A teleplay is a play written or adapted for television. The term surfaced during the 1950s with wide usage to distinguish a TV script from stage plays for the theater and screenplays written for films.
On the hour-long TV drama shows of the Golden Age of Television, such as The United States Steel Hour, The Philco Television Playhouse and Studio One, productions often were telecast from studios with limited scenery and other constraints similar to theatrical presentations. However, television dramatists, such as Paddy Chayefsky, JP Miller and Tad Mosel, turned such limitations to their advantage by writing teleplays with intimate situations and family conflicts characterized by naturalistic, slice of life dialogue. Such teleplays, if live, had a real-time quality not found in films (shot out of sequence), and they employed tight close-ups, low-key acting and other elements not found in stage productions.
Notable examples:
- Days of Wine and Roses (1958)
- Playhouse 90 (1956-1961)
- Jim Henson's The Cube (1969)
- Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party (1977)
- David Simon's The Wire (2002)