Kids’ TV writer Stephanie Wahlstrom discusses brand shows – and bland shows!

Stephanie Wahlstrom, let’s ease into this with the obvious questions: who are you and what do you do?
I’m Stephanie Wahlstrom, a writer and TV show creator. I run a company called Kidzilla Media. I created Kidzilla to be an idea hub; an idea factory for lack of a better word. Because often there’re studios that can do incredible art, but they don’t necessarily have in-house people who develop shows. I work with a lot of studios either on my own original ideas or helping them develop one of their own. We incubate them and test them out, making sure the story really works.

To what age group do you cater?
I write anywhere from preschool to teen or tween; what I like to call Teen Clean. So nothing too racy, nothing too saucy or too scary. I also work across the board in both live action and animation. I create and develop shows and get to where they need to be to be pitched around. Then, hopefully, we get to make it!

I know you work with licensed IP as well as your own – but where do your ideas come from?
Well, I have ADHD! So, you know, I’m not great at making myself a dentist appointment or calling the hairdresser! But the flip side of that is I’m pretty good at consistently coming up with original ideas. And ideas can come from anything… It might be sparked by a bee buzzing past, say – I’m like, ‘Could that be a show?’ I’ll start mulling it over, and if characters start to become real in my head, then they’ll just bug me until I can get them out.

“Get them out”?
Right. I have to write them out! And many of them might not come to anything in themselves, but it means I can be thinking of a couple of show concepts in a week whereas other people might create a couple of shows in a year. And if any of them feel promising, I take it about as far as I can on my own and then I might then work with a studio, or directly with broadcasters, to develop a show further… Get the art, do the scripts; take it all to the next level.

Just so people can orientate themselves around what kind of shows you do, what’s got your fingerprints on? Licensed stuff we can talk about, obviously…
I was head writer on Love Monster, which was for CBeebies. He’s a wonderful little character! It was easy to come up with a lot of episodes for him because he’s just such a lovable guy… I also had a show with Netflix recently and I’ve had originals with Wild Brain and Mainframe out of Canada. I have one with Atomic Cartoons right now. In terms of things we can talk about, I’ve written several episodes for Isadora Moon, which is on Sky Kids…

Isadora Moon? Half Vampire, half Fairy…
…totally unique. Yes! That’s a great book series. Love them! It was optioned by a production company called Kelebek Media run by Deborah Thorpe, she’s amazing. She saw the potential in Isadora as a TV show – and she was right! I came on board to help a little with development and then write some episodes.

So it might be that you read an original character in one of the books, and think you could play that character up? Or play another character down, or create a new character just for the show?
Right. So, let’s say you have a book about a puppy and a kitten playing in a forest. The main characters are obvious but maybe on one of the pages it mentions a ladybird or there’s one illustrated in the corner that looks a bit disgruntled. There! That’s a possible new character for the TV series, one that can add to the dynamic and the story engine. It can be something small that I want to latch on to – but really it comes down to character.

And who signs that off, Stephanie? Does it go back to the author?
It really depends on how involved the author wants to be. They work that out with the producer.

And from what you said when we were chatting earlier, you’re hugely respectful of the original material…
Oh, of course! Of course, because I’ve also written books myself and I’d want somebody to make sure that I was okay with any changes to my material. So I’m very precious for the authors; I don’t want to break their book… I’ll always want to be sure the author’s okay with things. But when you’re adapting original material for the screen, you’ve got to work out what its heart is. What’s the North Star? Because that’s what we pivot around.

Can you give me an example of that?
The first thing I always ask is, “Why are we going to do this? What’s the main point?” Because if you can’t answer that, then there’s no point in doing it! I might look at a project thinking: well, we haven’t seen somebody do anything like that on TV before… Or maybe there’s some real joy at its heart, or a valuable message, or just something that sparks your imagination. And that might be a line, or a character, or a relationship between two of the sidekicks.

Can you give me an example of that?
Let’s take the puppy and kitten example. Dogs and cats don’t mix, right? Well, what if they did in this case? Best friends with very different personalities and backgrounds – inherent conflict which means a great story engine. It has to be strong because I’ll also be asking myself how we can write 52 stories about it.

In any case, once we know what these things are, we put them in what we call ‘the bible’. Essentially, that’s what’s going to happen in this world… The general premise, the characters, the tone; a few episode ideas and springboards. Later, when you go into the script, you might find you aren’t using one character very much, or that you’re trying too hard to put one in a scenario, or that a character wouldn’t say this or do that. Once you start to actually play with it in an outline for an episode, you can really see what works.

And is there anything that, as an author, one could be doing with the thought that if they wanted this to be turned into a TV series, they could put something specific in a book for kids?
Oh, I think that’s a bit, you know, jack of all trades, master of none. Sometimes, it organically works in both – but often it doesn’t. I have an idea I’m working on right now, and I’ve had a couple of people ask me for it as a TV show… But I’ve said no – this is a book first. I’m going to write it as a book. I do have an idea at the back of my head as to how this might work as a TV series later… But first things first: I want to write the best story, and – for me – it’s about making it the best book it can be. That being said, great books and great TV shows always start with great characters.

And you say this as an author yourself… Expand on that for me.
Yes. My first book was called The Accidental Socialite. When I first arrived in London, I started keeping a diary… Well, kind of a diary! Then I turned that into a very stylised book which was published in 2013. It’s a romantic-comedy novel about a girl who moves to London and accidentally becomes famous.

I’ll put in a picture of that; give it a good plug! So what would you say is the biggest difference between writing for TV and writing a book?
In short, I’d say that on TV you need to find a way of showing what’s happening, not telling. TV is primarily a visual medium and a picture really is worth a thousand words. With a book, is pretty much all telling, no showing – as generally there are very few images used to help tell the story. So you need to use those words to paint a clear picture in a stranger’s head. Ideally, you’d be-working with a character that helps you do both at the same time.

Sometimes, if you’ve built something into the book, something is so ingrained that it can’t be unpicked – and it might not work very well translated to a TV show. That could be an issue. Say, for example, there’s a book in which some of it happens inside the character’s head… How are you going to show that in a way that makes sense to kids on screen? This can be a problem with first- person books. It’s great to get into the character’s mind in the book, but how do you translate this to screen without the character talking to themselves?

Right. You need to find a way to visually show internal dialogue, say, in a way that makes sense. And when you’re writing a script it’d be down to you to do that? Not the director?
Yes, I have to do that. In movies, it’s a lot more director led. But in TV, the writer has a big responsibility to make sure everything works because you’re doing 52 episodes of television… Sometimes you’ll have more than one director, and you often have several writers and a head writer across all the episodes managing story flow – so in television, the script needs to be very, very clear. And on TV, you’ll also often have a show runner overseeing everything creative; you have to have somebody across producing, writing, directing and making sure everything works, that you haven’t doubled up or contradicted yourself in an earlier episode. Remember, too, that a lot of kids TV is animated!

Right… Not a lot of ad-libbing from a cartoon character!
Ha! Exactly! So everything in animation is very intentionally put there. You have to be very specific about what you’re showing on screen because you can’t waste money, you can’t waste time, and everything has to go together. It’s a very tightly run ship. It costs so much to make animation; you don’t want anything that’s just a throwaway for no particular reason. Everything has to be there for a reason.

Got it. Amazing! How did you come to be doing this, Stephanie?
Well, I grew up in western Canada. Very sort of working class. There wasn’t a lot of storytelling where I came from, but I was always very creative. I loved telling stories. But because of where I grew up, there wasn’t anything that visible. I didn’t even know what a television writer was then… I thought actors just showed up and made up the words. In any case, I went to film school because I thought I wanted to be an actress. I had a few bit parts and blink-and-you-miss-me movies…

Oh, you’ve made that irresistible: anything we’d be able to say, “There! There she is!”?
I had no lines, but I was in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. If you really look hard, you can see me get hit in the back of my head with a peanut…

Ha! I’ll watch out for that!
I was in a movie called Santa’s Slay – a comedy horror. I also did some stunts, and I was a stand-in for some films. As I say, I thought I wanted to be an actress and I learned a lot, but I found that there weren’t a huge number of roles being written for me that I wanted to play. And then I realised I just wanted to tell stories, so I wrote a parody of an Archie comic, Betty and Veronica Have Aptitude Anxiety. These women take an aptitude test but – it gets real dark real quick – they end up killing a bunch of people.

It’s a take as old as time! This is at acting school, is it?
Yes… The lead acting teacher said, “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a better writer than you are an actress. You wrote one of the best things to come out of this program, but you only did it because you wanted something for your showreel… If you took the writing more seriously, I think you’d be very good at it.”

Wow! And did you take that well?
No!

Ha!
Ha! Eventually I went back to school, though, and I did a double-major in English and sociology. And I started experimenting with my writing a bit more… Writing my own little things for myself. But I didn’t know what I was going to do after university, so I just packed up and moved to London with no plan.

And wrote The Accidental Socialite! And on that idea – that a traveller accidentally becomes famous… I think how that idea came about illustrates what you were saying before we were on the record. Tell us about it…
Well, I was reading a lot of magazines at that time and a word kept coming up over and over again: WAG. Well, I had no idea what a WAG was. I had to google it! As you know, it’s British slang for Wives and Girlfriends, the partners of footballers and the like. This was in 2008, so that wasn’t a thing where I’m from… But I was fascinated at the idea that people could become famous because of whom they date.

Anyway, that just felt like the spark I needed alongside what I’d been writing in my diary. I wrote The Accidental Socialite, got it published… And I really just found a passion in my writing. Then I worked at a UK TV station, running the channels Tiny Pop and Pop Girl for several years. I created and wrote some factual shows like Style Stars, Learn to Dance and Spotlight. I learned a lot about audiences and what they wanted. And then I went out on my own in 2016! So I took a long, winding road to get here, but I’m in a place where I should’ve been a while ago: telling stories!

We need to start wrapping things up Stephanie, but I’m really curious… What’s the one question I could’ve asked you today, do you think, that I didn’t?
Maybe you could’ve asked what I think is wrong with the industry today… Or what I think is missing.

Well, let’s have a little on each! What’s missing?
What I think is missing is a cohesive approach to storytelling. We have to stop thinking in boxes and start thinking in large bins! We have to start thinking about story and narrative as a whole. Because at the moment I feel like the communication between the book, toy, and TV industries is pretty poor. The reality is that kids see no difference in the narrative between them. It’s all the same story… Kids seamlessly go from one to the other without thinking twice.

You’re saying kids aren’t subject to the medium? That they’re entirely focused on the story and that these industries would do better if they joined the dots between them?
Right! So we really need to start thinking a lot more about the story and less about which box things start out in. We have to start thinking about it more holistically. We need to be saying, “This will be the story: how does it live in many different forms?” Because that’s how kids deal with it. We need to start thinking in a more childlike way about how we think about our stories.

Wow. That’s one heck of an answer… Real food for thought. And something you think is wrong?
Something I think is sometimes wrong – not always – is that some people assume that you’ll reach a bigger audience if you broaden things out wider and wider… Because more people can identify with the material. But I’ve always said that specificity is the key to universality…

“Specificity is the key to universality…”! You know, I’m going to start saying that. I’ve no idea what it means, but I’m going to start saying it! What does it mean?
Ha! So I think the way to get a wide audience is actually to be really character specific. For example, I’m clearly not a cancer-stricken, middle-aged white man making meth in New Mexico… And yet, weirdly, I still like Breaking Bad. And I’m not a Miami-based blood-splatter expert who’s also a serial killer, but I enjoyed Dexter…

Ha!
So I think some people in our industry need to stop being really broad; stop making broad shows for a general audience. Because as long as you’ve identified a strong, interesting character, then a show is interesting. And I do think that it’s important that the characters are more interesting than likeable. I mean… Is Walter White likeable?

No, absolutely not. And now that you say that… Succession… Curb Your Enthusiasm – most of those characters are not at all likeable!
Right. But the characters are all true to who they are, and they’re all very interesting. Because, actually, likeable people can be pretty boring! So you want somebody who’s got character, who’s interesting, who makes a decision and you’re, like: ‘I think it’s crazy, but I see why you made that decision… And most importantly, I want to stick around and see what you do next.’

It’s how some countries choose their leaders…
Ha! And you know, the same thing works in kids’ television. The more specific you are, I think, the more kids like it. Bluey is a fantastic example! An Australian blue heeler dog, living in a very specific part of Australia… Each character’s very specific – and that’s why they’re interesting!

Great answer! Stephanie, this conversation’s been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining making time.