24 Hits The Bottle

Pretty exciting 24 last night, heh?

Poor Edgar. Poor SamWise McGill. Poor...Tony? Um...maybe.

But watching last night with my ever-attuned Canadian TV spidey-sense tingling, I noticed something else:

They never left the bottle. 24 last night was a bottle show.

When info leaks out about how so-and-so's budgeted, "IE: Each ep of 24 costs $2.8 million..." or whatever, that's actually a misnomer. During the course of a season, some episodes, locations, stunts, special effects are just going to cost more. Remember when they blew up the motorcade? That cost some change. Helicopters to-ing and fro-ing? More change.

You obviously don't want to go over your budget, so sometimes the best way to catch up is to do a Bottle Show.

A bottle show, classically, is a show that takes place only on the standing sets of a particular show, using the main cast. (Ie: guest leads minimal, low extras.) You don't do any location shooting, and you don't do any really complicated camera setups. That usually means you can shoot fewer days, and save money that you're going to spend down the road -- or, more likely, get your show's budget back into a manageable place after you've blown it.

The bottle show is a valuable safety valve - another contingency that you have to make sure that you stay on budget and don't spiral out of control. Since it's easier to shoot, it's also a chance to rest your crew a little.

The other way to save money, of course, is the much-derided Clip Show. The Bottle Show is at least a little more viewer friendly, because you're getting a new story...and depending on how it's executed, GREAT new content.

Here's why I love Bottle Shows: the writing is the only real special effect.

If you can't blow things up, fly helicopters willy-nilly, or employ a ton of extras, well, then son, you better have a pretty kick-ass story...because most of your story is going to be people talking to each other.

The trick is to raise the stakes as high as possible. On 24, that means trap everyone in a room -- literally, in a bottle -- and kill a couple of people we've been watching all season. (Once I realized it was a bottle ep, for a brief, sick second I was sure -- SURE -- they were going to kill Kim.) A Nerve Gas attack on CTU is a perfect bottle story plot. The tension's so high you don't even notice that 80% of the show is in three rooms, with characters unable to go anywhere.

On Charlie Jade, I wrote our bottle show (which, for budgetary reasons, was also a clip show -- don't even get me started.) and the solution we came up with was this: amp the stakes by making this the first time the hero and the villain confront each other directly. Oh, and have the hero torture the villain. And reveal a major, major twist: in this case, the true nature of one of the enduring mysteries of the first 12 episodes -- a change that makes our hero never able to look at things the same way again.

On 24, it means getting the Presidential subplot to the precipice of declaring martial law, and revealing that Homeland Security is, for all intents and purposes, shutting down CTU. Oh, and let Peter Weller escape. And maybe Kill Tony. And the nerve gas. Boom. Big stuff.

Yeah -- those two Homeland Security people were in a car that we haven't seen before. But you didn't see a driving shot, did you? Did you see outside, as they drove? Nope? Driving rigs are expensive.

It takes a special kind of TV director to make a bottle show sing. On CJ, we got ourselves into the comical position of having the director move two of the three bottle-show plots out of the bottle. I don't think he got that he was directing actors in this show, and that's what made it cool. He just wanted to blow things up. Whatever. Usually that doesn't happen.

When you sit down to write a bottle show, it brings an almost zenlike quality to the task. You know that, in effect, you're really going to be writing a four act play. It's a very different discipline, which is why I relish the challenge.

Unfortunately, a lot of Canadian shows are budgeted so close to the wire that they wind up including a bottle show in the budget...which removes it as a useful contingency when things fuck up. And things always fuck up in Television.

In fact, once upon a time, I was involved with a show that may-or-may-not have made it to production. Their season plans called for two bottle shows, two clip shows, and a show that had to be block shot with a second show which was the same story from someone else's perspective.

It was awesome.

There are worse things you can do as an exercise than think about how you could tell an interesting story with your main characters without leaving the standing sets.