Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer broke my heart yesterday. Yeah, she’s a babe, but I don’t mean it like that — we’ve never actually met. What she did was generously take the time to offer me some advice that I really didn’t want to hear.
I asked Amanda what, given her Hollywood experience, she thought the upper page count limit is for a half hour sitcom pilot — proudly noting that I had managed to whittle mine1 down to 44 pages. Did I need to keep whittling in order to avoid looking embarrassingly amateurish?
She suggested that I take a look at other similar pilots2 for the most recent season, gently noting that the pilot for the the breakout smash Modern Family rings in at a svelte 33 pages.
Ouch. She was too polite to say so outright, but I understood the answer to be that yes, me and my 44-page comedy pilot were clownshoes-wearing amateurs. Ah well. Time to put away the scalpel and get out the machete. This is going to be a painful and bloody mess.
If you have any aspirations toward screenwriting, I strongly recommend Amanda’s blog (and not just because she shares a first name with my protagonist). She’s working her way up the ladder as a writer in the same way that I am as a comic — and blogging about it along the way. She’s a bit further along on her journey, having begun in 2007 and already worked at an agency, and her archives are a treasure trove of valuable information.
- Amanda Evergreen is trying to put herself through college with a job at the local tanning salon, assisted and hindered by her exotic dancer roommate and the two sex-obsessed guys working at the gym next door. Body Shops is a raucous comedy about young people struggling to get by while toiling away in our modern-day body temples. [↩]
- I.e. half hour single-camera ensemble sitcoms. [↩]
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