Note: Arc Studio Pro users can scroll to the bottom to learn how to download a Character Development Worksheet as a note that lives alongside your script. New users can download Arc Studio for free and start writing their pilot today!

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With a movie the audience only spends about 2 hours with the characters, but with a TV show the audience comes back episode after episode, potentially spending hundreds of hours with the characters over multiple years. For the audience to invest that kind of time, your show need to have great characters. That starts with a TV pilot where the audience first falls in love with the characters.

But having great characters is not enough. Since TV shows keep going for multiple episodes, and hopefully multiple seasons, you need a lot of stories. One of the primary ways you generate these stories is through your characters.

In this article we're going to explore how you can create great characters for your TV show that will hold the audience's interest and help you generate stories moving forward.

Part 1: Creating Great Characters

You don’t have to make your main characters “likable,” but you do need to write them so the audience likes watching them. Below are some principles to help you accomplish this in your TV pilot.

Make Your Characters Active

Your characters should be actively doing things. Watching characters do things is how we get to know them, because characters are defined by their actions. What they do and how they do it tells us who they are. As we come to know them, we get invested and build a relationship with them. If your characters are just observing the world but not acting on it, your audience will eventually lose interest.

One tip to keep your characters active is to punish them for being passive. If they’re not going to do something, then the world should do something to them. Let me give you an overly elaborate metaphor. Let’s say your character is driving a car and they stop at a stop sign. At this intersection they can turn left, they can go straight, or they can turn right. But if they just sit there in their car, not moving, not making a decision, that’s boring. So have the world do something to them, like have someone rear-end their car.

Have Your Characters Do Things They Care About

But what kind of things should your characters do? Things that they care about. It doesn’t have to be saving the world, it could be something silly, but they have to be invested in it. There’s a Friends episode where they’re just seeing how many times they can catch a ball without dropping it. It’s stupid, but they really care about it. And if your characters care about what they’re doing, the audience is going to be more likely to care.

So think about your main characters. What do they care about? Are they doing things related to that?

External Goals

One way to think about what your characters care about is to think about what they want, and they should want something. The thing in their life that they want or are trying to achieve is called their external goal.

External Goal: What your character wants or is trying to achieve.

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If they have an external goal, they have something that is driving them. It forces them be active and make the kinds of decisions that will tell us who they are. It also helps to keep them active if there are consequences for failing to achieve their goal. That’s called the stakes, which you learned about in Lesson 1. The stakes are what they gain if they succeed, and what they lose if they fail. If there are stakes, they can’t give up or else they lose something important.

Even if you’re writing a slacker character who is perfectly content with the way things are, you still can have them want something. What they want is… everything to stay the same. And then you can create conflict by changing their world. What do they do now? Can they adapt?

Internal Goals

To take it a step deeper there should be a reason why the characters want their external goal. What’s their underlying motivation? This is called the internal goal.

Internal Goal: The underlying reason why your character is pursuing their external goal.

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The external goal is the thing in the world they want, and the internal goal is the emotional or psychological thing that they really need. It’s sometimes called their “hole in the soul.” The missing part of themselves that they need to be complete.

The internal goal of your protagonist is possibly the most important single element of your entire show. It’s the thing your audience will care about the most and identify with the most. The heart of your show is your protagonist coming to terms with whatever their internal goal is. Maybe they achieve that internal goal, or maybe they grow beyond it.

In TV, while the external goal might only last for a season and then change in the next season, the internal goal probably lasts for the entire show. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say your protagonist wants to win the state football championship. That’s their external goal for the first season of your show. But why do they want to win it? Maybe so they’ll earn the love and respect of their father.

So the external goal is to win the championship.

And the internal goal is to win their father’s love and respect.

And then journey of the entire show over multiple seasons might be them realizing that they shouldn’t have to win their father’s love and respect, and instead they need to love and respect themselves.

Using This In Your Script

How do you as the writer use what I’m talking about in your pilot script?

1. Make the external goal clear in the pilot script.
2. Show the audience the internal goal.
3. Start your protagonist on their journey toward their goals in the pilot.

First, figure out what your character wants, their external goal, and make sure that is clear to the audience. That’s the what.

Second, then on a deeper level, show the audience the internal goal. That’s the why. This internal goal doesn’t have to be explicitly stated, in fact the protagonist might not even know it about themselves. But the audience should be able to feel it. If we use the earlier example of the football player, you could show his internal goal by making him scoring the winning touchdown in a game. He should feel happy after winning the game, but he’s not because his dad didn’t see it. Through that the audience can see what he really wants.

Third, once you have the external and internal goals in your script, make sure you actually start the character on their journey toward their goals. This means that I’d advise against putting the inciting incident, the thing that starts your story, at the end. Move the inciting incident up in your pilot so that there is room for us to see them on their journey, making decisions, and taking actions in the pilot.

Part 2: Characters that Generate Stories

You characters aren’t just participants in the stories on your TV show, they actively create the stories by facing obstacles when trying to achieve their goals. Obstacles create conflicts, and conflicts create stories.

Fundamental Problems

These obstacles can come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, but it’s a lot easier if you don’t have to keep thinking of new obstacles as you go. Instead, think of a massive, fundamental obstacle that’s present from the start of your show. In other words, create a fundamental disconnect between what the characters want and the reality of the world they live in.

There are countless examples of this in TV shows.

In Abbot Elementary, Janine is a teacher who wants to do everything possible to help her students learn, but that’s really hard because her school is underfunded and she lacks experience.

In The Bear, Carmy wants to be a good boss with a great restaurant, but that’s really hard he’s saddled with a restaurant that’s falling apart and emotional and psychological baggage he can’t handle.

There are fundamental disconnects between what they want, and the reality of their world.

You’ll notice that these disconnects can be both external, like the school being underfunded and the restaurant falling apart, and internal, like a lack of experience and emotional trauma.

These fundamental problems create something we learned about in the previous lesson, chronic or unresolvable conflicts. Conflicts that don’t just get solved once and go away. They create problems over and over again. Which means they generate lots of stories, which means they generate lots of TV episodes.

Chronic Conflict: A conflict that continues to create problems over time.

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Think about your pilot. Have you created a fundamental disconnect between what your characters want and the reality of the world around them?

Character Flaws

Another way to look at this is through character flaws. Character flaws make your character more human and relatable, but even more importantly in TV they act as story engines. As a reminder, story engines are the aspects of your show that keep generating new stories.

Story Engines: The elements of your show that continue generating stories.

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So how do character flaws act as story engines? Because your characters’ flaws create conflicts for them, and as we know conflicts create stories. A fantastic example of this is Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In almost every episode the story is generated by Larry saying or doing something that gets him into trouble. He just can’t restrain himself, and he doesn’t want to restrain himself. If he could, the average episode would last for about 4 minutes.

But character flaws are useless unless you put your characters in situations where those flaws will be triggered. So it your character is impatient, you need to put them in a world where they’re patience is constantly being tested.

In your pilot have you put your characters in a world where their specific flaws will be triggered over and over again?

Antagonists

It’s not just your main characters that create stories. Your other characters should be developed to create stories as well. Chief among these is the antagonist. Not every show has a main antagonist, and some shows might have a lot of antagonists over the seasons. What makes someone an antagonist is that their goals are in opposition to your protagonist’s goals.

Antagonist: A character whose goals are in opposition to the protagonist’s goals.

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I hope your conflict spidey-sense is tingling, because if your show is about your character trying to achieve their goals, another character getting in their way is going to cause conflicts. And oh do we love conflicts.

One thing to keep in mind about antagonists is that they aren’t necessarily villains. They can be villains, but just because they’re in opposition to the protagonist doesn’t make them evil. For instance, if your protagonist is a teenager who wants to go to a party, their antagonists could be their parents who say they can’t go. This doesn’t make the parents evil, it just means that their goals of their kid remaining safe are in opposition to the teenager’s goals of having fun.

You’ll notice that both the parents and the teenager think they’re in the right. And that’s great, because everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story.

You can also have antagonists literally antagonize your protagonist. Whatever it is that bugs your protagonist. Whatever button they have to be pushed, have your antagonist push that button. This particularly holds true with comedies.

Supporting Characters

But not all the other characters are antagonists. You could have characters that are your protagonist’s friends, partners, neighbors, or spouses. These are called supporting characters. How can they help create stories?

Well the answer is in the name. Supporting characters are there to support your story. Don’t just think of them as comedic relief or a side kick. They should have an impact on your main character’s journey to accomplish their goal.

Maybe they’re the motivation for the goal. Maybe they help them achieve their goal. Or maybe they get in the way of the goal. Whatever it is, they’re having an impact by helping to put your protagonist into situations where they have to do things and make choices.

Also make sure your supporting characters want something themselves. Remember what I wrote earlier, everyone is there hero of their own story.

A helpful thought exercise is to think about what would happen to your show if you removed a supporting character. If nothing would change with that character being removed, you should give them more thought.

And a bonus trick that can come in handy is if you have 2 or 3 supporting character that aren’t having enough impact is trying to combine them into one more complex and impactful character.

Character Development Worksheet

I've put together a Character Development Worksheet to help Arc Studio Pro users through this process. (If you're not an Arc Studio Pro user, don't worry, you can download it here and start writing for free.)

You may not know, but Arc Studio Pro has a built-in notes app. This means you can open your notes side-by-side with the script itself for easy reference. No need to switch apps or browser tabs to see what you planned on writing.

You can create a note for each of your characters by clicking on the note icon on the character element in the Elements sidebar on the right. This gives you a place to store your thoughts and research on the character.

Even better, you can save a note as a template and then open it in another of your scripts. Plus, you can share your templates with other writers or use templates created by them. I've already created the Character Development Worksheet note template for you. All you have to do is add it to your Arc Studio Pro account and you'll be able to open it with any of your scripts.

To add it to your account, click here and then select Copy to my templates.

You can now add it to your character note by clicking '...' at the top of the note and selecting 'Import template into note.' Then select 'Character Development Worksheet' from the dropdown menu and click OK.

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