The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

8Identify Characters’ Weaknesses

We all have strengths and weaknesses. On TV series, these special abilities and liabilities are essential to both comedy and drama. Our primary goal as storytellers is to make our characters so relatable and accessible to an audience that they become emotionally invested in what happens week after week after week. We need viewers to cheer for their successes and lament their disappointments. We need the audience to worry about our characters and feel what they feel on a visceral level. And the key to this entry point is through character vulnerability.

In general, people tend to feel vulnerable due to physical and/or psychological limitations, such as

• lack of basic survival resources and safety (The Walking Dead, ...