In Search of the Unlimited Series
The three elements of an "Unlimited Series" according to Campside Co-founder Adam Hoff
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts and business.
When I was growing up, every so often, a broadcast network would air a “miniseries” and everyone would stop what they were doing and watch Lonesome Dove or The Stand for multiple straight nights.
Later, HBO would run John Adams or Band of Brothers as similar, event-style programming. It was only years later that the “limited series” became ubiquitous in Hollywood, bringing A-list talent to the small screen and sparking the imagination of creators who wanted to spend hours and hours building carefully curated worlds and stories with a beginning, middle, and end.
The rise of the limited was seen as something of a creative nirvana and a solution to the increasingly rare middle-market movie – in essence it became the new film. For the most part, everyone was happy. Until “limited series” became the television equivalent of throwing a dead cat on someone’s porch.
With poor economics for just about everyone involved, despite the same start up and opportunity costs as an ongoing series, “limiteds” went from a creative goldmine to an impossible sell, seemingly overnight.
Creative types tried everything they could to keep the dream alive, whether through packaging (bringing in undeniable actors and directors) or through clever anthology concepts (“no, see, it’s actually multiple seasons!”), but the writing was on the wall pretty quickly: a traditional TV show that could go multiple seasons was where everything was headed. (Which is where we started, of course.)
But what do you do when your “IP” – the journalism you make that Hollywood wants to adapt – is typically built around one case or one trial or one event that has a clear beginning, middle, and end? When the format of your medium (audio) IS the limited series and apples-to-apples thinking invites the inevitable thought to make a limited series in audio into a limited series in TV?
Well, you have three options: the first is to just stick with a limited and hope for the best, the second is to embrace the beginning/middle/end nature of the story and make it into a film, and the third is to go in search of the “unlimited” series.
I love this phrase, which was coined recently by the incredibly talented screenwriter Zach Helm, who I have worked with on a prior nonfiction adaptation (yes, that one did become a film project). Everyone in the television industry uses the term “ongoing show” to speak to a traditional TV project with multiple seasons, but I love the way Zach said “unlimited series.”
It speaks to not merely fitting projects into the latest box that the entertainment industry desires, but to the notion of truly lifting off from the original work and accessing something far greater. What does it look like to take a true story – told with dogged reporting and managing the constraints of non-fiction – and then go fully unlimited? What Campside projects would fit the bill? What is the dream IP for a television network?
Thinking this way has reoriented our approach at Campside and given us some easy tools that we use to assess how viable something can be as an ongoing – sorry, UNLIMITED – series in television. They don’t change what we pursue or sell to audio buyers and ultimately make, but this reframed thinking has helped us push the right projects into the world as more viable building blocks for a true TV experience. The core tenants of an “unlimited” series are:
A character who does their “thing” more than once. Whether we tell one specific story about one character, such as the incredible attorney and law professor Lara Bazelon in Suspect Season Three: A Shot in the Dark, or we tell many stories about one character like we did with Dr. Dante in Season Five of Chameleon, in each case the adaptation could have many seasons built around the different cases (for Lara) and cons (for Dante), regardless of what we chose to spotlight in 6-8 episodes of audio storytelling. But when two brothers show up in a town with a crazy story about never seeing civilization (Wild Boys) or a widow gets justice for her murdered sheriff’s deputy husband (Friendly Fire), those are one-time events – and therefore are probably movies or limited series concepts.
A world that the character can interact with and bump up against time and time again. To again cite Lara Bazelon, she has law students in her clinic, judges that she argues cases in front of, prosecutors she goes toe to toe with… a whole world of characters that could be just as rich and layered as any fictional legal show.
An animating question about who the character is, or who WE are as viewers, that keeps us going. One of Campside’s most viable ongoing shows in television development is not even based on a podcast, but is about a TV news reporter who is drawn to dark and upsetting crime stories. The animating question of the show is why is she pulled into this world? And can those forces allow her to find balance – and if she finds balance do we lose this warrior for justice? The best unlimited series put their characters at cross-purposes with the audience: if the character finds peace, there probably is no show for us to watch!
There are surely other layers, such as the location (the more the setting is its own character, the better), the natural twists and turns of the story, and the freshness of the overall idea, but…
If we have a character going into the breach over and over, bumping up against a chorus of foes, and battling against their own angels and demons, we’ve got a classic TV property on our hands.
Hopefully you will be watching one of them on a streamer you subscribe to very soon!
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Adam