Introducing Likeable Characters in the Opening 5 Minutes
La Brea Pilot Analysis #1: How to make your audience cry and root for characters they’d just met
This is my favorite time of the year: fall TV pilot season! Alright, one of my favorites, right up there with the holidays and March Madness. 😏
Fall is when the majority of new TV shows are released, creating a bonanza of pilots to feast upon. For the writer in me, I always feel a giddy sense of excitement. Not just because you can learn SO MUCH from a TV pilot on how to open your story — but also for the chance to discover my next TV obsession!
The opening of your story is absolutely crucial in drawing your audience into your fictional world, as any writer knows. So just imagine how much pressure is on the TV pilot to nail its opening. If it fails to reel viewers in, it’s just lost millions of dollars in production costs for its Hollywood studio and network.
That’s why I love analyzing TV pilots! They’re my secret weapon for learning the best storytelling methods to open any narrative.
TV pilots can teach you how to:
- Introduce your fictional world
- Introduce your characters quickly, but in a way that makes your audience care and root for them
- Set up several storylines at once: the main storyline, and at least 1–2 others
- Build a mystery, by revealing enough of the world to draw your audience in, but not enough, so you can continue to dangle questions for them to come back every week
- Set up both short-term story arcs that gets resolved within the first episode, and longer-term, season-long story arcs that will entice your audience to come back every week
Phew! That’s what makes them so useful to learn from. Now imagine being gifted with at least a dozen of these pilots every fall to dissect. Truly a writer’s dream!
This fall, La Brea (NBC) was the TV pilot I was most intrigued by. The trailer showed a massive sinkhole swallowing up a section of LA, dividing a family in half. I was instantly hooked.
I’m happy to report that the pilot episode didn’t disappoint, offering a treasure trove of storytelling lessons. It made me care about the characters enough that I was crying within the first 5 minutes, while expertly layering its world-building, creating a mystery that had me eagerly anticipating the next episode.
How did the writers do it, and what can we learn in order to improve our own openings?
I break it down in two parts:
- Part 1: how they introduced characters we care about in the opening 5 minutes — read on!
- Part 2: the 3 step process they used to layer their world-building and create a mystery to hook viewers in
How to watch
Opening 5 Minutes:
SPOILERS for first 5 minutes below.
Sympathy tears
I was honestly crying within the first 5 minutes here! Then I teared up again at two later scenes. Yep, I’m a softie — but this show also did a phenomenal job of getting us to care about the family at the center of this story.
It opens with the Harris family in a car, sitting in LA’s notorious traffic:
- Eve (mother) — who’s in trouble with her new boss because she’s late driving her kids to school
- Izzy (daughter) — has a prosthetic leg
- Josh (son) — writing a college essay using his sister’s prosthetic leg rather than anything interesting about himself
Already, we see some interesting tidbits about each member of the family. The father seems to be out of the picture, as Izzy suggests they move back to San Bernardino to “give Dad another chance”. There’s conflict in this family that’s been torn apart — I love it! The dad will definitely be coming into the picture soon, so this makes him instantly intriguing, without having even met him yet.
Suddenly the area right in front of them COLLAPSES into the earth!!
Save the cat
Eve reverses their car onto the sidewalk to get away from the sinkhole — clever! We like clever people.
But then they must get out to run. Josh stops to help a little girl who’d fallen — ooh, what a Save the Cat moment for him! Then, he gets knocked down to the ground by others stampeding to escape.
He’s a bit slow to get up … then gets swallowed up into the sinkhole! OH NOOOOOO!!!!!!
The mom and sister both scream in despair! This is when I started tearing up — mostly off of their desperate reactions, but also because the writers had made the boy both so heroic, AND wrongly victimized, right before his tragic fate. How could you not feel awful for him?
Personal sacrifice
Eve races back for him, but the ground collapses below her, and she falls in too. Ah, but miraculously, Izzy grabs her arm!
Yet Eve can’t pull herself up. She sees the nearby ground collapsing again — and makes the ultimate sacrifice. She tells her daughter “you must RUN!” — before letting go of Izzy’s hand. Eve falls into the sinkhole!
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
Now Izzy, shocked at losing both her brother AND her mother in the span of five seconds, has no choice but to run away from that hellhole. With tears in her eyes. On a prosthetic leg. In slow motion.
How can anyone NOT be crying here??
There you go. The blueprint on how to introduce characters in the opening of a story that we will cry over and root for in about five minutes flat, ensuring that the majority of the audience will come back after the commercial break to see what happens next.
Blueprint for introducing characters
- Characters who have some flaws within themselves, and conflicts with each other
- A family that has some issues, but also undying love for each other
- Characters who do heroic things, are unfairly victimized, or sacrifices themselves for another
- A family torn apart by a massive, tragic event
Of course, most stories will not open with such a massive tragedy that can wring tears from its audience. But you can still apply a lot of these same principles to your own opening.
For example, you can:
- Open on the move, towards a big event that generates anticipation and excitement
- Use action to show your characters doing something courageous or heroic
- Set up conflict between characters that readers will want to see resolved
Broken things must heal
In addition to nailing its opening, La Brea makes a key decision that sets up a season-long story arc that viewers will be watching eagerly to see if it gets resolved: will this family be reunited?
As soon as you tear people who love each other apart — whether that’s two lovers, or a family of four here — we want to see them get back together. We start rooting for them to reunite. It’s a natural human reaction. When you see something broken apart, you desire for nothing more than to make it whole again.
That’s why the writers’ decision to split up the family here was so clever. They sent two members of the family falling into the sinkhole, while leaving the other two members back on the surface.
This way, not only do we care deeply about what’s going on inside the sinkhole, but we’re also tied to the events in the real world. We start rooting for that rescue mission, just so we can see this family be put back whole again.
TV pilot rating: A
Did it hook me enough to come back for the next episode? YES!
Don’t miss Part 2 of my analysis: Join my email list to learn how La Brea uses a “Layer Cake” method to enrich its world-building and hook its audience — as soon as its published!
For more of my movie/TV storytelling tips, check out my Shang-Chi analysis:
Dancy Fu is a writer and learning experience designer. She has been analyzing movies, TV shows, novels and screenplays for more than 16 years, collecting storytelling insights to improve her own writing and online courses (on what else, storytelling! :) Dancy has lived in 8 different cities, and currently calls Los Angeles home.
