The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

2Explore a New Arena

Great television series provide us with a glimpse into an unknown world or a world we think we know—until we see it from an insider’s perspective. I always tell my feature film screenwriting students to think of the principal setting of their screenplays as another character in the story. This guidance applies equally, if not more so, to the world of a TV series. The “arena” of your series is its setting, but also encompasses time period, geography, weather, local customs, vernacular, style, traffic, values, social mores, and cultural, political and religious influences.

Sons of Anarchy, created by Kurt Sutter, shows us the inner workings of an outlaw motorcycle club based in the fictional town of Charming (in the Central ...