Teleplay
A teleplay is a television play, a comedy or drama written or adapted for television. The term surfaced during the 1950s with wide usage to distinguish a television plays from stage plays for the theater and screenplays written for films. All three have different formats, conventions and constraints.
On the hour-long TV anthology drama shows of the Golden Age of Television, such as The United States Steel Hour, The Philco Television Playhouse and Studio One, productions often were telecast live from studios with limited scenery and other constraints similar to theatrical presentations. However, television dramatists, such as Paddy Chayefsky, JP Miller and Tad Mosel, turned such limitations to their advantage by writing television plays with intimate situations and family conflicts characterized by naturalistic, slice of life dialogue. When seen live, such productions had a real-time quality not found in films (shot out of sequence), yet they employed tight close-ups, low-key acting and other elements not found in stage productions. However, for many viewers, this was equivalent to seeing live theater in their living rooms, an effect enhanced when television plays expanded from 60-minute time slots to 90 minutes with the introduction of Playhouse 90 in the late 1950s.[1]
Notable examples:
- The Comedian (1957)
- Days of Wine and Roses (1958)
- Playhouse 90 (1956-1961)
- Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party (1977)
At first glance, the format for an hour-long drama appears similar to a screenplay. The main difference between a screenplay and a teleplay, aside from running times, is that television commercials forced formats with pre-determined lengths for each act.[1]
[edit] Reality television
Professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose family starred in the reality series Hogan Knows Best and Brooke Knows Best, explains in his 2009 autobiography My Life Outside the Ring, that paying unionized camera crews to film subjects continuously until something telegenic or dramatic occurs would prohibitively expensive, and that as a result, such shows are "soft-scripted", and follow a tightly regimented shooting schedule that allows for typical work-related considerations such as lunch breaks. When filming soft-scripted shows, the subjects are given a scenario by the producers to act out, perhaps an exaggerated version of something likely to be encountered in their real lives, are informed of the outcome, and possible "beats" in between, and instructed to improvise, which Hogan says is a version of what he did as a professional wrestler. According to Hogan, this would result in behavior that members of his family would never exhibit in real life, as when his son, Nick tossed water balloons at neighbors from a window, or when his wife would wake up early to apply makeup and do her hair before camera crews arrived to film shots of the couple sleeping.[2]
[edit] References
- ^ a b Serling, Rod. "Writing for Television," Patterns. New York: Bantam, 1957.
- ^ Hogan, Hulk (October 2009), My Life Outside the Ring, St. Martin's Press. pp. 175 - 178, ISBN-10: 0312588895
