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sw-series-structure

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Episode and season structure for TV series (剧集单集与季的结构) — teasers and cold opens, broadcast four/five/six-act grids with page anchors, three tests for finding the invisible acts in streaming scripts, act-out and cliffhanger taxonomies, Oberg's four information tools, A/B/C/runner weaving and scene-count ratios, the Calvisi pilot beat sheet, five-part scene structure, and season shape (tentpoles, bottle and container episodes, two-parters, finales). Merged from Calvisi, Douglas, Oberg, Landau, Goldberg & Rabkin, Miller, Rabkin and Blum, plus act lengths measured from published West Wing, Succession, Sopranos, Downton and Fleabag scripts. Use when breaking an episode into acts, deciding how many acts a script needs, placing act outs and cliffhangers, designing a teaser, weaving A/B/C stories and runners, beating out a one-hour pilot, auditing an episode that has no shape, reverse-engineering a show's structure, or planning a season's episode order (分幕、出幕、悬念结局、季弧、瓶子集).

When to use

• breaking an episode into acts
• deciding how many acts a script needs
• placing act outs and cliffhangers
• designing a teaser
• weaving A/B/C stories and runners
• beating out a one-hour pilot
• auditing an episode that has no shape
• planning a season's episode order

When not to use

• series engine / franchise / bible / pilot type and sales
• half-hour comedy jokes and format
• writers' room process and document chain
• Chinese series volume and episode system
• full per-episode structure tables
• scene value shifts
• dialogue
• three-act paradigm and plot points

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