This thesis explores how to script an engaging and original television anti-heroine narrative that appeals to a mainstream audience. Specifically, it is centred on the screenwriter’s process, and the storytelling principles and craft techniques at play for encouraging audience engagement. The research was originally inspired by Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s text (2016) Moral Psychology of Fiction. Through textually analysing several commercially successful television anti-hero shows, Vaage (2016) describes a set of narrative techniques that can be advanced for achieving viewer engagement. The credibility of Vaage’s narrative techniques is that they are grounded in moral psychology and point towards the fact that people’s moral decision-making is intuitive. This understanding has loaned itself well to cognitive media theory, particularly for those scholars who have gone on to extrapolate the field of moral psychology for understanding the moral decision-making of television audiences. Theoretical research has surmised that specific narrative techniques can be utilised to deactivate viewers’ moral evaluation, thus eliciting and sustaining their engagement.
A natural starting point for this research was to explore if Vaage’s techniques would be directly applicable to the scripting of an engaging television anti-heroine show. However, it was important to shift away from only exploring Vaage’s techniques theoretically, as well as the research questions more generally. Therefore, the scripting of an anti-heroine pilot episode was central to fulfilling the research aim and objectives. First, however, as a means of appeasing industrial demands, textual analyses were conducted on successful anti-heroine television shows, resulting in the development of additional narrative techniques specific to the anti-heroine. Vaage’s framework was subsequently combined with these newly discovered narrative techniques, giving rise to the Wheel of Techniques. At this point, practice commenced. After completing the first draft of my pilot episode Angela, it quickly became apparent that the Wheel of Techniques was inhibiting my ability to craft an engaging and original narrative. I discovered that morality is not the most essential pillar, and there are further layers at play that are far more significant for engaging audiences. Throughout the following chapters, these precise layers are explicated in a way that allows practising screenwriters to advance the development of their anti-heroine narratives. We are at a time in which more nuanced female-based screenplays that subvert traditional representations of gender are demanded. This thesis contributes new knowledge that can aid screenwriters to craft nuanced and authentic female-based narratives.