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Happy Holidays!! Welcome to my Story Therapy newsletter.
My new product, Story Therapy: Character & Character Dynamics, is complete. I cannot wait to launch it into the world! It is my most comprehensive digital course to date. I will launch it in January.
THE SPLIT
When I was an executive at Spelling Television, I went through the divorce of my parents after 25 years of marriage. Shortly after that, I went through a divorce. The world shifted. I remember pitching the idea of doing a show about divorce. It felt like a ripe topic since the statistics were so high. Divorce is the biggest fear of loving at a high level. How do you capture all the emotions that are part of this experience? When you are in it, you feel like no one understands. You are alone. I recognized that no show fully grasped the experience of divorce until now.
THE SPLIT by Abi Morgan explores the idea of whether there is such a thing as a good divorce. As a Story/Career Consultant for screenwriters, I study what makes a show work at a high level and how to create story tools that other writers can use to create hit shows. Abi Morgan does a brilliant job of setting up the series arc in a way that makes three seasons of the show feel very fluid. There isn’t a weak episode. Everything links back to the setup. The Split is about a family with a family law practice. The eldest daughter, Hannah, is the central worldview. Hannah is a sought-after divorce attorney with a secret. Abi Morgan’s main points in the design create an engine of story that works. The questions that are driving the series are straightforward.
The story tools I created from The Split come down to three main points – the return of the father who left thirty years before, the trigger event that happens before we enter the story with Hannah’s secret, and the family law firm that brings in continuous situations involving domestic disputes.
The emotional and physical abandonment of the father is something that many shows explore. However, the idea that a father who has been gone for 30 years returns takes it to a new level with the setup of the series arc. At the start of The Split, we see Hannah and her husband, Nathan, on opposite sides of their bed. We feel the void. We see a montage of pictures. We see one of a mother with three daughters where the father is cut out. There is a value in that all three daughters share the same wound. The abandonment of the father shows up in each daughter’s life in different ways.
The trigger event that happens before we enter the story with Hannah’s secret of what happened the night before her wedding to Nathan works well because the reveal of it is part of Hannah’s biggest fear. The stakes are clear with Hannah’s marriage and her family. This story arc starts the love triangle dynamic between Hannah, Nathan, and Hannah’s colleague Christie, with whom she shares a history. When a writer successfully sets up a love triangle as part of the series engine, it excites your audience to come back.
What brings a marriage to a breaking point? The family law firm, Defoes, creates endless stories that thematically resonate. We learn at the start that Hannah leaves the family law firm since her mother didn’t step down so that Hannah can run it. Hannah is starting at a new firm, Noble and Hale. There is value in her being at a different firm since she goes against her sister and her mom on cases. The exploration of divorce through various situations allows the audience to heal because it hits universally. We get different perspectives of what leads a couple to want to split and when a marriage can be salvaged versus when it is time to let go.
When you utilize these three components for your series arc, and we feel it through the character and character dynamics, the season arc increases the chance for the concept's longevity. This is an incredible show for writers to study who want to know how to create a series setup that can lead to several successful seasons.
If you want to know more about story tools that could lead you to write a hit series, I will launch my new digital course, STORY THERAPY: CHARACTER & CHARACTER DYNAMICS, in January 2023.
If you want to learn more about my current offers, check out my digital content or one-on-one consults. My subscriptions are also selling at a high level.
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