Arts & Entertainment, Writing
Case Study: Grey's Anatomy Pilot - Part 2
Lesson time 14:28 min
Shonda continues to break down the Grey's Anatomy pilot act-by-act.
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Topics include: Grey's Anatomy Case Study
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These twists-- the mom reveal, Derek picking Meredith to work with them, George's patient dies-- do you put a mandatory amount of twists into it, or do you think ahead of the twists, or do you just try to let them come naturally when you're writing a pilot, or even writing any episode of the show? I think the reason why I think about act breaks is because it allows you to think something big needs to happen at the end of every act. It allows you to not get stale. It allows you to think I have to be building towards some piece of story turn every act break. That way you're not staying steady, stable, nothing's really going on. And I've seen a lot of people try to make something exciting happen at the end of an act just for excitement's sake, and you can't do that. It has to actually have been placed, planted, and build from there. You need to plant something and then pay it off. You can't just have, ooh, suddenly the hospital explodes for no reason. You really need to plant things so that when these things happen we are watching character growth. And if it's built in character, you can get away with almost anything. Trust me, we have, at the hospital. But if you really build it in character, if you make it about character, you'll buy a lot of goodwill, and people will buy anything. Going back to the characters' back stories, because we see Meredith's secret at the end, that her home life is-- her mom has Alzheimer's and she visits her in the nursing home, do you have an idea for the other characters about what their home life is when you write the pilot? So for Grey's, I really did. For Grey's, I did a lot of work. It was my first time out doing this kind of thing, and I really wanted to know as much as I could. And so for Grey's, I knew who George was. I knew that he came from this big family. I knew that he was from Seattle. Cristina, I knew that she was from Beverly Hills, and I knew that her mother had married this guy and she had a sister. I knew that Izzie was from a trailer park. I knew everything about these people, and I'd worked really hard at it. I remember when Burke finally says, "My mother owns a restaurant in Alabama." It's a big line for us on the show, because I had been walking around saying that for, like, a year and a half. And people were like, "Why do you keep saying that?" And I was like, I don't know. It's just very important. Burke's mother owns a restaurant in Alabama. It's stuff like that. Those details were very important for me, and they were very internalized. I noticed when I was reading through the pilot of Grey's Anatomy that there were several omitted scenes. And I was just curious, which scenes do you find get cut the most? Is it that kind of back story, things that feel needless once you start to go into breaking the actual story? And it might be different from Grey's Anatomy from other...
About the Instructor
When Shonda Rhimes pitched Grey’s Anatomy she got so nervous she had to start over. Twice. Since then, she has created and produced TV’s biggest hits. In her screenwriting class, Shonda teaches you how to create compelling characters, write a pilot, pitch your idea, and stand out in the writers’ room. You’ll also get original pilot scripts, pitch notes, and series bibles from her shows. Welcome to Shondaland.
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Shonda Rhimes
In 6+ hours of video lessons, Shonda teaches you her playbook for writing and creating hit television.
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