Week-to-Week: Digging into the dramaturgy of Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt with creator Monica Beletsky
If any other showrunners are subscribing to the newsletter and want to chat, let me know, eh?
It’s easy to think about “Peak TV” as a holistic concept, describing the expanse of the television industry: in an environment where there is an endless flow of new programming, standing out is more challenging than ever for a given series.
However, I’d argue it’s also important to think about how Peak TV manifests in more specific ways within streaming services like Apple TV+, where the issue of broad competition is compounded by the sheer volume of content being released by a single service. While cable channels like FX have historically scheduled their programming with an eye toward spreading it out across a schedule, and HBO has largely stuck to airing a single major drama series at a time, Apple TV+ has been content to run shows concurrently, with rarely a breath taken before the next is in front of viewers. In the time since Josh Spiegel started covering Masters of the Air, which has its finale today, they’ve debuted no less than two additional big-budget drama series (The New Look and Constellation), and the WWII drama is replaced in the lineup today by limited series Manhunt to be followed by hour-long dramedy Palm Royale and Colin Farrell drama Sugar in the coming weeks.1
Given our limited resources, we can’t possibly cover all of these shows, and in general first season shows and limited series are sometimes a tough ask if they don’t have a built-in audience (like Masters of the Air did), much as they’re a tough ask for viewers wading through not just a huge volume of TV generally but also a huge volume of TV coming from Apple TV+ itself. Heck, while I haven’t seen any digital marketing for Manhunt or Palm Royale, TikTok has been serving me sponsored posts for another new Apple TV+ drama, April’s Franklin, reminding us how quickly a show can get shuffled to “a half-hearted push notification that there’s a new episode” in the discourse.
I don’t really have any answers into what gets an Apple show more attention, and the rapid fire whirlwind of the company’s Winter Press Tour session last month didn’t create much space for additional insight (and my attempts to take to anybody on the day were mostly ignored). However, I couldn’t help but notice in the weeks following the panel that Manhunt creator and showrunner Monica Beletsky is a subscriber to this newsletter, and having enjoyed the episode I watched ahead of the panel and been engaged by the ensuing discussion (and not just Anthony Boyle charmingly admitting his only awareness of John Wilkes Booth was this Simpsons scene), I decided to use this as an opportunity to get some additional insight into the series.
Specifically, I was interested in talking with Beletsky about the two episodes that premiered today, exploring them both as dramaturgy in beginning to tell her story and as strategy in terms of the decision to debut with two episodes (as opposed to three, which has been a pattern for Apple, or the traditional one). That was a line of questioning I followed across some other Apple panels, and I also got to dig into another one of recurring threads from my press tour questions (about episode order), so I’ll use footnotes to add some additional insights from across my time. Primarily, though, I wanted to take a moment amidst the unending flow of content coming out of Apple to think about the show’s compelling two-episode premiere in a granular way, something I’d love to do with more showrunners if/when I’m given the opportunity to do so.
As always, this interview has been edited lightly for clarity.
Myles McNutt: When I hit play on my screeners for Manhunt, my biggest dramaturgical question was how the show would handle the story’s incident incident: narrative speaking, where do you put the most well-known assassination in American history? The answer turned out to be 23 minutes into the pilot, and I’m wondering how this decision played out. Was this your immediate instinct, or did you play around with how to place the assassination within the story?
Monica Beletsky: I am a real student of pilots, it’s one of my interests. I don't know if you follow me on Twitter, but I've tweeted about pilot writing for years. And you know, in some ways I felt like a little bit of an impostor, because I didn't have a pilot made at the time. But obviously, I've worked on shows [like Fargo, The Leftovers, Friday Night Lights, Parenthood] for many years, and I just love studying other people's great pilots and trying to teach people what I notice about them. And so when it came to doing this one, I felt that I didn't want [the assassination] to fall at the end of the episode, because everybody knows what's going to happen—in my opinion, it's a long time to ask people to wait to see the thing that they know is coming.
And, in general, that's really a predicament of the dramaturgy of the whole show that people do know plot points already. And so it's really about suspense versus surprise— it was about how can you build suspense for the thing that we know is coming as opposed to surprise. And because there were the other assassination plans that evening, that was my way in to building up the tension because I don't think a lot of people know about that. So I don't think it changed a lot, honestly. That felt right to me. I didn't want people to wait too long and just structurally I wanted to spend time showing how Booth came to decide to do it then and there. I also wanted viewers to have to have enough time with Lincoln, so that we could feel the loss of him as a human being before it happens. So it was a lot to try to accomplish, but that's how it all laid out.
You mention the idea of saving the assassination for the end of the episode was something you didn’t think would work, but it seems like the pilot trope that’s often used to address the issue of surprise and suspense is an “in medias res” opening. Was that ever on the table, starting with the assassination then working backwards?
I think that structure works more often than it doesn't. But Lincoln's not talking in the assassination scene—he's a spectator. So I think losing him without having any time with him or Booth or Stanton before it happens, I just don't think it would have any emotional punch, because we're not in their headspace. We're not with them emotionally, we're not yet engaged with them on a personal level. And for me, that’s really important in storytelling and engaging with audiences—I really want you to be with the people, so that you have a real personal connection in wanting to follow the story.
During the show’s press tour panel, I asked about the deployment of flashbacks to Lincoln before the assassination, and the show continues to move around in time a fair bit in exploring all its characters.2 The result is a larger number of chyrons (on-screen text), which are used to depict where and when scenes are taking place and vary in form more than you might see in an average series. Was this something you knew was going to have to be used to orient the viewer at the script stage, or was it something that emerged in post as you confronted the complexity of the narrative?
The chyrons are probably the most controversial debate I had in post, and you're not the first person to bring them up. And it was a combination of not having some exterior shots that would have been helpful, and to some extent the ones that worked the best help with the suspense—knowing seven minutes into the episode that we’re really close to the assassination, for example. There’s a risk of the viewer thinking “who are these two random yahoos on a horse?” when we don’t know who they are or what they’re about to do yet, so the chyron makes clear this has something to do with the assassination itself. You know, did we need all of them? It was a debate, and I think it was one of the very few debates I lost. [Laughs] I understand why it’s coming up, but I do think that it functions as a ticking clock, and on that level they serve their purpose.
For me, the chyrons were less a concern and more an artifact of how much the pilot engages with spatial and temporal displacement as a narrative strategy. Chyrons are a useful tool in both cases, but the fact it’s coming up speaks to how we respond to this type of orientation in personal ways depending on how we prefer to engage with narrative in general.
I think for some people, it really helps them put their mind at ease and they just know where they are and when they are. And I think for other people it gets them overthinking about needing to keep track, and when you get into that headspace the chyrons become a distraction. And for other people, they keep them from being distracted. So it can be a tough call.
One of my recurring questions for the Apple TV panels at this year’s Winter Press Tour was about the company’s variable episode release schedules, which see shows releasing one, two, or three episodes in their first week. I couldn’t help but notice that despite being produced with a series order, the first episode of Manhunt is still titled “Pilot,” although it was not released on its own, with the first two episodes streaming today. Was this a decision you were involved in, and at what stage in the creative process did that decision happen?
Early on, when I started getting close to locking cuts, Apple graciously asked me what I thought the best strategy was for releasing the show, and I knew that if people watch more than one episode there’s a better chance they will finish the show. And I do think in this day and age of having so much television, the pilot almost serves as a long cold open for your show to see if they want to watch it—I know it sounds crazy, but I do think there’s some truth in that. I wanted to release two so people could feel a little bit more inside the world and the story, because a lot of the pilot is the assassination stuff that we know as opposed to investigation. And I really wanted it to be clear this is an investigation show.
The other reason was there are several characters who I love who don’t show up until second episode—President Johnson played by Glenn Morshower, Betty Gabriel’s character Elizabeth Keckley (who was a trailblazing black seamstress who worked in the White House with Mary Todd), and Patton Oswalt playing Detective Baker, who was a very eccentric person. So, I just thought it would be nice to give people more landscape of what the world of the show is.
There was also a discussion about a binge model or week-to-week, and I love the name of your newsletter—I’m a real believer in the episode, and don’t prescribe to the idea that a limited series is a long movie at all. It’s seven one-hour movies that are connected. I really like people being able to discuss what happened in that hour and let it breathe, and the episodes are a little dense emotionally and story wise so to drop them all just felt like burning a lot of conversation and maybe even overwhelming the viewer. So I’m really happy that Apple were receptive to my opinions on this.3
You mention that this happened during the edit—did you adjust your approach to the editing of the first or second episodes when you realized they were going to go out as a pair, and that audiences would need to wait a week?
It’s a bit of a blur, since it was a couple of months before the strike. But I would say there was always some question about exactly how to end the second episode. In the script it was the train leaving the station and a really close shot of the coffin disappearing and that wasn’t exactly how it was shot. I wanted there to be a sense of propulsion into episode three since there’s a week between, and so I did move around the order of scenes slightly to end back on Booth.
Another one of the conversations I had across multiple panels at Press Tour was about episode order, an increasingly variable question for producers like yourself. However, it’s still generally presumed that shows are going to hit an even number, and I couldn’t help but notice that Manhunt is a seven-episode limited series—am I wrong in my assumption that this was either an 8-episode series that shrunk or a 6-episode series that grew?4
Yes, I originally thought it was going to be six. Before I had a writer’s room, I wrote a format very early on where I knew the areas that each episode was going to be in. But later on, when I was working on the scripts, I realized that it was too much to do Booth’s capture and the trial in the same episode—there was just no way emotionally for both to have enough room to breathe. And so I had to go back to Apple and ask for a seventh episode. I made my case, and they understood why, and so they approved it. And then, of course, I felt enormous pressure to make sure that I was right about that.
The other sort of dramaturgical question that's inherent in the story—do you end the show when the manhunt is over? Is there more interest in the story after Booth’s end? I do think that was a question, and while it wasn’t a question for me, but I had to be convincing that this was bigger than that. I would have loved to find a way to put Anthony in the seventh episode, and he would have loved to be in the seventh episode. But I always pitched this as a story from Stanton’s point of view, and I really felt we needed to go all the way to see him pursue justice for what happened. So that was the other reason the seventh episode was something I really needed.
You mention that you started on the project before there was a writer’s room in place—how did adding more voices to the creative process reshape that original conception of the story?
You know, I hired writers from different backgrounds—I had several writers who are successful in other fields, so I had two novelists and one filmmaker. And everyone I chose was incredibly good at research and loved research. And they brought me so many interesting ideas and tidbits from their reading. I wasn’t originally going to tell the manhunt through all of North America, I was going to mostly follow the book that tracks Booth south. And then the more they were bringing me information about what was happening in Montreal, and what was happening with the detectives and not just the cavalry, I really started to see how much of a conspiracy thriller this could be. And so I basically rebroke everything and rewrote everything to include the spy story, because I think I needed to make good on the biggest manhunt in history at that point. Just going to Virginia seemed too small for me, so those characters were some of the great details they brought to my attention, and then I just ran with it.
Manhunt’s first two episodes debuted today, with additional episodes arriving weekly through the end of the seven episode series. You can follow Monica on Twitter, and if you’re new to the newsletter, get more of this in your inbox by subscribing below.
I haven’t seen any of Sugar, but I did watch the first episode of Palm Royale, and tried the second before realizing that my investment was too low to justify continuing. Curious how others respond to it, but wasn’t worth the hour-long episodes for me.
Beletsky said at the time that the Lincoln flashbacks were both a way to bring the character to life and acknowledge the gravity of his passing, and a way to explore the psychology of Stanton’s decision-making. We also see flashbacks for other characters throughout the three episodes I’ve screened.
For the record, the creative team at Constellation told a similar story: they landed on three episodes for that show based on the specifics of the narrative, and Apple was receptive to the idea.
The other seven-episode series that presented at Press Tour, Peacock’s Apples Never Fall (which debuted yesterday as a binge), was originally imagined as eight but shifted to seven during development and before its sale to Peacock. Showrunner Melanie Marnich told me it was about realizing that the series mapped out cleanly into character-specific episodes with only seven, so it was a natural choice. (I can’t say for sure, the reviews scared me away)
Fascinating interview and glimpse behind the curtains here. I definitely would have let Manhunt pass, but I’m watching it now.
Really interesting interview. The source material for Manhunt is impeccable (Swanson’s book is one of the best researched and best written book on the subject) but after having watched the first two episodes, it seems clear they’re really playing around with the historic timeline and events to serve the investigative show aspect they wanted. Interesting watch so far but maddening for historians 😂