Writing the Pilot: The Streaming Series

by William Rabkin

When I published Writing the Creating the Series in 2017 I thought it was my definitive statement on the art and craft of TV writing. But then a funny thing happened. Stranger Things because Netflix’s first massive mainstream hit, and suddenly the gravity of the television world shifted to the streaming services. And it turned out that series made for streamers would be fundamentally different from those that came before.
We’ve gone from 22 episodes to six or eight or ten, we’ve traded self-contained hourlong stories to sprawling serials, we’ve lost our chauvinist blinders and embraced series from around the world, and we’ve abandoned the creative control once ceded to advertisers and given it to audiences. The result is a revolution in storytelling unmatched since silent movies gave way to the synchronized soundtrack.
Today’s top series are as different from those of a decade ago as a Model T is from a Tesla. With the new style has come extraordinary new freedom for writers to tell almost any story they can imagine and find an audience.
But even this period of unmatched creative freedom comes with its own sets of rules, mores, and standards. The streaming shows work in essentially different ways from the old ones – and as writers we need to understand and master those ways if we’re going to find our place in this exciting new world. This book is my attempt to do that.

176 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 8, 2023

About the author

William Rabkin is a two-time Edgar Award nominee who writes the Psych series of novels and is the author of Writing the Pilot. He has consulted for studios in Canada, Germany, and Spain on television series production and teaches screenwriting at UCLA Extension and as an adjunct professor in UC Riverside's low-residency masters program.

William Rabkin has written and/or produced more than 300 hours of dramatic television. He served as showrunner on the long-running Dick Van Dyke mystery series “Diagnosis Murder” and on the action-adventure spectacle “Martial Law.” His many writing and producing credits include “The Glades,” “Monk,” “Psych, “Nero Wolfe,” “Missing,” “Spenser: For Hire,” “seaQuest 2032,” “Hunter” and “The Cosby Mysteries”. He has also written a dozen network TV pilots. His work has been nominated twice for the Edgar Award for best television episode by the Mystery Writers of America.
He has published two books on writing for television, Successful Television Writing (2003), with Lee Goldberg and Writing The Pilot (2011) and five novels. He is the co-creator and co-editor of “The Dead Man,” a monthly series of supernatural action thrillers published by Amazon’s 47North imprint.

Rabkin, adjunct assistant professor of screen and television writing at the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert’s Low Residency MFA In Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, has lectured on television writing and production to writers, producers, and executives in Spain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands and Brazil. He also currently teaches “Beginning Television Writing” and “Advanced Television Rewriting Workshop” for Screenwriters University.

Reviews

[Mickey Casario · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great for big picture overview - not for specific structure

Rabkin has wonderful insights into how and why pilots work or don’t work with very specific examples. He also delves into a deep explanation of how the advent of streamers has affected writing for TV that’s worth a read for anyone interested in screenwriting.

If you’re looking for specific help with structuring a pilot, this isn’t the book for that. He does discuss the four act structure, but it’s not laid out in a way that you can use to map your own script.

[Speculargloss]

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