TV, like the internet, is simultaneously among the best and the worst things for a writer. It can absolutely be a distraction that can prevent you from writing if you allow it to be. But it’s also a potentially valuable source of inspiration and ideas, and one that I think gets overlooked because it’s viewed as an unproductive time sink.

What’s great about TV for a writer is that everything on-screen is edited and packaged for maximum viewer retention. It’s a case study in creating emotional hooks, setting up cliffhangers, establishing tension and intrigue, and building characters through dialogue and actions—all things that are very useful for both prose writers and poets. 

You can also get more direct story inspiration from watching TV, and not always in the ways you might expect. Here are three prompts that can encourage you to see TV in a more creative way:

Reality television is one of the more decried entertainment genres. And, sure, it’s got its flaws. I’m not going to claim it’s high art—but I do enjoy watching it. Competition-style shows are my reality genre of choice, and I’ll gladly watch people do just about anything if they’re competing on a TV show while they do it: cooking, designing clothes, modeling, doing drag, surviving in the wilderness, making piñatas, you name it. They don’t even need to be that good at it. Honestly, sometimes it’s better when they’re not.

I also do feel like this content has value for a writer, and I’m not just saying that to justify the hours of it I’ve consumed. Here are three lessons that storytellers can learn from reality TV, arguably better than from any other television genre.

I recently finished watching the Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher and thoroughly enjoyed it. It had everything I like in my horror: a dollop of creepiness, a dash of humor, and a high body count and gore quotient (also Mark Hamill as an evil lawyer).

While there’s a lot to discuss about Fall of the House of Usher—I may do a future blog post on the panoply of Poe references if the spirit so moves me—the thing that most impressed me was how well it pulled off two simultaneous and complementary tropes, what I’ll call “inevitable demise” and “cruel and unusual death.”

These are often found side-by-side in horror movies. Most frequently, at least in my experience, they show up in slasher films, usually ones that are either intentionally campy or are just plain not that good. This isn’t coincidence. These tropes are difficult to pull off with any kind of storytelling grace. When paired, they tend to end up in narratives where subtlety and depth weren’t ever on the menu.

I’m not a person who gives all that much credence to the idea of star signs. I can see some logic in the idea that when you’re born shapes aspects of your personality but not enough to ever choose partners or make other decisions based on this info.

That said, I’m very much a Virgo. I also identify strongly with the Vulcans on Star Trek, and for many of the same reasons. Which got me thinking: with the plethora of different species that have graced the screen across the Star Trek universe, there has to be one that aligns with all the other signs, too.

Unlike Tolkien, Gene Roddenberry didn’t set out to write languages when he created the Star Trek universe. In fact, it was linguist Marc Okrand, not Roddenberry, who did most of the heavy lifting for the best-known Trek conlangs, Vulcan and Klingon, both of which made their on-screen debuts more than a decade after the original Star Trek series was already off the air (Vulcan in 1982’s Wrath of Khan and Klingon in 1984’s The Search For Spock).

While these are the only two official, fleshed-out conlangs in the Star Trek universe, it’s become a fertile breeding ground for linguistic experiments and creations. Snippets of Ferengi, Bajoran, Romulan, and some two dozen other languages have made appearances in Star Trek episodes in either spoken or written form, making the universe a great one for aspiring conlangers to study.

One of my favorite things about the Star Trek franchise is the way they never let a good piece of worldbuilding go to waste. There are tons of examples I could cite from the latest slew of series, but the one I’m most tickled by is the resurrection of Captain Pike.

(Note: Thar be spoilers in this post, so if you haven’t watched Discovery or Strange New Worlds and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now).

It's hard to believe 8 series and a dozen movies later, but the Star Trek franchise nearly failed in its first season. Not only was the pilot widely regarded as a flop but by the mid-point of the first season they'd run out of episodes to film. Since almost nobody had watched the original pilot, anyway, Gene Roddenberry made the economical decision to re-purpose it, adding new material to stretch it into two full episodes. The resulting two-parter, “The Menagerie,” received a far better reception than the original pilot, evening winning a Hugo Award in 1967 for Best Dramatic Presentation.

As a modern viewer (read: binge-watching TOS on Netflix) “The Menagerie” gives you a feeling of déjà vu. Not only did I watch the pilot already, but I just watched it a few nights prior; the skillful re-use of the material, in this context, loses some of its brilliance. It also opens the two episodes up for more comparison and analysis.

The overlap between DS9 and TNG that was mentioned in part 1 of this post allowed for the further development of many races. The Cardassians and Bajorans mentioned earlier are joined by plotlines that showcase Klingon, Romulan, and Trill culture in new ways. As interesting as all of these developments are, the treatment of the Ferengi and the Breen are especially noteworthy from a world-building perspective.

As far as I'm concerned, the Star Trek universe represents world building at its finest: strong internal consistency, complex thought experiments, and a host of well-populated planets. The main difference between Deep Space Nine and the other series in Star Trek is conveyed in the name. Deep Space Nine is a space station in a continuous orbit around the planet Bajor, not a ship on a mission of exploration like the other series. Most of the action still takes place in the confines of the vessel with occasional jaunts to new and unique landscapes (similar to the away mission trope of other Star Trek series), but this change allows the show to delve deeper into the cultural and spiritual worldviews of non-Federation entities. That aspect of DS9 is what makes it especially valuable from a world building perspective.

Star Trek consistently takes a human-centric approach to science fiction. There are a multitude of species and worlds but the focus stays with Starfleet and its predominantly human-crewed ships. More unusual compared to other sci-fi universes, artificial intelligence is almost non-existent. In the Star Trek timeline, the first android wasn’t created until 2330, hundreds of years after technology like the transporter and warp drive. Compare that to, say, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, where robots are common in the 21st century, but space travel is still limited to the immediate solar system.