I happened to see this week that the NCIS NOLA syndicated reruns were in the second season, which is the one I worked on. I missed my favorite ep, but it got me thinking about some specific rules in procedural writing and what that ep taught me. So who's up for a story?

I think the best episode of S2 was "Billy and The Kid," which was written by Sam Humphrey. She was, IMHO, the best writer on the show. She found character moments in the procedural beats and her superpower in the room was tracking plot logic. If a change on the board had a...

...ripple effect through the story, Sam was the one who caught it. She was the best at logic/character police.

The story grew out of a hook from an article our consultant sent: the last murder before Katrina. Felt like a cool entry into a story

The HARD thing about writing a pure procedural is that it's so plot driven. on a pure police procedural, it's REALLY hard. At least L&O always had the second half of the show where the trial became the "moral mystery." a police procedural is a lot of investigative beats

But Sam used this hook to really get into character. She decided that this "last murder before Katrina" would be a case that LaSalle had worked when he was an NOPD officer. But it's more than a case that haunts him. We learn the initial investigation was....

....the first time he met Pride, Scott Bakula's character.

Present day story is: "We've got a lead on this killer!" But that gives us the flashbacks to 2005, which is the initial hunt, but REALLY is a story about Pride and LaSalle meeting and getting to trust each other

And THAT is where the meat of the story is: Who was LaSalle then? Who was Pride then? We learn that Katrina has LaSalle at a crossroads. Frankly, he's kind of an asshole and is ready to walk away. He and Pride don't get along at first and both of them grow in their investigation

On NOLA, one thing that made it hard for me to pitch character bits in the beginning is there was very little inter-character conflict. Everyone was a pro at their job and they almost all got along. So seeing it NOT be like that for a week was a cool contrast

You'll notice I'm not telling you any of the investigative beats. That's not what this episode is about. It's about the Pride/LaSalle relationship in two different timeframes.

You can't make EVERY procedural episode an important one for your characters, but if you're speccing...

...a procedural, finding THAT model for your story is something you need to do. and even in something as strictly procedural as that series, you can find those ways into the characters and play with their relationships.

The case can be the catalyst for the REAL story.

There was something very cool Sam did. There's a story LaSalle tells in the backdoor pilot from the mothership NCIS about the first time he meet Pride... except he says Pride was drunk off his ass at Mardi Gras.

We were allowed to disregard the backdoor pilot however.

That's why though Mothership had Pride in NCIS in the early 90s, NOLA established Pride was a Jefferson Parish Sheriff as late as 2002, because it worked for the story they were telling.

As Sam was writing, I told her, "Hey, we can ignore this, but there's this reference..."

"...to how Pride and LaSalle met." She was like, "But we're clear to ignore that history, right?"

Sam's pages come out. Pride and LaSalle meet in flashback. Pride sizes him up, says something like, "You don't remember me, do you? Mardi Gras, few years ago..."

...and then HE says something about how HE remembers seeing LaSalle being drunk out of his mind.

And so THAT puts a different spin on LaSalle recounting the story and casting it the other way when telling someone else.

I just love Sam did that to add a layer to this throwaway

So you could take either one or BOTH of them as unreliable narrators. And it's funny that older LaSalle remembers it fondly later since he's telling it at a point where he and Pride have gotten much closer and warmer.

I read that and i was like "THAT was smart."