you can visit the real Kramer’s website, www.kennykramer.com, and take his personal tour of New York City. George is based on Larry David himself. Not each and every detail; George isn’t a writer. But emotionally, and in the neurotic way his mind functions (in other words, his essence or character), George is based on Larry David.

Real life is always the richest resource for fiction. Not a stereotyped version of real life but keenly observed, specific details of real-life people. When Felicia Day developed the character landscape for The Guild, she didn’t have to just imagine a bunch of characters. She could draw on the types of people she knew among her World of Warcraft–playing friends and other online gaming acquaintances.

Drawing on real life is what allows you to be specific rather than generic. Let’s say you wanted to create a boss character for a workplace series you were creating. TV series have had countless boss characters, and your temptation might be to merely imitate one of those. Bad idea. Your character would come off as exactly what it is: a pale imitation of somebody else’s character. If, instead, you drew on real life — your own boss (you have a day job, surely) — well, then you’ve got a much better chance of creating a real character, an individual that seems like a flesh and blood human being, rather than a cardboard cutout. And even if your own real-life boss doesn’t fit the bill, surely someone you know has a boss he’s described in brutal detail who would fit the bill. For instance, my brother-in-law once had a new boss come in on Day One and tell everyone that his goal was to make sure that by Christmas time, the competition’s children all had one less gift under the tree. Terrible, disgusting, repulsive boss. But great character — and memorable dialogue you’d never come up with on your own in a million years.

GROWING YOUR CHARACTERS

The characters in your pilot are not intended to be a finished product. They are a work in progress. They must be, or you will have nowhere to go in future episodes and future seasons. For your series to continue to grow and thrive, your characters must do the same. Although much of this will be a voyage of discovery for you, and you will find ways for your characters to grow as you write and shoot more and more episodes and spend time with those characters, you should at least have some plans for how your characters will grow when you conceive your original series and character blueprint.

Character growth in a television series can be a tricky thing. On one hand, the characters have to be consistent from week to week. Frasier must always be Frasier, from his first appearance in Season Three of Cheers right through to his last appearance in Season Eleven of his own series a full 20 years later. The same holds true for Codex, the Douche sisters, and Fiona Wallace, the inappropriate therapist and lead character in Lisa Kudrow’s wonderful online comedy Web Therapy. But consistent should not be confused with static. Consistent means the character’s core and essence — her attitudes and predominant ways of dealing with the world — remain the same. But the circumstances and challenges of her onscreen life must evolve. Otherwise, the series will become repetitive and stale.

Think about the characters on the long-running network series Friends. Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey were recognizably the same characters from beginning to end. And yet their circumstances changed and evolved: new jobs, relationships, small increments of personal growth fueled by changes in the external circumstances around these characters.

That’s how growth happens for series characters. Though they are essentially the same from episode to episode (consistent), they evolve in response to significant changes in their external world. This is why on network TV, as a series gets on in years, so many shows introduce new characters, new romances, or other major changes in the characters’ lives such as getting married or having children. It’s a way to keep the characters — and the series — from stagnating and losing the audience.

So even though the main focus of your efforts (and this book) should be devoted to the pilot and the initial conceptualization of your series and characters, you should also have, in the back of your mind, at least some initial ideas about how the characters might grow or face new, life-changing challenges. Because web series are still in their infancy, there aren’t as many web series to cite as examples on this front. But take The Guild again, in its sixth season as I write this. Season Two saw the introduction of Wade, Codex’s hot, nongamer neighbor. The introduction of an outsider to the gamer-obsessed world of Codex — especially a hot guy and potential love interest — puts more pressure on her character. In the series pilot, Codex gets dumped by her therapist for failing to acknowledge her video addiction. This new character potentially reawakens that challenge — but in a more compelling way because it comes from a hot guy.

One good way of thinking ahead about your characters’ potential growth is to think in terms of season-long arcs. Characters A and B will butt heads all season long during Season One, but friction turns to sexual heat and they tumble into bed at the end of the last episode of Season One. Now Season Two can begin with a whole new energy and set of problems for your characters.

One note of caution on series growth: Don’t be tempted to jump the shark. The phrase “jump the shark” refers to the writers of a show using a preposterous gimmick in order to expand the boundaries of a character or the series. The origin of the phrase dates back to the series Happy Days. The Fonz, their breakout character, had performed minor miracles for five seasons, elbowing the dormant jukebox back to life and so on. But the “miracles” kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. So in attempt to make the Fonz ever more heroic, they did an episode where the Fonz, wearing a swimsuit and his trademark leather jacket as he waterskied, jumped over a confined shark tank to prove his bravery. It was, to say the least, a ridiculous scene. The show had crossed the line from playful fantasy to the utterly absurd and unbelievable. Despite this moment of weakness, the show remained hugely popular and lasted another 6 years. But the phrase “jump the shark” has come to mean the moment when a show becomes so gimmicky that the only humane thing to do is to cancel it and put the audience out of its misery. So yes, by all means, give your characters new challenges. Stretch them, grow them, make them deal with fresh and unexpected new curveballs. But do not jump the shark. Do not reach so far, in your desire to be fresh and new, that you catapult your series right out of its own reality.

FOR TEACHERS

As in the previous chapter, on premise, students can benefit from both analytical and creative assignments on character.

For the analytical, have the students examine a current web series and dissect its characters and character landscape. They need to do more than merely summarize externals. They must identify the internal essence of each character and then define how these characters create conflict and story potential by virtue of their conflicting or complementary character traits.

The same depth of thinking should transfer over to their creative presentation of the characters in their proposed series. They must define not just each character’s individual qualities but also how they work together — how each one plays off the other to create a rich and useful character landscape for the series. What type of story possibilities will there be between Characters A and B? Character A and Character C? What about when B and D are together: What dynamics will that present?