Why You Hate the Scene You’re Writing…

Andy Bobrow, updated 04-11-24

This is a collection of the things that the voice in my head tells me when I’m writing. It pertains specifically to sitcoms but maybe some of these apply to other formats. This is based on years of me writing scenes that I hated and then having to fix them, or watching someone else fix them, and then later in my career, being the person who has to fix other people’s scenes. The caveat is every single one of these rules probably has a bunch of brilliant counter-examples that prove it wrong. These are just the traps I’ve run into over the years. Hope this list gets me the kudos and RTs I’m trying to get:

Make your characters feel 100% of whatever they’re feeling. Scenes where you’re trying to progress a character towards an attitude or emotion are always hard to write and usually not much fun to watch. Make it about what your character does because they feel something, not about how they came to feel it. So If you’re putting a card on the board that has the words “starting to,” like “Elaine is starting to realize this was a mistake,” or “George is starting to get drunk with power,” think about it. Or good luck trying to write that scene where something almost happens or someone almost feels something. Either Elaine comes in knowing 100% that it was a mistake, or she believes 100% that it wasn’t a mistake and gets flipped 100% in the scene.
“I don’t need to listen to your crap” is a problem. Your characters ****should always have to listen to each other’s crap. Characters putting up with each other’s crap signals a relationship. It’s fine to have a character stuck in a bad situation or a frustrating conversation, but don’t just have them leave to get out of it. If they leave, make it for some other reason.
Big reveals usually fail in sitcoms. In a drama, you can have a character discover at the climax that someone has been lying to them. In a comedy, follow the liar instead and watch them get caught at the climax. There’s a reason why I Love Lucy wasn’t about a musician who never knew what his wife was up to during the day.
The more you justify something, the weaker it gets. If you feel you need to justify a character move, i.e. if it’s not self-evident based on what just happened or what we see on the screen, do it quick. Make it a joke and be done with it. But in general, when you’re explaining how or why something is happening, you’re losing them. Think about that Seinfeld episode where Kramer rebuilt the Merv Griffin set in his apartment. How did he find it? He was walking somewhere and he saw it in a dumpster. You could call that the laziest possible explanation, yet anyone who needs a better one just can’t be entertained. And why did Kramer want it? The fact that there was no explanation made it stronger. Imagine him having to say “Ever since I was a kid I worshipped Merv Griffin. My mom used to sit me down in front of the tv because she was busy with her second job, and Merv was like a surrogate father to me. Recently I caught a rerun - they sometimes have them on late at night - and I thought, ‘Whatever happened to that set?’ Do they just throw sets away? Even iconic ones? I asked a friend in the business and he said sometimes they hang onto them. I started making calls…” The more he talks, the less you believe his motivation. Just keep reminding yourself that the audience is inclined to ask fewer questions than anyone else in the process. But if something truly does need to be explained in detail, just kill that story. When you’re explaining, you’re not entertaining.TM
“Okay, new plan” is weak. Yes, you often want a character to have setbacks. But if a setback sets them back to square one, you just drove into a cul-de-sac and drove out. So when the first attempt to solve a problem fails, make it kick your character into a different, bigger problem, not the same problem. Often, when a story feels like it’s running in place, it’s because there’s a second attempt to solve the first problem.
Whose scene is it? And the answer can’t be “it’s a group scene.”
Speaking of group scenes, it’s easier to think of group scenes as two-person scenes. Don’t give yourself the impossible assignment of writing seven different POVs in one scene. Either it’s 6v1, 5v2, 3v4, or 1v1 with other people chiming in or egging them on.
If you have to do a montage, don’t do it. But if you don’t have to do a montage, you can do it. Like, if you literally can’t do the next story beat without a montage, you messed up and you know it. You started your story on the wrong day, or your story is about the wrong thing or something. Seriously, montages in sitcoms are a form of malpractice. Like if you’re doing a story where George wants to get good at karaoke, so he takes voice lessons, and you have to show him progressing over several weeks, fuck off. It’s like saying “so then he gets good at singing, and that’s exactly what I’m going to show you now, but not in any detail because the details don’t even matter and you already know where it’s going.” Either make the story about what happens during the lessons, or just skip the lessons and get to the part where he’s good. Or start the story with George telling Jerry he’s been taking voice lessons, and then make the story about how that blows up in his face. Now, on the other hand, if your story doesn’t require a montage but you have a really good idea for a montage, sure, whatever, have fun.
When it comes to exposition, pay your bills up front. You may think the audience will hate hearing blatant exposition, and they generally do, but what they hate more is not knowing what the deal is. So go ahead and start the story with a character coming in and announcing the news that gets everything going. Just do your exposition up top and be done with it. By the time you’re in act two, nothing should need explaining.
Everything should always add up. Don’t do that thing where a character says something mysterious or opaque that then becomes clear in a later scene. Don’t get excited about that Shyamalan moment when your audience goes “oh it all adds up now!” I mean, you can do it, but sitcoms are 21.5 minutes and you have less of your audience’s attention than mystery writers have.
Don’t make minor characters vanilla. Make them very flavorful.
Don’t try to make shit happen in the background. Don’t convince yourself that a story can be serviced by people on a different plane doing group actions or making group sounds. Don’t write “people are starting to get annoyed.” If it’s a story point, give one of those people a line and point the camera at them. Now, background-as-tableau is fine. “People are lined up for the grand opening” is great. “Raucous party” is great. But “The people in line for the grand opening are getting restless” needs dialogue, and “The partygoers become rowdy” needs dialogue.
Consider turning a group of people into one person. Whenever you find yourself thinking it’s important to the story for “people” to do something, just ask yourself if it could work with one person instead. Because a group of people, they just don’t have any weight or substance on screen. You can’t root for them or against them, you can’t laugh at their weird take on life, you can’t be entertained by them. So if you’ve got a card that says “people are getting excited about George’s brownies,” see how much more fun that scene gets if it’s one specific person.
This same concept, that groups are weaker than singles, applies to actions too. I think that’s why montages feel weak. If you’re writing in an outline, “George tries a bunch of things to get past Kramer,” maybe that’s fine, but it feels montage-y, and it also feels like the “okay, new plan” problem. It may be counterintuitive, but groups of people, actions, and bits have less impact than individual people, actions, and bits.
Find your jokes inside the story, not outside of it. If a scene is about George’s insecurity on a date, don’t build your jokes around his date’s weird accent or the waiter’s incompetence or the chef’s belligerence. For that matter, don’t even give George jokes unless they expose or deepen his insecurity. Like in a story about George’s insecurity, if you do a joke about his food being bad, you’re telling your audience you don’t believe in any of this and you secretly hate sitcoms. Maybe do jokes about his date flirting with the waiter, or about the chef serving something fancy that George doesn’t know what it is but is too insecure to admit it. Your whole episode gets real blurry real fast when you do jokes off-story. If you don’t want to do jokes that are on story, why not just have someone say “knock knock?” It would be just as pointless.
Similarly, don’t try to make a story work just because you found good jokes. If the story has to change, delete the jokes that supported the old story. Don’t hang onto them or try to repurpose them. You are not an indigenous hunter, and your joke is not a buffalo.
Live inside your jokes. I don’t know how to explain this one, but the “Who’s on first?” routine is two characters living inside of a joke. I think all I’m really saying is the same thing improv people say when they talk about the “game” of the scene.
Your characters don’t think they’re funny and they’re not trying to be funny.