Neil Landau is an award-winning screenwriter, creative producer, author, and professor of screenwriting in the MFA in Film, Television, and Digital Media Program at the University of Georgia. His screen credits include the teen comedy Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991) and the 2024 remake; the Goya Award-winning animated feature, The Adventures of Tadeo Jones and its two sequels; and the TV series Melrose Place, The Magnificent Seven, Doogie Howser, M.D., The Secret World of Alex Mack, Twice in a Lifetime, MTV's Undressed.

Foreword ix Acknowledgments xv Research Team xvii Author Bio xix PART ONE NEW TRENDS, FRESH SPINS 1 1 The Slow-Burn, Season-Long Mystery vs. the Durability of the Case-of-the-Week Procedural 3 2 Blurring the Lines: Redefining Genre and Tone in the Dramedy 31 3 Trust Me: The Confidence Games of Grifters, Swindlers, Imposters, Charlatans, Gaslighters, and Snitches 61 4 Dystopias, Alternative Realities, and Magic Realism 91 5 Coming-of-Age in a New Age: From Frozen and Conformist to Fluid and Authentic 131 6 Reimagining the Workplace Sitcom as a Hybrid Genre 159 7 The New American Frontier 189 PART TWO ART AND CRAFT 205 8 Episodic Story Structures, Circa 2024 207 9 Story Tentacles and the Role of Time 229 10 Caught between Two Wrongs: Moral Dilemmas, Triangulation, Limitation, and the Double Bind 247 11 The Art of Dialogue 279 12 Empathetic Character Development: Digging Deeper 311 13 Make the Body Count Count: Reframing the Narrative on Gun Violence in Episodic TV Series 341 14 Trips, Traps, and Tropes: Rookie Mistakes to Avoid 353 Index 366