Three Chords and the Truth - TV Tropes

There are endless riffs on story shape – sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal explorations and excavations of an original tune. Often you may have to search long and hard to find it, but the tune – even in its absence – will be there. In music, poetry, film – arguably all art – digression merely confirms the archetype’s importance.

television writing is attractive because it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

The “Four Chord Song” is simultaneously hysterical and mind-blowing. By showing the underlying structure of well-known songs, it illustrates that popular music does indeed have a formula. There are many possible variations on the theme, but the human mind seems to gravitate to that particular method of constructing a catchy tune.

Boiled down to its essence, the shape becomes: there is a problem the protagonists go on a journey they find the solution they return the problem is solved.