ABSTRACT
A movie needs one great story to work, but a TV series needs dozens or hundreds. This chapter explores how development professionals ensure that series have story engines built into them that generate enough stories so series can last many seasons. Two important kinds of story engines in TV today are “franchises” (not the fast-food restaurant kind) and “series drives.” While TV genres (as discussed in the previous chapter) define the world a series is set in, often the jobs of its lead characters and the kind of action that happens in most episodes, franchise is the mechanism at the heart of a TV genre that actually generates stories, episodic or serialized. A series drive gives the lead character or characters a strong goal they take action to achieve over the course of an entire series, generating many stories along the route of pursuing the goal.
