Skip to main content

TV drama act structure template

An hour-long TV drama is written in a teaser, four acts, and a tag. Each act ends on an act-out, a turn strong enough to hold a viewer through a break, and each act-out raises the stakes of the episode's question until the fourth resolves it.

A television planning strip places four main acts between a short teaser and a closing tag.

When to use it

  • You are writing a spec or pilot for an hour-long drama.
  • Your episode sags after the first break. Each act-out should turn something.
  • You need the episode's question clear enough to answer by act four.

Broadcast drama was written around advertising breaks. Streaming dropped the breaks, but most hour-long scripts still divide into acts.

The 6 beats at 60 pages

The marks assume 60 pages, because an hour-long drama script runs 55 to 65 pages. Each beat keeps its percentage at any length, so scale the marks to your own.

  1. Teaser 1% · page 1 The cold open. Ask a question worth staying through the titles for.
  2. End of Act One 20% · page 12 A turn hard enough to hold an audience across the break.
  3. End of Act Two 40% · page 24 Raise it. Something they believed is wrong.
  4. End of Act Three 60% · page 36 The worst moment. The break should hurt.
  5. End of Act Four 85% · page 51 The resolution of the episode’s question.
  6. Tag 99% · page 59 The short scene after: a landing, or a hook for next week.

A worked example

An episode of a hospital drama: a surgeon's patient is the man who injured her brother.

  1. Teaser. A car crash victim arrives, and Dr. Osei recognizes his tattoo.
  2. End of Act One. He is the driver who put her brother in a wheelchair, and he needs her to operate.
  3. End of Act Two. Mid-surgery, she finds evidence he was not driving that night.
  4. End of Act Three. Her brother arrives and demands to see him.
  5. End of Act Four. The patient names the real driver: her brother's best friend.
  6. Tag. Osei and her brother sit in the parking lot, not talking, and he takes her hand.

Open this template in Tabularia

Start a new project, choose Basic Screenplay, and pick the Television: Act-Outs shape. Each beat becomes a marker spread across the script, to drag onto the scenes you write.

Open in Tabularia

Or take it away

The Word file has every beat with its note and mark, a line under each for your own plan, and the example above. It opens in Word, Google Docs, Pages, and LibreOffice.

Download for Word