Go with what you know!
Even if your friend's cousin who works in the mailroom at CAA says to write Entourage, if you love Two and a Half Men, if that's the show you know, then that's the one to spec! You'll do a better job! If you love Entourage and you watch it every week, write that one.
“HEAR IT IN YOUR HEAD”
When you're writing for TV, you are writing someone else's characters. You're speaking with someone else's voice. Don't you want to be as familiar with those characters and that voice as possible? How do you get to know someone else's voice? By listening to it all the time!
If you're like me, you've watched every episode of Seinfeld seventy times. Even while Seinfeld was still on the air, I could hear that series in my head. If I think about Seinfeld right now, I can hear Jerry and Elaine and George and Kramer. I “do” Kramer for my wife all the time. She'll ask, “Are you sure you're ready for that meeting?” I'll strike a Kramer pose, point my index finger, and say in my hipster Kramer voice, “Oh. I'm ready.” I can hear Seinfeld in my head because I've seen it so many times.
Writing for sitcom is like being an impressionist. A comic who does a great George Bush impression learns to do it by watching and listening to Bush over and over and over again. If there's a series that you've watched over and over and over again, like Seinfeld, you're going to do a better impression of that series than of some other series that you don't know. Your spec script is your impression of a particular series. Why not try an impression that you already know how to do?
When I got hired to write my first episode of M*A*S*H, I was writing characters that had been created by the guy who wrote the book, adapted by the people who made the movie, and then refined even more by Larry Gelbart and the people who wrote the TV series. I didn't get to decide who Hawkeye was. Hawkeye was very well established as a character. Hawkeye had a distinctive way of speaking. He had specific attitudes. He had his own moral code. I didn't get to alter any of that.
My job was to use everything that I already knew about Hawkeye in a way that the writers of M*A*S*H hadn't yet explored. “Here's a situation we haven't tried yet on M*A*S*H. Now, based on everything we already know about Hawkeye, how is he going to act in this new situation?” That was my job as a freelance writer coming in on assignment. I had to keep Hawkeye “Hawkeye.” How was I able to do that?
I could write Hawkeye because I'd been watching M*A*S*H for years. I loved and respected it. I knew the kinds of things Hawkeye was going to say, and the kinds of reactions he was going to have, because I'd been listening to him for a long time. I could hear Hawkeye in my head.
It's the same as when you know what your girlfriend is going to do or say before she does or says it. You've been with her for a while. You know her quirks and her likes and dislikes. So when a neighbor calls and tells you that she is giving your girlfriend a surprise birthday party, you know how your girlfriend is going to react long before anyone yells “Surprise!” She's either going to be really happy or really pissed. But you can write that scene mentally before it happens because you know your girlfriend. You can “hear her in your head.”
Writing for TV is the same principle: You write what is already there, based on what you already know. You “hear it in your head.” So you want to pick a series to spec that you “hear in your head” already.
I'm not sure how I learned to “hear it in my head.” I guess like a lot of kids, I'd been doing impressions for a long time. I did impressions of my friends and my family and the teacher and John Wayne and Nixon. I was able to do impressions because I paid attention to behavior, attitudes, mannerisms and styles of speech, as all writers do, and because some part of my brain was able to recreate them. I wasn't great at impressions, but I was passable enough to get a few laughs now and then. If you have any experience “doing” people — observing them, recreating them, predicting their behavior — then you're well on the way to “hearing it in your head.”
Not all professional sitcom writers are able to “hear it in their head.” I've worked with a lot of “Joke Men” over the years. Joke Men are almost always guys who are hired on staff at a sitcom to relentlessly pitch jokes. They aren't really writers. They're gag machines. These guys never hear it in their heads. They never have any real understanding of the personalities of the characters or the premise of the series. Ninety percent of the jokes they pitch don't get used because the jokes are generic. They don't fit the characters. Why? Because Joke Men can't “hear it in their heads.”
Joke Men can never write the “moments.” If you've got a scene in the Second Act of an episode of The King of Queens where Doug needs to pour his heart out to Carrie, the Joke Man isn't going to be able to write that scene. He can't write it because he can't hear it in his head. He doesn't hear the voices of the characters. He has never learned what makes them tick.
Joke Men can earn big money on a sitcom writing staff, but they always impressed me as the most frustrated writers of all. All they had were the jokes. They never had the characters or the tone or the soul of the series because they couldn't hear it in their heads.
If there's a particular sitcom that you really love, and you can hear that series in your head. If you understand the characters, can predict how they'd react to things, know how they speak, empathize with how they feel. THAT is the series to spec!
BEYOND SEINFELD
I know this will sound ridiculously obvious, but let's cover it for a minute so you can't say I never told you: Don't write a spec script for a sitcom that is out of production!
If the series that you want to spec isn't on the prime time schedule of one of the major networks anymore, then that series is over. They're done. You can find reruns of Seinfeld and Friends someplace every day. But both those series are out of production. They don't make new episodes anymore. The sets are torn down and the actors have gone home. Don't write a spec script for Seinfeld or Friends.
No one in Hollywood who can give you a job is going to read a spec script for a series that is out of production. They're also going to think that you're a dope for not knowing that.
You might ask, “What difference does it make? Why can't I write a Seinfeld? It's still a sitcom. They haven't reinvented the genre since Seinfeld went off the air.” You're right. And if you can write a cracker-jack episode of Seinfeld, then you may very well have the chops to write any show. But you still can't spec a Seinfeld now because Seinfeld is over.
I've heard producers argue that anybody could write a good Friends or a funny Seinfeld because those series were on the air for so long. They're fool proof, goes the argument, so if you write a funny Seinfeld you aren't really proving anything.
I don't buy that reasoning. I've read spec episodes of Friends and of Seinfeld that weren't very good at all because the person writing the spec script couldn't hear that series in their head. You have to understand a series thoroughly in order to bring those characters to life, and to properly exploit the premise and the Formula. I think that if you can write a fresh and clever episode of Friends now, after all those episodes and all those Ross and Rachel fights, it proves something significant about your talent. But I'm not the one who is going to be reading your spec script and considering you for a job. You have to write what's current in order to be current. So just take my word for it and save yourself a lot of grief. Go beyond Seinfeld. Spec a series that is in production now.
If you're still thinking: “But I love Seinfeld. You said to write a show that I love. I'm busy. I really don't watch that much TV. The only show I know well is Seinfeld.” What I'd say to you is: “Then you aren't ready to spec a sitcom.” If you're working nights or going to school in the evenings, or you don't