What Screenwriters Can Learn from This Year's Emmy Nominees
If you take a look at the 16 Emmy-nominated series this year, you’ll find something quite intriguing about these shows – there doesn’t seem to be a formula to creating an Emmy-nominated TV series.
Outstanding Comedy | Outstanding Drama |
Abbott Elementary | The Diplomat |
The Bear | The Gilded Age |
Hacks | A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms |
Margo’s Got Money Troubles | Paradise |
Nobody Wants This | The Pitt |
Only Murders in the Building | Pluribus |
Shrinking | Slow Horses |
Widow’s Bay | Your Friends and Neighbors |
From elementary schools to restaurants and spy thrillers to political dramas, the recent Emmy nominees suggest that audiences aren’t necessarily looking for familiar stories, but rather human emotions presented through worlds and characters we rarely see, perspectives that challenge our thinking and a premise that sparks curiosity.
If there’s no formula, the question worth asking is, “What is television rewarding right now?”
Looking at the list of nominees, there are several recognizable subjects that are covered: relationships, work, family, ambition, friendship, marriage, politics, survival and grief. On the other hand, the premises have unique takes on familiar subjects:
A comedy about aging (Hacks)
Fantasy (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms)
Political thriller (The Diplomat)
Post-apocalyptic life (Paradise)
A period drama (The Gilded Age)
Of these handful of nominees, they are easily comparable to other recent Emmy-nominated series:
Aging (Grace & Frankie, The Kominsky Method)
Fantasy (Stranger Things)
Political thriller (Andor, The Americans)
Post-apocalyptic life (The Last of Us, Fallout)
A period drama (Shōgun)
Therefore, the formula isn’t specific, but rather finding a specific story to tell that has universal human emotion and character. Here are 5 factors to consider to help write your Emmy-nominated TV series.
1. Don’t Write the Show We’ve Already Seen
There’s a lot of advice out there about the need to write something that’s original. While that sounds good in theory, the idea is too simplistic.
When you look at the Emmy nominations, you’ll see it’s all original, yet recognizable. Take The Pitt for example. The concept of a hospital drama in an ER isn’t new. In fact, The Pitt’s star, Noah Wyle, was on a successful Emmy-winning hospital drama called ER 30 years ago.
What the creators did was take a recognizable genre and profession, then found the elements that made it feel different. Sometimes that’s how conflict arises or relationships play out, which include doctor/patient, co-worker, love and friendship.
Even a murder mystery in which podcasters obsessed with true crime try to solve the case is being repeated. Only Murders in the Building is a well-crafted ‘Whodunit’ about a trio living in a New York apartment building with a podcast. And then there’s Based on a True, Peacock show which involved a woman also obsessed with true crime trying to solve a murder via her podcast.
When a screenwriter can take a familiar genre and give it a distinctive premise, they’re providing something audiences recognize but is still fresh.
2. Make the World Part of the Story
The Emmy nominees aren’t about a collection of characters moving throughout generic location. Their setting helps tell the story in a unique way.
Take Slow Horses, for example. How many TV shows and movies have centered around highly capable spy or government organizations keeping the world safe from sinister forces? 24, Homeland, James Bond movies, Jack Ryan and many others.
Slow Horses is different. It’s not just the characters but the world they’re a part of that helps generate stories. The group of characters are part of a dumping ground of spies who messed up. Regardless of who the character is, they are impacted by this world, the “dumping ground” they find themselves in and the locations they must go.
The same with Abbott Elementary. The teachers on the show are well aware of the funding issues, politics and dynamics involved with being an educator in that environment; that drives their stories just like it did in The Office, a similar-styled show where budgets/sales, office politics and the dynamics of working at a paper company. They aren’t just in these worlds; they’re actively being shaped and challenged by them - even M*A*S*H* was a workplace-based TV show.
Screenwriters should think about setting as more than just a place where the story happens – it should also be one of the factors creating the story and causing conflict with the characters.
3. The Emmys and Audiences Want Stories About People
Regardless of where or when a TV show takes place, the Emmys and viewers ultimately want stories about people. Character is the emotional engines that make people tune in regardless of how unusual a premise might be. It’s why Andor resonates with its audience despite being a sci-fi adventure and how people understand the family complications behind shows like Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Nobody Wants This and Shrinking.
What makes every single one of the Emmy nominated TV series similar? The characters.
The audience won’t say they want stories about acceptance or professional recognition or a sense of belonging in their characters but they’ll watch The Gilded Age, which has acceptance and sense of belonging at its core. And after falling from grace, don’t people try to regain professional recognition like in Slow Horses?
The audience won’t even know it’s what they want in their stories but it’s why the viewer can relate to characters and story whether it’s in an elementary school, cursed island or an underground bunker.
This has always been the case. Even decades ago, when the Emmy-winning series The West Wing gave audiences a glimpse inside the White House, it was the characters who craved belonging, connection and recognition that made them relatable. Or when The Sopranos took the top prize; it wasn’t a mob story but a family and friendship story told in a unique way.
Emmy voters and audiences alike want stories about people (yes, I know that sounds vague). That’s why it’s important to focus on the human experience of characters placed in abnormal situations.
4. Give Your Characters Complicated Problems
The 16 Emmy nominated shows rarely have characters dealing with simple problems that have easy solutions. Shrinking – a comedy – deals with a husband and his daughter grieving their deceased wife/mother from a drunk driver. It also has an arc about an aging psychologist managing the onset of Parkinsons. Hilarious? Yes.
The world is full of difficult problems and, one would think, that viewers want a break from those complications, sit down and enjoy some TV. But audiences want to get invested in characters. The more complicated the problems, the more people root for their success.
Consider Deborah (Jean Smart) on Hacks. She wants to remain relevant even as she’s getting pushed out of her industry because of age and entertainment industry politics. Everyone can relate to desire to be relevant. Or The Pitt where even if they do their jobs to the best of their ability, success is never guaranteed.
Deborah wants to do stand-up, she legally cannot.
Doctors want to save patients, but sometimes those patients die.
People want to see the way well-defined characters deal with difficult circumstances - weren’t we all invested in Ross and Rachel’s complicated relationship and eager to see how they dealt with it? It meant so much that I don’t even have to name the show but you know what I’m talking about.
Characters don’t solve easy problems!
It’s this tension and uncertainty of how the characters respond to the situation that keeps audiences engaged and Emmy voters putting them into consideration for Outstanding Series.
5. TV is Evolving
In 1999, when The Sopranos won for Outstanding Drama Series it was the first time in Emmy history that a TV show that wasn’t on a network station was even nominated. Even then, it was the only non-network TV show to get a nomination until 2008 when Mad Men on AMC was nominated and won.
One last one – a few years later, Netflix’s House of Cards was the first streaming TV series to be nominated.
This is all to say that the idea of TV is evolving, fast. In fact, of the 16 nominated series, only 1 (Abbott Elementary) was on network TV and most were from streaming services like Apple TV, HBO Max and Hulu.
The stories TV show creators and show runners are telling may not get the number of eyeballs as networks did when there were only 3-4 stations, but there’s no doubt they are more creative. A TV series can focus on niche audiences as opposed to trying to gain the widest audience by playing it safe.
The changing landscape doesn’t mean that streaming is more popular, it means there is a better environment for writers to be more unique and creative in the stories they tell. They are no longer beholden to the traditional expectations of broadcast television.
The 16 Emmy-nominated TV shows go beyond the old categories with varying episode lengths, stranger premises, pushing the limits on comedy and having the anti-hero as the protagonist.
There has never been a better time for a writer to flex their creative muscles and write something truly original and human.
There’s No Formula…and That’s the Point
What can screenwriters learn from this year’s Emmy nominees?
There is no magic formula.
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