 Welcome to our last unit in this chapter. So what are the biggest challenges when creating a series? You have to have a story that an audience, a story and characters that an audience will emotionally connect with. I think that's the number one thing that you need to do. If you can make an audience care about what's actually going on on screen and what's happening to the people that are watching on screen, then you've succeeded basically in the storytelling. The other big thing that you need to do, and JJ Abrams uses this expression of it's very important for him to get an audience to want to lean in to the screen. That's something that goes all the way back to storytelling around a campfire for centuries. That thing that is now becoming so interesting to me that actually everything else around me kind of falls away and I actually want to lean in and find out a little bit more about what's going on. I think those are the two most important things that you need to achieve. And it's a very difficult thing to do in ongoing serial television because you can succeed from the get-go very quickly and you can have people devoted to you for a season or maybe even two seasons. But to be able to keep that going for three, four, five, six, seven, eight years onwards is a huge challenge. And it is why generally speaking, most shows the longer they go on, audiences do start to fall away. Because they're not getting from the story what they wear at one point in time. There's an inevitable tiredness that comes if you're producing 22 episodes a year. But I think those are the fundamentals of good storytelling. Getting people hooked is all about getting their attention. Of course you can have like several aspects of a hook. One part would be getting people's attention. You think like, oh my god, what's that? And then there would be sort of an emotional component. Getting people, oh my god, I have to watch this because I care about this. I want to see what happens. So just putting in a shock. I don't know if someone is getting killed which is not a shock anymore but anyway something like that. It's not going to move people and it's not going to make them stay because you can watch people get killed or have sex anywhere. So you have to have something else, something that tricks them into carrying. And I think that's what's so difficult about a good hook. Where you can see, I want to see how this character deals with this. One of the major points both our experts mention more than once is the importance of the characters and the audiences interest in and care for them. We approach the means to create that interest in a character in chapter one already. Characters with clear goals, desires and the will to fight for them against all odds are most notably found in serial dramas like Game of Thrones or Lost where actual fighting against enemies and for survival is present in every episode. Yet also daily struggle serials like Gilmour Girls or The OC center around a group of people opposed to others, mostly relatives and neighbors that constantly keep the protagonists from reaching eternal happiness. In a procedural the desire of an investigator lies in solving his or her case first whereas inner demons, mean spirited colleagues or for example a murderer can be direct inner or outer antagonistic forces. Your creative and also analytic task for this week is therefore please pick any existing serial protagonist that you know very well and use the attached PDF to create a character profile so to say a portfolio of this character. This profile should include his or her most important traits that keep this character interesting to you while watching the Who series. Whether it's desires, enemies, professions, hobbies, religions, behaviorisms or else please fill out the form with all the info you yourself and please not Wikipedia because in that sense it's not worth anything for you. God from watching this show, you might want to rewatch one episode or two to jog your memory. Why is this helpful? This is a good question. To A. Compare those traits to the profiles of other protagonists and see the differences. B. Ideally learn a lot about how these characters are built, how they are designed and why some of them work better than others. Have fun!