Sitcom Pilots & The Promise of the Premise

Crafting The Perfect Sitcom Story Premise For Television

You are writing your spec sitcom pilot not with the hope that it will sell.  It won’t.  You are writing a spec sitcom pilot because the gate keepers of the sitcom universe are too arrogant and lazy to carefully read and evaluate spec episodes of current series.  You are writing your spec sitcom pilot script as a tool of seduction for agents, executives, and, eventually, egomaniacal writer/producers.  For the agents and executives, the premise of your spec sitcom pilot doesn’t even have to work.  As long as your script is filled with colorful characters, slang, a few surprises, and smart-ass jokes, you’ll fool the suits every time.

But if your characters aren’t well developed and if your premise doesn’t work, you won’t fool professional writers.

I prefer a simple premise for a sitcom pilot: Six friends look for love in Manhattan.  Two lonely, overweight people start dating.

I prefer a premise that sounds like fun right from the log line: 

  • A married man buys a house across the street from his meddling mother. 
  • A divorced chiropractor moves in with his wealthy, womanizing brother. 
  • The lives of a nerdy physicist and his eccentric roommate are turned upside down when a pretty blonde moves in across the hall. 
  • A quirky girl on the rebound shares a loft with three single guys. 
  • A hard-boiled waitress takes in a penniless socialite.

A workable premise should be easily stated in one sentence.  That one sentence should promise comedy.  That’s what Blake Snyder meant when he talked about “The promise of the premise.”

If you have a main character in mind already, the main character will lead you to the premise.  Barry Kemp started with a morally flexible college football coach.  The premise of Coach sprang from the personality of the main character.

If you don’t have a main character in mind yet, ask yourself what you’d like to write about.  Do you want to write a domestic comedy or a workplace comedy?  Or, do you want to write about one or more main characters that move between work and home?

Every successful sitcom is one long story.  It’s about how one or more regular characters move(s) from Point A to Point B.  In the pilot of Frasier, Frasier Crane was beginning a new life in Seattle with many unresolved issues between him and his estranged father, between him and his competitive younger brother, and within himself.  In the final episode of Frasier, each recurring character’s life had moved to a better place.  Frasier was on his way to another new life, but with a sense of inner peace he had never felt before.

Friends was about the six main characters growing up.  Seinfeld was about the four main characters not growing up.  The Big Bang Theory is also about growing up, and so is How I Met Your Mother.   Modern Family is about making your family work, regardless of how it’s constructed.

I’ve said before that every sitcom is a family.  We watch sitcoms because the characters are able to resolve their problems and continue loving each other no matter what happens.  Enduring love and the successful resolution of conflict seldom occur in real life.  In real life, we stop speaking to relatives or they stop talking to us.  Our marriages end.  Our friends move away or stop returning our calls.  On a sitcom, the characters are always there for each other, and that’s why we watch; because we can’t find that kind of security in our real lives.

Saying that your sitcom is about working at Starbuck’s isn’t stating a premise.  That’s identifying a location.  If you want to set your sitcom at Starbuck’s, or a restaurant, or a factory, or a logging camp, or your grandmother’s boarding house – because you once worked or lived there and you remember all the crazy things that happened – that’s fine.  But what’s the premise?

The premise of a sitcom is the framework within which the thematic questions of the series are asked.  If you want to write a sitcom about a bunch of single friends looking for love and success in the adult world, you have to create a way for them to be together.  If you want to write about a family, you already have a way for them to be together, so you have to figure out what the conflict is going to be.

The premise provides the framework for the characters to be together and be in conflict:

  • They work together.
  • They live together.
  • They hang out at somebody’s apartment.
  • They drink at the same bar.
  • They have the same agent.
  • The have the same rotten father or self-absorbed mother.

Your premise is what binds your characters together.

The American version of The Office was about the misery of working in an office.  The characters were bound together because they all worked in the same place. But, to me, the American version of The Office was really about – at least in the first few seasons – whether Jim and Pam would get together.  That’s what we cared about.  Yes, Michael was the main character, and he was a tragic figure, an active main character who caused problems for himself and everyone else, but the heart of the series, the reason you came back every week, was to see whether Jim and Pam, two people who had given up on themselves at the start of the series, would actually grow enough to finally get together.

Think of a spec sitcom pilot as the first act of the world’s longest screenplay.  What story do you want to tell?  What personal issues do you want your characters to tackle?  Is your sitcom about finding a mate, getting ahead at work, learning to like yourself, or discovering how to get along with people who are different?  Once you figure out which story you want to tell, and which characters can best help you to tell your story, you will be led logically to the right premise.  

When Season Five of The Big Bang Theory ended, on his vanity card, Chuck Lorre wrote that he was fighting tears when they shot the last scene.  I confess I was misty-eyed myself.  (I love that show.)  In the pilot, after we’ve met Leonard and Sheldon and learned that they are physicists, Leonard meets Penny and falls in love with her at first sight.  Premise.  By the end of the pilot, we’ve met Howard and Raj.  You would have thought that these four guys were such dweebs, were all so neurotic and damaged, that none of them would ever grow up or find a girl.  You’d still think that even at the end of Season One or Season Two.  Five years later, Leonard and Penny are still struggling to get together, but it looks as if they might.  Howard has married Bernadette.  Sheldon, the world’s most inflexible, antisocial, and asexual person, has a girlfriend.  In the final shot of the season, Penny takes hold of Leonard’s hand, and Sheldon takes hold of Amy’s hand.  It was a moment of triumph.

The Big Bang Theory is about growing up.  It’s The Forty Year Old Virgin as a TV series.  It’s about leaving behind the action figures and the video games and Thursday is pizza night, and all of the other contrived comforts of childhood, and taking the biggest risk of all, reaching for something that is just beyond your grasp, aware that you may fall and get hurt, but reaching for it anyway.  

That’s a premise.  That’s promise.   That’s what a successful sitcom is about.

Screenwriting Article by Sheldon Bull
Sheldon Bull

Sheldon Bull has been a highly successful TV writer and producer for over thirty years.  He has held positions from Story Editor to Executive Producer on a dozen different prime time network situation comedies, working with and writing for Bill Cosby, Alan Alda, Danny DeVito, Bob Newhart, Henry Winkler, Craig T. Nelson, Anna Faris, Allison Janney, Betty White, and Melissa Joan Hart.

Sheldon has produced a string of hit series including Newhart, A Different World, Coach, and Sabrina – The Teenage Witch. He lives in the Los Angeles area.

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