The Five Act Structure as Theme

How I stopped seeing structure as a worksheet to fill out.

5 min readSep 24, 2022

In trying to get myself to write on a biweekly schedule, I decided to take a break from technical articles this week to talk about my other career that’s not working out right now: screenwriting.

(You know how it is with creative work. You have to have a viable career option that definitely is going to start making you money soon if you can just figure out the job market, to support your true passion: having writer’s block for months at a time.)

The Five Act Structure

I’ve been writing for my whole life. I have taken part in the time honored tradition of writing a really bad novel as a preteen that was exactly novel length by word count, imagining it being published, then forgetting about it until you were old enough to know how bad it was.

But what got me into screenwriting was TV. I’d been following the behind the scenes of the Umbrella Academy, thinking wow. I want to make something like this. And despite misgivings about the state of the entertainment industry at large, I started writing my first pilot.

It started out as a kind of silly, YA-esque “magic school with cool magic categories” thing with a twist, and over many, many rewrites, morphed into a steampunk, philosophical treatise on the stories we tell ourselves about good, evil, power and kindness.

I’m still not sure how that happened, and I’ve definitely got many more rewrites to go.

When I first looked at my very, very first pilot, written in a week, filled with silly names for your supernatural university major, I’d been mostly concerned with pacing and structure. A TV pilot is tight, quick, and has to really start and end strong.

I started doing research into the structure people often used for this: the Five Act Structure.

What I found drove me up a wall.

So few articles seemed to follow a single pilot through each act. They would jump back and forth between series to showcase the best of each, never letting me see exactly where the act breaks might be. I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around the difference between the third act or the fourth act, and the fourth act and the fifth act. Where was the midpoint? What if you didn’t need a midpoint?

I kept trying to write out the beats of a five act structure, Save the Cat style, and found that it felt flat and formulaic each time. I kept trying to write out the act structure of other pilots, but there was never a clear boundary between acts, and that seemed correct. It was always the same script — the tone had to be the same throughout, right?

I’ll explain my breakthrough on how to use it right in a bit, but first, let me finally offer that thing I could never find: an example pilot broken down by act.

The Pushing Daisies Pilot

Is this pilot uniquely well structured, or is this just my ploy to get more people to watch this show?

… It’s the second one. I love this show.

Act 1: The first act speedruns a lot of exposition in such a tone-aware way, it immediately shows off the charm of the show. It explains protagonist Ned’s gift (the ability to bring people back from the dead with a touch), his childhood love, the surrounding characters and his current profession (piemaker by day, detective by night). The inciting incident happens around the 10–12 minute mark: his childhood love, Chuck, is murdered.
Act 2: In this act, we deviate from the norm set up in act 1. Normally, Ned brings back murder victims a minute at a time. But now, Chuck, the girl he loves is the victim, and despite the dire consequences of bringing someone back from the dead permanently, he can’t bring himself to un-bring her back from the dead.
Act 3: Now back from the dead and unable to tell anyone for fear of raising too many questions, Chuck decides she wants to solve her own murder, tipping the actions of act 2 towards the consequences.
Act 4: The characters investigate the murder, eventually coming to find that the murderer is headed for Chuck’s aunts: the problem.
Act 5: They get to the aunts’ house at the same time as the murderer, ending in the final battle where the murder is solved and the murderer is killed. The pilot ends with a set up for the new norm, with Chuck now also on Ned’s crime solving team.

Benefits of Act Structure

Though Pushing Daises does a lot of character moments and has an amazingly unique tone, when spelled out, the act structure shows that its core plot stays pretty simple: a girl is murdered, and her murder is solved. It keeps the plot neat and wraps everything back around for a neat conclusion.

It also keeps cause and effect clear. Everything is queued up in act 1, and we watch it all unravel into the plot in later acts.

But how do we keep from feeling formulaic?

Theme

What finally made me feel less as though act structure was just me filling out a worksheet to be fleshed out in my script was considering it a tool for theme, rather than events.

What’s the theme of Pushing Daisies? Love and isolation. Ned’s gift allows him to bring people back from the dead, but he can never touch them again without killing them. He’s become withdrawn and private as a result.

In act one, we learn this about him. We see him interacting with people who want to be closer to him by being even more reserved. In act two, he’s suddenly faced with someone who challenges his isolation — someone he loves, someone who loves ferociously: Chuck. However, he brings her back in such a way that he can never touch her, plunging them both into isolation. In act 3, Chuck now has to face that isolation, pushing her to solve her own murder.

In act 4, we see the action turn on the people she loves (her aunts). In act 5, the murderer is defeated, but she can’t reach out to her aunts, and finally Ned and Chuck end the episode in love but unable to reach out to each other — Ned has secrets he’s keeping from Chuck, and they also literally can’t touch.