ScripTipps Turns On The TV

There's never been a more exciting time to write for television. With the feature spec market a thing of the past, it seems more new writers are aiming for the small screen these days.

If you're trying to break into TV writing, you'll need two types of writing samples: A spec episode of an existing series and an original pilot.

Now, to help you learn how the pros write killer pilot scripts, ScripTipps presents our first screenplay deconstruction focused on television.

Last fall, SLEEPY HOLLOW won the most viewers of any fall debut on FOX and was the first series of the year to be renewed for a second season.

Conceived by unproduced, Black Listed screenwriter Phillip Iscove, the show is a mash-up of two Washington Irving stories: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. What if Ichabod Crane slept for two centuries and woke up in 2013?

Further developed with STAR TREK scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the show is a genre hybrid: a heavily serialized fantasy/horror mythology grafted onto a dual-protagonist, case-of-the-week police procedural.

ScripTipps deconstructs the pilot episode of this smash hit series, analyzing its structural irregularities, how it introduces its important characters and themes, how it establishes a unique tone for the entire series, and more.

With this first TV-centric edition of ScripTipps, we also welcome a new writer to our team.

Angela Jorgensen originally hails from Iowa. She currently resides in Los Angeles and aspires to write for hour-long television dramas. She produced the short film Dolphin Dolphin’s Head and is currently producing a feature-length documentary, The Longest Straw. Her weekly column, As Scene on TV, analyzes individual scenes from TV shows, and can be found at firstclassreels.com. ScripTipps: Sleepy Hollow is her sixth book.