Biblical Proportions: Guide to Developing the TV Series Bible

Be it for broadcast or online the mythical ‘Series Bible’ is a much cited but rarely clarified or defined cornerstone of episodic screen story-telling. The scale and scope of an episodic series demands a different development mechanic and paradigm than that of a feature film. Where the traditional Logline, Synopsis and Treatment can adequately serve a focused feature, the episodic series demands a greater depth of consideration if it is to sustain narratives and character archs over a long-form duration. Moreover, the ongoing series often involves a team of writers and directors who may change and evolve over time and require a central resource to guide and ensure coherence with the original concept.

Enter the Series Bible - a document package that details the scope, rules, concepts, themes, characters and parameters of the Story-World in which the series plays out in.

That all sounds well and good but as anyone who has ever gone looking for examples of series bibles can attest, the diversity, range and variation in what might constitute a series bible makes such examples very far from consistent. Unlike a screenplay lay-out, the series bible has no set form or format. Each bible for a series is in effect a direct response to the needs of the unique story-world. Thus the bible for a show like Battlestar Galactica is decidedly different to that of The Wire as the story-worlds of these two shows have very different demands. That said, there are consistencies to be found in how series bibles are assembled and the purposes they serve.

Before we can dig into a useful structure and makeup of the series bible it’s worth noting that different kinds of bibles may serve different purposes. Commonly there are two: the Pitch Bible - a document used to ‘sell’ the show to producers and financiers; and the Production Bible - which is more generally a compendium generated over time with the series documenting facts, plots and character elements to ensure that staff-writers have a reference for future episodes. The former is commonly submitted along with a pilot episode script to give a sense of where a series might head as it develops or to map out the larger narrative and episodic archs over a season. The later is something that develops over time with a long-running series as it is in production.

What I am proposing here is a more clearly defined third kind of series bible; the Development Bible. The purpose of this is for the bible to serve as an effective writing and project development tool. Certainly parts of the Dev Bible might become part of the pitch and indeed it may also serve to guide writers of a series into the future when a show is in production, but its primary purpose is to give the creator of the show a firm structure and platform to flesh out story-worlds, natural dynamics, characters and story-archs in a way that will feed the series scripts.

In specific, the dev bible structure proposed below is an attempt to deal with one of the more common issues writers new to series development (particular younger filmmakers whose headspace has more readily come from short and feature films) fall afoul of; that is the development of Plot or Story-Arch before Story-World. The Development Bible focuses on ensuring you don’t put the cart before the horse and go for Plot before you’ve established your World. A series has to be able to sustain and maintain drama over a long period of time as opposed to a feature film which generally has a single protagonist focused on the fulfilment of a singular goal in the tiny span of 2 hours. A series will often see several characters pursuing different goals, facing different problems, and being beset by new problems at different times. The Story World is therefore of primary importance as it provides the fuel to ensure that your show doesn’t run out of steam. If you create a world that is too confined, limited or lacking in natural dramatics then you will find your show will quickly collapse regardless of how intricate your plotting on interesting your characters. If however, you can construct a world beset with contradictions, conflicts and engaging potential problems in an authentic and considered way then you will have given your story a much bigger fuel tank.

Take the superb series Breaking Bad as an example. Whilst we may on the surface cite great performances, great characters and great plot as the backbone of the show; its real strength that drives and underpins all of these is the pressure-cooker of the Breaking Bad world. Before we think about Walt, Jesse and the tension of drug-deals lets consider the circumstance pressures the story-world applies from the very outset.

The story-world of Breaking Bad is one where teachers are paid poorly, a wholly capitalist privatised health system is fundamentally failing, and it is a theoretically libertarian society where great sums of citizens demand a drug that is illegal and in short supply. This is all elevated again by the visual, conceptual and geographical setting of the story-world; a city on the ‘frontier’, isolated, desolate, surrounded by deserts, in close proximity to the Mexican border. A place where American white suburbia collides head-on with the wilderness and the wildness of drug-cartels, illegal migrants and poverty. A place where the rationality of science sits side-by-side with a kind of pagan, tribal pecking order.

This is the carefully developed and specifically crafted story world of Breaking Bad; one packed with natural drama and plenty of fuel to sustain many stories and many plots over a long period of time. What serves to spark off the ‘plot’ in the pilot episode is a character and an event in the context of that world - a down on his luck scientist is diagnosed with cancer and his health insurance wont cover it. With this spark the powder-keg of the Breaking Bad story-world catches fire and burns hot and bright for multiple seasons.

This example illustrates the importance of the Story-World and the construction of a story-world pressure cooker. The parameters of the Development Bible outlined below are focused on ensuring you have a solid world in place, driven by concept, metaphor and natural drama, from which an engaging dramatic plot can organically emerge. Rather than the all too common world imposed artificially on a plot.

[READ MORE HERE FOR A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE COMPONENTS OF THE DEV BIBLE AND HOW TO WRITE THEM]