What is a TV game?
The answer to the question “What is a teleplay?” it is interesting and easy to find. In the late 1950s, Playhouse 90 was a 90-minute television series. From the earliest times there were two broad categories of television shows: drama and variety shows. The ancestry of television dramas can be traced back to radio dramas. Over the years, the concept of teleplay has undergone many changes and today it has come to mean a script written or adapted exclusively for the small screen. In a broader sense, a television play is simply a script, a composition that will be used for the production of films, plays or television programs. A teleplay has all the elements and forms that will best fit the television screen and is written with descriptions, instructions, and dialogue to suit the television industry. By now you should have at least part of an answer to the question “What is a TV game?”
Another part of the query, “What is a teleplay?” it has to do with its structure and format of conventional act. Both are basically consistent across all episodic TV shows. The one feature that distinguishes a TV script from movie and play scripts is the need to intersperse all dramatic writing with commercial breaks. Television has been hailed as the greatest mass medium of advertising for more than half a century. It is the fastest way to reach the masses, and this prominence has not been unearthed even with the introduction of the Internet. The targeting ability of television advertising is due to the impact created by its sound, sight and movement. Advertisers have come to rely on television to create awareness of their products. The teleplays are structured with built-in time allotted to the commercials. Writers looking to familiarize themselves with an answer to “what is a teleplay” should read as many TV scripts of popular shows as they can.
Determining what a teleplay is and what is the best way to entertain viewers has been a matter of controversy since the evolution of television. It has been estimated that the man’s attention span lasts about 15 minutes at a time. Teleplay writers keep this in mind when planning commercial breaks. Since one page of script equals one minute of broadcast time, the writers make sure that after every 14 or 15 pages, they wrap up the scene, preferably on a dramatic cliffhanger. This keeps viewers glued to the teleplay in progress, without having to switch to another channel. The emotion leads them to discover what happened in the next story.
The puzzle of determining what a teleplay is will be solved when you start writing specs for different shows that are already on the air. Watch these shows carefully and, if possible, read the scripts. Study the style of all the characters, how they talk, what they do and how they act and interact. The increase in the number of channels with their individual style of airing the shows has widened the market for budding, new and talented teleplay writers.
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