The White Lotus: Engine of a Limited Series

The White Lotus: Engine of a Limited Series

This week, we're going to be looking at The White Lotus, Season 1 and Season 2, and through The White Lotus we’ll be looking at a really important concept in writing for TV: the TV Series Engine. We're going to be learning how to build an engine for a limited series, and how to apply those concepts to any kind of series– whether it's a TV drama, comedy, dramedy, or anything in between. 

To understand how the engine of The White Lotus works, let's start by talking about what the engine of a TV show actually is. 

The engine of a TV show is the collection of consistent elements that allow that show to feel both similar and different at the same time.

When you sell a TV pilot, you are not just selling a great story: you're actually selling a blueprint. You're selling a model for a kind of storytelling that can produce episode after episode, and in which each episode will feel both similar and different from the others. That blueprint is the engine, and it’s something you need to understand when you’re writing for TV.

When you tune into your favorite shows, you're coming for a familiar feeling: to hang out with specific characters and to see them act a certain way. But you also want to feel like you're going on a journey, and you want to be surprised. So you want it to feel different and similar at the same time. 

In a way, every show is like a franchise: just like a McDonald's! Every episode has a certain feeling in common, and each show has certain elements that are designed to generate that feeling. While you can play around with those elements, if you change too many of them, you break your engine. 

If you break the engine of a TV show, the show either peters out because you can no longer sustain the drama, or you end up losing its audience because you no longer have the feeling.

On the simplest level, a limited series like The White Lotus is really just a giant movie, so the engine works differently than in a traditional TV comedy, drama or dramedy series. 

Normally, when a limited series is conceived (what used to be called a miniseries) it’s conceptualized like a giant movie. Each episode is designed to feel similar to the ones that preceded it, while also being different enough to hold your interest. 

Each episode is designed to double down on– or, in improv terms, “Yes, and”– everything that's happened before, until it’s all boiled up into a giant mess that gets resolved in the final episode. 

The structure of a limited series is very similar to that of a movie. While a movie might have seven acts (the way I teach it in my Write Your Screenplay class), The White Lotus has six “acts” in Season 1, and seven “acts” in Season 2. Except in a limited series, we call these acts episodes, and they are broken down into smaller acts inside each of those episodes and into scenes within that. 

In a limited series, you have to think about the engine in terms of how each episode relates to the others– but normally, when you conceive a limited series, you don't design a season engine. In other words, you're conceiving it as a single product, not as something you're going to replicate season after season. 

But of course, what tends to happen when a limited series is successful is that we want it again, and that limited series ends up turning into a series, just like The White Lotus.

One of the big differences between a TV series and a movie is that movies are designed to create catharsis: when we get to the end of a movie or limited series, we want to feel a feeling of completion. We've gone through this journey with these characters and we've reached an end. And that end, whether it's tragic, or comic, or somewhere in between,