The War Against the Kitchen Sink Pilot

Another way to describe “The War Against the Kitchen Sink Pilot” would be:

“How to Overcome the Premise Pilot Blues.” A premise pilot literally establishes the premise of the show. Often they’re expository—it’s Maia’s first day at Diane’s law firm; the first time Mulder and Scully are working together; the day Cookie gets out of prison; when Walt decides he’s going to cook meth and potentially deal drugs. Premise pilots generally reset everything. When they work well, the creators take their time establishing the introduction into the world. We get the launch of the series in a nuanced, layered, slow burn way. I’m more satisfied by a pilot that has depth; there’s time for me to get to know the characters before throwing me into a huge amount of plotting. For me, character is always more important than plot. Once the characters are established, I’ll follow them anywhere.

In 1996, when John Guare, the smart, prolific, outside-the-box playwright and screenwriter, published his first volume of collected works, he wrote a preface for the book The War Against the Kitchen Sink. One of the things Guare was rallying against was that desperate perceived need for realism, such as of drab objects in plays, when they could only ever be a construct. More interested in inner realities,

!1 he grew curious in musicals, because there is no fourth wall. The actors interact with the audience, and Guare was intrigued by the connection between the audience and the actors on stage. If they got a big laugh or applause, they would pause, bow and acknowledge; they had a relationship with the audience. He wondered why plays had to be so limited, with people sitting and talking in one room, all exposition, in a naturalistic, proscenium arch presentation. He was knocked out by Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play, A Raisin in the Sun. As he explains:

...[The play] began in a real living room with a dreaded kitchen sink

spouting real water. But suddenly, in the second act, in a stroke of

madness, we moved into an imagined African interior. I was inside

Sidney Poitier’s head. I was not simply engaged in watching these

people. In one flash, I understood these people.

Characters’ inner realities, expressed visually—via action and specific behaviors— are more important than cramming too much plot, everything including the kitchen sink, in the pilot. Guare championed putting the unconscious on stage and unlocking parts of it. He responded positively to Chekhov’s Three Sisters:

2 Get me to Moscow. Get me to New Orleans. Give me some shape to

the voices in my head. Show me the forces moving me. Don’t show me

a theater whose prime focus is only creating an illusion of surface

reality, where the play is true because, ‘Look! It’s a real room, with real

water running into the kitchen sink. Ergo, real.’

He talked about moving beyond naturalism:

Does the playwright elect to use the kitchen sink to soothe the

audience? Does the playwright dismantle the kitchen sink, and take the

audience into dangerous terrain? How the playwright resolves this

tension between surface reality and inner reality, how the playwright

restores the theater to true nature as a place of poetry, song, joy, a

place of darkness, where the bright truth is told; that war against the

kitchen sink is ultimately the history of our theater.

When We Bond With a Show

Making the internal external and turning a plot outside in are our main challenges as visual storytellers. There have been certain expectations around the one-hour drama pilot, that broadcast networks have perpetuated for decades. First, the

3 pilot had to get strong numbers. Broadcast networks by definition need to cast the broadest, widest net possible. When creating pilots, the mandate was, we have to hook the audience on Episode 1. That’s when the audience was either going to fall in love with the characters, connect to the premise of the show and tune in for subsequent episodes or seasons; but if we didn’t get them with that first episode, the show would die. Nielsen ratings were all about the overnight rating. Before the digital television revolution, high overnight ratings were everything. Those Nielsen ratings have since been declared almost irrelevant.

Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS Corporation, has stated publicly (as have many network and studio executives) that overnight ratings don’t matter anymore. There is an “overnight plus,” (or LIV+3 days, for example) which expands the rating system (there’s still the overnight, but they open it up for some days after that, to allow for DVR viewing and those who don’t catch the show in its regular timeslot but catch it over the next two, three, four days). But that’s also becoming irrelevant, due to the prevalence of on-demand television. If a show is programmed on linear television against a strong competitor, it doesn’t matter if an audience watches one show first or another; as long as they watch it, the show will find a life. Now, the pilot doesn’t have to cram everything into it and prove itself, nor be prototypical episode of a program on steroids, to make the audience

4 tune in and come back for more with great anticipation (or else fail). It’s a blizzard of plot that can distance us from getting to know the characters and leave us snow-blind. I always instruct my students: When in doubt, simplify. A great pilot is simple but not simplistic. For me, a simple but layered plot is always preferable to a convoluted, rushed premise pilot that tries to do too much (with the side effect of also losing credibility) and ends up alienating the viewers. Check out the pilot to NBC’s Blindspot and to see what I’m talking about—it’s a fun, intriguing premise, but everything happens so fast!

Variety published an article back on September 23, 2015, about how Netflix data revealed exactly when TV shows hook viewers. Clue: It’s not the pilot. Given that

Netflix now has 94 million subscribers globally, they know a lot about us from data and algorithms. They’re aware of our tastes, what we watch, what we buy, how long we keep watching, when we come back for more, what other shows we watch after watching those shows, what shows we watch historically. They take such data and instead of doing Nielsen ratings, they actually account for our tastes. Accordingly, they take what they hope is a predictable pattern and program to specifically targeted viewers. Netflix did research to find out when

70% of viewers were hooked on to certain shows and would go on to complete the entire season. This tipping point was never after the pilot. For The CW’s show

5 Arrow, it wasn’t until Episode 8. For A&E’s Bates Motel, it happened after Episode

2. Grace and Frankie tipped at Episode 4. I also personally felt that by that episode, the show had hit its stride and found its tone.

With Better Call Saul, it was by Episode 4. Better Call Saul is an interesting example, as it’s the prequel to Breaking Bad. The audience came in with the expectation of wanting to learn more about Saul Goodman. We don’t even meet

“Saul” in the first season; he’s still Jimmy McGill, which may be why it takes the audience a little longer to get into the show than for Breaking Bad, on which the audience was hooked by Episode 2 (which featured that scene of the acid in the bathtub).

So, we never have to feel we need to force anything or cram everything into the pilot episode. Here’s the litmus test: If anyone has to ask him or herself, “Is that forced, or is it organic?”—it's forced. If that little voice is questioning something, listen to it. When writing comedies and musing, “Is that funny?” Believe me, it’s not. If you’re wondering, “Do I need that line, or should I cut it?” Cut it. That inner voice helps us and is our weapon in the war against the kitchen sink pilot. There’s no need to panic about shoving everything, including that mundane kitchen sink, into the pilot. We need to trust ourselves, and our audience’s intelligence, enough

6 to introduce characters who are going to be so compelling that we don’t have to force them into overly intricate plot lines all in the pilot episode.

When our characters are iconic, distinctive and come from personal connections to our own unique voices, our show is going to reach that tipping point and find its audience. Don’t be misled by overworking plot or unnecessary expository detail.

Lead and invite us into the world, at the speed that’s right for the story you want to tell, and we’ll be piqued to come back and follow those iconic characters, anywhere.

Note

John Guare, The War Against the Kitchen Sink, Volume 1 (Smith & Kraus Publishing, 1996).

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