What You Can Learn from TV Show Trailers

And How They Can Help Strengthen Your Writing - Part One: Genre

Jan 07, 2025

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TV show trailers are essentially short previews (under 3 minutes) for a future or recurring television series. While they function on a promotional and marketing level to draw attention to new content, they are also great storytelling tools worth analyzing that can help your writing in a number of ways.

By studying and articulating how trailers efficiently introduce us to genre, simplify the overarching narrative, tone, the world, memorable characters and dialogue, you can utilize similar approaches to strengthen your own material. This can be a useful exercise when putting together a pitch, series bible or assessing what bread crumbs you might want to include in your pilot script.

Trailers for the first season of a series are particularly helpful in highlighting what makes the content not just a pilot episode, but a show, and what the story engine will be episodically (ie., will we be following a mystery over a season or dropping into a day or week in the life of a workplace comedy? ).

In the first of several posts on this topic, we’ll observe key elements of trailers, starting with —

Genre

Genre is a broad way of conveying a type of storytelling. As per IMDB, “An easy way to identify the elements of genre is to piece together the narrative arc.” Here’s a helpful equation:

Story (Action) + Plot + Character + Setting = Genre

And here’s a list of the most common genres:

Audiences often want to get a handle on the genre of a show pretty quickly to determine if it’s the kind of storytelling that will align with their interests. For this reason, platforms identify genre as a route to their most likely viewers.

HBO’s series Hacks, is listed on their website as simply a Comedy. Here is the logline: “To salvage her waning career, Las Vegas comedian Deborah Vance is forced to team up with an entitled, outcast television writer.” Now watch the trailer for Season 1 and take note of how quickly (and how frequently) you are able to determine the genre of the show. How many jokes or comedic moments are there? What visuals inform it’s a comedy?

A subgenre is a smaller genre that’s part of a broader genre. For example, coming of age is a subgenre of drama. Streaming services have helped to make subgenres more popular than ever, due to their ability to find a niche audience and there can be more than one subgenre assigned to a series.

The German Netflix series Dark is referenced with many subgenres upon a simple google search. They include: Thriller, Drama, Suspense, Science fiction, Mystery, Supernatural, Detective fiction, crime fiction and police procedural. Here is the logline: “A missing child sets four families on a frantic hunt for answers as they unearth a mind-bending mystery that spans three generations.” Watch the trailer for Season 1 and see if you can find all of these genres in the series trailer. What specific imagery is most memorable?

Now, take some time to watch trailers of your choosing with an eye for genre. If you have determined comp shows for your own series, be sure to do a deep dive on those in particular. Research your genre, learn the tropes and consider how you can subvert them in your own work. Go back through your material and identify where exactly you are revealing genre - how quickly does your audience learn of it and brainstorm ways you can sharpen it in your next revision. Do you have clear moments that would make a trailer?

Next up: What You Can Learn from TV Show Trailers: Streamlining the Overarching Narrative. Stay tuned!

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