76-320 The Writer's Room: TV Writing
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
This course will focus on writing dramatic serial television. The class will operate as a writers room. Students will develop a story document, pitch their show, and develop and write a pilot and episodes of an original television show. We will not write sci-fi, fantasy or anime. The mystery or thriller genres will be considered if the story operates within the lives of normal people doing extraordinary things, think The Americans or Homeland. During the first three weeks of the semester we will study pitch documents, pilot episode scripts and the pilot episodes from some of the most critically esteemed TV shows of the last few decades: Homeland, Nurse Jackie, Killing Eve, and The Bear. (Screenings will take place outside of class.) We will study the structure of a television script. We will study the assignments and duties of the various positions within a typical writer's room. Students will interview for staff positions with the showrunner (the instructor) and be assigned various job titles (co-executive producer, producer, supervising producer, executive story editor, story editor, writer). We will build our own show from concept to scripts. As a group we will write and edit the pilot script. Depending on class size we will break into writing teams and write and revise 3-4 more episodes of our show. The major graded project for the course will be the episodes that students write alone or in teams. If possible, we will have a public dramatic reading of an episode.
Prerequisites: 76-212 or 76-269
Offered: Spring 2027, Fall 2025
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