Elephant Bucks. Sheldon Bull

human beings are as silly as we are.

      As the Second Action, Frasier and Niles return to the opera club in an effort to get back in the race for president. Frasier is still trying to accomplish his First Goal of becoming president of the opera club.

      It's important that your Main Character never loses sight of that First Goal. He is always trying to get back to it.

      Frasier and Niles make a real effort to be respectful of one another. But of course they can't pull it off. Because of the established personalities of the characters this Second Action quickly deteriorates into more bickering. Frasier and Niles not only lose the presidency, but they are kicked out of the opera club forever.

      At this moment, all seems lost for Frasier. He has no chance now of accomplishing his First Goal. Because of his human frailty, he is worse off than when he started.

      So what happens next?

      We've played out our First Goal, Obstacle, First Action, Act Break, Second Goal and Second Action. Now the characters must reach a Resolution. How do we logically resolve this story?

      When I was producing sitcoms, it was pretty normal for the writers to get stuck plotting out a story. Often we'd hit a point where we didn't know what the characters should do next. When that happened, I would always ask the same question: Why are we telling this story?

      Maybe we didn't know why we were telling the story, and it was time to figure it out. Maybe we did know, and we'd just lost sight of it for a minute. Sitcom stories work best when they have a theme: when there's a reason for telling the story. If you know why you are telling a story, you never get lost. You can always figure out what the characters should do next.

      Why are we telling this Frasier story? I ask that question at this moment because the answer is going to lead us logically to the Resolution.

      What's this Frasier story about? It's partly about running for president of the opera club. But how are the premise of the series and the personality of the main character working together to produce this story?

      Part of the premise of any series is the relationships of the characters. Part of the premise of Frasier is the relationship between Frasier and Niles. This Frasier episode is really about their sibling rivalry, which was mined again and again on Frasier. In our story, we are exploring how Frasier and Niles' similar interests have made them furiously competitive. That's the theme of the episode so far. So if the theme of the episode, at least at this point in our story development, is the relationship between Frasier and Niles, and the lengths to which the two men will go to outdo each other, then our Resolution is going to involve that dynamic.

      As our Resolution, let's say that:

      6) Frasier and Niles admit that their sibling rivalry caused the problem. This also harkens back to the premise of the series: Frasier's human frailty — in his case, pomposity and vanity — constantly getting him in trouble.

      Frasier and Niles' realization that their sibling rivalry caused their problem brings about the Resolution. They realize how foolish they have been. They rediscover that their relationship as brothers is more important than outdoing each other. They patch things up between them. But just so things don't get too sappy, we might end the story with Frasier and Niles vowing to form a new and even snobbier opera club in which one of them would be guaranteed the job of president.

TWO-ACT FRAMEWORK

      We saw in this exercise that every sitcom story has two basic parts.

      Part One includes the First Goal, the Obstacle, and the First Action, all leading up to the Act Break.

      Part Two is the Second Goal, the Second Action, and the Resolution.

      I'm sure you see that the two parts form two acts.

      Situation comedies have traditionally used this Two-Act Framework.