By the end of the act (on page 35), Damon joins Blanca’s new house-The House of Evangelista-and his dancing talent will help them compete in the balls. In Pose, Blanca meets Damon, a brilliant dancer and a runaway from Pennsylvania, who has no place else to go. This is not unlike the first act in the pilot for Breaking Bad, where Walter White lives a quiet, dull life as a chemistry teacher, but then one day collapses at the car wash.ĪCT TWO finds our protagonist(s) in a new situation, pursuing something new with great agency and meeting the people that will help or hinder them in that pursuit. At the end of the act, she leaves House of Abundance to start her own house. After testing positive for HIV, Blanca decides to pursue her dream. She walks/competes in balls for the House of Abundance. We meet protagonist, Blanca, in New York City in the late 1980s. In the shooting draft of the Pose pilot, the first act is 16 pages long. By the end of that act, there’s a catalyst, a big decisive action or an event that shakes things up. In fact, the structure of one serialized drama episode can feel a bit screenplay-like in nature, especially if you’re looking at a pilot.ĪCT ONE is where we meet the protagonist in their ordinary world. Part of what makes a season of serialized drama feel like a movie is that we follow that one central character (or, again, a few of them) in the way that we follow one central character in a film. The great serialized dramas tend to feature huge ensemble casts, but those huge ensemble casts are usually anchored by one protagonist (or sometimes a small group of them). Sometimes they include a teaser or even a fifth act, but four acts seems to be the standard. This way you can see specifically where the acts stop and start on the page.Īs mentioned before, you’ll find that scripts of this nature often have four acts. It’s especially helpful to start with shows that air(ed) with commercials… shows like Pose or Breaking Bad. The best way to learn serialized act structure is, of course, to read scripts. This knowledge will come in handy when you’re spec-ing a serialized drama show, writing a serialized drama pilot… or trying to get more efficient with outlining and drafting. We’ll stop looking at scripts without act breaks like this: We’ll offer instruction on how to spot the act breaks in cable/streaming scripts that don’t explicitly show them. So, with this blog post, we’ll do a little something different.

Feature screenplays are often broken into acts, but the writer doesn’t announce “END OF ACT ONE” on the page. Just because a writer doesn’t flat out state that this is the end of act one doesn’t mean the end of act one isn’t there. Good stories have turning points, mysteries, and revelations in order to keep a spectator interested. If a script doesn’t delineate its act breaks, we say it doesn’t have any.īut almost every TV show is broken into acts, even if those acts are not spelled out on the page. Even some of our earlier blog posts about spec script formatting are somewhat perplexing on this matter. Neophyte TV writers might assume that because a script doesn’t explicitly note its act breaks on the page that a script does not contain act breaks. It’s particularly rare amongst shows that drop/air on streaming platforms. These days, it’s rare to find serialized drama scripts that actually include act breaks on the page. As a result, these shows have a more cinematic feel. The episodes weren’t airing with commercial interruption, so there was no need for them. didn’t include act breaks in their scripts. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, HBO shows like Oz, The Sopranos, etc.

Format for writing a tv pilot