Glen Mazzara's Six Rules for Writing a Compelling TV Episode

by Sundance Collab team

Showrunner Glen Mazzara (The Walking Dead, The Shield) thinks that writing for TV has one rule: Cool people doing cool stuff every episode. While this sounds simple, anyone who's tried it knows executing it successfully can actually be quite the opposite. If you follow these six pieces of advice that Mazzara gives in his Sundance Collab Master Class on Episodic Writing, you are going to be a whole lot closer to writing a captivating script that keeps audiences coming back for more.

Create Larger Than Life Characters

On a good TV show, your character needs to be the most interesting person in their world, Mazzara emphasizes. Characters, need to be compelling, and active They are doing stuff that - when there are 500 shows - you say, I can't believe that character just did that. I want to see what happens next. I want to see what they do next.'

Mazzara gives the example of Tony Soprano, who he called the most interesting person in his world. Rather than writing a character like Tony Soprano, Mazzara warns that, Very often, young writers will write about the agent who's taken down a Tony Soprano character. They will find some surrogate for themselves as a writer, and they will put themselves into a story, but really your characters need to be larger than life.

Let Character Wants Drive Your Plot

In addition to being larger than life, your characters need to want something that drives them forward, which in turn is what propels that plot. To do this effectively, Mazzara came up with three rules/questions to address: What does my character think they want, what do they really want and what are they doing to get either one?

According to Mazzara, If you can't answer those questions, you're just going to move information. You're just going to defer your story. Therefore, he teaches, It's important every time a character enters a scene, they must want something. Another engaging technique is using a character's internal conflict to make them, their own worst enemy. Meaning, your character would get their want, but by getting their want, they also complicate their lives, and that complication becomes their future story. Mazzara explains that characters burn up story because they have an engine, they need to be fed story. That story needs to put them in conflict with people, and then their mistakes lead to future story.

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