A Tried and True Method for Crafting a Story

What do Fringe, Grimm, and Criminal Minds all have in common?

We started a rewatch of Fringe, well… Rewatch for me and first time watch for my wife (Its such a good show. Sad that J.J. Abrams (Star Wars) and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek) used to make really good original stuff and then moved into franchises that they ruined… I digress…)

All three shows use the same story skeleton or story arc to set up episodes:

• Set up the story with a crime, event, mystery, or issue that the protagonist(s) must react to. This usually revolves around introducing new characters that cause the event needed.

• The protagonist(s) are then called into investigate.

• The protagonist(s) now set out to uncover the truth and unwind the mystery.

• The Climax and the aha moment to the mystery or the event.

• Heroes/Protagonist(s) are triumphant.

Fringe and Grimm in later seasons would move away from this more and more as their universes were set up and major threads carried over from one episode to the next but Criminal Minds would stick with the formula (we stopped watching it in season 8 because… You have to evolve the formula to keep it fresh… or do you?)

Fringe wound up its story in 5 seasons and Grimm in 6. Both of those shows had stronger threads that ran through their serial episodes whereas Criminal Minds had very loose threads tying them together (mainly a cast story deep in the background). This allows fickle viewers the ability to come in anywhere, watch an episode, and leave without have to watch everything. Great for mini movie of the week TV but not so great for those that do tune in every single week.

Pretty much every CBS show (CSI (every version), NCIS(every version), Etc…) used this method of crafting an episode. Notable exceptions that played a bit more loose with it were Hawaii 5-0 and Magnum PI.

The point being, it is a winning formula that works to catch the interest of viewers (and it can be used in genre) and I know that James Rollins uses this to some degree for his massively popular Sigma series, so it works for books too. If you are a writer, and you get stuck trying to craft a story, it can’t hurt to give this method a try. At the very least, it may stoke the embers of a really good story that you can remake in another way.

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