Writer, Producer, Author and creative incubator Jeff Norton returned to the London Screenwriters’ Festival this year to lead another of his excellent practical classes, this time on creating a TV Series Bible.
A series bible comes in two types. A writer’s bible and a pitch bible. A well written bible forces us to know our story world and for a writer’s bible all the information needed to sustain a show will be contained in it. It works like adapting from a novel so that any writer, referring to the show bible will be able to write episodes but a pitch bible is a shorter, more concise document that is used to sell the show to executives. As a working LSF session we began creating with Jeff the pitch bibles for our own work.
The point of the pitch document is to tell executives what a show is, and to reassure them you have laid out the trajectory of the show and know how the story comes to an end. It’s a professional document that tells those investing that you know what you’re doing and that you know who the audience you’re writing for are. In general, pitch bibles are a few pages covering everything the executives will initially need to know usually created in either Word, Power Point, or Photoshop, depending on the writer’s preference and what they wish to include.
Attempting in the session to create a pitch bible for our own series ideas, we planned, with Jeff’s help, to take something practical we can use out of the room after the session. We begin a pitch bible with ‘The Big Idea’ which is the concept for the show and what defines it, is followed by an explanation of the whole series, not just the first episode.
Episode premises are then also included, forcing us to look at every episode as a self satisfying entity whether or not there’s an overarching series story. The story engine for each episode can be included but keep things brief. About six episodes usually work (UK series tend to run in about this number) but you can do more. Describing the tone of the show, defines how the show will come across and helps executives understand the audience it’s for (ie. if it’s a show about a computer nerd is it intellectual or goofy). Then very brief character introductions for the main characters and the setting for the show, where and when it takes place helps give a sense of the look, tone and feel a show will have.
Giving an idea of the lens through which we will view a show is important too, there are many medical shows featuring emergency rooms but when American show ER came along it had a fast pace that was very fresh for it’s time and very different from long running medical shows like General Hospital. The bible lays out why characters and setting are unique and worth watching, it’s important that those elements are not a trope.
The pitch bible is a sales tool and while it’s good to have firm story and characters laid out so a studio knows what’s proposed, you can change things later as a TV show develops. They work for any show, whether it’s an ongoing story or if each episode is self contained within the overall premise of the show. These latter episodic or ‘problem of the week’ dramas are often referred to as procedurals, but procedural can mean different things in different countries so be aware of this. In the UK a procedural show may just mean that the procedure of the occupation takes place (cops doing cop things). On the subject of procedurals Jeff points out to us that while it’s easy to think we know trends the market for shows can be different. There’s a lot of acclaimed ongoing dramas with long story arcs at the moment but the international market is crying out for procedurals and there are wide opportunities to sell all kinds of work out there.
Our pitch bibles sketched out we talk about the other bible we create for a TV show, the writer’s bible. These documents will be longer and read like Wikipedia pages for characters, places and world philosophy. Those writer bibles will inform everything we will write and contain more detailed information about episodes, character arcs and plot. The principles remain similar though, in that whichever bible you are creating the show needs to be clearly described in terms of what it is and who it’s for and how it will be. This session proved both clear and very useful and for most of us we were able to leave the room with some work done towards our own TV ideas and thanks to Jeff Norton, all of us had a lot more clarity on how to define what we wanted to write.
Posted by a member of the London Screenwriters’ Festival team.
