Character Study: What TV Shows Can Teach Us About Writing Characters
If you’re here, you probably love stories. And if you love stories and you’re anything like me, you get your stories in whatever medium you can, whether that’s novels, movies, TV, or maybe something else.
And while there’s nothing quite like reading for me, I am obsessed with certain favorite shows: Trying is one of them, Schitt’s Creek is another.
Today, I want to share four things that TV shows can teach us about writing more compelling characters in our fiction.
Lesson #1 from TV shows: Change can happen gradually over time
The cool thing about TV shows—even ones that only last one season—is that they give us lots of time to spend with the characters.
Think of it this way: in a movie, we need to see a full story and change in our characters in more or less two hours.
On a standard network TV show, we get 22 episodes at 45 minutes a pop, coming out to 16 and a half hours of material.
That’s a lot more time to tell a story and to be spending with its characters. TV shows—when they’re well written—show us incremental change, and the characters in season 1 will likely feel like different people by the end of season 4.
That’s what you want for your characters: you want them to be different than they are at the beginning of your book, and they change because of the events they experience in the story.
But often we might think that that change needs to happen quickly… this is a mistake that I see new writers making often.
But it doesn’t. It can and should happen incrementally.
At the beginning of my novel Privilege, the main character Annie is an optimist who is naive and trusting. She believes that justice happens because why wouldn’t it?
Then she’s wronged, and by the of the story, she’s learned that the institution she believed would save her, her college, wouldn’t.
But it takes her a long time to get disillusioned. If the disillusionment happened in the first chapter or even the fifth chapter, that would feel too quick, and the novel would have to go somewhere totally different to justify another 30 chapters.
Don’t mistake what I’m saying here: You want your characters to be changing. You don’t want them to stay the same. But that change can be happening incrementally—or it can happen abruptly, but after some time as passed, not too early in the story.
Lesson #2: Demonstrating character through behavior
Like in movies, TV shows usually show us characters and events through the “objective” perspective of the camera, right?
Unlike in novels, we don’t get to delve deep into the psyche of characters through words, unless there’s a voiceover, which is rare.
Instead, what we learn about them is learned through observing their behavior.
Now, this doesn’t mean you should write a novel just like a TV show—you shouldn’t.
If you’re not going to get into characters’ heads in your fiction, just write a TV show. Or a screenplay. In fact, if you don’t get into their heads, the characters will feel flat.
But showing your reader what characters are like through behavior is a great storytelling tool that we can learn from TV.
For example, take the medical drama ER, a series about the doctors and nurses of the County General Emergency Room in Chicago, handling patients while juggling their personal lives. In the premiere episode of ER, we learn things about the personalities of the characters through the way they behave at work.
We know medical student John Carter is probably wealthy and privileged because the rest of the staff makes fun of his tailored lab coat (which in turn tells us that the staff are probably not wealthy and privileged).
We know resident Susan Lewis prioritizes her patients over hospital rules because she gives a man an unofficial cancer diagnosis when he begs her to tell him the truth. We discover who these characters are from the things they do and the ways they behave.
Lesson # 3: Don’t be afraid of a formula!
I’m going to tell you something that might sound controversial: formula does not mean unoriginal.
That’s right, I said it.
Following a formula does not make your story unoriginal. In fact, some of the most critically acclaimed and popular stories have relied on formulas, and people still love them.
Why? Because formulas provide structure.
You don’t have to follow them perfectly, and in fact you shouldn’t, because the thing that will make your story original is the way you put your own unique spin on it.
But that’s where the magic happens, and TV does this all the time.
Some of the longest running TV shows have lasted that long because they use formulas and execute them really well.
A great example of this is Law & Order. I’m talking the O.G., where the cops solve a crime in the first half, and the district attorneys prosecute the criminal in the second.
This show did basically the same thing every week for twenty years and got nominated for 37 Emmys and won 6.
Sure, you know what to expect every time, but people tuned in every week because each episode put a fresh, unexpected spin on that formula.
You can look to the structures and tropes of your favorite TV shows—and by extension, your favorite books—see what they’re doing, and emulate it!
I love the movie Lars & the Real Girl, and I love the TV show Enlightened.
Neither of these is a novel. But I’ve downloaded the scripts—you can always find scripts online—and used them both as models for my own novel brainstorming before, because I love them so much.
Lesson #4: Characters can sometimes do things that are not “in character”
This probably sounds crazy to a lot of writers, because a criticism a lot of us get in our writing is “inconsistent characters”.
Someone reads your book and thinks “oh that character would never do that.”
Or you think, “I need to make my characters as consistent as possible.”
And while that’s sort of true—you don’t want to leave your reader thinking, “where the heck did that come from?”—the truth is that characters, just like real people, sometimes do things that are not things they normally would do.
In fact, it’s usually a character doing something they wouldn’t normally do that changes the status quo of their regular lives and sets their story in motion, or really amps things up when they’re already looking pretty dire.
The set-ups of TV shows often do this really well.
Prime example: Breaking Bad.
The main character is Walter White, a sheepish and disaffected chemistry teacher who receives a life-shattering medical diagnosis that pushes him to turn to a life of crime, making meth…and then, spoiler alert, way worse.
But what sets the whole show in motion is that Walter makes a decision that is actually really out of character for a wimpy chemistry teacher like him: he chooses to start producing drugs as a way to support his family.
Not something someone like him would probably do, right? But that’s the whole premise of the show, and what sets off his tragic descent into madness.
Your characters don’t always have to be “consistent”, they just have to be human.
Ready to write your book?
If you made it this far, I’m guessing that you are writing a book, or want to write a book.
If so, I want to talk to you.
When I’m not writing, my mission in life is to help talented writers write their dream books. I love it. I live for it.
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