Malcolm Spellman on Vertical and Horizontal Storytelling in THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER

https://shadowandact.com/the-falcon-and-the-winter-soldier-head-writer-anticipates-fans-will-be-surprised-by-the-honesty-of-sams-journey

In an embedded video on Shadow and Act, THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER showrunner Malcolm Spellman gives voice to limited series structure, but from the perspective of a writer mostly used to working in ongoing episodic television (Spellman’s credits include long-running shows like EMPIRE).

“Kevin (Feige) said ‘I want each episode to feel like a movie, in the storytelling, not just the action and adventure, but in the way you tell the story, while getting the benefit of the deep dive of the serialized story.‘

“I call it VERTICAL storytelling, which is a movie… compressed time, everything building to an event, and HORIZONTAL storytelling, as in a series… the rhythm of how relationships evolve or how a character arcs is very very different.”

He goes on to call it a “hybrid goal of storytelling” that requires its own mechanics.

I’m attracted to this spatially-oriented approach to the architecture of short-episodic order seasons or limited series that have highly serialized storytelling but build to a definitive climax.

“Stretching out a movie is not going to work, you gotta find something different.”

In this quote, Spellman points out a dead end I see all the time — structuring the season (or limited series) as a “long movie”, and treating the establishing scenes of that “long movie” as a pilot without thinking the pilot through as an episode of television with an arc of its own.

So, the next time you are outlining a highly serialized project, make sure to think of it HORIZONTALLY (as a long movie, with all of the structural elements that entails, including building to a definitive climax) and VERTICALLY (as episodes of television that sequentially explore character relationships and track character arcs, with each episode telling a complete A story with a discreet beginning, middle and end, that segments to the next episode). This is a great discipline to prevent your pilots from getting bogged down in exposition.

Spellman came back to Shadow and Act for a print interview at the end of the run, where, among other topics, he discussed why they resisted flashback for the Isaiah Bradley character:

https://shadowandact.com/the-falcon-and-the-winter-solider-head-writer-on-cut-storyline-rumors-the-bradleys-sarah-bucky-and-more