How I Wrote an 8-Part Comedy Series in a Month

Here's the exact step-by-step process—steal it and use it!

I put this process behind a paywall last week, and a lot of people liked it, so here it is for free and with more detail.

All told, I spent about 3-4 hours per week over a month to write the 8-part series. Were there snags? Of Course! Deadlines were missed. A lot of material was crappy. But overall, it was a fun and painless process.

Full Disclosure and Admission

I didn’t do this alone. Keith Webster, my writing partner, bore half the weight. He contributed an additional 3-4 extra hours per week of drafting. SO, had I worked alone, I would have spent 6-8 hours per week.

Keith’s other considerable value add was in making the final product a lot funnier. (Humor written alone is a slog.)

The series is not locked by any means. All we have is a first draft, and that’s what I’m counting for the month because it technically exists, and the hard part’s over.

How It Started

During one of our monthly walks around a neighborhood lake, we hatched the idea to do an 8-part comedy podcast based on a screenplay we’d written together some 15 years earlier that we both still thought was funny and believed had a lot of potential.

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TIP: This is what everyone should do with their TV pilot or screenplay that doesn’t sell. Get it out there in some other form—a book, a web series, anything. It’s your only hope for the project.

BONUS TIP: Your only hope for a career as a writer of scripts is to write a lot more screenplays and TV pilots beyond that first one.

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Our screenplay, Action Man, was a parody of an action cop movie from the 1980s. We renamed the show Action Cop and came up with a totally different story and decided to produce it as a podcast. The only things we borrowed from the screenplay were a couple of joke lines and the main character.

The character is a renegade cop who doesn’t follow the rules to an absurd extreme. Ridiculously grizzled, gruff, and always getting in trouble for being too violent, destroying a lot of public property with his John Wayne antics, and getting his gun and badge taken away a lot by the sarge.

Step 1: Figuring Out the Story

Our first step, which we gave ourselves a couple of days to complete, was to write 10 story ideas each, which mostly involved coming up with a villain. We had our hero (actually, anti-hero), but who was the villain?

Next, we reviewed each other’s 10 ideas (in detail here), emailed them to each other, voted, and then selected our highest-ranked villain from the combined list of 20 ideas: the local owner of a carpet store who flagrantly violates the flame-retardant regulations.

Step 2: Crafting the Story Beats

The next step was to rough out an outline of all eight episodes. We did this in two passes. I wrote episodes 1-4 (writing about a 5 paragraphs, or 5 story beats, for each episode). Keith wrote episodes 5-8 and punched up mine. I then punched up his. This was about a 4-day process.

We knew this incredibly rough story would improve as we drafted and re-drafted scripts and made character, story, and joke discoveries. We put the plots, such as they were, in a Google Drive folder called “Action Cop,” and we put the 8-episode structure in a doc called “Structure” that we used for reference when drafting. You can see the structure document here in full.

Step 3: Writing Crappy Rough Drafts

This is the step that stops up most people who embark on this process. It’s painful. Keith and I winced as we hit “upload” on these crappy drafts.

But that’s the step: writing rough drafts—crappy rough drafts. To make them good would take too long. I know from hard-won experience that it’s easier, more fun, and less time consuming to edit and rewrite a crappy draft than it is to write a good one from scratch.

We wrote 10 pages each every 4 days, staggering the episodes and each writing either 10 or 20 pages of an episode, depending how they were staggered. For example, for assignment 1, he wrote 10 pages of episode 1, I wrote 10 pages of episode 2. For the next assignment, I wrote 10 pages of episode 2 and he wrote 10 pages of episode 1, with each of us punching up, beefing up, and/or rewriting the pages the other had written.

Each episode is 30 pages (roughly 30 minutes of air time), so we completed each episode after just 3 passes.

I wrote my scripts in Final Draft and then copied the text and pasted it into a Google doc uploaded to our shared folder, a different file for each episode. Turns out, Google Docs are almost perfect at copying and pasting Final Draft scripts with all formatting intact.

Step 4: Finishing

About a month later, we completed all 8 episodes.

Next Steps…

Our next step will be to meet and read through these punched-up rough drafts, try to make sense of them, finesse what’s working, cut what’s not, and do some brainstorming and rewriting to iron them out.

I’ll let you know how that goes and how long it takes. Stay tuned!

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