Inside Unthinkable: I Can't Make the Show Without This Doc
There's always a method to someone's madness when that madness makes you mad. Like, with love. Like, you are mad at how good something else and "go mad" for it.
I hope you feel that way about my show, Unthinkable.
Okay, new plan: Ditch the attempt at clever wordplay and say what I'm trying to say.
Even if you don't know it's there, the best experiences and stories often have an underlying structure known to the creators.
This makes it repeatable — and clear enough that they can reinvent it over time with a purpose.
That's where a rundown can come in handy, especially for episodes in audio and video form. Rundowns help you...
Maintain a consistent feel across episodes
Understand what material you need from prep work/research or production/interviews, and where it should slot into the final story
Repeat your production without as much effort as formatting something new every time
...while also giving yourself a base off which to innovate and play (i.e. the rundown is a strong suggestion but not a RULE for a given episode)
And above all, for the audience, the right format and structure are how you provide them ample motivation to stay. The rundown is like the visible, usable version of your format and structure.
Rundowns are a combination of three pieces:
Blocks (A Block, B Block, C Block) are a term pulled mainly from TV production and other high-caliber shows. These are large sections of the show, with a dedicated runtime + purpose to the audience for appearing in that spot in the rundown. I've written out the purpose under each of Unthinkable's blocks.
Beats are the specific moments, i.e. "story beats." Sometimes, they recur (e.g. in the Show ID every episode, my beats are identical, because that's how I introduce the show). Most times, the beats are dependent on the specific story, but may rhyme with the beats of that same block from prior stories.
Transitions. Though not written out overtly on my rundown, I use the movement between blocks as excuses for music or other aural types of transitions. This serves to reset your ears, snapping you back into active listening, and allows me to make harder transitions possible. I don't mean "difficult." I mean there's more of a hard cut or bolder line between moments.
Just to explain this further: It's easier to stitch together 4-5 self-contained moments or blocks than it is to tell 1 coherent, end-to-end story across the whole episode.
That means, when I don't know how to move you between two blocks, I can just cause the music to come to its natural crescendo and ending, then start with new music, which may even signal a tonal shift, and subsequent voices or voiceover.
See Unthinkable's episode rundown here.
This took me literal years to arrive at this document, and one recent change we made was to add two things to the doc, making it one MASTER document per episode. Those two things we added were:
the planning questions that help us filter a potential story through a productive conversation and brainstorm, such that we are reasonably confident it will make a worthy episode to pursue.
the research sections (and subsequent list of questions, which I always like to write out despite actually asking maybe 25% of them live)
I hope this document can help you think better about ALL your projects — and if you’re running a show and need a place to get started, steal away.