How do you keep a series engine alive across episodes or seasons?
In this script analysis of Amazon Prime’s limited series The Girlfriend, you’ll learn how changes in the “game” of your series can change the experience of your audience and make or break your series engine.
🎬 Finding the Game: How to Build a Series That Lasts
Great TV doesn’t come from piling on ideas. It comes from finding the “game” of your series, and mining it for all its worth. In this episode of the Write Your Screenplay Podcast, Jacob Krueger breaks down Amazon’s limited series The Girlfriend to explore how games set up in the pilot ripple through the series in the early episodes, and what happens to the series engine when writers break the very patterns that made their story work.
✍️ What You’ll Learn
What is a series engine, how does it work, and what happens when it breaks?
How the writers of The Girlfriend establish their series engine in the pilot, and stray from it in later episodes.
How the “game of the scene” can be used to develop a series engine that can drive a pilot, a season, or a whole series.
How improv concepts like “game of the scene,” “resting the game,” and “a hat on a hat” can be used even when creating a dramatic TV series.
Why adding too many “good ideas” can actually break your story structure
How mirrors and foils deepen theme and character across episodes
How audience perception—and misperception—fuels dramatic tension
How to rest, replay, and escalate a “game” to keep stories fresh
Practical tools for squeezing all the juice out of every scene you write.
🎧 LISTEN NOW and learn how to use the “game of the scene” to build a series engine that lasts, episode after episode, season after season, in your own TV writing..
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