teleplay

A teleplay is a play written or adapted for television. The term surfaced during the 1950s with wide usage to distinguish a TV script from stage plays for the theater and screenplays written for films.

On the hour-long TV drama shows of the Golden Age of Television, such as The United States Steel Hour, The Philco Television Playhouse and Studio One, productions often were telecast from studios with limited scenery and other constraints similar to theatrical presentations. However, television dramatists, such as Paddy Chayefsky, JP Miller and Tad Mosel, turned such limitations to their advantage by writing teleplays with intimate situations and family conflicts characterized by naturalistic, slice of life dialogue. Such teleplays, if live, had a real-time quality not found in films (shot out of sequence), and they employed tight close-ups, low-key acting and other elements not found in stage productions.

Notable examples:

• The Comedian (1957)
• Days of Wine and Roses (1958)
• Playhouse 90 (1956-1961)
• Jim Henson's The Cube (1969)
• Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party (1977)

In modern usage, a "teleplay" generally refers to a script written for a television series. Formats vary depending on the type of show.

The format for the average one-hour drama, however, at first glance looks virtually identical to a screenplay (and, in fact, is often a variation on the screenplay format standard for the studio producing the series, assuming the studio does feature work). The main difference between a screenplay and a teleplay, aside from length, is that a teleplay is split into acts. This allows the writer to control when commercial breaks will occur, between the acts.

See also

• Radio drama