T.W.
Friday 20th November 2009 6:36pm [Edited]
15,786 posts
I take your point, but there are writers who don't really know what the plot of further episodes will be until they sit down and start to write them. If a pilot episode is sufficiently strong is establishing interesting characters and an initial premise, then there is no reason that (a minimum of) another five episodes should not be possible.
Writing five outline further outline plots may sound like almost an essential way to plan for a series, but actually that can be the very point that anything original in the pilot goes out of the window and a sitcom becomes formulaic. The plots should come from the characters and if the writer(s) know their characters then an initial seed for a plot will germinate from something within those characters.
Some of the best plots come from the most innocuous initial idea which a writer will run with and see where it goes. I'm not saying that plotting out episodes is a terrible idea, but I think that if the writer sitting down to script an episode doesn't initially know where the story is going, then it's more likely to end up in a script which surprises the audience as well.
I would cite I'm Alan Partridge as the type of show where one can sense that the plots developed organically during the writing process. I personally prefer sitcom where it isn't obvious how the episodes have been constructed.
Saying "in episode two, X gets seen kissing Z by Y, thereby leading to..." or "X needs to find money to pay for a romantic dinner with Y, so he goes and finds a job doing..." et cetera, tends to lead to comedy-by-numbers. Plotting is a consideration, but it is a mistake to think that writing the pilot is the easy bit because it's just one story. The whole focus of a show and any future plots is set-up within that pilot (if you're doing it right).
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