You can now support this channel on patreon. If your goal was to create the
most binge-able TV show ever, I think you'd come up with something
pretty close to Death Note. This show is incredibly fast-paced. Watching it feels
like being strapped to a rocket. So what exactly does it mean to be fast-paced?
And what is pacing? You'll often hear critics use the words, but it usually
feels undefined. To me, pacing describes how quickly and how
smoothly a story moves from beat to beat, from scene to scene, and from episode to
episode. In his book "Story: Substance Structure
Style and the Principles of Screenwriting," Robert McKee outlines the
units of storytelling. You can break acts into sequences,
sequences into scenes, and scenes into beats. He calls a beat, "the smallest
element of structure." It's an "exchange of behavior in action/reaction." Something
happens, and that causes something else to happen, and that keeps repeating until
we've created a scene. A scene is when "the value charged condition of the
character's life changes." So if they start the scene happy, the scene
isn't over until they're miserable. Note this has nothing to do with time or
location. A scene can move between multiple settings over the course of
hours and still be one scene. I think a big problem a lot of blockbuster movies
have is that they stretch out a single story beat for most of the final act of
a movie. When you can summarize 30 minutes of a film with "They fight" that's
a problem. So let's take a look at the pacing of what I consider to be the most
tense episode of Death Note. Episode 7, "Overcast." So spoilers up until this
episode. We start in the middle of a tense situation.
This woman has information that will expose Light, the protagonist, as the
serial killer named Kira. Light has to learn this woman's real name so that he
can use the magical Death Note to kill her before she
reaches police headquarters. Even though this episode is only 21 minutes long, it
has, by my count anyway, 42 story beats. That means we're getting a new beat
every 30 seconds, which is insanely fast. Now, the episode is arranged into ten
scenes. Four of these are devoted to the B-story and are all very short. They're
used to punctuate the big moments in the main story, which is why I'd say that the
episode is structured more like a traditional one-hour Network drama than
it is a half-hour TV show. If you look at the structure of half-hour comedies, they
typically have three or four parts. A really short teaser at the beginning,
often unrelated to the rest of the episode, followed by an act one that sets
up a problem, and an act to where it is solved.
Sometimes they have a short scene afterwards that's called a tag, but
basically it's a two act structure: setup, resolution. And many Death Note episodes
follow that structure. In this one, the first three scenes of the main story set
up the problem. But even though the show is burning through story beats, it also
finds a way to linger within moments of tension. It does this by using internal
monologues. In fact, 10 of the 17 beats that make up these three scenes happen
entirely in Light's head. Light: Calm down. You know what needs to be done. Just find out her
real name. This is a convention of anime ported over from manga in a way
that it usually isn't when American comic books or novels are adapted for
the screen. Now, narration is often seen as a lazy technique, but it works within
the world of Death Note, where the characters constantly scrutinize every
gesture. They have to guard their true thoughts from the world. This creates a
dissonance, a clash between the mundane visuals, and the frantic panicked inner
thoughts of the characters. Light: If this phone rings it's all over for me. What am I
gonna do. It's this dissonance that we find magnetic. The tension in every scene
is, "Can Light keep his thoughts hidden?" On the most granular level, the narration
also masks the beats of the story. We're given the impression that Light's thoughts
are out of control, but the writers are taking us through his logic step-by-step,
bringing dramatic clarity to the situation he's in. They consistently
blend exposition with tension, and that keeps us hooked. These
three scenes are followed by one short scene at the end of the act that is used
to recap the situation. It's a rare misstep, I feel, and it exists only
because the show is about to cut to a commercial break. So otherwise we can
safely ignore it. The final two scenes resolve the problem. In these scenes, we
ditch the internal monologue that dominates the first half, and are
launched into the action. Light improvises his solution, and we get a new
beat with just about every line, as the two characters react to one another,
until finally, Light succeeds. Light: "because I'm Kira." But there is a deeper structure
than that. One that resembles a one-hour drama. Most one-hour dramas have a teaser
plus four to six acts. With so many commercial breaks to get through,
hour-long dramas are structured in a way so that there is always some kind of
climax right before the commercials. In this episode, every scene in the main
story ends on one of these big moments. Mystery. Light: What's so funny, Ryuk? Revelation
Light: he's reacted the same way every time her name comes up. An alias!
New obstacle. Woman: I'd like to go there by myself if you don't mind. Cliffhanger
Woman: I was hoping I could speak with L directly. In effect, the episode treats
its B-story like the commercial break, and it treats its scenes, like acts. The
series is so binge-able because it has compressed a format designed for a
one-hour structure into half that time, and then sped it up even more by having
more beats per minute than some of the most adrenaline pumping dramas. And it
does all this in an episode that's just about two people walking down a street.
So from beat to beat, the story maintains our interest by always putting the
characters in some sort of tense situation. It lets us know their true
thoughts by dramatizing the disconnect between what they're thinking and what
they're doing. These beats build two turning points that define how we move
from scene to scene. Now be warned, these techniques are easy to overuse and can
be seen as cheap. You don't want to create a story that's an endless series
of empty cliffhangers. And keeping an audience's
interest is not the same as creating compelling characters. But Death Note's
tight writing style is a recipe for creating outstanding standalone episodes
within a larger narrative. The episodes have one specific goal, and it feeds into
the main arc. And that's something of an endangered species these days, with the
rise of streaming services and binge watching, where every episode sort of
blurs into the next. There is a tangible progress made in each episode of Death
Note, and you can track this in the relationship between Light and the man
trying to unmask him, L. Their relationship changes drastically every
other episode, putting Light into increasingly compromising situations,
where his identity is nearly discovered. Pacing is one of the most difficult
elements of storytelling to master. Every story has a ton of information it needs
to convey to the audience. Information that can weigh the story down, but if
you're looking to craft a narrative that is the right kind of binge-able, mix
tension into as many beats of the story as you can. Earn your cliffhangers and
tell complete stories with every installment. Death Note does this so well
that you don't even realize how breathless the story has made you until
the tension is finally released. Light: and goodbye, Naomi Misuda
Many thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video. If you want to know more
about story beats and story structure, then I highly recommend listening to the
aptly named "Story," by Robert McKee. Of all the screenwriting books I've read, I
consider this one the best entry point into the craft of storytelling. Go to
audible.com/justwrite or click on the link in the description below to
create an account and get a free audio book with your 30-day trial. That book is
yours forever because, even if you cancel your membership, you can keep the book
you downloaded. It it's totally risk-free to try. I really love listening to
audiobooks while I work on these videos. They help me make the most out of every
day by filling up the gaps in my schedule with self-improvement
opportunities. So remember to go to audible.com forward slash j u s t w r i t e, so
that they know who sent you. And thanks so much to you guys for watching liking
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