Sympathy for the TV Procedural

most of what I know about writing scripts I learned by writing mysteries-of-the-week

“Hey, congrats on your film career, Caruso. I’m sure you’ll never find yourself doing procedural TV again.”

Before David Milch wrote DEADWOOD, he wrote crime-of-the-week scripts for HILL STREET BLUES and NYPD BLUE and BROOKLYN SOUTH.

Before co-creating TWIN PEAKS, Mark Frost likewise spent years writing for HILL STREET BLUES.

Before David Chase wrote THE SOPRANOS, he cut his teeth on crime-of-the-week scripts for THE ROCKFORD FILES and KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER.

Before creating THE WIRE, David Simon’s first scripts were crime-of-the-weeks written for NYPD BLUE and HOMICIDE (the latter of which was based off his book).

Before BREAKING BAD and BETTER CALL SAUL, Vince Gilligan started off on THE X-FILES…

You get the idea. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a bunch of the iconic showrunners of the most recent golden age of television learned their craft doing crime/mystery-of-the-week type television programs. In our peak prestige television age, the procedural has become a wildly underrated mode of storytelling.

At their best, these sorts of shows can be surprising and moving and funny and dramatically gripping while also doubling as compact character studies. And even better, they often accomplish all of this with shockingly bullshit-free storytelling efficiency that a lot of prestige or hipster type TV shows — not to mention bloated feature films — would do well to learn from.

That’s to say, a procedural show can be the ideal training ground for a screenwriter. I started off my career writing mystery-of-the-week scripts for LONGMIRE. And in terms of pure writing, it’s probably still my most challenging gig.

At some point, I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at doing mystery-of-the-week type storytelling again. I’ve got this ROCKFORD FILES type throwback TV series idea about a washed up former pro wrestler turned private investigator in Ft. Smith, Arkansas…

But until then, I’m mostly doing serialized cable dramas and muscular-type features in my screenwriting life. In doing so, I find myself continually returning to a bunch of the lessons I learned from my LONGMIRE showrunner Greer Shephard in writing my non-procedural scripts. Here are some of those.

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TELL A DAMN STORY

Obvious, but so, so easy to forget.

In writing a procedural type of script, simply moving the plot forward in your episode isn’t enough. For a mystery-of-the-week episode, you need to come up with a satisfying story that has a beginning, middle, and end, but that also moves the plot forward in the serialized story.

So for each episode, you have to tackle the basic but daunting question of “what’s this episode’s story?” That means, you’re gonna need a catchy enough hook in the opening minutes to get a viewer invested in that week’s installment (as opposed to just picking things up from last episode’s cliffhanger). You also need to conceive of a perp for this week’s crime, ideally someone who the viewer doesn’t suspect right away: you want it to be a surprise when the perp’s identity is revealed. But! The ideal perp isn’t just surprising: when their identity as the murderer is revealed, their motivation should also be emotionally resonant and understandable. And ideally, your protagonist will need to engage and finally solve this mystery in a way that reflects on their own current existential or emotional state.

Almost all of these lessons carry over to non-procedural, dramatic TV storytelling: the necessity of a catchy, early hook that sets up the rest of the episode’s story. The ability to hide the ball on an antagonist or motivation in order to set up a surprising reveal that makes sense emotionally and logically once the reveal is made. The necessity of having each episode’s story reflect your hero’s current heart-and-mind status so that the weekly episodic story also develops the hero’s character.

But there are also some more detailed script lessons I learned under this tell-a-story heading. As a staff writer on LONGMIRE, I found myself often wanting to write scripts that developed supporting characters like Branch, Vic, the Ferg, Henry Standing Bear.

Over my run, I learned I was much more likely to convince my showrunner and the head writers to let me do so if I could do two things:

1) pitch an episodic story for one of these supporting characters that had an arc for them (that is, a beginning, middle, and end) without taking up too much real estate from Sheriff Longmire, our main character

2) make sure the supporting character’s episodic story tightly tied into the mystery-of-the-week and Sheriff Longmire’s story for that episode

The side benefit is that both of these bullet points turned out to be great mini storytelling lessons.

In pitching my idea for a storyline for a supporting character, I’d have to lead with a logline version of it: first Ferg does this, but then he does that, and then he ends up in this new place. If I could hook the EPs on the shape of a storyline, I was much more effective than just saying “I want to do a Ferg story this episode.”

And if I could tie that Ferg story as a foil to Walt’s story, or have it help with the mystery plot, all the better. I learned how to condense and clarify character arcs and substories in simple language.

What all of this taught me: every dramatic moment in a script needs to be a pivot point in its own story. Even if it’s just a very simple three beat story that takes up two minutes of screentime, it needs to be telling a story with an intentional shape to it. Set-ups and payoffs and emotional consequences.

For instance: a guest character crying suddenly is peculiar behavior, but it’s not inherently a story, and is pretty hard to connect with emotionally. But a guest character mentioning how much they love their mother, then later revealing that their mother died in their childhood, then later fighting tears when they see a mother-and-son reunited: that’s a modest little story story about longing and loss and empathy, and is much easier to connect with emotionally.

As much as I can, I try to find ways to braid together as many of these little stories I can. Even if it’s a nameless henchman without any lines. First time we see him, he’s chewing on a toothpick, cleaning his weapon. Second time, he’s grinning and slipping his toothpick behind his ear taking aim during a shootout. Third time, we see him dead on the ground, his toothpick in the middle of a pool of his blood.

You’re not going to win a WGA Award for writing something like that. But what you will do is give a nameless, voiceless character a recognizable identity, and maybe even feel a tinge of sadness for the guy because he had at least a sliver of humanity. And if you keep layering all of these mini-stories within your larger stories, pretty soon your scripts will have emotional textures and a vibrancy that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Tell a damn story in the episode, yes. But also tell a damn story with your emotional beats and your disparate details. And figure out a way to deeply tie these mini-stories with your protagonist’s story; otherwise, they’ll get lost in the edit.

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SCHEDULING INFORMATION

This is a lesson LONGMIRE showrunner Greer Shephard had to really drill into me: thinking strategically about what gets revealed when in every single investigative scene.

When you’re brainstorming the major beats of an episode for a mystery show like LONGMIRE, you’re basically parceling out what bits of information Sheriff Longmire is getting in each scene: what he learns in act one, act two, etc. If you know ahead of time who did the crime and why — and if you’re doing a mystery type story, you really should know all of that ahead of time — then when you’re breaking the story, you’re essentially determining what various expositional cards you’re holding. Now you gotta figure out the best way to reveal those cards.

In each episode, when Sheriff Longmire is investigating a crime, he’s pursuing a working theory. And this working theory is what drives his current questions and actions. As a writer, you want to give him actionable information to either prop up that working theory, or to debunk that theory so he has to switch tracks. Sheriff Longmire’s early working theories — by storytelling necessity — are always a bit wrong, simply because he doesn’t have (or recognize) the key pivotal insight or evidence necessary to figure out the real story.

So, scene by scene, you’re giving Sheriff Longmire just enough info for him to credibly pursue one line of investigation, but at the same time you’ve also got to somehow lay down the right groundwork so that when the real story is revealed, it’s not a cheat. And you gotta do this in such a way that the viewer doesn’t figure it all out before Sheriff Longmire does.

Every mystery is actually a bit of a complicated dance, operating on a couple of different levels. Holding cards and laying them down is how I think about it. So when I was writing a LONGMIRE scene, I’d try to identify what the major card each scene held, and when and how I wanted to lay that card down.

Usually, this means Sheriff Walt Longmire arrives somewhere, wanting information. Whoever he meets either doesn’t want to give him that information, or they want to misdirect him, or they have some other agenda. Sheriff Longmire has to figure out how to navigate this situation in order to get whatever information he’s seeking. At the same time, other information gets dropped as well. Once he gets what he thinks he wants — or hits an obvious wall — he’s propelled forward to the next scene.

What I learned: there is just about always an optimal order in how a scene like this goes down. There’s the right time for Walt to identify the resistance in the scene, and there’s a right time for him to overcome it (sometimes via a threat, sometimes via empathy). There’s the right time for when Walt should ask each question. And there’s the right time for Walt to get the piece of information he came here to get. And there’s also the right time, as the writer, to secretly drop the key real clue to the real story into the scene without Walt or the viewer realizing that it’s the key real clue at that time.

LONGMIRE is made up of scene after scene like this. The thing is, most dramatic scenes work with a very similar dynamic. Your protagonist arrives into a scene wanting something. They meet some kind of obstacle (usually the scene’s antagonist wants something else). The scene is over once the protagonist’s working theory is either confirmed or found to be lacking. But in the meanwhile, you’re also sowing dramatic seeds that you’ll reap in a later scene without your characters or your viewers being totally aware that you’re sowing those seeds.

Even now, whenever my current scenes are getting flabby and flat and boring, often it’s because I’m being lazy in how I’m scheduling out that scene’s information. I’m not being properly strategic about what dramatic cards I’m holding and when/how I’m laying them down in the scene. So even though I'm not writing mysteries right now, many of the same principles still hold. Instead of clues, I think of what cards a scene holds in terms of emotion or psychology or a surprising reveal or a dramatic turn. And then I try to determine how to schedule these cards out in their optimal order. Or, how to hide or de-emphasize those cards so it feels more like a discovery when they come back into play later in the story.

Say I have a scene where an adult daughter walks into her father’s camper to question him about something from her childhood. If I’m being lazy, she comes in and asks a question and gets an answer. The plot moves forward. But no drama is conjured and nothing of consequence really occurs.

Or, I can structure that scene like it’s a Sheriff Longmire investigative scene. The daughter enters the scene with a working theory about what happened in the past. She wants to talk about it with her father. But he avoids the topic, by whatever means. The daughter has to figure out how to either gain his confidence, or trick him into revealing what she’s come into the scene to find out (it depends on their relationship). But in the process, the father reveals some key other piece of information that the daughter previously lacked. So now the daughter is propelled forward into the next scene by this information. And the daughter-father dynamic is subtly shifted and the emotional consquence of what just went down can play out when we pick it back up in a later scene (perhaps as part of an episodic three beat story about the daughter/father dynamic).

I happen to prefer this latter type of storytelling. It’s just thicker with texture and drama and humanity. And structuring countless investigative scenes on LONGMIRE was an ideal practice for developing this particular skill.

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PLOTS CAN BE COMPLICATED BUT MOTIVATIONS NEED TO BE SIMPLE

Greer would always tell me: Sheriff Walt Longmire’s investigation can take him around the world in a million different directions, but once he’s face to face with the person who did the crime, that person’s reason for doing it has to be direct, simple, visceral, and relatable. Plots can be intellectual and conceptual, but motivations need to be emotional.

I’ve taken this lesson with me to my more dramatic scripts. No one should behave in my scripts just to be a villain or a hero. Or just to prop up a cool, tricky plot. Every key decision a character makes needs to be grounded in real psychology and human emotions and simple motivations, even if the consequences of those actions end up creating endless complications.

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MAKE IT WEIRDLY WYOMING

A constant question in our writer's room was: is this a uniquely LONGMIRE mystery, one that wouldn't show up on another procedurally-minded show? How can we make this episode weirdly Wyoming?

The seeds of a lot of the mysteries were just found by scanning the news for crimes in Wyoming and crimes having to do with Indian reservations and jurisdiction issues. Or from talking with Marcus Red Thunder, our Cheyenne technical advisor.

Our goal wasn't necessarily, I don't think, to provide social commentary, but to find situations and conflicts unique to rural and Western and Native American life and then to explore them as honestly as we could manage. If it was a crime or conflict that could happen in a city, we'd leave that to other shows. If it was a crime that could be solved by technology, we’d leave it to other shows. That shit wasn’t our strength. Our aim wasn’t to approximate the stories others shows were already telling well, but to discover what sorts of stories could only get told on our show.

And that’s been my goal ever since: figuring out what kinds of stories could only get told in the sort of world that I was creating for the script, and then tell the best version of those stories that I could tell.

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PLAUSIBLE NARRATIVES ARE BETTER THAN RED HERRINGS

The easiest thing in the world is to introduce a character in a mystery doing something suspicious so they seem like the perp. Sheriff Walt Longmire walks into a bar and someone runs out. Instant suspect! Sheriff Longmire asks a question and someone pulls a knife. Uh oh! Etc.

I’m not above doing this sort of thing. Sometimes you just gotta get things going. But like having too many jump scares or surprises or explosions in your story, constant red herrings lose their impact with overuse.

It’s much better to hide your episode’s murderer by creating a breadcrumb trail of clues that leads the viewer to a logically plausible, dramatically sufficient, completely wrong murder suspect.

It’s basic sleight-of-hand. You make sure you give just enough evidence and motivation to let a viewer think they solved the case before Sheriff Longmire did. You make sure you don't have Walt vocalize an opinion either way — that way, your viewer, who knows the crime-of-the-week game, thinks "oh, of course, they're waiting for the last 5 minutes to get to unmask my guy as the perp." (As soon as someone is vocally identified as a subject in a mystery-of-the-week show, you can be pretty certain they didn’t actually do it.)

If you can establish the groundwork for a plausible alternative — like how THE USUAL SUSPECTS creates a plausible-enough case for Gabriel Byrne being Keyser Soze, which does a shit ton of the work in hiding Soze’s real identity — without overdoing it, then the real revelation will be all the more surprising. If you give the audience the 2 + 2 for the wrong answer, and avoid having anyone say “4” on-screen, then the seasoned viewer will suspect 4 will be the final answer.

This kind of plausible narrative sleight-of-hand doesn’t just work for procedurals and mysteries. If you’re wanting to hide from the audience (and your protagonist) who the real mole is, or the real secret Santa, or who really sent the flowers, or the real reason for the bank robbery or the divorce, you can use the same strategy: hide the right answer by creating a plausible breadcrumb that leads the viewer to the wrong answer. Then just when the viewer thinks their assumptions will be validated, you surprise them with the right answer, which was hiding in plain sight all along.

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WHEN WALT CONFRONTS A PERP, HE’S ALSO CONFRONTING SOMETHING INSIDE OF HIMSELF

Before joining Longmire as a writer, I was a poet and academic. The best thing I wrote in this prior life was a book about Johnny Cash’s first American Recordings album. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was an ideal training ground for LONGMIRE.

One thing I love about Johnny Cash: when he’s singing about a murderer or a sinner, he isn’t glorifying or damning such a person. Rather, he’s confronting some darker element inside himself by giving voice to it.

My favorite scenes to write for LONGMIRE were essentially duets, usually between Walt and some bad character: Walt warning a corrupt social worker that the mythical Dog Soldier is coming for her, or Walt switching identities with a Contrary Warrior in order to allow a confession.

Or, Walt telling his partner’s stalker the story of Achilles and Hector to warn the man to leave town while he still can.

For me, in scenes like these, Walt isn’t just conversing with a bad person. He’s also conversing with troublesome elements in his own soul. My hope is that this underlying kinship between Walt’s flawed nobility and some outer darkness gives an intimacy and immediacy to these scenes. “We men are wretched things,” he tells Vic’s stalker. At some level, such a confrontation is also a self-reckoning.

In a similar way, when I’m creating antagonists for whoever my lead character happens to be these days, I try to figure out a way to make that antagonist embody some inner element that my lead character doesn’t like about themselves. That way their conflicts aren’t simply external confrontations, but a way for my main character to grapple with his or her inner demons.

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Even if their ambitions are elsewhere, I truly wish every writer could have the privilege of spending at least a few seasons learning their craft on a procedural type show. Even if you’re writing the wildest Charlie Kaufman mindfuck script or the coolest edgy EUPHORIA type of script (I assume that’s a cool edgy show — I don’t know, I’m a middle-aged dad who mostly watches old movies), the ability to boil a scene down to its essential elements and then build it back out to your specifications is a skill that’ll always going to be useful.

Because in my experience, there’s one thing that really separates the real pros from the rest of the crowd. It’s not big ideas. It’s not surprising twists and turns. It’s not great one-liners. It’s this: taking formless scenes that could just kind of exist as forgettable plot points and turning them into gripping scenes of compressed drama, character, and narrative momentum. If you start putting together a run of those types of scenes, pretty soon you’ll have yourself a page-turner script, maybe one as effortlessly addictive as whatever random old LAW & ORDER episode you might stumble upon in a hotel room. And if you can do that, as David Mamet — another procedural-writing famous dude — once said: “WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR *AND* HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU.”